Contemporary Chaucer Across the Centuries: Essays for Stephanie Trigg, edited by Helen M. Hickey, Anne McKendry and Melissa Raine (Manchester: Manchester UP, 2019)
Spenser knew Chaucer’s works well, and drew on them as poetic model and inspiration throughout his career, perhaps most notably in the Shepheardes Calendar, where E. K.’s commentary explicitly identifies Tityrus, the poet-shepherd whose death is mourned by Colin Clout and his fellows, as a stand-in for Chaucer. In reimagining Chaucer this way, the Calendar takes part in a long tradition of remaking and repurposing the medieval poet and his writings, one that consistently blurs the line between scholarly commentary and imaginative adaptation. The methodologically and topically diverse essays in Contemporary Chaucer Across the Centuries trace this dynamic throughout a wide range of historical periods and literary contexts, honouring the equally wide-ranging work of Stephanie Trigg.
Trigg, the Redmon Barry Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Melbourne, is the author of two books that consider the postmedieval reception and transmission of the Middle Ages through the lens of a ‘symptomatic long history’. Congenial Souls (U Minnesota P, 2002) examines readers’, editors’ and critics’ affective responses to Chaucer, while Shame and Honor (U Pennsylvania P, 2012) offers a multifaceted cultural history of the Order of the Garter; both deal with the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in considerable detail. Trigg has also been at the forefront of the study of the premodern history of emotions, exemplified in the collection Affective Medievalism, co-edited with Thomas Prendergast (University of Manchester Press, 2018). Whatever the topic, Trigg’s work embodies, as the editors of this volume note in their introduction, a methodology that ‘carefully interrogates moments of reflexivity, as well as instances of heightened tension between past and present within seemingly stable traditions’ (1). In its wide-ranging analysis of culture, feeling and literary history, Trigg’s work reminds us again and again that medievalism and medieval studies are not so separate as we might think.
Trigg’s scholarly impact can be measured in part by the global scope of contributors to this volume, who come from universities in North America, the United Kingdom and most of all Australia. An antipodean viewpoint has been central to Trigg’s approach to the study of literary history, foregrounded in the collection Medievalism and the Gothic in Australian Culture (Brepols, 2005), edited by Trigg. This is more than simply national interest, however; as the editors of Contemporary Chaucer write ‘this privileging of an Australian critical perspective asserts the ethical significance of accommodating difference more generally—insisting, in other words, that diverse voices generate fresh and incisive research perspectives’ (3).
Rather than attempting to isolate the interwoven threads of Professor Trigg’s scholarship, the editors of this collection have arranged the essays in roughly chronological order. Approximately half the pieces in the collection take up issues surrounding the transmission and reception of Chaucer’s works, in contexts ranging from the fifteenth century to the twenty-first. The collection begins with Paul Strohm’s reflections on his experiences as a Chaucer biographer, the blurry lines between identification with and admiration of the medieval poet and the implications for the way we situate ourselves as critics. Questions of identification and admiration are also central to Thomas Prendergast’s contribution, which explores the apocryphal Tale of Beryn and the associated prologue stitching it to the rest of the Canterbury Tales in Northumberland MS 455. Both the anonymous author of this post-Chaucerian composition and the scribe who copied it into the Northumberland manuscript, Prendergast argues, express fidelity to the idea of the Tales as a project, rather than to Chaucer as an author.
Moving forward to the end of the fifteenth century, David Matthews compares Caxton’s treatment of Chaucer’s writings with his editions of John Trevisa’s Middle English translation of the Polychronicon of Ranulf Hidgen. Matthews observes that Caxton intervenes more readily into Trevisa’s text than Chaucer’s, arguing that Caxton’s attitude toward the works he printed—Chaucer’s writings already held pride of place in an emerging canon of vernacular literature—informed his willingness to emend and alter the text. Jumping ahead several centuries, Stephen Knight adds to the canon of Chaucerian references and allusions from the nineteenth century, giving special attention to the popular press and other less-commonly studied sites of allusion in popular culture. In an essay considering responses to Chaucer’s religious views during this same period, Andrew Lynch posits that it is well past time for scholars of Chaucer’s life and works to reckon with the ample evidence that Chaucer may have been, when all was said and done, a fairly sincere medieval Catholic—a challenge both to early critics portrayed Chaucer as a proto-Protestant, and more modern scholars tend to see him as a kind of prescient secularist. An additional study of nineteenth-century Chauceriana comes from John Ganim, who rereads the Chaucerian influences in William Morris’s utopian novel, The News from Nowhere, finding in Chaucer’s dream visions inspiration for Morris’s utopian ‘ecosexuality’. Finally, in a wide-ranging assessment that riffs on Trigg’s own work on faces and facial recognition, Louise D’Arcens considers our lasting attachment to Chaucer’s face and the forms of identification and transhistorical empathy that such an investment facilitates.
Other contributions to Contemporary Chaucer address Middle English writing in more specific detail. Elizabeth Robertson’s essay on ‘snail-horn perception’ in Troilus and Criseyde elegantly traces Chaucer’s sensitive depiction of the protagonists’ first encounters, situating it within the context of medieval theories of perception. Helen Cooper explicates an oft-overlooked line in the Tale of Sir Thopas and shows its ‘mourning maidens’ function as an integral part of the poem’s parody, a subtle allusion that situates the Chaucerian text within the world of late medieval vernacular romance. Ruth Evans turns to form, and considers the role of rhyme-breaking in Chaucer’s distinctively ironic poetic voice, arguing for a reconsideration of formal features as ways of registering Chaucer’s affinity with other linguistic and national poetic traditions.
Returning to a topic explored in a 2017 issue of Postmedieval co-edited with Trigg, Stephanie Downes turns to Chaucer’s depictions of ‘pale faces’ and the interpretive work that they invite. (This is one of several pieces in the collection that allude to Trigg’s 2016 biennial New Chaucer Society address on ‘Chaucer’s Silent Discourse’.) Jeffery Jerome Cohen offers an ecocritical assessment of the ‘heavy atmosphere’—the long aftereffects of human activity, both audible and climatological—in the Canterbury Tales, while Frank Grady takes a comparative approach, drawing parallels between the Book of the Duchess and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight’s shared concern with courtly hunting and fortune’s vicissitudes. The collection concludes with an essay by James Simpson on re-cognition and the recognition of prior knowledge in literary works including the Aeneid and Dante as well as Troilus and Criseyde. Re-cognition, Simpson, argues, is a, and perhaps even the, master topos (230).
This is certainly a fitting note on which to conclude Contemporary Chaucer, which as a collection not only demonstrates the richness of Chaucer and his writings as sites of cultural negotiation and re-negotiation, but also shows the value of a critical approach that takes this recognition as fundamental to the process by which we understand and make meaning of the past. While none of the essays in this collection engage with Spenser or other early modern authors in detail, the fourteen pieces collected here are a fitting homage to Trigg’s vibrant body of work and offer a wealth of engaging theoretical and methodological models for those interested in the history of emotions and in reception studies in the longue durée.
Megan L. Cook
Colby College
49.3.9
Comments
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Link / ReplyAbout half of the essays in the collection discuss problems with Chaucer's works' transmission and reception in settings ranging from the fifteenth to the twenty-first centuries.
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