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Jill Mann, Life in Words: Essays on Chaucer, the Gawain-poet, and Malory
by Gareth Griffith

Mann, Jill. Life in Words: Essays on Chaucer, the Gawain-poet and Malory. Ed. Mark David Rasmussen. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2014. xl + 359 pp. ISBN: 978-1442648654. $55.50 cloth. 

This collection brings together fifteen previously published essays by Jill Mann, written between 1980 and 2009, with a substantial introduction by the volume’s editor, Mark David Rasmussen. Such a collection scarcely needs excusing: Mann’s other books (especially Chaucer and Medieval Estates Satire and Feminizing Chaucer and her Penguin edition of The Canterbury Tales) have established her as a hugely perceptive critic and influential voice in studies of late medieval literature.[1] As such, a volume of her essays is always to be welcomed.  However, this collection recommends itself for two further reasons. First, it brings together several articles that are otherwise hard to obtain, having originally been printed in festchriften, lecture series or guides to literary periods (a kind of publication which, regardless of the excellence of its content, sadly often falls into a gap between the general reader and the university library). Second, the juxtaposition of these hitherto disjecta membra allows them to be read as separate manifestations of a single intellectual project, and means that Mann’s methodology and extraordinary contribution to her field can be seen more clearly, and assessed in more detail.

The title signals that such an assessment is one of the main aims of the collection: this is a cross-section of Jill Mann’s scholarly “life in (her own) words.” But the title also focuses on the key methodological conviction that underpins Mann’s work: that there is life in words, that individual words matter, and that as scholars our best chance of making intelligent sense of what texts are and how they work is to pay proper, close attention to the particular words of which they are composed, together with the complex way that they interact with one another. Mann’s forte is, appropriately, close-reading, and this collection furnishes a host of examples of instances where her attention to verbal detail is revelatory in its transformation of our understanding of canonical texts.

The emphasis on close reading places Mann in a broadly humanist tradition; as Rasmussen notes in his introductory essay, Mann “is especially drawn to examining how great authors create new meanings within their own historical situation and existing systems of thought, reflecting on the nature of human experience as they understand it” (xxii). The emphases here would be familiar to humanist scholars of earlier generations: on “great” authors (the received canon), and “human experience,” with fictional figures valued for the insights they give on what it means for readers to be human, too. The great value of Mann’s work here is that she rescues aspects of this tradition that are of enduring value, but also goes beyond it by responding to the challenges of younger critical schools.

Humanist scholarship has argued at times that “humanity” in its modern sense is a creation of the early modern period (specifically a creation of Shakespeare’s, if one believes Harold Bloom).[2] This argument usually concedes some ground to medievalists by acknowledging the development of “personhood” in the poetry of Geoffrey Chaucer. It comes as no surprise that Mann’s reading of Chaucer lends strong support to the argument that he was writing complex, “human” (in a very modern sense) characters centuries before Shakespeare. 

This is evident from the first essay in the collection, an exemplary instance of how close reading dispels myths and can reveal surprising depth of character in medieval texts.  “Troilus’s Swoon” (Mann is careful to point out that he only does it once, despite that fact that “this isolated instance is sometimes casually multiplied and generalized,” 3) proceeds minute by minute through key encounters between the two title characters in Troilus and Criseyde, showing how carefully gradated are their responses to each other, and the complex psychology that this can be taken to indicate. If Mann’s conclusion that “we not only can, but need to, respond directly to the emotions and instincts involved, examining Chaucer’s representations of human relationships with no other preconceptions than our belief that a poet of profound humanity will have something complex and enriching to show us in them” (19) seems challengingly essentialist, the means by which she reaches it are so painstaking and so thoroughly rooted in the fabric of the text, that it is hard to disagree with her reading.

It would be wrong to suggest that Mann writes with the intention simply of showing that medieval literature is in some sense “as good as what came after it.” Rather, her work shows that narratives of literary “improvement” from one era to the next misrepresent and oversimplify the ways in which writers write with different interests. The second essay in the book thus explores what Mann calls “a rather curious paradox [ … ]: in the presentation of Criseyde, Chaucer is more ‘Shakespearean’ than Shakespeare – that is, his heroine has a depth of life denied to her stage counterpart” (p. 20). What follows is a careful and authoritative exploration of why “Chaucer convinces us of the existence of Criseyde’s inner reservoir of thoughts” whilst Shakespeare’s Cressida “is a blank cheque on which men write their own estimates of value” (26, 34). The insights into both texts here will mean that this is an essay of importance to Shakespeare scholars as well as Chaucerians, and to all who work on the period between the two writers.

The next two essays, on chance and destiny and on The Franklin’s Tale, are valuable if less revelatory than the first two. The fifth, “Anger and ‘Glosynge’ in the Canterbury Tales,” takes a key theme from the tales of the Wife of Bath and the Pardoner, namely “glosyng” or the (mis)interpretation (of texts), and traces it through tales where it has seemed less prominent. The link with anger may seem quirky at first, but proves to be richly rewarding because “both are a means of shutting out reality, retreating into a world of private illusion” (100). The focus remains on Chaucer in the fifth and sixth essays, but the fifth, “The Authority of the Audience in Chaucer,” broadens the texts considered to take in The House of Fame and The Parliament of Fowls, and it is exhilarating to see Mann’s approach brought to bear on other parts of Chaucer. Once again, she takes a familiar idea (the role of authority) and breathes new life into it, this time by turning the focus from the author to the audience as a source of authority. 

If Chaucer is the poet with whom Mann’s name is most closely associated, however, this collection shows that his texts are not the only ones from the medieval period which open up well to Mann’s approach, and in which readers can find complex “humanity.” It is particularly rewarding here to see Mann’s writing on Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (three essays) and Malory’s Le Morte D’Arthur (four). The transition to Gawain is made here via an essay on “Satisfaction and Payment in Middle English Literature” which focuses on Pearl and The Clerk’s Tale. This is not one of the best essays in the collection: it is full of detail, but lacks punch (and leaves this reader wishing The Merchant’s Tale had been the object of Mann’s scrutinies here). However, it does set up the ninth essay, “Price and Value in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.” Beginning with a dissection of the meanings of “pris” in Middle English, this essay takes us to the heart of the tensions that create meaning in this poem, and re-reads Gawain’s dilemma or test as being under pressure to “adapt his sense of his own worth in terms of a prevailing demand” (180). Questions of “worth” in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight resurface in the tenth essay, in the context of a discussion about aesthetics and ethics. Together, these two essays provide an illuminating reading of the poem, and incidentally articulate ways in which the issues at stake in the poem are of interest to others besides medievalists. 

Essay eleven again functions as a hinge in the wider collection; “Sir Gawain and the Romance Hero” rounds off the consideration of Gawain the text and Gawain the complex human character, but also prepares the way for the four essays on Malory. Here, there is continuity but also change: Mann argues that the nature of Malory’s text demands a distinctive type of critical reading: “We could begin, in my view, by banishing from this critical vocabulary the word ‘character,’ as inappropriate” (236). Yet this is not to banish personality entirely. Battle is still the means by which a knight “realizes himself,” and more broadly “the physical is made the medium for the revelation of the non-physical” (238-9). Action, specifically the nexus of adventure and chance held in the single word “aventure,” is the means by which we learn the true nature of the narrative’s protagonists, but this is through the body, rather than inside it.

The ideas of body, place and space are worked out from a variety of angles in three interlinked essays on Malory, before a final piece on “Malory and the Grail Legend.” The Grail is a suitably climactic subject for the final essay, but may seem far removed from what this collection elsewhere shows is Mann’s primary occupation with “the human.” However, this is precisely the paradox she seeks to confront here: why the Grail should be “the goal and climax of knightly endeavour” (316). Her solution is to link it once again back to the human body: “the body and blood […] are the concentrated symbols of Christ’s redemptive suffering […] body and blood are also the central elements of the knightly experience” (318). This is suggestive and her case is well made, but a suspicion lurks that however much sense it makes in words to link knights and grail through “body” and “blood,” this explanation nonetheless fails to take full account of the way the Grail functions in the wider narratives of Arthur. It limits the scope of these stories, and turns the one narrative that seemed to point beyond Arthur’s court back onto that subject once again. This is perhaps a deliberate tactic, a statement that it is strictly “the human” that is the proper subject of the critic.  As a reading of Malory, however, it seems too modern in its reductiveness.

Finally, it should be re-iterated that this is in fact a collection of sixteen essays: fifteen of these are by Jill Mann, but they are preceded by Rasmussen’s own piece, which is an elegant and sustained engagement not only with the substance and significance of what Mann does in the remainder of the book, but also with the literary-scholarly context in which she has written. Rasmussen succinctly and clearly outlines the varying approaches to the study of medieval literature that have held sway in recent decades, and locates Mann’s approaches and achievement within this wider context. In doing so, he is able to critique the limitations of other metholodogies (and the ways in which they have evolved upon or deviated from their original aims), and to assert the particular value of Mann’s writing not only as a body of knowledge in itself, but also as an example of scholarly method that could usefully be imitated by a new generation of scholars. There is certainly a debate to be had here, and not all readers will wish to endorse or adopt the ways of reading that Rasmussen identifies in the body of work that he has collected. Nonetheless, through his introduction and the manifold perceptive readings and sustained arguments in each subsequent essay, this collection shows powerfully the potential that Mann’s approach has in unlocking the workings of medieval texts, and makes possible an important conversation on her achievement and its implications for those of us who come after. 

Gareth Griffith
University of Bristol



[1] Jill Mann, Chaucer and Medieval Estates Satire: The Literature of Social Classes and the General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales (London: Cambridge UP, 1973) and Feminizing Chaucer (Woodbridge, Suffolk, UK; Rochester, NY: D.S. Brewer, 2002); Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales, ed. Jill Mann (London; New York: Penguin, 2005).

[2] Harold Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human (London: Fourth Estate, 1998).

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44.3.60

Cite as:

Gareth Griffith, "Jill Mann, Life in Words: Essays on Chaucer, the Gawain-poet, and Malory," Spenser Review 44.3.60 (Winter 2015). Accessed March 29th, 2024.
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