Some years ago I was rummaging through correspondence at Cornell University, attempting to sort out the provenance of a manuscript, when I came upon a letter offering Cornell a finger of Dante for its collection. To my knowledge, Cornell did not take up this offer, though the digit might have been enshrined pointing to the library's extensive holdings for the poet, if not shelved in the archives as another text. The status of this literary object seemed a striking problem at the time, and similar to the floating fragment of Brunetto Latini I was checking out. Still, the reverence for relics of the poet's body, and their commodification, has mostly been a topic for anecdotes and antiquarians rather than substantial study by literary historians. Chaucer is a special case in this, as in so many things-his remains in Westminster Abbey have been the object of attentions from a long series of enthusiasts and scholars, even though the actual position of his bones may be as elusive as the ur-text of the Canterbury Tales.
The latest entry in this entertaining necrology is Thomas Prendergast's book-length study, which should interest Chaucerians of all stripes. Coming in at 150 pages of text that covers five centuries, this book aims to be a pleasurable read rather than a slog through deep shoals of data, and for the most part it succeeds. Prendergast takes up fascinating questions on Chaucer's remains, the responses to those remains in periods when his reputation as the Father of English Poetry transmuted, and the shaping of his poetic canon in relation to the memorials of stones and bones. At a few points this gratifying matrix of topics produces a wonderful effect we experience all too rarely: "this is so obviously important I can't believe it hadn't been jumped on long ago!" For instance, the corpse of John Dryden (the so-called Father of Modern Poetry) may have been shoehorned into Chaucer's original grave in that ultimate British academy in the Abbey known as Poet's Corner, an act that had at least as much religio-political resonance at the time as it did literary-historical symbolism. Also, Prendergast's arguments regularly open the larger topic of medievalism in many useful ways. On the other hand, the book operates as a series of meditations whose recursivity and limited field of vision could give some readers pause.
Prendergast begins with an interesting question: why were some debtors in the mid-sixteenth century directed to pay their debts at Chaucer's tomb? In a move that becomes common strategy throughout the book, he admits quickly that he cannot answer the question, but the question itself raises all sorts of interesting theoretical problems about recovering connections between Chaucer's corpse and poetic corpus. These problems spin out in more-or-less chronological order: Chaucer's death and the responses to his presumed laureate status in the fifteenth century; the construction of a new tomb in 1556 for Chaucer, located in the South Transept of the Abbey and familiar to pilgrims today, at a time when Chaucer was recruited to both Catholic and Protestant causes; nineteenth-century efforts to restore Chaucer's tomb and his poetic canon; modernist attempts to come to grips with Chaucer's "stature"; and a final meditation on the forms of pilgrimage we make to cultural sites of what Prendergast calls a "mortuary imaginary" (146). Among the unanswerable questions are the precise location of Chaucer's original grave; the current whereabouts of his remains (which may not have been translated to the current structure, rendering the latter a memorial rather than a tomb); the existence of an epitaph by Stephen Surigonus said to be engraved on or near Chaucer's original floor slab, the accuracy of the Victorian restoration of verses carved onto the second and surviving tomb. All of these problems receive detailed discussion if not answers, and the reader enjoys snapshots of Chaucer admirers from Lydgate, Hoccleve, and Shirley to Stow, Speght, and Thynne to a wealth of Victorian amateurs and professionals-all having a go at Chaucer's remains.
Some of this territory has been covered by Derek Pearsall and Joseph Dane in recent years [[1]]; still, a fair bit of the material here is newly deployed, if not precisely new, such as an unauthorized measure of Chaucer's leg bones (? Or somebody's possibly poetical leg bones?) by one Henry Troutbeck, published in a nineteenth-century periodical (quoted 119-120). Prendergast also publishes for the first time (in an appendix) Laurence Tanner's response to a burning question exercising interested parties since the early nineteenth century: is the surviving tomb of Chaucer scavenged out of the wreckage of the Reformation and recycled in the Abbey, or newly commissioned at the time of his apparent translation from an original grave in the floor? Tanner is quite sure that the tomb was commissioned, a position also supported by W. R. Lethaby and Derek Pearsall, but Prendergast is more interested here in an underlying anxiety about Chaucer being translated to a second-hand tomb-and the consequent implication that Chaucer's value was itself at flea-market levels rather than museum-quality. Even in the realm of relative scholarly certainty, in other words, Prendergast is at pains to discover occluded uncertainties. At times, this tactic opens up startling new vistas. The discussion of Chaucer's new tomb as a pro-Catholic move under Queen Mary, for instance, builds very effectively on original suggestions by Lethaby and Pearsall while drawing in the complications of Dryden's Catholicism interred in the same discursive field if not Chaucer's grave itself (57-69). The intertwined corpses of these two poetic Fathers, both inconveniently non-Anglican, stimulate any number of unanswerable questions about England's literary culture. At other times Prendergast is mining for ambiguities in Chaucerian veins already well-worked by others, such as early print, late-Victorian textual editing, and modernist ideas of high culture.
Chaucerians are comfortable with closure-resistance, of course, but Prendergast leans heavily on the trope of anxiety to maintain explanatory power in the face of all this intractability. He begins with Bloomian anxiety of influence to discuss Chaucer the Father in Lancastrian England, moves to anxieties about the locus of Chaucer's remains and his propaganda status in Tudor England's religious conflicts, invokes Victorian anxiety about the authenticity of Chaucer's surviving tomb and printed corpus, traces modernist anxiety about Chaucer's elite level of genius given the poet's famous harmony with the commons. Various other anxieties pop up (the transition from manuscript to print culture, John Stow's usefulness as a scapegoat for the sins of editing) but not many other tactics. Prendergast's own academic Fathers (and Uncles) may be one source of this trope. Although Prendergast owes much to Paul Strohm in terms of critical strategies, Seth Lerer's Chaucer and His Readers is the starting place here, particularly the chapter "At Chaucer's Tomb") [[2]]; Lerer's argument that Chaucer's tomb invoked "new ideas of paternity and laureation" (149) surely provides the founding assumption of Prendergast's project. However, Prendergast also seems to have inherited what many medievalists would now see as a problem in Lerer's book, summarized in Lerer's declaration that "to be a poet in the fifteenth century was by necessity to be a Chaucerian" (11). There may be Middle English scholars who still think that Chaucer was the one and only literary influence of consequence in fifteenth-century England, but many of the poets in question might disagree: John Audelay, Osbert Bokenham, John Capgrave, and the authors of the Alliterative Morte Arthure, various Arthurian romances, the Gilte Legende, Mum and the Sothsegger, the Robin Hood ballads, The Wallace, and so on. Chaucer's influence is detectable in a few of these examples, such as Lydgate's East Anglian contemporaries Bokenham and Capgrave. Still, to call them "Chaucerian" in any full sense is special pleading indeed. And, at the risk of being tiresome on this point, John Fisher pointed out forty years ago that among the usual suspects establishing Chaucer's "laureation" John Gower was called "master" in close linkage with Chaucer by Hoccleve, Lydgate, the author of Kingis Quaire, Philip Sidney, and Samuel Johnson, among others.[[3]] Can we still speak of this period's poetic models as exclusively Chaucerian without even mentioning Gower, Langland, and a host of other now-anonymous authors? Our view of Middle English poetry and its reception is badly served when old truisms about Chaucer's undoubted importance continue to obscure a far more complex world.
Prendergast retains these familiar blinders throughout his study. He barely hints that any force other than Chaucer and the "Chaucer school" existed in fifteenth-century literature or in later reception of Middle English poetry. Unlike Lerer, whose contextual detail for fifteenth-century England is massive in support of his arguments, Prendergast relies on coded gestures and allusions to broader cultural issues while foregrounding questions and contradictions in the critical tradition on Chaucer. As a result, in the index the reader cannot find Gower, John after Goux, Jean-Josephe's citations. In fairness, I should mention that Gower does come up once in the endnotes (160), but the endnote material is not included in the index. Similarly, though his notes reveal that he has delved into the Victorian culture of death and memorialization, Prendergast's discussion itself stays away from any broader engagement, fixing on Chaucer's tomb as the sole basis for his discussion of British "necronationalism." Undoubtedly this approach is a deliberate choice. In his final chapter Prendergast seems to be enacting Bloomian patricide when he argues that Lerer (along with Pearsall and Dane) labors "to valorize [...] academic labor" by recovering the authentic Chaucer rather than giving in to fantasy play (143). Prendergast clearly prefers a playful scholarship free of anxiety about its transcendent value. And he does deliver many pleasures by bringing Zizek, Goux, and Derrida to bear on everyone from Hoccleve to Lerer. However, he also passes through topics of major interest with a level of engagement that is not gratifyingly rich or nuanced. To take an example familiar to medievalists, Prendergast twice asserts Caxton's belief in the "personal authority of the manuscript" which according to Walter Ong results from readers' perception that they are closer to the author in a handwritten document (19, 41-3). Students of medieval manuscripts have for some years now used ideas like Paul Zumthor's mouvance to argue that scribal culture could have very different effects than creating intimacy with an author, since scribes and compilers could profoundly alter authorial presence in every sense. Chaucer's work often circulated in manuscripts without attribution and/or in excerpts gathered with chunks from other authors, seriously undercutting any personal authority. Consequently, the discussion of Caxton here is much less convincing. In this case I am not asking Prendergast to declare that Ong is Wrong, or to build mounds of data on reception to create the effect of empirical "soundness," but to take at least some time to honor the complexities of manuscript and early print cultures. Without that, his arguments seem substantially less interesting even as he sails across deep waters.
Another interesting consequence of Prendergast's method is a recursivity that brings up topics and figures both in and out of their chronological context, as if Chaucer studies were best understood as a web of information in our heads, by definition accessed in a synchronous present. John Stow, for instance, comes up very briefly in a discussion of John Shirley (25) and of Chaucer's new tomb (53-4), mainly to point out that Stow in his 1561 edition of Chaucer seemed entirely unaware of the latter's recent translation to a more glorious memorial in 1556. The substantial discussion of Stow comes in a later chapter on Victorian textual editing where we discover that Stow in later years "sees himself and Brigham [sponsor of Chaucer's new tomb] as co-editors of 'Chaucer'" (106). Prendergast brings up Stow (and William Thynne) as part of a narrative about Victorian choices for best manuscripts of the Canterbury Tales, which itself brings up the whole question of fifteenth-century manuscripts-all of which is not mentioned in the chapter on Chaucer's reputation in that period. Relaxing into this recursivity may be easy for some, but readers hoping for a tidy chronological assembly of arguments may struggle.
Nonetheless, the gestural criticism Prendergast develops, alluding to broad vistas of data his readers presumably know rather than constructing his own carapace of footnotes and careful scholarly equivocation, offers pleasurable reading along with important new insights. Many of us may prefer our leading edges to be thin. Chaucer's Dead Body is incisive and stimulating, qualities we can enjoy on their own terms.
Notes:
[[1]]. Derek Pearsall, "Chaucer's Tomb: The Politics of Reburial," Medium Aevum 64 (1995): 51-73; Joseph Dane, Who is Buried in Chaucer's Tomb?: Studies in the Reception of Chaucer's Book (East Lansing, MI: Michigan State UP, 1998).
[[2]]. Seth Lerer, Chaucer and His Readers. (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1993), 147-75.
[[3]]. John Fisher, John Gower: Moral Philosopher and Friend of Chaucer (New York: New York UP, 1964), 3-34.