Chaucer and the City.
Edited by Ardis Butterfield. Chaucer Studies XXXVII. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer,
2006. Pp. xiv + 231. $80.
The dozen essays of this attractive collection offer scholarship of critical
substance and originality that deserves to be considered and responded to
by students of Chaucer and his times. In her Introduction to the book, "Chaucer
and the Detritus of the City," Ardis Butterfield calls our attention immediately
and repeatedly to the sounds, more than the sights, of London. The essays
that follow, she says, call particular attention to the "aural and linguistic,
material and historic" (pp. 4, 12) and not "merely material" (p.
5) perspectives on "the reading of the city in Chaucer" (p. 6). Opening
with an account of the sounds and materials in two exhibits at the tate
Modern, she leads us, in a very few pages, from thinking about the differences
and connections between detritus and evidence, to headier regions inhabited
by Walter Benjamin and Michel de Certeau. They and Henri Lefebvre (or should
it be LeFebvre, as on pp. 4[n.5], 33?), along with Caroline Barron and the
book's dedicatee David Wallace, are the influential genii loci
for a number of the book's contributors. The city, along with the "City,"
plays its part in the essays: the idea of the city as much as the historical
London (and environs) makes this a book that non-Chaucerians may also wish
to consult. Chaucerians, on the other hand, will find in it new contexts
for and reinvigorated perspectives on Chaucer's London.
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