In recent years scholarship on religious dissent, popular piety, gendered devotional practices, and relationships among Christians and non-Christian others has transformed the conversation about religious writing and experience in late medieval England, edging the focus away from clerical authority and toward subaltern and lay responses. Chaucer and Religion, a collection of essays edited by Helen Phillips, offers a welcome new set of assessments of the place of religion within Chaucer's writings. As Helen Cooper notes in a lucid introduction, studies about religion and Chaucer are troubled by several obstacles, among them the pervasiveness of religion in late medieval society and modes of intellectual inquiry today that tend to be suspicious of religious faith. It has been notoriously difficult for critics to find a foothold on Chaucer, whose own writings repeatedly invoke religion even as they tend to avoid devotional forms popular among many of his contemporaries. How are we to evaluate Chaucer's uses of religion as matters of faith, politics, and culture?
The sixteen essays in this volume are grouped into two sections, "Contexts and Critical Approaches" (twelve) and "Teaching Chaucer Today" (four). Aspects of religion surveyed in "Contexts and Approaches" include sexual and marital morality, death and judgment, practices of pilgrimage, cultic worship of the Virgin and the saints, and Lollardy. Survey is an apt term for much of the volume. Alcuin Blamires, in "Love, Marriage, Sex, Gender," takes up each of the topics of his title, offering incisive if brief background material as a springboard for local readings: late medieval attitudes toward virginity as context for the Physician's Tale and the Second Nun's Tale; the Church's position on fornication as context for the Summoner's Tale and the Reeve's Tale; courtly love and relation to The Book of the Duchess, The Parliament of Fowls and Troilus and Criseyde; marital consent and the Knight's Tale, the Man of Law's Tale, and the Clerk's Tale; marital sexuality and the Merchant's Tale and the Wife of Bath's Prologue; procreation and deviancy and the Nun's Priest's Tale and Pardoner's Tale. In these texts, Blamires argues, Chaucer conscripts religion to reveal the human--to show how people use and abuse doctrines or received wisdom about sexuality and love.
Blamires' sweeping review serves as a kind of template for other analytic surveys in the volume: Google Earth overviews that then zoom in for local snaps. Frances McCormack's "Chaucer and Lollardy" surveys work by such scholars as Katherine Little, Karen Winstead, Helen Phillips, and Paul Strohm, and then argues that Chaucer used Lollardy as set of data points with which to engage larger questions about knowledge, authority and discourse. Carl Phelpstead, in "Contextualizing Chaucerian Perspectives on Death and Judgment," gives a useful primer on late medieval attitudes towards death and purgatory as a backdrop for reading the Pardoner's Tale and Troilus and Criseyde. Both texts, he argues, pose the specter of the Day of Judgment against human deferrals that repeatedly resist closure. Helen Phillips's "Morality in the Canterbury Tales, Chaucer's Lyrics and the 'Legend of Good Women'" opens with an overview of critical approaches to Chaucer and morality, especially D. W. Robertson and the Princeton school of exegetical critics, and uses that as a point of departure for a broad analytic survey. Phillips's other contribution to the volume, "The Matter of Chaucer: Chaucer and the Boundaries of Romance," argues that Chaucer invokes romance to critique chivalry as well as to raise philosophical problems that aren't resolved through romance closure. Though the argument of this rich and interesting essay pairs well with Phelpstead's argument about resistance to closure, it is hard to make out what the essay contributes to a volume on religion.
Dee Dyas, in "Chaucer and the Communities of Pilgrimage," gives another broad scan in a superb overview of practices of pilgrimage, challenging well-known arguments by Victor and Edith Turner to argue that Chaucer elides metaphoric or life pilgrimage with literal or place pilgrimage to reinforce social boundaries and norms. Graham Caie, in "Chaucer and the Bible," surveys lay familiarity with the Bible, arguing that Chaucer constructs and critiques characters through their knowledge, use--and often abuse--of the Bible. Sherry Reames, in "Mary, Sanctity and Prayers to Saints: Chaucer and Late Medieval Piety," contextualizes Chaucer's prayers and references to the saints, particularly the Virgin and Jesus. While Chaucer's Marian prayers pious tales are models of exemplarity, they also resist easy sentimentality.
A few essays zoom in to offer closer views of individual texts. Laurel Broughton, in "Chaucer and the Saints: Miracles and Voices of Faith," argues that Marian devotion in the Prioress's Tale (a lily miracle, she claims), the Man of Law's Tale and the Second Nun's Tale is entirely without irony--a position that resonates with Reames but sits in provocative contrast with Anthony Bale's "'A maner Latyn corrupt': Chaucer and the Absent Religions." Bale contextualizes the Prioress's Tale and the Man of Law's Tale through multicultural exchange, both of trade and persons, arguing that Chaucer uses both tales to critique Christian imperialist practices--in the Prioress's Tale through a narrator whose "misplaced mercy" is "silly, shallow and misguided" (58) and in the Man of Law's Tale through an aimless and fallible narrator whose wandering narration interrogates the precepts of Christianity. The most idiosyncratic and original essays of the collection are the two contributions by Stephen Knight. "Toward the Fen: Church and Churl in Chaucer's Fabliaux" reads the Miller's Tale and the Reeve's Tale as hybrid forms that conscript anti-clerical satire for the purposes of anti-churl satire, as exemplified by the "illusory clericality" of the miller's bald pate that gets him clubbed by his wife in the Reeve's Tale. "Classicizing Christianity in Chaucer's Dream Poems," always smart if in places almost unreadably exuberant, makes the similar claim for the intersection between religious and secular: Christianity in the dream poems is voiced through allusions, an off-stage prompting that informs on how we should interpret the classical or secular settings.
Essays in the final section, "Teaching Chaucer Today," offer advice for introducing students to the Bible, negotiating symbolism and allegory, and engaging students as active readers. Teachers of Chaucer will find much of value here. It is doubtless no accident that two of the teaching essays come from instructors in the UK university system, Roger Dalrymple and Gillian Rudd, and the other two from instructors in the United States, D. Thomas Hanks Jr. and David Raybin. All four contributors draw on their own classroom experiences, albeit from very different institutional settings.
The thread that links many of the essays in this volume is gesture. Christianity, heard through biblical, liturgical, and patristic echoes and through aphorisms, prayers, and exemplary figures, gestures toward the social world pictured in Chaucer's narratives. For Chaucer, religion serves as a guide to human behaviors and institutions. While the volume is admirable for its coverage and broad sweep, it pays little attention to questions of its own methodology or to earlier generations of critics who have grappled with Chaucer and religion. The only nod to the long dure of critical culture wars on Chaucer and religion, especially the scholarly furor surrounding the work of D. W. Robertson and the Princeton exegetical school, appears in Phillips' essay. If D. W. Robertson is addressed only in the last essay of the "Contexts and Approaches" section, Chaucer's Religious Tales, the influential 1996 essay collection edited by David Benson and Elizabeth Robertson, isn't discussed at all. One might argue that the approach to religion in this volume is not so very different from D. W. Robertson's, in fact; Robertson, like many of the contributors to this volume, understood that Christianity offered Chaucer a set of contexts for commenting on the world, though Robertson tended to see Christian ethics as positing for Chaucer an absolute moral compass. Chaucer, in Phillips' volume, emerges as utilitarian rather than idealist in his conscription of religion for purposes of social commentary. In her introduction Helen Cooper suggests that the issue of faith stands as an elephant in the room when we try to engage in a conversation about religion, and this volume is no exception. Faith is a signal topic that these essays repeatedly avoid. In dodging issues of Chaucer's faith or piety, most of the contributors also bypass reflection on their own methodology, instead referencing liturgical practices or biblical references as roughly interchangeable with other cultural or textual contexts. The most provocative questions about faith and literary production, in fact, turn up in the essays on teaching. In asking his students, "Does Chaucer suggest that his work--or perhaps just the 'Parson's Tale'--is inspired by God?" Roger Dalrymple poses a question about belief and textuality that would seem fundamental not just to the classroom but to the volume as a whole.
If the volume stands on the merit of its individual essays, there is much to commend here. Wide-ranging in their address of late medieval religious practices and institutions and broadly attentive to Chaucer's texts, these essays will be a go-to source for graduate students or for teachers looking to brush up on the literature. One hopes the conversation begins rather than ends here.