Studies in the Age of Chaucer

David K. Coley’s book provides a series of readings of Chaucer, Saint Erkenwald, Hoccleve, and Gower that foreground acts of speaking and the performative power of speech in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries. To state that “[t]he spoken word, both in its symbolic potential and in its performative efficacy, became a contested locus in late medieval England” (4) is not to make a radical claim, and indeed Coley invokes Anne Middleton’s “The Idea of Public Poetry in the Reign of Richard II” to help launch his own thesis, though Piers Plowman, important to Middleton’s framing of poetic voice, does not receive [End Page 398] extended discussion here. This book is most effective in its often thoughtful reflections on primary texts, with the work of a number of other scholars cited, nuanced, or debated. There are several areas, however, where its larger methodological or critical claims are less strong, or invite more rigorous development.

The Wheel of Language contains five chapters and a brief conclusion. In the first, introductory chapter, Coley discusses some contexts and tensions at work in the flexing of poetic voice; he also very briefly sketches J. L. Austin’s work on performative utterances and the responses found in Searle, Bourdieu, and Derrida (these pages can only suggest a large set of questions). Finally, he uses The House of Fame and its understandings of sound and speech as active and physical (a ripple, a body) to emphasize a medieval view that “the spoken word was uniquely powerful, that speech both represented and created in equal measure” (29). Chapter 2 stays with Chaucer, arguing that The Manciple’s Tale can be read as an intervention in a post-Ockham debate over universals, metaphysical realism, and nominalism. Phebus’s belated reevaluation of his wife as “giltelees,” and his ability to change the crow through the performative power of his divine speech, Coley argues, “may not so much be a comment on the potential of speech to deceive, but rather a comment on the power of poetic language to create worlds within the poetic text” (53). That is, Phebus’s potentia absoluta (in Ockham’s terms) has overridden any sense of “crow” as a stable universal, and has instead reshaped reality through language. There are some keenly made readings here, but the case for what kinds of linguistic philosophy Chaucer was employing or endorsing remains highly debatable, and at key moments (for example, 46–50) Coley relies on assumptions about the Manciple as an intentional agent separable from an extra- or intradiegetic Chaucer that tend to confuse rather than clarify the linguistic forces at work.

Chapter 3 focuses on Saint Erkenwald, arguing that it is “deeply invested in sacramental speech and in the precise nature of the changes that such speech effects” (70). I found this the most persuasive chapter of the book, combining close readings of Erkenwald’s powerful speech with an argument that the poem “uses baptism as a stalking horse for . . . the Eucharist” (71). Coley comments on a series of connections between the poem’s imagined spaces and bodies on the one hand, and debates about transubstantiation on the other, developing the claim that Saint Erkenwald may be read as an anti-Wycliffite text whose treatment [End Page 399] of the pagan judge’s “Old Law” associates Lollardy with Judaism as limited or failed understandings of right and truth. Staying with questions of religious speech and intercession, Chapter 4 reads some of Thomas Hoccleve’s devotional works and the early parts of the Series through the prism of linguistic exchange and economies of speech. Starting with “The Monk who Clad the Virgin,” Coley describes how “Hoccleve develops the tension between the seigneurial and mercantile structures of exchange through the persistent use of economic language” (120). Devotional and social interaction, or productivity, may then be gauged by the flow of profitable language between participants. Coley draws on a...