Life in Words: Essays on Chaucer, the Gawain-Poet, and Malory by Jill Mann
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Reviewed by: Life in Words: Essays on Chaucer, the Gawain-Poet, and Malory by Jill Mann Caitlin Santavenere Jill Mann, Life in Words: Essays on Chaucer, the Gawain-Poet, and Malory (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 2014) 359 pp. The latest edition to Jill Mann’s extensive bibliography is a compilation of fifteen of her previously-published essays. The collection provides works from 1980–2009 and is merely a glimpse into Mann’s scholarship. The Introduction by the book’s editor, Mark David Rasmussen, gives an overview of Mann’s [End Page 303] career and publications. Rasmussen’s Introduction is highly complimentary of Mann’s work and addresses the fact that he chose the essays that he thought best provided a glimpse into an illustrious career. The fifteen essays featured in Life in Words, are arranged as separate chapters and grouped together by subject rather than chronologically. The first seven essays deal exclusively with Chaucer. The first three focus on his poem, Troilus and Criseyde. Given that Mann has written over fifty essays on medieval literature, the choice to focus the beginning of her collection solely on Troilus and Criseyde is slightly polarizing because of Troilus and Criseyde’s position as one of Chaucer’s lesser known works; this establishes that Life in Words is targeted to a scholarly audience. The first essay focuses on power play in the poem; the second essay compares Chaucer’s characters to Shakespeare’s characterization; and the third essay explores destiny within this poem and The Knight’s Tale. The third essay segways into the fourth essay, which begins Mann’s discussion of The Canterbury Tales. The heavy focus on Troilus and Criseyde takes away from the purpose of the collection. It would have been more effective to replace one or two of the Troilus and Criseyde pieces with another of Mann’s Chaucer works to provide a better example of her erudition. The Canterbury Tales are the focus of three of Mann’s essays in which she explores different tales in the collection. Chapter 6 is an independent Chaucer essay on the role of the audience as readers of Chaucer. This essay is an excellent example of Mann’s dedication to the medieval field. It is refreshing to see a more technical essay featured amongst Mann’s literary criticism. She uses evidence from Chaucer’s poetry to expand upon the role of the author in conjunction with the role of the audience. An exploration of power is a common thread in Mann’s Chaucer essays. Each essay acts as a stand-alone piece; however, the editorial decision to group them by subject ties the themes together. Power is discussed in different ways throughout all of the Chaucer essays although they are not presented as a collection solely about power. Chapter 8, “Satisfaction and Payment in Middle English Literature” carries the power theme from the Chaucer essays and into the Gawain-poet and Malory essays where the conversation of power evolves into a discussion of value, ethics, and chivalry. The first essay that focuses exclusively on the Gawain-Poet begins in chapter 9. “Price and Value in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight” is an effective starting essay for this part of the collection because the discussion of value transcends into the ethical and chivalric argument presented in Mann’s later Gawain-Poet and Malory chapters. Mann argues that Gawain’s value is measured by his place and his armor, which ultimately becomes symbolic for his ethical and moral value. The following essay, “Courtly Aesthetics and Courtly Ethics in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight” shines in the collection. Mann’s strength comes through in the close reading of the language used in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. This strength is also apparent in the close readings Mann does later in the collection with her analysis of Suite du Merlin in chapter 13. It becomes obvious that Mann truly is the scholar that Rasmussen introduces in the presentation of these close readings. Her knowledge, understanding, and presentation of Middle [End Page 304] English is exemplary, and she writes for an audience with some prior knowledge of the medieval. In chapters 13 and 14...
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".