Abstract

RHETORICA 106 J. Stephen Russell, Chaucer and the Trivium: The Mindsong of the Canterbury Tales (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1998), x + 266 pp. Although he acknowledges the veil of time hiding the exact nature and extent of Chaucer's education from us, J. Stephen Russell argues that the curriculum of late medieval grammar schools, the trivium (grammar, dialectic, rhetoric), thoroughly influenced and shaped die Canterbury Tales. Establishing his key assumptions early on, Russell claims that Chaucer usually relied on accessus, florilegia, and other scribally-mediated collections of classical and medieval authors rather than full texts, and consequently that Chaucer's citations of specific auctores, texts, and terms does not prove that he knew them well. Russell assumes the grammar school curriculum was Chaucer's only formal education and objects to some current, grander claims about Chaucer's knowledge of philosophy or theology. Chaucer, for example, "may have known Ralph Strode, but Strode did not teach Chaucer the Summa Logicae over dessert" (p. 8). Such claims raise questions about what limits we might want or need to place on Chaucer's capabilities, and they raise questions about how extensively we can argue for a culture's ability to write itself into individual texts. Russell does not, however, explore these issues; instead, he focuses on the trivium specifically and explores ways it shapes the Canterbury Tales. The primary value of his study is to reassert the crucial importance of medieval rhetoric and literacy studies for any reading of Chaucer. Russell provides an overview of the trivium in his first chapter, "A Medieval Education and Its Implications". Grounded in Latin grammar and readings, the curriculum taught children a "subliminal lesson that Latin was purity and precision, the vernacular chaos and compromise" (p. 11). Elements of the school curriculum that addressed dialectic or logic posited a basic model of human cognition: the agens intellectus "recognizes" objects perceived through the senses; the intellectus passivus "cogitates" on those objects. Students learned that a universal, "mental" language exists that is capable of perceiving truth but that our Reviews 107 language of actual communication in the world, "natural" language, is always inadequate and inferior to ideas. (Here some might object to Russell's simplifications of the models or to his use of more obscure semanticists like the Modistae.) In this chapter, Russell stresses the importance of the Tree of Porphyry, Aristotle's Categories, and supposition theory; together, these created taxonomies and produced particular kinds of thought patterns in students. Russell subsequently traces the influence of this curriculum on Chaucer's work, preferring to locate ré­ inscriptions rather than refusals of these models. In the General Prologue, Chaucer the pilgrim-narrator uses the Aristotle's ten categories as the groundwork for his observations. Beginning with a careful study of Chaucer's grammar, Russell develops a brilliant explication of the conceptual structure of the General Prologue: "each successive verbal act, each step in the dance of predication, involves the ubiquitous decision Quid est? and the answer to that question, Chaucer knew, is always a pas de deux between the object and the predicator, the other and the self" (p. 96). As the Chaucer the observant pilgrim "falls" into language, negotiating tensions between ideal human types and the rather motley crew before him, he cannot sustain Aristotelian formality. His own passions begin to show, and a "slippage" occurs "from natural and accidental supposition to confused determinate supposition, reflecting the narrator's fall from objectivity and reportorial responsibility" (p. 95). For Russell the Knight's Tale focuses on issues of definition, the Man of Law's Tale on "words as commerce, apostrophe (or right coinage) and...God's jurisdiction" (p. 137). The Clerk's Tale offers Russell the opportunity to explore metaphors (i.e., Walter as "the fallen creator", Griselda as a Christ-figure), rhetorical features of narrative, and the epilogue (where the Clerk explicates his own tale). For Russell, the tale is, finally, "an abstraction, a meditation on linguistic, logical, and theological arts that is almost", but not quite "abducted from complications of authorship" (p. 173). Russell does much to establish that the Canterbury Tales "explodes into life thanks to the lessons of grammar, rhetoric, and logic" (p. 202), although...