CHAUCERIAN ESSAYS.

By Gordon HallGerould '99. Princeton University Press.1952. 103 pp. $2.00.

Chaucerian Essays, by Gordon Hall Gerould, Holmes Professor of Belles-Lettres, Emeritus, at Princeton, contains six essays. Their individual titles are as follows: "Chaucer's Calendar of Saints," "The Social Status of the Franklin," "The Vicious Pardoner," "Some Dominant Ideas of the Wife of Bath," "The Serious Mind of Chaucer," and "The Limitations of Chaucer." These titles indicate clearly enough the scope of the volume; they indicate further that this is a book for Chaucerians, since throughout it the author assumes familiarity with Chaucer and with Chaucerian scholarship. To that company, larger than some might suppose, ChaucerianEssays comes as an informative, stimulating and, in parts, provocative addition to Chaucer studies.

In a one page preface Professor Gerould states his reasons for writing these six essays. "I have been irked," he says, "by current interpretations or the lack of them." The book, he says, "is not controversial in intention," but it does contain "novel truths," new interpretations which the author has worked out during his long career as scholar and teacher, and on which he now wants to go on record.

Chaucerians will find all of the six essays informative and suggestive; one, "The Vicious Pardoner," may well become controversial in certain scholarly quarters; in fact, its new interpretation of The Pardoner's Prologue and Tale has already been discussed in Sanborn House and will be most thoroughly discussed, I happen to know, in the Chaucer course next semester.

In so brief a review as this it is not possible to comment in any detail on this chapter and even less so on the book as a whole. It must suffice to call it to the attention of Chaucerians. They will find in its several chapters much that will enrich their understanding of a great poet and much that will, or should, make them reread what may be very familiar to them in the light of new interpretations of old "problems." It invites "a fresh and careful reading of Chaucer's text," to quote Professor Gerould's own words. Any critical work which does that has genuine value and importance.