Amanda Holton's The Sources of Chaucer's Poetics is a very good and very useful book, even if it seems to hark back to the scholarly questions of the 1960s and 1970s. Its title is somewhat grandiose, since the book is largely about Chaucer's vexed relation to medieval traditions of rhetoric. There is a long tradition in Chaucer scholarship that argued that a poet as sophisticated as Chaucer would have dismissed the many and widely circulated arts of rhetoric in the Middle Ages. In 1963, Robert O. Payne published his still-influential Chaucer and the Key to Remembrance, which changed the terms of this debate by suggesting that Chaucer's statements about poetry and the rhetorical manuals shared a common aesthetic. Robert Jordan's Chaucer and the Shape of Creation: the Aesthetic Possibilities of Inorganic Form (1968) related Chaucer's poetics to an emerging structuralist enterprise. By the end of the 1970s and early 1980s, Anne Middleton had published her seminal essays on Ricardian poetics, raising questions of public and poetic address that we are still working out. In the past two decades, the study of rhetoric has been reinvigorated by the work of Rita Copeland, which has connected the traditions of rhetoric to institutions of education, religion and communities created by reading and translation. Holton's book arcs back in this trajectory, suggesting that we have missed an important component in Chaucer's poetic practice, which is how he transformed the figures of his French, Italian and Latin sources and restructured their models of narrative. Her approach is ostensibly formalist, with a nod towards high structuralism, though her close attention to source study grounds it in literary history.
A summary of Holton's argument does not necessarily communicate the most impressive aspects of the book, which reads like a series of extended commentaries or annotations. In addition to an introduction and conclusion, the chapters of the book are titled "Narrative," "Speech," "Rhetoric" and "Figurative Language." The first chapter discusses how Chaucer handles the elements of narrative in terms of which events are to be described and what is to be said about those events. While Chaucer is capable of amplification, Holton notes that Chaucer seems especially skilled at isolating the essential aspects of a narrative unit. The Knight's Tale stands as an example of this concision. When he does expand on the narration, Chaucer does so by adding his own interpretation and commentary or building on significant speeches by major characters, rather than including intrusions by minor characters. Hence, the second chapter notes the varying amount of speech making in works such as the Knight's Tale and the Man of Law's Tale. Holton notes that Chaucer develops internal commentaries by the characters in the form of included complaints, something he learned from Ovid but understood through a Boethian framework. The third chapter demonstrates how Chaucer uses the rhetorical tropes of his continental models, foregrounding the constructedness of his narratives and their surface elegance. If Holton is correct, the way some of us have read the Knight's Tale, the Man of Law's Tale or, by extension, the Clerk's Tale or the Franklin's Tale as rhetorically expressive of their narrator may be wrong, since Holton's suggestion implies that this self-consciousness is a consistent aspect of Chaucerian style. The fourth chapter seeks to demonstrate that Chaucer tended to reduce the extended metaphors and similes of his sources, seeking to control the play of signification, often clustering images found widely spaced in his sources. Holton finds this somewhat contradictory, since such metaphors perform the same function as the included commentaries he elsewhere elaborates.
Holton thus offers a highly contextualized revision of our understanding of how Chaucer responded to the rhetoric and poetics of his sources. At times, her Chaucer sounds like a creature of T. S. Eliot or Harold Bloom, negotiating the burden of tradition and canonicity. She also makes original critical observations that I found to be the most memorable aspects of the book, though I wasn't always certain whether those observations were driven by her thesis. "The Monk's Tale," she writes, "is extremely unusual in its willingness to be blown about by the stylistic practices of its sources rather than steered firmly according to the charts of Chaucer's customary practice" (150). In the story of Philomela, Chaucer removes qualifying similes in his source and thereby "ruthlessly introduces an idea of determined will" (138). Dido's horse, described as "paper-whit" (LGW 1198) is related to other images in the scene that describe all of the relevant objects in terms of the materials of texts and writing, revealing an "intense textual anxiety" (121) about the Aeneid. Chaucer uses native English alliteration quite differently than the way he deals with European figurative rhetoric, "turning away from the urbane decorativeness of Ovid" (112). The Knight's Tale "cannot offer the ritual calm of tears which is offered through figures of repetition in the Teseida" (101). Chaucer removes energetic emotion from his sources "and what chiefly goes is anger, particularly female anger" (91). Chaucer's Constance not only talks more than she does in his sources "her speech is consistently aimed at making others do things" (58). Chaucer has "a strong attachment to the non-temporal modes of narrative" (44). Some of these observations require her earlier arguments, some seem like brilliant perceptions, but she is admirably willing to acknowledge those moments in Chaucer when he doesn't do what she says he does at most other times.
Holton's principles of selection for which tales to discuss are driven by her thesis, resulting in a range that some readers might find puzzling or limiting. From The Legend of Good Women, she deals with the tales of Dido, Thisbe, Lucrece, Medea, Philomela and Hypermnestra. From The Canterbury Tales, she deals with the Knight's Tale, the Man of Law's Tale, the Physician's Tale, the Manciple's Tale and five of the stories included in the Monk's Tale. By focusing on selected tales and eliminating consideration of Troilus and Criseyde, Holton misses some important scholarly precursors, such as Karla Taylor, who identified so many of Chaucer's stylistic and imagistic borrowings from Dante. As impressive as it is to publish with such a prominent (and expensive) imprint as Ashgate, I wondered whether Holton's findings would have been more accessible if they had appeared in a scholarly journal with on-line access, so that one could search for relevant details. Holton is both a careful scholar and a good close reader, and she is convincing in pointing to ways that Chaucer himself might have read and borrowed and made what he read and borrowed his own. If there ever is another edition of the standard Riverside Chaucer or new editions of any of the tales she discusses, many of Holton's observations and discoveries deserve to be included in the notes.