Holsinger, A Burnable Book

Bruce Holsinger. A Burnable Book. New York: William Morrow, 2014.

Reviewed by Christopher Roman (croman2@kent.edu)

In what ways can academics engage with a broader public? There is plenty of debate and discussion on what exactly members of the university community can do to reach beyond our sometimes narrowly defined disciplines and engage with our local and global communities. At times this debate can focus on outcomes, as in, if the professoriate engages with the public in the form of Twitter or blogs, does it count toward tenure or promotion? Do blogs count as scholarship? (my easy answer to both of these questions is yes). But, sidestepping questions of “does it count?,” it may be more important to reflect on how we can connect to our non-academic or cross-discipline communities. There is the simple act of a lecture in a non-academic setting like a coffee shop. There is engaging with history, Chaucer, and spoken word poetry, as in the recent work of Patience Agbabi. There is reimagining communities transhistorically, as well as across the hard and fast lines of professional/amateurs as Carolyn Dinshaw has recently explored in her book How Soon Is Now? This is all to say, as well, why don’t we write more novels?

Bruce Holsinger’s A Burnable Book engages with the ways in which history, literature, and power intersect. Holsinger creates a medieval world through deep characterization, rich detail, and glimpses of shadowy mystery that engage with the time period immediately after the Uprising of 1381 during the reign of Richard II. There are a number of intertwining plotlines having to do with the possible assassination of Richard II foretold by a secret prophetic book, the friction between the lumpenproletariat and the nobility, the information trading that comes from rings of prostitution, religious, and middle class peoples, fraught relations with Italian politics, the knowledge-hoarding machinations of John Gower, and access to language. Holsinger’s novel is a fast-paced mystery filled with murder, bawdy language, and medievalist in-jokes that keep the reader engaged with the dizzying layers of medieval society always fermenting beneath the feet of those who are not paying attention.

A Burnable Book is in the tradition of Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose amongst others. We have the problem of access to books and the problem of bodies. Perhaps these bodies are linked to the books (and considering Holsinger’s academic work in medieval animals studies revolving around the matrices of book production and animals, it is hard not to read one informing the other), but it is up to John Gower, unlikely detective, to solve the mystery. Perhaps it is unfair to compare this book to Umberto Eco’s magisterial novel, but it is worth thinking about how both books borrow from the detective genre in order to piece together a medieval world that is distant (and familiar to us). We are doing our own detective work when we enter into the archives or teach students of a medieval world in institutions papered over with medieval(ist) regalia. Where Holsinger’s novel veers from Eco’s is perhaps in scale (a king’s life is on the line) and Gower’s fallibility (William of Baskerville is probably fallible in his grief over a loss of books, but who can blame him?). And, Gower’s fallibility is what makes this novel so much fun and (re)creates him as an empathetic historical figure.

As this novel is set during the height of what we now call Ricardian poetry, reference to the work of Geoffrey Chaucer, John Gower, William Langland, the Pearl-poet fly thick. Perhaps that is one of the greatest appeals of this book; as a medievalist, I get to enjoy the jokes. But, I also think this would be the appeal to a wider audience; readers gain access to a medieval world not in a lecture or with a test at the end, but threaded through a narrative. This is to say, as well, that I learned things. I had not read Sir John Clanvowe in the past, so, inspired by an exchange between Clanvowe and Gower, I read Clanvowe’s The Booke of Cupide and The Two Ways, and his character’s depth increased. As well, a joke exchanged between Gower and Clanvowe referencing Chaucer’s writing as “tripe” made that dialogue even more amusing. Multi-textual readings thicken the text so one wants to reach for their Chaucer or Gower or Clanvowe.

And, most interestingly, Chaucer comes off as a bit of a jerk. Holsinger muddies the waters for medievalists by suggesting the medievalist’s favorite son has a bit of an anger problem, a wife problem, political problems, vanity issues, and some serious writing insecurities. Gower is always the lowly poet compared to Chaucer, but maybe that’s all right considering how Gower, despite his ability to know everyone’s secrets, comes off as a little more sympathetic than his buddy Chaucer. In a shouting argument only the best of friends can have, Gower shouts down Chaucer, “Go to hell, Chaucer,” and a reader can’t help but laugh.

Language and books. It is the obsession of medievalists and a bridge from modern to medieval. A Burnable Book is of our pop culture moment (not only because of our interest in the Wolf Hall’s of the world) in that television shows like Grimm or Sleepy Hollow (also falling within the boundaries of the detective/mystery genre) use the archive as a prime resource. In both of these television shows the true key to the mystery is usually not in the clues at the crime scene. Though the investigation might start there, clues at the scene obfuscate rather than illuminate. The referencing of older works that reveal forgotten and hidden knowledge are the true keys to the mystery. This is to say, if you would have already read about the marks left by a dragon-man (or, in Grimm-speak, a Dämonfeuer) or used a historical concoction that reveals zombie George Washington’s invisible message that he left in his Bible four days after he was said to have died, you would have solved things by now. The underlying message here is read, and not only read, but learn to read the past. Ignoring the problems of keeping centuries old manuscripts preserved in Portland’s humidity, Grimm almost always circulates around the problem of language itself. Some characters have wider language knowledge than our main character, and it is their ability to grasp Spanish or German that leads to a breakthrough for the hero.

And the matrix of problems surrounding origination and language is one of the problems that Gower attempts to solve in A Burnable Book. In Gower’s speculating about connections between the missing book, its dating, the problem of Lollardry, and who wrote it, Gower seeks out a forgotten library in Oxford. In my favorite opening to a scene in this novel, Gower walks into this library:

           

the first thing I noticed about the dark space was the smell: rich, deep, gorgeous. Cardamom, I thought, and cloves and cinnamon—and old parchment, and leather, and boards, and dust. (213)

First, how is this not already a Yankee Candle? Second, notice Holsinger’s attention to detail, this book is full of moments like this, and one notices the ways the work of the academic influences the rich textures of the description. Third, this is yet one more of these moments where consulting the archive opens up a path to meaning (though not in the way Gower at first intends). The forgotten, the ancient mechanisms of meaning, turn, revealing themselves in ways we (or Gower) may not realize initially.

Which brings me back around to language. The opening mystery is witnessed by a character who does not understand that the language being spoken is Italian. This is significant because some of the political intrigue working in the background of the book is misunderstanding and underestimating the Italian influence on English politics. Is this a way to jibe Chaucer for not owning up to borrowing from Boccaccio? Probably. But more significantly Holsinger is suggesting both the power of language and how it circulates among social class and the ways in which borders (both national and language-wise) are porous. It all bleeds through.

Cosmopolitanism revolves around the exchange of language. In this book medieval London and Southwark illustrate the swirling linguistic and social conflicts that characterize political, class, and gender struggle. Interpretation and meaning making are marks of the creation of a world. Holsinger sets forth a world in which who gets to make meaning and who gets to evaluate communication proves the fine line between life and death.

And Moral Gower has to tread that line.

Christopher Roman

Kent State University Tuscarawas

Ladan Niayesh, ed.: A Knight's Legacy

Ladan Niayesh, ed. A Knight’s Legacy: Mandeville and Mandevillian Lore in Early Modern England (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2011).

Reviewed by Andrew Bozio (andrew.bozio@lmc.gatech.edu)

Since David Aers’s seminal essay, “A Whisper in the Ear of Early Modernists; or, Reflections on Literary Critics Writing the ‘History of the Subject,’” scholars of Renaissance literature have been encouraged to reconsider the influence of medieval literature and culture upon the early modern period.[1] One of the strengths of Ladan Niayesh’s edited collection, A Knight’s Legacy: Mandeville and Mandevillian Lore in Early Modern England, is that it enables this reconsideration of periodization with exceptional precision. Certainly, the volume’s most specific contribution comes in its ability to advance the field of Mandeville studies; prior to its publication, it was possible to say, as Mary Baine Campbell notes in her introduction, that “no collection of scholarly essays related to Mandeville’s Travels yet exists in English or French” (1). But the methodological strength of this volume lies in its use of Mandeville’s Travels as an instrument for exploring the refashioning of medieval thought within the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In three sections, the volume moves chronologically to trace the ways in which Mandeville’s Travels was disseminated, adapted, and reimagined in the years following its initial composition. The result is not only a more nuanced understanding of Mandeville’s place within premodern culture, but also keen insight into the way that Mandeville, and medieval culture more broadly, was reinvented over the course of the early modern period.

In the first section, Michael C. Seymour, Charles W. R. D. Moseley, and Kenneth Parker study the reception of various editions of Mandeville’s Travels across the late medieval and early modern periods. Collectively, these essays undermine a familiar narrative of epistemic rupture, where the Renaissance ushers in a period of skepticism and scientific inquiry that reveals the beliefs of the medieval period to be, at best, naïve. Namely, as Moseley argues, it is “simplistic” to assume that “as a result of ‘new discoveries’ the factual credibility of Mandeville’s description of the world evaporated towards the end of the sixteenth century – between, say, the two editions of Hakluyt’s Principall Navigations (1589, 1598-99)” (28). Suggesting, instead, a profound complexity within the reception of Mandeville’s Travels, these essays contain a wealth of information, and they represent a valuable resource for anyone interested in understanding the manner of Mandeville’s dissemination or in theorizing the political and ideological significance of his reception. 

Building upon this work, the essays of the second section foreground what Niayesh terms “Mandevillian ideologies,” or the styles of thought that Mandeville develops and, in turn, disseminates with the circulation of the Travels. Drawing upon Rosemary Tzanaki’s concept of religious geography, Leo Carruthers foregrounds the relationship between spiritual and physical spaces, using this intimacy to illuminate the peculiar topography of the Travels. In turn, Matthew Dimmock builds upon the relationship between religious belief and geographic space in his excellent essay on Mandeville’s treatment of Islam. Rather than appraise Mandeville’s putative tolerance of Islam, Dimmock notes that the Travels represented, in the words of Frank Grady, “the most popular secular book in circulation,” and thus, according to Dimmock, it became “undoubtedly a primary source for medieval Christian notions of Islam, the Qur’an and the Prophet Muhammad” (93). The essay is rich in nuance, showing the complexity of Mandeville’s consideration of Islam and of Muhammad. Scholars of medieval England may be particularly interested by Dimmock’s claim that the Travels argues for the conversion of the Muslims against their destruction in the Crusades and, in so doing, articulates an idea that would reemerge in certain strands of Lollard thought, Langland’s Piers Plowman, and The Book of Margery Kempe. With still greater focus, Line Cottegnies considers the status of Mandeville’s Travels in early modern England by contrasting the work with Sir Walter Ralegh’s The Discoverie of Guiana (1596). Although both texts are presented as travel narratives, as Cottegnies argues, they differ sharply in “their epistemologies of travel” (110). Namely, Mandeville relies upon the auctoritas of earlier explorers to ground his work, whereas Ralegh “uses a type of experimental observation” in his encounter with other cultures, anticipating Francis Bacon’s work in The Advancement of Learning (1605) (109). Thus, although several essays in the collection disrupt our sense of an epistemological break between the medieval and the early modern periods, Cottegnies’ essay reinforces the idea of a profound discontinuity, embodied most palpably in the styles of reasoning that Mandeville and Ralegh deploy. Arguably, this tension is one of the real strengths of the collection. Taken as a whole, the essays of this collection show how one might rethink the nature of periodization with intellectual rigor and new insight.

In tracing the contours of Mandevillian ideology, the essays of the second section lay a strong foundation for the concluding section of the book, which concerns the representation of Mandeville and Mandevillian lore upon the early modern stage. This section, entitled “Mandevillian stages,” is the culmination of the collection, in part because the essays suggest how reception and ideology fuse together within the dissemination and adaptation of Mandeville’s Travels. Richard Hillman reveals that Christopher Marlowe’s Tamburlaine the Great, Parts 1 and 2 (1587-88) were strongly influenced by the story of Judith and Holofernes. Also drawing upon the work of Rosemary Tzanaki, Ladan Niayesh argues in her fine essay that there were “five dominant types of receptions” of Mandeville’s Travels in the medieval period, when the work was treated “as a pilgrimage itinerary, a geographical treatise, a romance, a history or a work of theology” (161). Niayesh then localizes this plurality within the figure of Prester John, showing how the transformation of his character over the course of the late medieval and early modern periods reflects “not just the changing fortunes of Mandeville’s legacy but the errancies in the West’s complex relationship to ‘the East’ (taken in its broadest sense)” (166-167).

In another stellar contribution to the volume, Gordon McMullan traces the ways in which early modern drama appropriated Mandeville’s Travels in works such as Jonson’s New Inn (1629) and Shakespeare’s The Tempest (c. 1611) before offering a focused reading of John Fletcher’s The Island Princess (1621), a play that McMullan persuasively argues invokes and refashions Mandevillian imagery. By extending his discussion to include recent performances of The Island Princess, some painfully relevant in light of the 2002 Bali bombing, McMullan also offers a solemn reminder of the politics of history and temporality, a central concern of this collection. Finally, in her essay on Richard Brome’s The Antipodes (1636-38), Claire Jowitt considers the ambiguous place of Mandeville’s Travels within a play about fantastical travel. Using Brome’s play to consider both the status of Mandeville’s Travels within the seventeenth century and the “larger political and generic questions concerning the ways in which dramatic texts use travel writing in this period,” Jowitt reveals that Brome, like Mandeville, transforms new worlds into templates for understanding the old (197).

In short, the strength of this collection lies in its efforts to define Mandeville’s place within the politics of place and periodization in late medieval and early modern England. In “Of Other Spaces,” Michel Foucault argues that the Renaissance differed fundamentally from the medieval period in its conception of the nature of location. If the medieval episteme was defined by “a hierarchic ensemble of places: sacred places and profane places; protected places and open, exposed places; urban and rural places,” the early modern period witnessed the invention of space as an a priori and immaterial dimension; “extension was substituted for localization,” in Foucault’s words, as part of a conceptual shift that Max Jammer, Edward Grant, and Edward Casey have described at considerable length.[2] A Knight’s Legacy adds nuance to this schematic history. By tracing the reception and reinvention of Mandeville’s Travels across the late medieval and early modern periods, this collection reveals the difficulty of speaking in broad terms about Mandeville as a singular figure, one whose work was uncritically absorbed in a particular era only to be soundly rejected in the next. Indeed, the essays invoke a dominant narrative of epistemological rupture only to undermine it, and, in doing so, they reveal new continuities and discontinuities between the medieval and early modern period. For these reasons, A Knight’s Legacy represents an exciting collection that would appeal to anyone seeking to understand the continual reinvention of Mandeville’s Travels and, more broadly, the appropriation and adaptation of medieval thought.

Andrew Bozio

Georgia Institute of Technology

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[1] David Aers, “A Whisper in the Ear of Early Modernists; or, Reflections on Literary Critics Writing the ‘History of the Subject’,” in Culture and History, 1350-1600: Essays on English Communities, Identities and Writing, ed. David Aers (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1992), 177-202.

[2] Michel Foucault, “Of Other Spaces,” translated by Jay Miskowiec and published in Diacritics 16, no. 1 (Spring 1986): 22-27, esp. 22-23. See also Max Jammer, Concepts of Space: The History of Theories of Space in Physics, third edition (New York: Dover Publications, 1993); Edward Grant, Much Ado About Nothing: Theories of Space and Vacuum from the Middle Ages to the Scientific Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981); and Edward S. Casey, The Fate of Place: A Philosophical History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997).

Klitgård, Chaucer in Denmark

Klitgård, Ebbe. Chaucer in Denmark: A Study of the Translation and Reception History, 1782-2012. Odense: University Press of Southern Denmark, 2013.

Reviewed by Candace Barrington (BarringtonC@mail.ccsu.edu)

It might not be clear to most Chaucerians why they should be interested in Ebbe Klitgård’s fascinating new book on translation and reception history, Chaucer in Denmark. Denmark, after all, is a small county, and it’s been nearly a millennium since Sweyn II’s failed invasion marked the end of Danish incursion on British shores. Beyond an epic hero (Beowulf), a tragic one (Hamlet), and Old Norse remnants in modern English (a “happy oaf”), the Danes’ literary and linguistic influence on the English seems to have been minimal, leaving most Chaucerians to assume they have no professional interest in Danish language or literature. So, in addition to providing an overview of Klitgård’s study, this review will also try to convince readers why his work is important to Anglophone studies in medievalism as well as to Anglophone studies of Chaucer.

Chaucer in Denmark is the first comprehensive study of a non-Anglophone culture’s reception and translations of Chaucer, an unexpected distinction considering that Chaucer’s works traveled to colonies throughout the British empire and were widely translated in the past century.  This is not to say nothing has been written on Chaucer’s global reception. A handful of studies have provided brief overviews, with tantalizing hints of Chaucer’s readership in French, Romanian, and Hungarian. And we get a sense of Chaucer’s place in many more cultures when we read the introductions appended to translations that now number over fifty contemporary languages, ranging from Arabic to Finnish and Mongolian. Despite being a goldmine of information, these resources have generally been overlooked by Anglophone Chaucerians. The most extensive study of Chaucer’s modern reception, Steve Ellis’ Chaucer at Large: The Poet in the Modern Imagination (2000), remains focused on Chaucer’s Anglophone reception and considers translations into only varieties of Present Day English and not other languages. Even when scholars have looked beyond the Anglophone matrix of Australia, Canada, U.K., and the United States, their engagements remain steadfastly with Chaucer’s reception in the academy.   Thus the only previous book to study extensively Chaucer’s non-Anglophone reception, Richard Utz’s  Chaucer and the Discourse of German Philology (2002), focuses on the ways German scholarship has shaped our understanding of Chaucer; he does not look at translations of Chaucer’s tales into German. Klitgård’s book covers new terrain and should inspire scholars to examine what these understudied non-Anglophone Chaucerian translations can provide, from useful prisms for examining the receiving culture to new perspectives on Chaucerian hermeneutics.

Chaucer’s Danish reception also undermines some easy assumptions about the trajectory of British cultural expansion. Whereas global translations of Chaucer’s tales might be expected to neatly map onto the outlines of the British empire, a remnant of the British cultural impositions, Chaucer has had a rich history Denmark, near a part of Britain’s colonial expansion. Klitgård reveals a history of Danes discovering Chaucer on their travels and in their studies, part of the bounty of cultural goods brought back home to displace the German tradition. At the same time, the story of Chaucer in Denmark belies the truism that a rising tide lifts all boats, showing how the increased dominance of English has not always resulted in a correlating increased profile for Chaucer in Denmark. The story begins at a point when The Canterbury Tales were mishandled because English was relatively unknown in Denmark, then moves through a period of increased fortunes as English overtook German as the dominant second language, and ends with the Tales sidelined once again when Denmark’s educated class became thoroughly bilingual. By placing those representations of Chaucer’s Tales in protean contexts (English education and the spread of English in Denmark; Danish scholars and their criticism; and, non-academic forms of information, such as encyclopedias, anthologies, and reference works), this reception history records an intriguing dance in Denmark between the upward linguistic fortunes of English and the mixed literary fortunes of Chaucer’s Tales, the contours of which should encourage scholars to trace those in other linguistic and cultural domains.

Interspersed within this story is another, less obvious tale in which translations can reveal to English readers what they might otherwise overlook in Chaucer’s Middle English. For this reason, Chaucerians with no interest in medievalism can learn from Klitgård’s study. By carefully reading the Danish translations against their Middle English sources, he guides us through those moments where the Danish text illuminates the Middle English in ways unavailable to the non-Danish reader, thereby problematizing what Middle (and Present Day) English takes for granted. Sometimes it’s something as simple as the domesticating convention of translating place names, wherein the Tabard Inn becomes the “Herolds-Vamsen,” or herald’s coat, helping us keep in mind what “Tabard” would have evoked for Chaucer’s early audiences (120). At other times, it’s a matter of locating a Danish word that conveys more fully a Middle English word’s connotations now lost in Present Day English, the case when Uffe Birkedal translates in 1911 the Shipman’s disdain for a “nyce conscience” (I.398) as “øm Samvittighed” or tender conscience, “which in Danish has connotations to a softness that would be both foolish and too scrupulous in a character that makes stealing from others part of his living” (132). In the case of translating from historical forms of English to modern Danish, two languages that share a common Germanic ancestor, we can see how some syntactical patterns taken for granted in English are innovations unknown to its distant cousin. For instance, Otto Jespersen translates “elvyssh,” Harry Bailey’s description of the Chaucerian persona, “as ‘elleskudt,’ meaning hit or shot by the elvish people…[because] there is no idiomatic adjective correspondence in Danish” (105), reminding us that affixing the –ish suffix was somewhat uncommon in Old English and had reappeared as a rather recent strategy for converting nouns into adjectives modeled more on French than German antecedents. Other examples highlight the inevitable slippages of meaning that occur when an idea is so embedded in the source language that no translation can approximate it, a dilemma translators such as Børge Johansen  try to circumvent with comparable idioms, which in turn cause a new set of problems (220-233). Thereby re-awakening meaning in the source text, the translations allow us to engage more deeply with the Tales, initiating the hermeneutic conversation that Hans-Georg Gadamer finds beneficial to both interlocutors in the exchange. By providing numerous back translations into Present Day English and then carefully explicating what a Danish reader would see in the intermediate Danish translation, Klitgård guides his English readers into a textual world otherwise close to them. 

In telling “the particular story of how the most important medieval English poet has been translated, presented, analysed and discussed in one European country in the period from the Enlightenment to the present day” (273), Klitgård predominately examines three forms of reception: translation, reference works, and scholarship. The issues he examines in the translations include the use of archaic language, idioms, and euphemisms or deletions regarding sexually explicit passages, tale selection, and the translator’s general Chaucer biography and his complete works. With reference works, he is concerned about their accuracy vis-à-vis contemporaneous scholarship. And with scholarship, he establishes their contributions to the larger field of Chaucer Studies. To identify these bits of Danish Chauceriana, he has tracked down translations in textbooks, ephemeral magazine publications, and adaptations for the stage. Because Klitgård writes with a non-Danish audience in mind, he includes ample, well-placed background information on Danish culture and its history without overshadowing his main interest in Chaucer’s reception. 

Perhaps it is fitting a Danish scholar should produce the first study of this type. After World War II, the Danes were among Chaucer’s first and most prolific translators. As Klitgård’s thorough research establishes, the Danes had at this point already been translating Chaucerian texts for over 150 years. These translations predate any translations of Shakespeare into Danish, a fluke of literary history that arises here (and in the Americas) when Dryden’s and Pope’s versions of Chaucer are transmitted and translated without any reference to their Chaucerian source. The first oblique appropriation can be traced through a series of translations that begin with Dryden’s modernizations of the Wife of Bath and (via French and German translations and adaptations) end up as Johan Herman Wessel’s musical drama, Feen Ursel eller hvad der behager Damerne (1782); nearly a half century later, the second series of appropriations begins with Pope’s adaptation of the Wife’s Prologue and ends as Thomas Christopher Brunn’s Slagelse-Madamen (1823), a de-medievalized narrative poem set in nineteenth-century Denmark. Apparently neither Danish author realized his source was ultimately Chaucer. Shaped by the Danish sense of decorum and the public’s general unfamiliarity with English medieval culture, the translations are highly domesticated and refine any elements deemed coarse among bourgeois readers.

Klitgård continues his historical survey with the nineteenth-century nationalist turn to folklore studies. Among those active folklorist was Louise Westergaard, whose 1853 translations of Chaucer were part of her enthusiastic effort to introduce to Danish readers English writers she had discovered during her travels to England for the 1852 industrial exhibition in London. Relying on British scholarship and Thomas Wright’s midcentury collection of Chaucer’s works, her booklet, Chaucer, relates several tales by interweaving short passages in Middle English (using modernized spelling) with her glosses and explanatory notes in Danish. Primarily focusing on tales most amenable to Victorian tastes and sensibilities (such as The Clerk’s Tale and The Knight’s Tale), she selects for translation passages of high pathos in order to illustrate and exemplify the moral lessons serving her larger didactic purposes. By the second half of the nineteenth century, English begins to have an established presence in Denmark, and Chaucer’s elevated profile was aided by the work of Britain’s Chaucer Society and the Early English Text Society. During this time, anthologized Chaucer primarily consisted of “oblique translation mixed with summary” (92). Denmark also cultivated serious Chaucerians, such as Otto Jespersen, whose Chaucers liv og digtning [Chaucer’s Life and Poetry] (1893) included translated passages that moved beyond the usual tales of high emotion and didactic purpose.

Soon after the turn of the century, in 1903, English became “a compulsory main language in the Danish gymnasium for the first time” (110), and with that change in status we see more translations of Chaucer, each attempting a different effect. All these translations were generally shaped by conservative social mores, and Vilhelm Møller’s perplexing decision to include The Summoner’s Tale among the limited number of tales he translated in 1901 meant he had to severely bowdlerize it. Uffe Birkedal’s translations of The General Prologue and The Nun’s Priest’s Tale try to convey a medieval sense by using poetic terms so archaic they have to be explained; at other times he invents archaic sounding words as he tries to capture Chaucer’s sense in poetry rather than prose. During the interwar years, English language and literature surpassed German in Danish schools. Significant Chaucerian scholarship came from Denmark with Aage Brusendorff’s The Chaucer Tradition, which established the canon of Chaucer’s works. He brought together Anglo-American and German research, each otherwise isolated from the other. At the same time, Niels Møller’s three-volume survey of world literature, Verdenslitteraturen, gave Chaucer a more sympathetic and accurate treatment, and Margrethe Thunbo’s highly redacted and illustrated volume of tales for children neatly parallels choices made for Anglo-American editions of children’s Chaucer.

The war years accelerated the general anglification of Danish culture, a paradigm shift magnified by Danish resistance to censorship during the German occupation and manifest in an increase in the proportion of translations from English relative to other languages. Translation of Chaucer’s tales reflect this cultural shift in number and kind. Transforming the tales into short stories in line with contemporary tastes, Lis Thorbjørnsen’s translations do not include explanatory notes and affect a certain sentimentality by evoking the Danish past with archaic word choices and native idiomatic expressions. On the other hand, Flemming Bergsøe’s reader-friendly poetic versions admitted more of Chaucer’s exuberant humor, captured his tone, and followed his meter, while avoiding useless archaisms. Jørgen Sonne, a poet of note, continued this post-war Chaucerian effloresence with a series of lively translations, first in the 1950s into prose (translating The Reeve’s Tale, The Franklin’s Tale, and The Nun’s Priest’s Tale, plus unusual choices such at The Manciple’s Tale and The Physician’s Tale), and decades later into poetry (translating “To Rosemounde,” “The Complaint of Chaucer to His Purse,” and excerpts from The Book of the Duchess, The Parliament of Fowls, and “Merciles Beaute”). His unusual choices helped to fill in gaps of Chaucerian works previously not available in Danish.

The postwar period also features the only two complete (or nearly complete) translations of The Canterbury Tales, and each translator approached his enormous project differently from the other. Beyond one being in prose and the other in verse, each strove for different effects. Mogens Boisen, a renowned translator whose reputation often overshadowed that of the authors he carried over into Danish, relied primarily on R. M. Lumiansky’s 1948 modernization of the Tales into English prose. Boisen worked to make the medieval English tales accessible (even palatable), and the end result is a translation that avoid difficulties by veering toward euphemisms and direct moralizations. Børge Johansen’s 1958 poetic translation works to capture medieval authenticity by tending toward the old-fashioned, both retaining the old Danish spelling system (which had been reformed in 1948) and finding comparable generic forms (such as using a form of Danish folk poetry used for occasional verse with “dubious syntax, rhymes and idiom” for The Tale of Sir Thopas (221). He undergirds this mediated authenticity by relying on (and acknowledging) valid scholarship and Skeat’s Middle English edition. These remain the only complete Danish translations of The Canterbury Tales.

After this profusion of translations, Chaucer’s visibility in Danish culture has paradoxically diminished as the English language’s has risen. Since 1960, English has become widely read and spoken among the educated classes, and most “important English literature in prose is translated with a year of publication” (237). Left behind are older English works, such as Chaucer’s. Except for Shakespeare and Dickens, these older texts are seldom retranslated because they appeal primarily to highly educated readers who no longer need a native, Danish text to stand in for the foreign, English text. In schools, Chaucer is predominately taught either in Middle English or in modern English translations via extracts found in English literature anthologies. (By including Chaucer and other Middle English in their curriculum, Danish universities differ from those in other Scandinavian countries that begin their English literature studies with Shakespeare.) When Chaucer’s tales do appear outside the academy, they are translations of modern English popularizations, such as Barbara Cooney’s children’s picture book, Chanticleer and the Fox. By illustrating the provisional nature of any translation project, Klitgård’s Chaucer in Demark provides a salient reminder that Chaucer’s reception in non-Anglophone cultures is no less complex and no more predictable than the more familiar Anglophone reception in the Australia, Canada, United Kingdom, and United States.

With the commendable precedent for the study of Chaucer’s non-Anglophone reception now in place, Chaucerians and medievalists should encourage similar studies by our colleagues in predominately non-Anglophone universities and cultures.  Such work enriches the study of Chaucer in important ways, yet its survival is not necessarily ensured.  Because we know first-hand the difficulties of maintaining medievalist lines in English departments where we serve an English-speaking student population, we should be sympathetic to the even more precarious situations of Chaucerians housed in foreign-language departments. By attending to what they can tell us, ordering their books for our campus libraries, and by incorporating their research and translations into our own studies, we can support their important work and their careers.  We have just begun to listen to them; it would be shameful to lose their voices now. 

Candace Barrington

Central Connecticut State University