Donald Howard on Chaucer

[jsburbidge]

Donald Howard was a Chaucerian under whom I just missed studying: I arrived at Johns Hopkins as a graduate student the year he left for another university; instead I took mediaeval literature under his succesor, Lee Patterson. Both are now dead, Patterson, in the end, having made a more prominent and important contribution to English Mediaeval Studies than Howard. Still, Howard's The Idea of the Canterbury Tales was one of the early interesting books on Chaucer I ran across, and I have a soft spot for it. (I still think the gist of its argument correct, as well.)

Last year, at a university book sale, I ran across a copy of Howard's last major work, a biography of Chaucer, which was the recipient of the 1987 National Book Critics Circle Award for Biography. I started it with some anticipation.

I was disappointed.

It's the little things that started to make me nervous. Howard cites a quotation from Augustine which I can't find in Augustine (although I can find it in Liguori, in a text which cites a vaguely similar and widely quoted text from Augustine). In discussing paper versus parchment in Chaucer's day, he cites Trithemius' De Laude Scribendi without giving the source, using the not-usual form of the name Tritheim, and ignoring the fact that the text - from well after Chaucer's lifetime - deals with early print culture (paper vs. parchment), giving a misleading impression of the relative importance of MSS. in paper in Chaucer's time.

Umberto Eco says, in This is not the End of the Book, "But who will check the checker? In the old days, the checkers were members of great cultural institutions, of academies and universities. When Mr. So-and-So, member of Such-and-Such Institute, published his book on Clemenceau, or Plato, one assumed that the data he provided was accurate, because he would have spent his entire life checking his sources in libraries...". Howard reads as though he's writing based in general memory - the memory of an accomplished mediaevalist, admittedly, but still memory rather than careful research.

That being said, I have no critique to make of the broader historical background, but only of its relevance to any focus on Chaucer.

There's a lot of "might have done" in this book, plus general background of peripheral interest to the poems - all the details of the Black Prince's victories, for example - allowing Howard to spin what would otherwise be a few pages into a chapter. In treating the House of Fame he goes beyond a serious treatment of Chaucer's use of Dante to ungrounded and tendentious "might have" speculations about how Chaucer read and viewed Dante.

When he is on his own ground as a literary critic and not in speculative mode - for example, in his treatment of Boccaccio's oeuvre or discussing the Parlement of Foules - he is both enlightening and interesting. The treatment of the Troilus is worthwhile. (The treatment of the Canterbury Tales is thematically largely what his earlier work argued, with some additiosl speculation on time and circumstances of composition of the various parts.)

But Howard tries to bridge the gap between what we have of Chaucer's life, which is essentially one of a successful civil servant and peripheral courtier, and his poetry, and when he does that he strays into speculation about Chaucer's internal mental state which is to my mind fanciful.

If you are not a mediaevalist at all - if you don't know anything about the Black Prince, or the broad traditions of French courtly poetry, and your only sense of the court of Richard II comes from Shakespeare, then this biography will hold your hand and not confuse you. Even then, you may miss some things - for example, Patterson's treatment of the Scrope / Grosvenor case (in Chaucer and the Subject of History) is far more illuminating than Howard's, though Howard provides the general facts.