Chaucer’s Queer Poetics. Rereading the Dream Trio by Susan Schibanoff (review)

REVIEWS 271 than revolutions in science and exploration as the primary cause of Eden’s gradual disappearance from mappae mundi. These arguments will be familiar to readers of Scafi’s 1999 essay, “Mapping Eden: Cartographies of the Earthly Paradise,” in the edited volume Mappings. Those who were tantalized by the earlier work will find reasons for delight and disappointment in this extended treatment of the same topic. Chief among the delights are the illustrations. The medieval mappae mundi that Scafi examines are reproduced in glorious color plates in the center of the book. Large blackand -white versions, printed with exceptional clarity, appear throughout the chapters. Valuable diagrams accompany over forty of these maps and render them accessible to contemporary Anglophone scholars. Another great strength of the book is that medieval conceptual frameworks, rather than anachronistic categories, dictate the parameters of the discussion. Scafi’s analysis of mappae mundi conforms to medieval criteria for this genre rather than modern expectations of what constitutes an accurate world map. In order to distinguish between the spatial and temporal aspects of the world, Scafi embraces Hugh of St. Victor’s twelfth-century terms—mundis and saeculum —rather than importing Newtonian theoretical categories. Scafi’s commitment to probing medieval theology and cartography on their own terms extends beyond word choice to the very core of his project. The major disappointment is that the book’s encyclopedic scope forestalls deeper investigation into key issues. Scafi surveys the entire Christian history of paradise, from its biblical origins to its manifestations in twenty-first century art installations and travel posters. This diachronic format forces Scafi to abandon some of his most compelling ideas prematurely in order to rush off to the next era. As a result of his single-minded focus on the theological background of mapping paradise, Scafi marginalizes overlapping poetic and scientific factors . Passing references to Dante and Milton are superficial and unsatisfying. Scafi’s claims that the era of exploration was of limited relevance to changing perception of Eden are unconvincing. A minor but nagging difficulty is Scafi’s use of the phrase “Judeo-Christian ,” which appears inconsistently and without explanation. Since Scafi makes no mention of Jewish religious or philosophical literature and, in fact, the Garden of Eden created different challenges for medieval Jewish and Christian exegetes, this term is quite misleading. These deficiencies notwithstanding, Mapping Paradise is an achievement worth celebrating. Scafi has identified a fascinating area of Christian intellectual history and indicated countless avenues for advanced research. He accepts the convention of examining theological discourse and artistic materials sideby -side, and ingeniously reframes the discussion to include mappae mundi as visual theology. This book is a provocative and productive contribution to scholarship on Christian thought and material culture in all periods. JESSICA ANDRUSS, Near Eastern Languages and Cultures The Ohio State University Susan Schibanoff, Chaucer’s Queer Poetics. Rereading the Dream Trio (Toronto : University of Toronto Press 2006) 365 pp. REVIEWS 272 The academic field of medieval authorship and authority encountered one of its first few seminal works in the 1980s with Alastair J. Minnis’s Medieval Theory of Authorship, which posited that the medieval auctore (author or figure of authority) fashioned his authorial identity as one who both “ties” his work to a classical-literary past, as well as one who “performs” his work as one distinct from it. These two praxes of Minnis’s medieval theory of authorship, heritage, and re-creation, have come to characterize authorship studies in the medieval period despite the onslaught of new critical practices. In Chaucer’s Queer Poetics , Susan Schibanoff obliquely pays tribute to Minnis’s influential theoretical paradigm, teasing out the ideological implications of Chaucer’s literary career and development throughout the trajectory of the dream trio of visionary poems, The Book of the Duchess, The House of Fame, and The Parliament of Fowls, in their corroborations of French and Italian influence, revealing how Chaucer the poet was immensely indebted to tradition as much as he sought to re-perform it. Her study of the dream trio is encyclopedic in approach, encompassing the voices of critics and scholars long “canonized” in the field of Chaucer studies such as Minnis, Charles Muscatine, and Wolfgang...

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