Content area
Full text
Ann W. Astell, Chaucer and the Universe of Learning (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1996). xvi + 254 pp. ISBN 0-80I4-3269-3. L27.50.
Ann Astell makes three arguments in this book on the basis that Chaucer is a philosophical poet. She makes a solid case for the significance of the layout of the Ellesmere MS in terms of clerical and astrological learning, suggests that we have undervalued the status of clerks as a fourth estate in Chaucer's vision of society, and argues that The Canterbury Tales represents both a social summa (in the General Prologue) and a philosophical one (in the groupings of tales). She argues carefully, if controversially, that Chaucer's audience consisted primarily of clerks rather than a courtly circle of 'gentlemen' (p. 5), then goes on to compare Dante, Gower and Chaucer as `lay clerks' who `occupied a novel status in late medieval society' (p. 19). For Astell, all three work with the genre of didascalic literature, which is marked by several features: analogies between the estates and divisions of learning; the presentation of hierarchical competition between the disciplines; and `the encyclopedic survey of the divisions of knowledge into the imaginative plot of a cosmological pilgrimage, the soul's planetary descent and ascent'...