FALLIBLE AUTHORS. Chaucer's Pardoner and Wife of Bath. By Alastair Minnis. 510pp. University of Pennsylvania Press. $69.95; distributed in the UK by NBN. Pounds 45.50. 978 0 8122 4030 6.
Thirty years ago, Alastair Minnis helped change medieval literary studies. Moving away from generations of close reading, from attention to theme and image, character and contrast, Minnis argued for a theory of the author grounded in scholastic scholarship. From the so-called "academic prologues" to canonical Latin texts, Minnis recovered a critical idiom that could explain the nature of authorial intention, the quality of reader response, and the relations of form and rhetoric that would inform not just the reading of classical and religious writers, but the writing of imaginative, vernacular fiction. Compilatio and ordinatio were the governing principles of literary structure: the first, an activity of reading, bringing source materials and previous authorities together; the second, an act of writing, organizing this material into structures that would give voice to an argument. Working through the traditions of commentary on Peter Lombard's Sentences, the reflections of St Bonaventure, and the massive summae of Thomas Aquinas and Vincent of Beauvais, Minnis extracted principles of literary composition and reception. The endpoint of this project, and the final section of his Medieval Theory of Authorship (1979), was Chaucer, and Minnis explored just how The Canterbury Tales deployed the practices of compiling and organizing - not just in its overarching structure, but also in its individual tales. In the end, Minnis claimed, "Chaucer treats his fictional characters with the respect that the Latin compilers had reserved for their auctores. The 'lewd compilator' has become the compiler of the 'lewd'".
Minnis was not alone in this project. Many scholars in Britain and America were looking at the ways in which medieval texts were compiled and arranged. Many, too, were using these inquiries to dovetail medieval literary study with the quest for "theory". We now stand at a new cusp in medieval literary study. For, after spending all this time with texts originally pressed into the service of theology, we have come to realize that we need to understand theology itself. Religion has become the new theory - the place where authority and argument, social narrative and aesthetic evaluation found their medieval voice. But medieval devotion was not some monolith of credence, but a fractured set of orthodoxies and dissents. The believing world of Chaucer's time was shaped not only by the dictates of the Catholic Church, but also by those who would seek to undermine its hierarchies. Chief among them were the followers of John Wycliffe, known as the Lollards, who in their own time were involved in the vernacular translation of the Bible, the condemnation of sacred imagery and (possibly) dramatic performance, and the criticism of the Church's ownership of property.
In our time, the Lollards have become the touchstones for a politically charged medieval studies. They have been seen as figures of a "premature reformation", and the intellectual and social sharers in the emergence of popular political activity that broke out in the famous Rising of 1381. For Minnis, in Fallible Authors, Lollardy provoked a new form of "vernacular hermeneutics": a way of understanding the world through an English text. He rightly cautions against the extreme fascination with these figures that has motivated some current scholars. "We should be wary", he advises, "of reconstructing the Lollards as avatars of religious freedom and free expression." Nonetheless, he does share in the current trend in medieval English literary study: to argue that the key question to be asked of any medieval author (Chaucer, Gower, or Langland) is precisely his relationship to Lollardy.
In the case of Chaucer, Minnis finds two major issues raised by late medieval theological inquiry, and by Lollardy in particular: choice of language, and, as a corollary, the nature of preaching in the vernacular and thus the possibility of asking whether the preacher lives by his own words. It is this possibility that leads to the central question of this book: can an immoral speaker tell a moral tale? "Many two-faced figures exist" in medieval literature, Minnis acknowledges. But Chaucer is, he claims, "unique in the way that he pushes such duplicity to extremes". In the Pardoner's Tale, Chaucer dramatizes the "sharp distinction . . . between reliable words and unreliable speaker, between the truth of what is said and the falsity of the person saying it".
The purpose of Fallible Authors is to explore the philosophical implications of this claim. In pages rich with explication of scholastic, literary and historical material, Minnis recovers a medieval notion of authorial fallibility. For the Pardoner, in particular, this literary fallibility is inseparable from his sexual identity. "I trowe he were a gelding or a mare", Chaucer's narrator announces in the General Prologue portrait of this character. This one line has spurred more critical response than almost any other in the Chaucerian corpus, and for Minnis, the question is not how we decide among the options but, instead, how we hold a variety of non-normative possibilities in mind. Chaucer, he claims, was "fascinated" by his literary creation. The Pardoner is a creature of ambiguity, a figure not holding some dark secret but blatant in his announcements. "He publishes his greed, pride, and vainglory, openly."
The other great self-narrator in The Canterbury Tales is the Wife of Bath, and Minnis pairs her with the Pardoner to ask comparable questions about verbal performance. In this case, however, he has a more specific enquiry about her place in Lollard ideology. Wycliffe and his followers had raised the possibility of women preaching, and Minnis suggests that Chaucer's literary response to this challenge was to create, in the Wife, a fallible female preacher, constantly subverting her own authority, and yet compellingly holding our attention in spite of her faults. The Pardoner and the Wife, as "fallible authors and usurpers of the office of preacher", therefore become a way for Chaucer to speculate on the public arts of authorship and the relationships between intention, experience, book-learning and advice.
What motivates this book is the conviction that poets are like preachers, and that the artes praedicandi are the sources for an ars poetica. But Alastair Minnis also wishes his historical research to have a contemporary, political resonance (he invokes the fallibility of Bill Clinton, the ruses of the Bush Administration, the lash of fundamentalism). Whatever this book tells us about literary characters or current politics, it does tell us a great deal about medieval literary studies. In its attentions to debates on Lollardy, its learned engagement with theological detail, its sensitivity to nuances in scholastic definition, Fallible Authors tells the student and the teacher that we'd better get our Latin into shape, learn more about Archbishop Arundel, and brush up on our Bonaventure.
