Chaucer: An Oxford Guide.

Boffey, Julia

Chaucer: An Oxford Guide. Ed. by Steve Ellis. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2005. xxiv + 644 pp. 24 [pounds sterling]. isbn: 978-0-19-925912-0.

The publication of yet another guide to Chaucer's works--and one that weighs in at nearly four pounds, even in paperback--risks provoking a tart Chaucerian response: 'Hoo ... namoore of this!'. But Steve Ellis's substantial collection of specially commissioned new essays contains much to win over the resisting reader. Ellis aims to uncover (primarily for undergraduates) a Chaucer who is not 'boring' or 'irrelevant', and his assembled materials demonstrate not just Chaucer's variousness and complexity, but the ways in which the history of Chaucer scholarship and interpretation are serious critical topics in themselves. There is much here for readers of all levels and persuasions.

A section on 'Historical Contexts' is the first and meatiest of five constituent parts. Fourteen essays cover Chaucer's life, fourteenth-century society, politics, and culture, and matters like 'identity' and 'nationhood', while 'Chaucer's Language' and 'Literacy and Literary Production' are treated in informative and accessible ways by Donka Minkova and Stephen Penn, respectively. Most contributors to this part of the book draw instances and illustrations from Chaucer's writings into their various overviews. David Griffith's discussion of 'Visual Culture' is particularly effective in anchoring a combination of information and methodological discussion in the detail of selected portions of text.

Five essays on 'Literary Contexts' survey different 'backgrounds' to Chaucer's work--classical and biblical, English, French, and Italian. These are richly learned, but also fresh and thoughtful, and they fulfil an important role in ranging beyond The Canterbury Tales to explore other parts of Chaucer's ouvre. The focus narrows a little in the following section of 'Readings', where most of the essays (with the exception of those by Marion Turner and Barry Windeatt) use selected tales to demonstrate the strategies and fruits of their allotted critical approaches. The eight essays here are usefully representative of current trends in Chaucer criticism, but their historical contingency is neatly confirmed by an introductory discussion of 'Modern Chaucer Criticism' (by Elizabeth Robertson), and by their juxtapositioning with the fourth section of essays, called 'Afterlife', which returns us to Chaucer reception from the fifteenth to the nineteenth centuries. In this context, the twenty-first-century Chaucer who offers himself up to readings variously carnivalesque, psycholanalytic, postcolonial, queer, postmodern, feminist, or new historicist, simply takes his place alongside numerous other Chaucers who have come and gone in space and time. Included in the 'Afterlife' section are discussions of the history of Chaucer editing, and of 'Chaucer and his Guides' (entertainingly outlined by Peter Brown). The book concludes with an excellent section on 'Study Resources', both printed and electronic, which complements the annotated lists of further reading at the end of each essay.

What is new or distinctive about this collection? First, its scope and size allow for wide-ranging coverage, for apparatus of a genuinely informative kind, and for essays of a length that permits contributors to be something other than superficial. Secondly, it succeeds in combining high-quality scholarship and learning with illuminating and wellhandled critical readings and discussions. A number of the essays (Barry Windeatt's discussion of 'Postmodernism', in particular) might profitably be recommended to non-Chaucerians for the deftness with which they articulate particular theories or methodologies. Finally, and crucially, its well-chosen topics and contributors have been brought together in a shape that invites readers to think and to explore. Virginia Woolf 's assessment of Chaucer, quoted here in Stephanie Trigg's essay on 'Reception: Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries' (p. 531), is pertinent: 'There can be no more forcible preaching than this where all actions and passions are represented, and instead of being solemnly exhorted we are left to stray and stare and make out a meaning for ourselves.'

Julia Boffey

Queen Mary, University of London