Chaucer's Prayers

Megan Murton offers her readers the illuminating opportunity to dwell imaginatively within the highly performative nature of Chaucer's prayers. For Murton, who anchors Chaucer's Prayers in the new critical approach to first-person voice in late medieval writing, the “I” of prayers is both a space to be inhabited in devotional posture or else as vantage-points onto, or into, a story. Therefore, to perform Chaucer's prayers, whether pagan or Christian, is to participate imaginatively and affectively in his narrative worlds, and to experience the different kinds of religious devotions promoted by them. To adopt the “subject-position” as readers submit themselves to Chaucer's influence should guide their imaginative involvement with his poetry and direct their interpretation, while being granted agency through the very act of participation. Each chapter contributes, through an astute and rigorous close reading of the prayers drawing on the narratives' overall contexts and Chaucer's sources, to the establishing of the literary qualities of the poet's devotional writings, whether viewed as Christian or secular.By tracing Chaucer's Marian prayers in the “ABC to the Virgin” and in the prologues and tales of The Second Nun's Tale and of The Prioress's Tale, Murton characterizes these petitions to Mary as scripted prayers for all those seeking her mercy. The “ABC” reveals in particular the preemptive and transformative dynamics of prayer as the “I” persona needs Mary's grace in face of his or her utter inability to pray. Looking at the prologue prayers of the Second Nun and the Prioress, Murton then establishes that both prayers demand readerly participation, for as readers inhabit the prayers, not only are they made worthy recipients of Mary's mercy but also formed into ideal readers (38). The Prioress's prayer, in the prologue, suggests the inability of human language to praise Mary adequately, which prepares readers “to bring to the tale a sense of anxiety about the capacity of language to serve as a medium of Mary's praise” (48). The Second Nun's prayer captures the tensions found in embodiment, where physicality is a shared attribute with the Incarnate Christ and represents an alienation from God as it is tainted by sin. Readers who inhabit the prayer are thus prepared to interpret the conflicted attitudes reflected in Cecilia's martyred body and to engage with the ambiguity of embodiment unfolded in the tale.The middle part of the book is concerned with prayers and philosophical speeches within pagan contexts. Murton first considers The Man of Law's Tale, The Knight's Tale, and The Franklin's Tale in light of their undergirding existential question: Why would a providential deity allow innocent people to suffer? To inhabit Custance's prayers in The Man of Law's Tale consists in an imaginative work of experiencing the extent to which she submits to God in her suffering, so as to be made Christ-like, since through participating in Christ's suffering she then partakes in his triumph over pain and death (65). As demonstrated in the pagan world of The Knight's Tale, the act of prayer for the Athenians is characterized by petitions and complicated negotiations with finite gods so to escape suffering, while achieving one's desires. All of Arcite's, Palamon's, and Theseus's prayers display “a robustly imagined version of pagan devotional interiority” (75) and invite readers to experience them as acts driven by human will and the necessity to persuade. In The Franklin's Tale, Dorigen's monotheist prayers and Aurelius's polytheist prayers, both presented as empty words with an underlying uncertainty, respond to the problem of suffering through a kind of humanism that emphasizes compassion while “distancing divine intervention” (89). The “devotional uncertainty” (90) of these pagan settings offers different imaginative experiences as one learns what it is like to pray as a pagan. Murton then turns to the performative value of prayers in Troilus and Criseyde. Whereas Criseyde's atheistic world view emphasizes the earthly transience of love, a sentiment shared by Pandarus, Troilus understands the human experience of love as partaking in divine love. Until the end, unable to unlove nor disbelieve, he holds on to his faith in the God of Love, and subsequently to human participation in divine love. Murton argues that Troilus's contemptus mundi, as mediated by the narrator's comment on his afterlife, is an apostasy of his religion of love and is imposed on readers without giving them a chance to perform Troilus's newfound beliefs in the afterlife. However, the last two stanzas of the poem offer an opportunity for readers “to recuperate [Troilus's] beliefs about Love within a Christian framework” (123) through a participatory performance of the praying “I,” which bridges the gap between the paganism experienced and their own Christian reality.The last section of Chaucer's Prayers considers The Parliament of Fowls, The Book of the Duchess, and The House of Fame, and Chaucer's Retraction at the end of the Canterbury Tales in light of the writing of reading. Murton perceives the prayers of the dream poems as generating the dreams, with a poetic “I” that is both the voice of the authoritative poet and a confused and anxious reader. While in the Duchess, Chaucer grounds his poetics in enthusiastic reading as expressed in the dreamer's naïve initial prayer, the beginning of the poetic process in Parliament uses the prayer to stage a self-conscious performance of craftmanship. In Fame, the first-person voice of the prayers reflects both a growing sense of anxiety when reading his own dream and the possible misreading of his readers. The anxious poet thus anticipates his or her readers' responses and ventriloquizes them by including their reactions in the very poem, demonstrating the interdependence between poet and readers. Chaucer's Prayers then culminates in Murton's revisionary performative reading of the Retraction. Scripting two prayers for readers to perform, Chaucer invites his audience to pray for him, and with him, praying thus as a community of readers “united around the shared work of interpreting poetry and the shared goal of salvation” (158) as they also pray for themselves. The final sentence blurs the line of agency between Chaucer and his readers, moving toward an act of communal prayer, which reveals a resolved crisis between poet and readers, who are united around the common goals of salvation and formation.Murton skillfully unveils the potential of reading Chaucer as a religious poet involved with the literary nature of devotional writings and the devotional nature of literature. While she clearly limits the scope of her study to the performative quality of prayer rather than its theological framework, Chaucer's Prayers might have benefited from a more extensive historical situatedness and the further embedding of performances of prayer in the devotional contexts of its time so to read the prayers and their world views in light of Chaucer's European exposure. Murton's methodical and meticulous reading of each prayer in light of its Italian or Latin sources prevents her from ascribing to Chaucer a form of cultural imperialism, in his appropriation of pagan contexts in particular. She navigates this fine line well by welcoming all kinds of readership without imposing on the reader Chaucer's authorial goal, which she interprets as a process of teaching and learning through poetry, what Norm Klassen calls an explicit participation in God's created order in his Fellowship of the Beatific Vision (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2016).Chaucer's Prayers' significant contribution returns our attention to Chaucer as both a secular and religious poet. Readers of JMRC will enjoy rediscovering Chaucer as an integrated author who does not compartmentalize his secular and sacred interests nor succumb to an ongoing dualist approach to his works, but on the contrary, as a poet who embodies in his writing and reading a free flow of both ideas and practices between Christian and pagan literature, and the sacred and secular

Aesthetics · Art · Hymn · Literature · Narrative · Performative utterance · Poetry · Prayer · Prologue · Theology · Historical Studies of British Isles · History · Medieval Literature and History · Philosophy · Themes in Literature Analysis