The thrill continued

As I said in the previous entry, "I had something I had to say." The fact that Professor Trigg assumed I "sidestepped" a lot of Chaucer criticism published in the preceding forty years did not mean I was careless or sparing in my searches. It only meant that the books I read almost never connected to more recent scholarship.
     V. A. Kolve is an exception. His The Play Called Corpus Christi provides exciting information. He demonstrates, for example, that action in medieval plays mimics the action of games! Kolve intends to assist today's readers to recognize images that were a "major vocabulary" in the medieval mind-set. This enhances the "possibility of divergent readings" of the Canterbury Tales.
     I pursued other books he'd written. His Chaucer and the Imagery of Narrative has been called "the best and most important book on Chaucer to appear in twenty-five years."
     The name of Augustine seemed to touch everything medieval, all aspects of my research. I needed to know more about him. I could hardly believe he had died in 430 A.D.  That's 1000 years before the death of Chaucer. His influence not only continued uninterrupted through the Middle Ages, but it is still forceful today. What a powerful figure!
     To return to Professor Stephanie Trigg, she sees my reading as dependent on the Middle English Dictionary when I looked for "possible alternative meanings for Chaucer's lines." In truth, the dictionary proved to be a treasure trove. I'll demonstrate with the "outstanding" word I mentioned last time. You'll need a little background first.
     The word is found in the story of Thopas, which is a litany of sexual encounters told in two parts. At the end of part one, Pilgrim Chaucer leaves the decision to continue in the hands of his audience as he offers: If you will [have] any more of it, To tell it will I fonde. In the MED, fonde has ten definitions. Editors choose number seven, which says, "to try or strive to do something." That fits the surface story.
     To understand the startling alternate meaning of the line, however, it is essential to recognize that Chaucer's Host is the covert image of Christ, guide of pilgrims. (The Christic identity is established in great detail in my first book, which deals exclusively with the Host. I coverered that topic first because Christ is the heart of Chaucer's hidden message.)
     Now let's check the first definition of fonde: "to try the patience of God." Astonishing! But knowing that Christ is listening to this bawdy story, the definition comes as no surprise. After only twenty-two lines--in the middle of a sentence--the Host/Christ calls a halt as he says: "No more of this, for you make me so weary . . . My ears ache." That shows unmistakably that Christ's patience is at an end. Fonde foreshadowed the interruption.
     Near the closing of her review, Professor Trigg says "most presses would have insisted on major rewriting to update Cullen's research." She goes on to confide, that, as they exist, few teachers would recommend my Chaucer books to their students. Then, in spite of all her prior objections, the professor muses, "And yet I suspect many such teachers would be secretly quite glad if they could inspire their own students to write a series of three volumes on Chaucer." Professor Trigg is a woman who is not merely echoing Ivory Tower pronouncements. Her seeing an unspoken value in the unconventional can't help but warm this aged heart.   :)

My presentation may not abide by the academic formula, but students will know that research can be an adventure.

The thrill of research

My Chaucer research was a personal endeavor. Professors I knew tried to "dissuade" me from pursuing what I "saw." But that's OK, because nothing, no one, hindered me from following connections I found. One book led me to another as I collected information I needed--and discovered things I'd never seen before.

A charming, recent opinion regarding Professor Stephanie Trigg says, "when she walks around the corridors of the University of Melbourne a golden radiance follows her." I mention this radiant  professor because she did me a great service when she reviewed my second book, Pilgrim Chaucer. I got a quick course in the standard attitude toward producing literary criticism. "Cullen thus makes an interesting discursive intervention into a field that is normally dominated by specialists." True. I might even be considered an unqualified intruder into elitist territory--but I had something I had to say.
     She notes that I "sidestepped" a lot of Chaucer criticism published in the preceding forty years. "In a research paper, this would be woefully inadequate." Yes, but I wasn't writing a "research paper." I wasn't addressing academia. I was telling my reader about my adventure. I did delve into a lot of sources. (Most everyone acknowledges that.) What I chose to include bolstered my ideas--what I saw as Chaucer's ideas.
    Professor  Trigg is surprised that I present the evidence I find "as if they represented novel and fresh primary research." But to me it was! No one gave me a required reading list. Everything--from Augustine to our contemporary V. A. Kolve--proved new, exciting, stimulating.
     I love words. When you're dealing with an allegory, the author is bound to use words with more than one meaning. So when the professor says I depend "a great deal on searches of the Middle English Dictionary . . . for possible alternative meanings for Chaucer's lines." Of course. That's how you discover possibilities. But they have to fit the thought. The most outstanding example is fonde. The seventh definition is "to try, to strive." That's what the notes recommend. But the first definition is "to try the patience of God." What a startling difference, but each does fit--one for the surface plot and the other for the covert storyline.
     Her next comment comes as a real eye opener. "She charts, for example, her own frustrations and successes in her library searches ("I almost cheered"; "my face turned red . . . and I burst out laughing"). Such enthusiasm is normally edited out." What a sad editorial practice. Doesn't it dull down what I'm saying if you don't know how excited I got? Let me tell you the story of my almost cheering.  
     It has to do with the Thopas story, one of Chaucer's own contributions to the Tales. The main character, Thopas, is pricking here and pricking there when he is confronted by an enemy. Pricking can refer to horse riding, but it also means intercourse--as Chaucer makes clear in the Reeve's Tale: John (an opportunist and overnight guest) manages to share a bed with the good wife. "He pricketh her hard and deep"--the best she'd had in a long time!
     I assume the enemy, Sir Elephant, must be a threat to sexual activity. He exclaims "Termagaunt!" a word the Middle Ages took to be of Arabic origin. Chaucer gives us only these two clues to identify this adversary.
     At the library I took down books on the history of diseases. I turned the pages slowly, scanning each description. At last, after several books and many pages, when I turned a page the next caption read Elephantiasis Arabum!--and "Right there in the library, I almost cheered." Wouldn't you?

Upon publication of Pilgrim Chaucer, Judith Wenrick, a reviewer and specialist in guiding young writers, said--"It serves as a teaching model to inspire writing students to view scholarship as an adventurous and creative endeavor." That was precisely my intention.
     To be continued.