In the background of this book there lies a disaster; in the foreground, a contradiction. The disaster has been aptly labeled, by Victor Davis Hanson and his colleagues in Classical Studies, "the bonfire of the humanities." In English Studies, twenty-five years ago there were 65,000 undergraduate majors in the United States. Since then the college population has doubled, so that one might expect to find 130,000. Five years ago the actual figure was 49,000, and it is unlikely to have increased since. Putting it in commercial terms, departments of English have lost close on two-thirds of their "market share." This, of course, is not a concern for tenured professors in élite institutions, like Seth Lerer and his contributors, who can continue to teach their graduate seminars in the sure and certain knowledge that their jobs are safe, and that the social cachet of their universities will ensure a constant supply of students. It is a concern for the students in those graduate seminars, being poured into a shrinking job market, and even more for students outside the élite institutions. But that's their problem, and their disaster.

To turn to the contradiction, Lerer (professor at Stanford) is well aware that there are already half a dozen "guides" and "companions" to Chaucer on the market, and is concerned to establish selling points for this one. In brief, it's young, it's American, and it aims to do more than "just conveying facts" or providing "bald surveys." Young is stretching it: most of the contributors are in their forties and fifties, though academics start late these days. I am sure all the competing collections aimed to do more than "just convey facts." As for Americanness—and here the reviewer must confess that he is just the kind of old-style Englishman whom Lerer has in his gunsights—it's odd that, while all Lerer's contributors subscribe to the normal academic ideal of diversity, as soon as they encounter figures who do not conform to the approved "theoretical and critical perspectives" (listed as "poststructuralism, psychoanalytic feminism, New Historicism"), the deviants are said to be not just out of date, ignorant, or misguided but "almost willfully out of step." Willfully? Deliberately? Because the values of modern American academia should always have been self-evident? There's a narrowness of vision here which contradicts the diversity rhetoric and shows up even in what is said about Chaucer.

The plan of the volume carefully avoids the traditional division by works and genres. Instead there are four essays on "Contexts and Cultures," four on "Major Works, Major Issues," and two on "Critical Approaches and Afterlives." One of the most useful essays is actually the last one, by Ethan Knapp (the only contributor from a state university, Ohio State), who details the long struggles between philologists and critics, Leavisites and New Critics, leading to the present set of "theoretical and critical perspectives," where Knapp adds "queer theory" to Lerer's list above. A major claim being made collectively in this volume is that it takes a broader view, looking not just at texts but also at contexts, and looking not just at the familiar texts as edited for generations of students by the Riverside Chaucer (which despite several updates goes back to 1933) but also at the manuscript evidence too often airbrushed out of the picture. No one can argue with the value of such approaches. But are the claims meant seriously? Or are they tacitly subordinated to the values and perspectives given above?

Chaucer's life, for instance, is by medieval standards unusually well-documented, though almost all the documents relate to his life as an administrator and royal servant. Drama has been extracted from it by Terry Jones, of the Monty Python team, with his recent book Who Murdered Chaucer? There is not much to be said for Jones' theory, but one might ask conversely, not "who did Chaucer murder?", but perhaps "what was Chaucer's relationship to the murder of King Richard II?", probably arranged, and possibly carried out, by Chaucer's nephew-by-marriage Thomas Swynford, acting for his mother's stepson (not quite Chaucer's nephew), Henry IV. Chaucer was continually on the edge of great events, but Christopher Cannon's "The Lives of Geoffrey Chaucer" does not make much of them. He prefers to see Chaucer as "acutely conscious of a glass ceiling." His son was Speaker of the House of Commons, his granddaughter was Duchess of Suffolk, his great-grandson even had a shot at the throne, but no, the American stereotype of England is one of social immobility, and Cannon—an American, though a Fellow of Pembroke College, Cambridge—sticks with the stereotype.

Meanwhile, there's the question of Chaucer's relationship to other writers of the time. Several of the contributors would clearly like him to have been in contact with and responding to his contemporary William Langland, author of Piers Plowman, especially as Langland seems to have had something to do with the Peasants' Revolt of 1381, an event very congenial to politically liberal academics. It's true Chaucer never mentions him or alludes to or quotes from his work, but there is a Plowman among the Canterbury pilgrims, though he never tells a tale. If Langland were a sympathizer with the revolt, and Chaucer were a sympathizer with Langland, then there would be a basis for the kind of democratizing biography of Chaucer which Derek Pearsall (another Englishman) noted long ago as the preferred American narrative. The truth is that if the rebellious peasants had got hold of Chaucer in 1381, they would certainly have lynched him—bureaucrat, civil servant, tax-collector, just the kind of target they were looking for. D. Vance Smith of Princeton feels sure, however, that "Chaucer's virtuous plowman must be directly indebted to Langland" because of the "point-by-point reversal of the almost universal contemporary criticism of laborers."

What is shocking about this view, to this reviewer, is the casual confusion of plowmen and laborers. As was pointed out long ago by serious historians, tenant-plowmen plowing their own land with their own draft-teams (an important point) were very different creatures in agricultural society from landless day-laborers; and while Langland is all in favor of the former group, he rarely has a good word to say about the latter. For one thing, day-laborers probably wanted nothing better than the chance to get into town and find a steady job, while any attempt to get a plowman off his land would have had him running for the medieval equivalent of the National Rifle Association. (Note that the one other individualized Canterbury pilgrim for whom Chaucer never finds a tale is the Knight's Yeoman, "And in his hand he bar a mighty bowe.") Langland, one might argue, finds it easy to identify, maybe for family reasons, with the independent, intransigent, and militarily formidable rural yeomanry—with the medieval equivalent of modern "rednecks," in fact, a group with whom modern academics have no sympathy, and one whose political loyalties cannot securely be counted on by Left or Right. Chaucer by contrast has no liking for them at all, and trying to line him up with Langland, to line up plowmen with laborers and with Wat Tyler, to get them all to fit a modern liberal narrative of equality and democratic aspiration—this is just a new kind of airbrushing.

And though it's no doubt coincidental, it's unfortunate that Stephanie Trigg (Melbourne), in her essay on "Chaucer's Influence and Reception," confuses the two different "Plowman's Tales" tacked on by later authors to the Chaucerian canon. She predictably picks the one which "foregrounds a reading of Chaucer as anticlerical satirist and ecclesiastical reformer," but that is not the one "in Christ Church Oxford MS 152," which is instead an entirely orthodox Virgin-miracle story written by Thomas Hoccleve. We all make mistakes, but this one does make the back-to-the-nitty-gritty-of-manuscript-culture claim look rather hollow.

It is always unfair, in reviewing collections like this, to lump all the contributors together, and several of the essays have their own views and their own value. James Simpson (Harvard) provocatively sees Chaucer, and English writing in his time, as essentially "suburban," hanging on the edge of London and the edge of Europe. Rita Copeland on rhetoric and Jennifer Summit on Troilus (Pennsylvania and Stanford respectively) have good things to say, and there are other authors for whom space forbids even a mention. Lerer himself, however, writing the lead essay on the Canterbury Tales, seems to be offering venerable clichés in new language. The "signal moment" of the collection is the Miller's anti-hierarchical interruption of the Knight; the Reeve "takes the laughter of the Miller's Tale and turns it into spite"; the Pardoner "seeks only coin"; and so on. Verbiage about linguistic trickery and language remaking the world can only cover so much. And there are blind spots even as regards language—nothing about the contest of literates and illiterates, not much to the point about dialects and sociolects, no attempt to get to grips with a trilingual society, or indeed with Chaucer's own quite unusual abilities as a polyglot (French, Latin, Italian, and a good case might be made for Flemish). Chaucer could do Arabic numerals too, a rare talent in his time, and he knew a great deal about money, both matters possibly connected with his documented employment "on the secret business of the king" and certainly reflected in his poetry.

He really is an interesting writer, whatever they do to him, and it's sad to see him so flattened out by the new and dominant academic orthodoxy. But going back to all those missing students of paragraph one, scores of thousands of them, and every one young and American, remember: does this kind of deeply politicized treatment perhaps explain where and why they've all gone?

Tom Shippey is Walter J. Ong Chair of Humanities at St. Louis University. He is the author of The Road to Middle-earth (Houghton Mifflin) and J. R. R. Tolkien: Author of the Century (Houghton Mifflin).

Copyright © 2007 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.
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