Reviews 871 seems possibly gendered: cf. Hildegard of Bingen and Marguerite Porete), and the par- ticularly vivid form taken by her strong desire to share in the human sufferings of Christ, a longing that appears to have been one of the most potent impulses of her age. THOMAS H. BESTUL, University of Illinois, Chicago JEAN PASSINI, El camino de Santiago: Itinerario y nucleos de poblacion. Madrid: Ministerio de Obras Piiblicos y Transportes, 1993. Pp. 248; 241 color figures, 56 plans, 26 maps. Pts 2,200. French version published by Editorial Maisonneuve et Larose, Paris. This book is a most welcome addition to the voluminous literature on the pilgrim's road to Santiago de Compostela, which evolved between the early ninth century with the "discovery" of the apostle's tomb at Santiago, culminated with the rebuilding of the Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela between 1078 and the late twelfth century, and extended into the late Middle Ages. Covering the Spanish section of the route, province by province, Passini presents in convenient portable form sets of original plans of the urban settlements along and around the route and the isolated architectural monuments, together with brief descriptions, maps, and magnificent color photographs. The quality of its production is one thing that sets Passini's book apart from all previous studies of the pilgrim's route; the other is the originality of his approach. Drawing upon his pi- oneering study published in 1984, Villes medievales du chemin de Saint-Jacques-de-Compos- telle: De Pampelune a Burgos. Villes de fondation et villes d'origine romaine, Passini examines the patterns of urban settlement along the route in terms of topography and chronology. Each village or town is situated on a convenient small plan, drawn by the author, that shows its relation to the surrounding terrain and to the pilgrimage road; the author's analysis of whether the settlement is Roman or medieval allows him to situate it in a context of preexisting passage or in a network of development governed by the cause and effect of the pilgrimage phenomenon itself. Almost all the photography is the author's own, much of it aerial views which admirably complement the author's attractively pre- sented plans and maps. A full bibliography of works in Spanish and French follows, together with indices. It is to be hoped that an English edition will soon increase the market for this superb study. ALISON STONES, University of Pittsburgh DEREK PEARSALL, The Life of Geoffrey Chaucer: A Critical Biography. (Blackwell Critical Biographies, 1.) Oxford and Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell Publishers, 1992. Pp. xii, 365; 21 black-and-white plates, 4 tables, 2 maps. $29.95. Derek Pearsall begins his excellent and absorbing biography of Chaucer by immediately raising, then confronting, three likely objections to the project: "that it cannot be done, that it is not worth doing and that it has been done" (p. 2). It cannot be done, some would say, because the documentary record, though relatively full for a medieval figure, contains nothing that is intimate or directly related to Chaucer's role as a poet. The temptation is to repair such deficiencies with speculation; the result is not biography but fiction. The second objection, that the traditional critical biography is a waste of time, is a consequence of theoretical formulations on the death of the author advanced by Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault. Although Pearsall asserts that medievalists "are understandably sceptical about a project to get rid of authors whom they find difficult enough to locate in the first place" (p. 4), he admits the pertinence, fortuitous or not, of postmodern ideas on the "author-function" to medieval conceptions, without, how- 872 Reviews ever, consenting to the pointlessness of literary biography. The third objection, one that Pearsall claims to feel the most keenly, has largely to do with the appearance of this volume so soon after Donald Howard's Chaucer: His Life, His Works, His World (1987), a book very different in outlook and intended audience but with which Pearsall's book will, for better or worse, inevitably be compared. Pearsall concludes that his project is indeed worth doing: knowledge of a writer's life does not "explain" his works in any superficial sense, but it offers a valuable context for understanding them. After this prolegomenon, the book follows what has become the conventional pattern of organization in Chaucer biography, with separate chapters en- titled "Beginnings: c. 1340-1360"; "Early Career: The 1360s"; "Advances: The 1370s"; "Fame: 1380-1386"; "Reversals, New Beginnings: 1386-1391"; and "Renewal: The 1390s," each chapter summarizing what can be known of the life in those years, followed by analysis and interpretation of the literary works thought to have been written in the period. There are very helpful appendices with a catalogue of the Chaucer portraits and chronological tables. The critical stance adopted is skeptical and relentlessly antiromantic, almost in answer to what Pearsall believes to be the excesses of speculation that mar the work of so many of his predecessors, notably Gardner and Howard. Pearsall, here as in much of his critical writing, is suspicious of grand designs, pointedly against the "cult of the persona" and the overreliance upon irony as an interpretive tool, and, in general, unwilling to entertain any hypothesis, however attractive, that does not rest on what is known or taken to be firm fact. Was Chaucer's marriage a happy one? It is useless to speculate. Was the Parson's Tale written at the end of his life? Not necessarily, fits of piety may strike a man at any stage in life. Are the tales in rhyme royal early? There is no evidence for such a sup- position. As to that large quantity of previous scholarship that neatly connected historical event and literary text, its reductive nature and lack of significance is exposed by the question: So what? The life of Chaucer that emerges is thus shorn of romantic accretions, suppositions, and cherished notions, many of which (such as the supposed education at the Inns of Court and the idea that John of Gaunt was Chaucer's continuing patron), Pearsall avers, were born of the wishful thinking of modern scholars rather than grounded upon a dispassionate view of the documentary record. Instead, we have a Chaucer who is, above all, connected to court life, poised delicately and ambiguously between the world of the court and the world of commercial London, keenly aware of social structure and class, and, perhaps because of the ambivalence of his position, studied in his avoidance of historical allusion or of anything that might give offense to any person, party, or faction. The relationship between text and event is not at all simple but rather a matter of understanding those "complex networks and processes of which they are both part" (p. 6), of finding out how poems may be embedded in those networks and processes. Deeply relevant to Chaucer's own life and writings are the conflicts between social classes, the increasing permeability of rank, and new ways of understanding contracts, vows, oaths, and other forms of social obligation. This is a view of Chaucer and his position in fourteenth-century society that has much in common with that developed by such scholars as Paul Strohm, Anne Middleton, and others, with Raymond Williams not too distant in the background. In fact, Pearsall's skepticism is not to be confused with cynicism: he is generous to other critics and has absorbed much of the best of recent criticism on Chaucer, including the insights of feminist criticism, as his discussions of the Wife of Bath and the Legend of Good Women demonstrate. In the early chapters Pearsall reminds us that 1340, the traditionally accepted date of Chaucer's birth, is an estimate only and suggests, in his revisionist view of Chaucer's education and learning, that modern scholars have tended to exaggerate his acquaintance Reviews 873 with Latin literature. Chaucer's familiarity with court life, acquired in the 1360s, set the poetic agenda he was to follow for much of his career, namely, the centrality of love as a theme, and led to the formation in him of a "courtly" point of view, quite different from the "clerkly" viewpoint of Gower, the Gawain poet, and Langland. Such a court culture also, perhaps, contributed to the way human behavior is portrayed in Chaucer as "a kind of connoisseurship, in which 'appreciation' substitutes for moral evaluation" (p. 69). In his discussion of the Book of the Duchess Pearsall has some sharp things to say about the modern critics who use the "persona" as means of ironizing the text, robbing it of its subtlety and fluidity. It may indeed not be simpleminded to consider Chaucer as the "I" of his poems, but the point seems pushed too hard. The sections of the book on the foreign journeys are very fine, especially on the matter of Chaucer's response to Italian literary culture, which, in Pearsall's view, had a profound and liberating effect on his conception of himself as a poet, providing him with the necessary models to bring about the transformation in English of the bard into the public poet, intelligent, learned, a man of letters. Chaucer's particular affinity to Boccaccio is urged: it was through his influence, Pearsall claims, that Chaucer reached his full maturity as a poet. The later chapters contain much cogent discussion of Troilus and the Canterbury Tales. Chaucer's skill and imagination in the portrayal of Criseyde are reaffirmed as the heart of what is self-consciously Chaucer's masterpiece. Pearsall makes us see afresh the re- markable achievement of the Miller's Tale: it was Chaucer's innovation, however natural and self-evident it seems now to us, to attribute a fabliau to a churl's voice; and the success of the tale made impropriety a proper subject for English poetry. The larger point about the Tales is that Chaucer sought to disengage himself in his verse from the rigidity of orthodox moralizing: the danger, as Pearsall sees it, is that modern ironizing interpretations reinstate what Chaucer had struggled to be free of. In comparison with Howard's robust portrait, Pearsall's Chaucer will seem attenuated and elusive to many. It is interesting that of the very few occasions when Pearsall allows himself to indulge in personal speculation, one is at the beginning of the book, when Pearsall admits that, like most people, he finds Chaucer to be a decent sort of fellow, and another is toward the end, in a footnote, when he distinguishes his own view of Chaucer from those of Middleton and Strohrjn, seeing him as "much more alienated from his society" than they do, "much more pessimistic, much less 'responsible'" (p. 247). Pearsall's achievement in this book is very great. He has succeeded in laying to rest, probably for good, the romantic Chaucer, and given us, volens nolens, a postmodern Chaucer. He has marshaled the available evidence with circumspection and interpreted it with impressive critical acumen, making the most of it, but no more. He has provided a solid context, social and historical, within which Chaucer and his works can be under- stood. THOMAS H. BESTUL, University of Illinois, Chicago ILLUMINATO PERI, Villani e cavalieri nella Sicilia medievale. (Biblioteca di Cultura Moderna, 1040.) Rome: Laterza, 1993. Paper. Pp. iv, 201. L 35,000. This volume gathers several essays, all but the shortest one previously published, by the dean of historians of medieval Sicily, Illuminato Peri. The republication of these essays here not only makes them more readily available but allows us to measure the changes in the field since their original appearance several decades ago. Better than half of the book is devoted to a long essay—a monograph, really—on villeinage in Sicily, which has been a standard point of reference ever since its first