Translating the Near East in the "Man of Law's Tale" and Its Analogues.
- Author/Editor
- Stavsky, Jonathan.
- Title
- Translating the Near East in the "Man of Law's Tale" and Its Analogues.
- Published
- Stavsky, Jonathan. "Translating the Near East in the 'Man of Law's Tale' and Its Analogues." Chaucer Review 55.1 (2020): 32–54.
- Review
- Building on his 2017 edition of "Le Bone Florence of Rome," Stavsky argues that this Middle English romance--and many others like it, including Gower's "Tale of Constance" in the Confessio Amantis--tones down the Orientalist pro-Crusades outlook found in its French source. In this essay, he uses the argument to help set up an analysis that counterpoises the pro-Christian "identitarian conception of virtue" (51) of Chaucer's "Man of Law's Tale" with a view of Muslims in the "Parson's Tale" "which prioritizes self-inspection and reform over warfare" (53); the latter perspective, Stavsky tells us, is also found in Gower's Tale and in "Le Bone Florence." "Florence" and Chaucer's Tale figure most prominently in the essay, although Stavsky also addresses the Middle English "Octavian romances" (37) and differences between English and French anthologies of the "Octavian-Florence cycle" (39) as well as Gower. He leans recurrently--and perhaps most heavily in his brief discussion of Gower--on the evidence of the ethnic labeling of non-Christian peoples and individuals, identifying what Middle English translators do differently than their French predecessors and as a result reduce their orientalism, as Stavsky sees it. In the case of Gower, Stavsky resists Emily Houlik-Ritchey's argument (in "Rewriting Difference: 'Saracens' in John Gower and Juan de Cuenca," 2017) that Gower uses "Sarazine" for the Sultan's mother in order to justify Crusade-like "retaliation against her descendants," as Stavsky puts it. To the contrary, Stavsky observes, Gower uses "Sarazine" only twice (the instance in the Tale and one in an accompanying Latin gloss ["Sarazenos" at 2.1084]), while equivalent terms occur in the Constance story of Nicholas Trivet's "Chronicles," Gower's source, in "no fewer than a dozen instances." Stavsky cites only one instance from Trivet (and a complete list would be useful): the phrase "Terre Seinte encontre les Sarasins," for which Gower offers no equivalent whatsoever in his adaptation, lessening the orientalism, Stavsky implies. Elsewhere, Gower tends to use "Barbarie" instead, a "rather vague designation that could be anywhere outside of Christendom," Stavsky maintains, and nowhere presented by Gower as "grounds for a new Crusade." Closing his one-page assessment of Gower's Tale, Stavsky describes it as an "exemplum against detraction that is designed to cure its addressee," citing Carol Jamison's 2012 essay "John Gower's Shaping of 'The Tale of Constance' as an Exemplum contra of Envy" (37). [MA. Copyright. The John Gower Society eJGN 40.1]
- Date
- 2020
- Gower Subjects
- Confessio Amantis
Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations
Language and Word Studies