Congenial Souls: Reading Chaucer from Medieval to Postmodern. By Stephanie Trigg. Medieval Cultures Series, 30. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002. Pp. xxiv + 280. $57.95 (cloth); $22.95 (paper).

What does it mean to be a Chaucerian? For authors, scribes, and writers of the fifteenth century, it often meant pursuing Chaucer's literary models: writing in his genres, miming his idioms, ventriloquizing his personae. For readers of the Renaissance, it meant establishing a bond with the paternal figure in an English literary history: celebrating his originality and scope, while at the same time lamenting the shifts in language that had made his poetry increasingly opaque. For the Augustans and their followers, it meant moving toward a mode not so much of poetic replication or social praise, but of what we now think of as literary criticism: assessing Chaucer's formal and thematic achievements against sources and contemporaries, but at the same time establishing the critic as a subject, if not on a par with then at the very least in dialog with Chaucer's authorial subject. To be a Chaucerian, in modern terms is, as Stephanie Trigg puts it in Congenial Souls, to establish "a relationship with the author that depends initially on distance, not intimacy or apprenticeship. " She goes on: "The subjectivity of the critic is more self-consciously constructed than inherited, since it is built around the possibility of bridging the cultural and historical gaps between Chaucer's time and the present " (p. 75).

Seth Lerer
Stanford University