A New Companion to Critical Thinking on Chaucer ed. by Stephanie L. Batkie et al (review)

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Reviewed by:

• A New Companion to Critical Thinking on Chaucer ed. by Stephanie L. Batkie et al
• Kevin J. Harty

stephanie l. batkie, matthew w. irvin, and lynn shutters, eds., A New Companion to Critical Thinking on Chaucer. Leeds: ARC Humanities Press, 2021. Pp. xx, 348. isbn: 978–1–64189–252–0. $162/£120.

Publishers long ago decided that there is money to be made in issuing, often in series, and (too) often with increasingly expensive pricing, collections of essays by diverse expert hands that attempt to provide encyclopedic coverage of the volume’s topic. Thus, we have The Oxford Guide to X, The Cambridge Companion to Y, and The Routledge Handbook of Z, among others. (Disclaimer: I have contributed essays to such volumes.) Just who the audience for these volumes is can be tricky. Contributors need to steer a course between being too esoteric or technical so as to lose a non-specialist audience and being too superficial or too general so as to turn off a specialist audience. Should the volume be aimed at undergraduates, graduate students, the general reader, scholars—a mix of the four?

Professors Batkie, Irvin, and Shutters take a different approach in their edited ‘companion.’ They asked sixteen scholars each to choose what they consider one key word from ‘Chaucer’s singular vocabulary’ and trace its use across all his works. The essays are grouped in sets of four, and each set is followed by a response from an additional scholar. Group one looks at Chaucer’s use of ‘consent,’ ‘entente,’ ‘pite,’ and ‘slider.’ Group two considers ‘merveille,’ ‘virginite,’ ‘swiven,’ and ‘craft.’ Group three addresses ‘vertu,’ ‘wal,’ ‘thing,’ and ‘blak.’ And group four investigates ‘auctorite,’ ‘seculere,’ ‘flesh,’ and ‘memorie.’ The result is a ‘companion’ that offers essays in conversation with each other and an endless number of new ways to look at Chaucer’s texts in a volume addressed to all four audiences which I enumerated above.

Helen Barr’s examination of ‘swiven’ is typical of the essays in this collection (pp. 129–41). Chaucer, whom Spenser praises as ‘the well of English undefyled’ (Fairie Queen, 4.2.32), uses this most vulgar of terms seven times: in the tales of the Manciple, the Merchant, the Miller, the Reeve, and the Cook. But Barr argues that Chaucer’s use of the word is always ‘poetically nuanced. It is not simply a matter of “bawdy.” Rather, “swiving” in verse makes an important literary—and social point. Chaucer’s use of “swiven” asks the questions: What is poetry? Who is it for?’ (p. 129). Barr’s discussion rescues the word from the hands of previous scholarship and editorial practice which ignored, glossed over, or considered it less than literary. In his ‘conversation’ with Barr’s essay, Simon Horobin approaches the issue of the [End Page 77] censorship of the word ‘swiven’ by looking at the scribal tradition in manuscripts of The Canterbury Tales (pp. 163–65). Those scribes were obviously uneasy about Chaucer’s use of the term, and, even allowing for scribal errors, routinely replaced the word. ‘Swiven’ thus was clearly a taboo word, and how such linguistic taboos in Chaucerian texts are addressed speaks volumes about the poet, in one way, and about those scribes, editors, and readers who designate words as taboo in a very different way.

R.D. Perry looks at the Wife of Bath’s seemingly least favorite word, ‘auctorite,’ which also appears in Womanly Noblesse, Troilus and Criseyde, and the House of Fame (pp. 241–54). For Chaucer, authority is something that one willingly agrees to be subject to; otherwise, authority is nothing more that an exercise in tyranny. Thus, authors and their characters, as well as readers, have a distinct relationship with multiple kinds of authority. All three have the freedom to reject or to accept authority if they ‘leste’ (p. 253). In his response to Perry, Andrew Cole looks at the other side of authority, experience, and how the Wife’s contrasting and comingling of the two words, and of all that they suggest, may ultimately undermine the authority she claims on the basis of her experience (pp. 304–8). Narratively, then, Chaucer seems here, as elsewhere, to...