Congenial Souls: Reading Chaucer from Medieval to Postmodern

College Literature, Winter 2004 by Bossiere, Camille La

Congenial Souls itself authorizes a way for this reviewer to make an end. As its author indicates, "it's in the marginal and the anecdotal that we can best examine the telling boundaries of professional and personal identity" (2002, 23). Let me recount, then, a few anecdotes of my own. In my thirty-three years of undergraduate and graduate teaching, I have met but two students familiar with all of the Bible. But I have met many students much more familiar with Derrida, Irigaray, and Gadamer, for example, than they are with Nietzsche. Even in graduate courses on literary theory, I have not hazarded to assume a shared acquaintance with Human, All Too Human or The Gay Science or the entire text of The Genealogy of Morals. With junior undergraduates, I have come to take care to explain what a rosary is and to provide translations of Amor vincit omnia and-please believe me-In principio /Mulier est hominis confusio. And now, one last anecdote. Near the very end of her book, in the process of mulling over the question "Why study Chaucer?" Trigg refreshingly speculates: "How odd it would seem . . . if I began to meditate on the strangeness of writing about Chaucer in a house on the banks of the Merri Creek, where the Wurundjeri people told stories about the Sacred Kingfisher, thousands of years before the English came to Australia" (236). Writing this review within sight of the Bonnechere River and Hills, within a short walk to Algonquin lands still very much alive, I feel no strangeness. A Manitoba Metis whose forbears (on my father's side) hunted, fished, and chanted thousands of years before the French and the English came to Canada, I have found no difficulty in sharing Chaucer with First Nations folk, who show every sign of sharing in the spirit of "God's plenty." What thoughts or feelings you may experience on taking in these anecdotes, dear reader, I can hardly help but leave entirely up to you.

Camille La Bossiere

University of Ottawa