The Familiar Enemy: Chaucer, Language and Nation in the Hundred Years War.

Author/Editor
Butterfield, Ardis

Title
The Familiar Enemy: Chaucer, Language and Nation in the Hundred Years War.

Published
Butterfield, Ardis. "The Familiar Enemy: Chaucer, Language and Nation in the Hundred Years War." Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009 ISBN 9780199574865

Review
Butterfield has written a book which, in the view of this reader, will alter entirely how the Anglo-French relationship can be understood henceforward by scholars of language, social history, and literature. To do such a book justice requires a format altogether other than this. Suffice it to say that her canvas is vast--the Hundred Years' War--although this is sometimes difficult to recall, amidst so much and so widely-cast learning that includes, among many things, "English, French, and Anglo-French,” "puys," treaties, translation theory, politics at all levels of intimacy, from kings and diplomats to Guillaume and La Belle (and poet and poet, mutatis mutandis), music, merchants, manuscripts, stanzaic structure and an unusually clear set of maps that, thoughtfully examined, depict virtually by themselves the ebb and flow of Anglo-French “intertextuality” between 1157 and 1429. It is a book that (happily!) will gore a few sacred cows: Butterfield’s gentle but unavoidable revision of English “nationhood” (she has her doubts), must needs give pause to those now busily engaged in defining that concept; and her argument that the assumption of Chaucer’s centrality for the history of English letters requires rethinking is entirely persuasive. So also is the powerful case she makes for lyric poetry as having been taken as seriously--if not more so--as narrative poetry, long the sole focus of medieval literary scholarship in England and the U.S. Hence it is no surprise that Butterfield accords Gower’s "Cinkante Balades" an important position on this panorama. Altogether rightly, she treats Gower’s balades as part of “a passage of words across Anglo-French boundaries” (246). Reading five balades in particular through the lens of their common refrains (an approach grown out of meticulous studies of poetry and music she has pursued over the last decade), she positions Gower in relation to Chaucer, Graunson, Machaut, Thomas de Paien, and Froissart (and with Deschamps hovering in the background), developing convincingly the “conversational” nature of what is--clearly--self-conscious exchange. For Butterfield, these poets read each others’ "forme fixe" work with high seriousness, borrowed from each other, fully expecting their own poems to be so scrutinized--and borrowed from--as well. Hers is the best, most powerful claim yet for the elevation of the balade as an intra-and international form, to a parallel place alongside the narrative and polemical verse of the late middle ages--and of course for Gower’s substantial place amongst international practitioners, too. Typically, she moves from the micro to macro by way of concluding: “A further implication of such material is that it shows us another model of how language is exchanged. It is particularly pertinent to the larger argument of this book that these examples of cross-reference pass between authors that we now categorize as English and French, but that then had a much looser identity . . . . In short, the categories of English and French in the late fourteenth century are more porous than source study usually implies, and the linguistic and literary relationships are conducted by means of, and sometimes against the grain of, many subtle distinctions of position, status, and cultural ambition that are not adequately rendered by the single opposition English and French” (264-65). This is a magnificent book, rich, learned, challenging--one all who would know Gower should read. (One very minor point for Gowerians: the reference to the “800th anniversary conference held July 2008,” on pg. 239, n. 20, adds an extra two hundred years to Gower’s antiquity.) [RFY. Copyright. The John Gower Society. JGN 29.2.]

Date
2009

Gower Subjects
Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations
Language and Word Studies
Cinkante Balades