Pagans, Tartars and a Frank Review

Francis Tobienne, Jr.
Purdue Doctoral Fellow
Adjunct Professor, University of South Florida--St. Petersburg
26 May 2009

Schildgen, Brenda Deen. Pagans, Tartars, and Jews in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. Gainesville: University of Florida, 2001. Pp. xiv, 184. $59.95. ISBN-10: 0—8130—2107—3.

Reviewed by Francis Tobienne, Jr.
Purdue University
ftobienn@purdue.edu

Adding to the on-going and provocative discussion of the “other” in Chaucer Studies, Brenda Deen Schildgen’s Pagan’s, Tartars, and Jews in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales supports the idea that Geoffrey Chaucer is better suited as an interpreter of “the ancient world,” than simply acting as a Christian writer imprinting his Canterbury Tales (Tales) “with a mere Christian ethos” (emphasis my own, 1). Citing support for Chaucer’s classicism, in support of the roman antique, Schildgen examines select stories from the Tales “outside a Christian-dominated world” (2). The eight tales she traces (the Knight’s, Squire’s, Man of Law’s, Franklin’s, Wife of Bath’s, Prioress’s, Monk’s and the Second Nun’s tales) reflect “Chaucer’s expansive narrative interest in the intellectual and cultural worlds outside Christianity” (2). In short, this book examines, via pagan philosophy from both the schools of Epicurean and Stoic tradition, as well as close readings, inter alia, of the eight tales, to suggest Chaucer’s awareness of a pan-European “contemporary cultural and social world” yielding an awareness of an “other” alongside English-speaking “palmeres” who “seken straunge strondes”.

Schildgen’s book consists of eight chapters, the first of which is an “Introduction” (pp. 1-12) in which she argues for an expanded reading of the Tales using “pagan philosophies or narratives” in addition to Augustinian theology (1). These narratives would have influenced Chaucer and, according to Schildgen, they give the Tales a “range of ethical and philosophical viewpoints” (4). What is at stake then, as Schildgen points out, is a “discursive ethical discovery” (4). She contends that Chaucer was an intellectual inheritor of the twelfth century activity of exploring “secular philosophy, history, and narratives,” which positioned the poet “in the pan-continental cultural context of the fourteenth century” (11). Second, she argues that in this time period, people adhered to non-normative Christian idealism, and thus that “these tales probe alternative value systems that are distinct from contemporary Christian practice” (12).

Chapters 2 and 3, respectively, “Pagan Philosophical Perspectives: A Knight and a Squire” and “Fortune, the Stars, and the Pagan Gods in the Knight’s and Squire’s Tales,” (13-47) can be read as Schildgen’s focus on the Knight’s Stoicism as well as the Squire’s Epicurean value(s) of pleasure. Moreover, this section supports Chaucer’s use of pagan philosophy and alterity amidst varied pilgrims (young, old, devout, et cetera), showing not only that Chaucer’s “openness to alterity is intergenerational” (13), but that Chaucer “endorses” a Knight whose tale “explores […] the values and attitudes of a pagan philosophy—Stoicism,” as well as a Squire who deals indirectly with “hethenesse” (21). By examining tales where contrasting, non-Orthodox ideologies are offered alongside Christian ones, ethical discovery is not only privileged, it is made possible and further “feature alternate systems of morality while they explore secular history” (21).

Leaving the Stoic behaviors of the Knight and his “busy gods” (38), Schildgen challenges scholarship that focuses on the Squire’s tale as a view into the exotic realm, arguing in favor of an “Epicurean ethos and emphasis on pleasure,” which best registers an “actual setting, not only in a non-Christian realm, but more importantly in a culture that was contemporaneous with Chaucer’s own and that did not share his own assumed Latin worldview” (39). Chaucer identifies with his audience in the fiction created by the Squire. In a third sub-section, Empirical Truth, or, What Exactly Was Known About the Tartars? Schildgen opens with: “The contrast between the Squire’s version of Tartary and the historical realities […] glosses over contradictions that Chaucer’s fourteenth century audience could well have recognized” (43). Giving a brief historical backdrop to the Tartars and their conversion via Franciscan missionaries as told in the Speculum Historiale, she offers both the “medieval ethnographer’s” travel narrative depiction in two frames: the monastic approach and the mercantile ethos. Completing the circuit then, Schildgen returns to the “Squire’s Tale” suggesting that Chaucer may have benefitted from such source materials, giving to the Squire a “pluralist attitude” (45). In her final sub-section, “Conclusion” (46), which sums up both Chapters 2 and 3, respectively, Schildgen examines the Knight/Squire with reference to their respective narrative control over historical realities. Moreover, in terms of these two characters and their tales, she reminds her readers of both a Stoic and an Epicurean idealism which “refuses to impose Christian norms on their narrative materials” (47).

In her fourth Chapter, “‘Hethenesse’ in the Canterbury Tales: Christian versus Islamic and Pagan Space in the ‘Man of Law’s Tale’” (48-69), Schildgen continues her reading of the Tales through the Man of Law which “incorporates merchants, Moslems, and pre-Christian Britons into its telling, to create insiders, outsiders, and mediators between the two” (49). In this particular chapter then, Schildgen seeks to further distinguish East from West (the latter existing as the idealized Roman church/emperor; and the former a possible idealized, Islamic state). Schildgen presents “five dimensions” which appear in the tale in support of the Islamic effect “on European cultural development” (51). Briefly, these are: the negative views of Moslems and prejudice during Crusading in light of the chansons de geste; Islamic learning alongside medieval, Latin culture; the viability of marketing and trade agreements between Christian Europe and Islam; the threat of Islam based on perceived religious and political ideologies; and finally, “’les musulmans fictifs,’ the hermeneutic of exoticism and difference conferred on the Moslems” (51). The author suggests that Chaucer, who “respects Islamic learning” (52), makes the Man of Law the appropriator of Islamic knowledge, turned classical knowledge. Schildgen ends this particular chapter discussing Chaucer’s use of allegoresis in Political Allegory (53), asserting Chaucer’s use of allegory was a political device whose authority worked to counter Christian Rome.

Taking up the notion of a pre-Christian Britain, Schildgen continues her exploration of suspended Christian teleologies, moving into the arena of ancient folklore and faerie. In Chapter 5, “Rash Promises, Oaths, and Pre-Christian Britain in the Wife of Bath’s and the Franklin’s Tales” (69-92), Epicureanism links the tales, which take their narrative landscape from Britain/Brittany. Moreover, Schildgen offers her readers a possible reading of Chaucer’s Franklin and Wife who, in their tales, maintain “the deliberate inclusion of other worldviews” beyond the Christian ideal.
In Chapter 6, “A Prioress and a Monk: Providential History on Trial” (93-108), Schildgen argues that history, according to Christian teleology, “separate[s] Christian thought from pagan, Stoic, or Epicurean thought” (93). In terms of Christian and non-Christian readings of history, the Prioress and the Monk, according to Schildgen, offer a syncretic reading of history. Her method in this section, a compare-and-contrast approach, covers the anti-Semitic polemics of the Prioress as well as the pluralistic and inclusive tragic histories of both Christian and pagan worldview vis-à-vis the Monk. Schildgen argues that Chaucer creates the “Jews” by pitting Christian ideology against Jewish “diabolic imaginings” while the Monk moves beyond such absolutism of good versus evil “in favor of a more murky view of history” (108).

In Chapter 7, “The ‘Second Nun’s Tale: Christians as a Persecuted Minority’” (109-20), Schildgen examines the subject of martyrdom as a reversal of values. Moreover, the author asserts, “the ‘Second Nun’s Tale’ draws up sides that divide the world into those who conform to temporal codes […] and those who reject these worldly structures as ‘folye’” (117). Further, she argues that in the fourteenth century Christians were not always in the majority and that their minority status, in terms of ideological preference (i.e. belief and practice), could prove a “potentially life-threatening choice” (110). This placed Christianity itself as an “othering” identification.

Quite possibly the weakest part of her text, Schildgen, in her eighth chapter, concludes with generalizations and disclaimers in support of a “Chaucerian, transitional time” (123). Arguably, it is a time where fictional pilgrims exist as “equals,” telling stories which function as narrative vehicles for ethical discovery and the appropriations of pagan and Christian idealism alike. Moreover, the stories even become a “means for aesthetic speculation about ethics and identities within a posttradtional political rather than metaphysical framework in which absolute conclusions are elusive” (123). Still, such “neutrality of worldviews” (125) in light of the varied tales collected here gives rise to a greater appreciation, a greater reading of Chaucer’s poetics and of a better understanding of both the known and unknown cultural make-up of the fourteenth century and beyond. This author, on the whole, addresses such matters admirably.

God Is Dead--really?

I was given the opportunity by Sycamore Review (Purdue U) to review Ron Currie Jr.'s God Is Dead. I was further elated when the author contacted me, and thanked me for such a review of his book. He sent me a signed name plate, and I, sent a copy of my review. The exchange was a wonderful one, and showcased the amicability between reviewer and author. I was truly honored.

Ron Currie Jr.’s first novel, God is Dead, is a contribution to the larger “what if” dialogue regarding the death of God and what happens to life, humanity, and hope without the presence of a divine figure. Currie has received critical acclaim for his short stories, which have appeared in Glimmer Train, The Sun, and Night Train; but this new project probes deeper, examining what happens to the human self when God, or the “head” of a concentrated belief system, is removed. Suggestively, God and hope are held in tandem, and it is not until the former is demised and the latter, essentially departs, that the fractured self take precedence. Instead of reliance on God to fix our distinctions, the onus is re-appropriated back into the hands of humankind. Thus in the novel, when God, “disguised as a young Dinka woman,” dies, word of the Creator’s demise immediately spreads as wide and far as the Sudan desert itself. But in Currie’s imagination, God’s death leaves the world unchanged; no cataclysmic earth shatter or Zeus-like thunder bolts emerge. Instead, wars and violence continue, and people continue to complain and act selfishly.

From the opening chapter of God Is Dead, Currie creates a fragmented world that is uncannily familiar. Tethered by the common filament of progressive human failure, his chapter selections present this world in a collection of narrative vignettes. “God Is Dead,” “Indian Summer,” “Interview with the Last Remaining Member of the Feral Dog Pack Which Fed on the God’s Corpse,” and the closing chapter titled “Retreat,” all remind us what it means to be human in a frightening age. For the most part, each narrative focuses on a single character, and it is not until the end of the text that we notice characters overlap, a technique that serves to emphasize human despondency. While each chapter selection can stand on its own as a didactic interval, a morsel of instructional warning for better living, overall they help to further disrupt the traditions of the Divine character.

Inhabited by desire, conflict, and the sadism it uncovers, God Is Dead illustrates the death of a concentrated belief system, but not necessarily, belief itself—offering in tasty bite-size morsels a meal of reflection as well as a feast of our fissured selves and our carnal shortcomings. Currie not only kills God, but decides to “take out” religion altogether, replacing it with subjects such as teenage suicide, and the well-placed humor of Aramaic-speaking desert dogs who reluctantly feast on God’s flesh. Currie ends his threaded tale with “Retreat,” an Armageddon of sorts. In a world already on the brink of self destruction, the absence of God does not staunch the progress of our own divisive methods. Currie presents the reader with plagued human beings that though forgettable in name, are not so when they present a reflection of our present real-world indifference.

Currie openly experiments with the flaws of humanity by first suggesting there is perhaps a flaw in the Creator. Though “God came at dusk to a refugee camp in the North Darfur region of Sudan,” and is clothed in “a flimsy green cotton dress, battered leather sandals, hoop earrings, and a length of black-and white beads around his neck,” death does not respect such a transfiguration. Further, when first introduced to God’s less than perfect physique we are told that “He’d manifested a wound in the meat of his right calf, a jagged, festering gash upon which fed wriggling clumps of maggots.” With an early and disturbing image of God, Currie further problematizes God’s demise by raising a somewhat philosophical question: If humankind prays to God on their death bed, then who can God pray to exactly? Better still, who could accept the burden of carrying such a confession? These are the intriguing inquiries that Currie hoists upon the reader and are the true brilliance of the book. At the same time, these questions demonstrate the humor, criticism, and measured irreverence of Currie regarding God, death, and hope. For example, at one point the author shows a pensive Colin Powell confessing to a “sympathizing” and dying God. The character Powell asks:

how does a man become the first black assistant to the president for national security affairs? How does a man become the first black chairman of the Joint
Chiefs? How does a man become the first black secretary of state? And then I
answer myself: by behaving, in every possible manner, like a white man.

Again, the reader comes face-to-face with Currie’s wit, denigration, and careful impertinence as a powerful man questions his own failures. In God Is Dead, no one is exempt from direct scrutiny and the pressure to re-examine and re-evaluate the self—not God, not Powell, and not the engaged reader. Indifference must be eradicated and responsibility privileged.


One could argue that Currie’s personal philosophy is at stake in God Is Dead, but his command of language and the situating of current events alongside religious upheaval contain lasting implications about the fractured self, which is constant and not necessarily dependent on God being alive. We as readers are all implicated, as the novel is a mirror of our own frail, finite and fantastic selves. Currie shows that people do not necessarily need God to behave as civil, rational, and responsible human beings. Filled with equal parts seriousness and hilarity, Currie’s master tale is at once a fiction and a truth-telling of our current status, namely that we are all too human. By taking the title from a phrase long associated with Friedrich Nietzsche, Currie has developed a thoughtful, yet disturbing text that, like Nietzsche, claims to disrupt the status quo. In his world, God is truly dead, but unlike the German philosopher, Currie does not overtly claim, “and we have killed him!” Although there are moments of hilarity, this is ultimately a serious book, and readers should approach this novel with the measured tension of both reverence and irreverence.

Ron Currie, Jr.
God Is Dead
Viking Penguin Group, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-670-03867-1.
182 pages
$21.95.