"The Doctrine of These Olde Wyse": Commentary on the Commentary

Tradition in Chaucer's Dream Visions

Josephine Bloomfield

Essays in Medieval Studies, Volume 20, 2003, pp. 125-133 (Article)

Published by West Virginia University Press

DOI: 10.1353/ems.2004.0001

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Chapter 10 “The Doctrine of These Olde
Wyse”: Commentary on the
Commentary Tradition in
Chaucer’s Dream Visions

Josephine Bloomfield
Ohio University

Peter Abelard, who in his Sic et non comments on both scriptural and patristic
writings, begins this work by noting that there are writings of authorities—such as
the Holy Fathers—that not only differ from each other but even contradict each
other. Interestingly, he calls on one of those authorities, St. Augustine, to give
authority for his argument that authorities are not always consistent or correct.1
While one would hesitate to cite this quite serious commentary on commen-
tary as a source for Chaucer’s not-so-serious disquisition on authority at the be-
ginning of the Prologue to the Legend of Good Women, their placement is, nota-
bly, exactly the same—the first lines of the prologue to the work—and in each
case the author rapidly follows reasons to question authority with arguments for
following authority nevertheless. The effects of the two prologues are not so dif-
ferent either: though Abelard goes on to strongly defend the inalterable rightness
of Scripture, no matter how apparently contradictory it may seem,2 his having
introduced the notion of scriptural fallibility changed much subsequent commen-
tary. As A. J. Minnis notes in his 1988 Medieval Literary Theory and Criticism,
“Abelard’s successors . . . return[ed] again and again to consider the awful possi-
bility that Holy Scripture might contain error or even downright falsehood” (68).
Likewise, readers and commentators on Chaucer’s Legend of Good Women struggle
with the ways that Chaucer’s commentary on the problems of authority (ll. F 1-34;
G 1-34)3 undercuts, subverts, or deconstructs the text that follows. Chaucer offers
an equally subversive proem to his dream vision The House of Fame in which the
narrator presents a skeptical commentary on all of the major commentaries on the
meaning and causes of dreams immediately before presenting his dream (ll. 1-58).
At the beginning of the Parliament of Fowls the dreamer is also engaged with
authoritative commentaries—in this case on both love and dreams—and manages

Essays in Medieval Studies 20 (2003), 125-132. © Illinois Medieval Association. Pub-

lished electronically by the Muse Project at http://muse.jhu.edu
126 Josephine Bloomfield

before telling his dream to prove by the authorities both that his dream was signifi-
cant and that it was insignificant (ll. 95-108). Even in the preface to his earliest
dream vision, The Book of the Duchess, Chaucer’s narrator engages with authori-
tative dream commentary by saying that none of the authorities, not even Joseph
or Macrobius, would be able to make sense of his dream (ll. 279-289). In his
dream visions, then, Chaucer seems to be exploiting and playing with the author-
ity constructed by the high medieval practice of systematic textual commentary—
a practice of commenting on authoritative texts that in itself, of course, produces
authoritative texts that sometimes supersede the originals in importance. More
interestingly, perhaps, this particular play of Chaucer’s in his dream visions as-
sumes the audience’s deep familiarity not just with the commentary tradition but,
I would argue, with the very specific practices and modes of that tradition.
As Rita Copeland, Alastair Minnis, and others have noted, if we have con-
sulted the collections of medieval accessus ad auctores, we will have observed the
close similarities between a preface to Ovid’s Heroides that occurs in the collec-
tions of accessus and the Prologue to Chaucer’s Legend of Good Women.4 In the
preface to Ovid’s work, the now unknown commentator, explaining how Ovid
came to write the Heroides, suggests that
He was brought up on charges before Caesar, because in his
writings he had taught Roman matrons about illicit love affairs:
whence he composed his book for them, offering it as an
exemplum, so that they should know which women they should
imitate in the matter of love and which women they should not
imitate.5
Though in the Prologue to the Legend of Good Women Chaucer substitutes the
God of Love for Caesar and himself for Ovid, it seems almost certain from the
exactness of the plot duplication that not only had he read his Heroides in a manu-
script accompanied by such an accessus, but that he was imagining an audience
with enough members in it who had read Ovid in just the same way to make the
joke play. The premise in the Prologue that the God of Love recognizes Chaucer,
knows his works, and then attacks him based on a misguided reading of those
works is quite funny in itself, but the comedy is very much complicated and deep-
ened for the reader who further recognizes the allusions to Caesar and Ovid in all
their wild presumptiousness.
And there are all sorts of other fun going on here: the fact that Chaucer
borrows from the accessus to the Heroides in his Prologue to the Legend encour-
ages the reader who recognizes that to consider them as comparable works; in-
deed, Rita Copeland calls the Legend “a vernacular response to the Ovidian an-
thology” (189). And for those who miss the allusion, the G version of the Pro-
logue actually mentions the Heroides as a source of material on women who loved
in exemplary ways (G 305-6). The jokes, the allusions, and hence the core of the
“The Doctrine of These Olde Wyse” 127

deconstruction and subversion that take place in the scene setting of the Prologue,
then, rely on familiarity with and dialogue with the commentary tradition. How-
ever, whereas Copeland argues that this engagement of Chaucer’s with academic
commentary in the Legend of Good Women represents his desire to present him-
self as auctoritas as well as auctor (196-97), I would like to argue that his engage-
ment with the commentary tradition here and in the other dream visions leads in
exactly the opposite direction—to a destabilizing of auctoritas rather than a striv-
ing to achieve it.
In The House of Fame, as John Fyler, among others, has noted, Chaucer was
making use of the Ovide moralisé, perhaps the most influential of medieval com-
mentaries on Ovid, and of such other commentaries as Servius’s on Virgil and
Pierre Bersuire’s Ovidius moralizatus (Benson 977).6 In addition, he also draws
on Macrobius’s commentary on dreams—either directly or though another bor-
rower from Macrobius such as John of Salisbury—and on school commentaries
on Cato’s Distichs (978). But from the outset, he uses the commentaries not so
much as authorities as he uses them as tools to unsettle the idea of authority. Crit-
ics have suggested that his use of dream terminology in The House of Fame is
confusing, but that is the only thing dream terminology can be if one relies on the
commentators: “Chalcidius’s ‘somnium,’” Fyler notes, “is equivalent to
Macrobius’s ‘insomnium,’” and “a single dream may belong to several catego-
ries” (978). Trotting in the wake of the discordance in Chalcidius’s and Macrobius’s
understanding of the distinction between somnium and insomnium, Chaucer trans-
lates them in lines 9-25 of The House of Fame as drem and sweven respectively,
then proceeds, in lines 30 to 52, to use the words interchangeably.
And it is not only in the definition of dream types that Chaucer uses com-
mentary to disorienting, deauthorizing effect in The House of Fame. His Venus
has qualities that come from Pierre Bersuire’s Ovidius moralizatus (979) and from
Boccaccio’s own glosses (his chiose) on The Teseida, rather than directly from
Ovid, Virgil, or even Boccaccio, though the Troy story written on the table of
brass in Venus’s temple comes from Virgil himself. But that is not entirely straight-
forward either, because Chaucer complicates the Virgilian story by intermittently
adopting the Ovidian perspective or by himself altering the story: in lines 198-
238, for instance, he appears to be summarizing the first book of the Aeneid but in
fact alters it to increase Venus’s role (980); in lines 240-282, in the midst of Virgil’s
account of Dido, he inserts Ovid’s perspective. This is not, however, just Chaucerian
creativity, though of course it is that too: it seems, instead, to be something more
complex and smarter and more thought-provoking—Chaucer playing with the treat-
ments of Aeneas, Venus, and Dido as they appeared in medieval commentaries.
As Rita Copeland has demonstrated, going back at least to the commentary on the
Aeneid attributed to Bernardus Silvestris (and probably even as far back as Servius),
commentators were recasting the fictions they were analyzing according to the
dictates of their own modus agendi (80-81). Bernardus sees the plot of the Aeneid
128 Josephine Bloomfield

as an integumentum or veil for philosophical truth, and so sees it as appropriate to

“save” the text though his allegoresis (81). In his view, the Aeneid is actually
about “the human pilgrimage from birth to adulthood, from ignorance and errant
passion to learning, wisdom, and virtue” (81), and he comes to feel that this real-
ization of the text is as important as the original text (82). Bernardus is even
willing to radically displace the original Virgilian text by doing a word by word
paraphrase in which he reads every word of the Aeneid to say what he thinks it
should mean rather than what it appears to mean in Virgil’s Latin (85). To use an
example that Rita Copeland singles out, he paraphrases and then rewrites the fell-
ing of the trees in the forest for the funeral pyre of Misenus as “the work of rational
contemplation, uprooting vices and planting virtues” (85). As Copeland says, it is
“a reading that produces the tropes that it explicates” (85). When the dreamer in
The House of Fame then becomes more and more subjective, aroused by his sym-
pathy for Dido, and creates a new focus for Virgil’s work, he seems to be in a witty
conversation with the Virgilian and Ovidian commentators of his own age, who
with high seriousness rewrote the works of the classical authors to reflect the moral
or literary ideas that they had brought with them to their exegetical task. But his
blatant deletion of positive aspects of Aeneas’s motivation (ll. 427-432) and his
original creation of new complaints for Dido (ll. 315-360) make it clear that he is
engaged in humorously questioning the establishment or determination of auctoritas
rather than striving to join the commentators by asserting such auctoritas for him-
self.
In the Parliament of Fowls, which is by no means the bookishly referential
work that The House of Fame is, there is still the underlying assumption that the
audience will bring close familiarity with the commentary tradition to its recep-
tion of the text. The narrator’s description and discussion at the outset of the poem
of Cicero’s Dream of Scipio (ll. 17-84) is necessarily a reference to Macrobius’s
long commentary on Cicero’s work, because this part of Cicero’s De Re Publica
was only preserved for the Middle Ages within Macrobius’s commentary (Benson
995). The fact that the narrator has been reading the commentary as well as Cicero’s
work is clear in lines 21 and 28, where he states and reiterates that it took him a
full, long day to read the book. While we know that the actual Dream of Scipio is
very short and could be read in half an hour, the commentary, of course, is sixteen
times the length of the dream (995). Later, when in his dream, the dreamer/narra-
tor encounters Affrican, Affrican (in l. 111) links the dreamer with Macrobius in
his interest in the story of Scipio Africanus. But these are incidental references:
the more direct references to Macrobius’s commentary come throughout the dream
vision, wherever dream types or dream meanings are mentioned, for this dream
analysis is the work not of Cicero but of Macrobius (995). The first and most
obvious of these references occurs when an event in the narrator’s life—his read-
ing about Scipio—prompts his dream about Affrican, placing it in the dream type
classified by Macrobius as the somnium or somnium animale (996).7 And while
“The Doctrine of These Olde Wyse” 129

the dreamer seems to be describing and paraphrasing Cicero’s tale in the introduc-
tory ninety lines of the poem, rather than Macrobius’s commentary on it, in fact
what he presents as Cicero’s tale is often subtly modified by his having read
Macrobius alongside it. For instance, the Galaxy or Milky Way that he mentions
in line 56 is described by Macrobius rather than by Cicero (1.4.5; 1.12.2)8; the
production of the music of the spheres that he describes in lines 59-63 comes from
Macrobius rather than Cicero (2.1-4), and, as Charles Muscatine has noted, his
reference in line 111 to Macrobius having cared for Cicero’s work “nat a lyte”
seems to point to the final line in Macrobius’s commentary, when Macrobius says
of the piece that “there is nothing more perfect than this work” (Benson 996).
But Macrobius’s is not the only commentary that permeates the Parliament
of Fowls. There is a more complex and deeper reference to commentary in
Chaucer’s representation of the figure of Nature. Though his goddess Nature in
the Parliament of Fowls is often seen as an amalgamation or derivation of the
Nature figure in Alan de Lille’s De planctu naturae and Jean de Meun’s Nature
and Reason figures in the Roman de la Rose (Benson 999), at the time that Chaucer
was working on the Parliament of Fowls, as Ralph Hanna has argued, he was
almost certainly also creating his translation of Boethius’s Consolatione
philosophiae (Benson 1003). And as scholars ranging from Peterson in 1903
(1004) to Alastair Minnis and Mark Gleason in this decade have substantiated,
Chaucer was demonstrably working with a manuscript of the Consolation that
was accompanied by a commentary by Nicholas Trevet, a commentary that in turn
drew substantially from an earlier commentary by Guillaume de Conches.9 In
addition, as Minnis shows, Chaucer was also probably reliant on Jean de Meun’s
French translation of Boethius (Li Livre de Confort) which was itself deeply in-
debted to glosses of Guillaume de Conches.10 It is Guillaume, as George Economou
has shown in his study The Goddess Natura in Medieval Literature, who is the
central figure responsible for the original shaping of the medieval figure of Nature
in the Boethian commentaries.11 In his glosses on Boethius, Guillaume empha-
sizes Nature’s procreative power and her stewardship to God, and also defines
Genius as a morally neutral procreative force. Guillaume in his commentaries is
optimistic about man’s natural tendency to follow nature and hence God (34-37).
Though both Alan de Lille and Jean de Meun draw from the Boethian com-
mentaries in the creation of their Nature figures, they also, as Economou notes,
radically change Guillaume’s characterization of Genius (37), and to some degree
narrow, exploit, or even satirize Guillaume’s gloss on Nature. Whereas Jean’s
Nature is merely procreative without any concern for marriage accompanying that
procreation, as Economou has pointed out, Chaucer’s Nature—like that of
Guillaume de Conches—is both procreatrix and pronuba (142). And whereas
Alan’s depiction of Nature in the De planctu naturae12 is focused on the rip in her
tunic13—representing mankind’s failure to follow her law—Chaucer’s depiction,
again reverting to Guillaume (via Trevet), is about human eagerness to follow
130 Josephine Bloomfield

Nature’s decree (Economou 141). So in this case, Boethian commentaries seem to

be as instrumental in Chaucer’s shaping of his Nature figure as are the literary
forebears whom he mentions in the work.
Most interestingly, it is Guillaume who introduces the problem of the will in
resistance to Nature. Economou shows that both Guillaume and the pseudo John
Scotus Eriugena, in their glosses on the Consolation and Plato’s Timaeus, say that
anyone who follows nature acts rightly and that even the devil’s nature is good: it
is his will that is evil and leads him astray (35). This problem of the will is of
course central to the incompleteness and ambiguity of the closing of the Parlia-
ment, when Nature and Reason would dictate that the formel accept the tercel (ll.
631-637): despite the formel’s clearly good nature, her individual will mysteri-
ously rebels (ll. 652-653). Whereas Alan, assuming auctoritas in the De planctu
naturae, punishes the recalcitrant will with excommunication,14 and Jean de Meun,
with equal authority in the Roman de la Rose, shows the unbridled will leading to
empty obscenity,15 Chaucer does something different. Looking back to earlier
glossers and commentators and eschewing the role of auctoritas, in the Parlia-
ment he reopens the problem of the will as a real question.
This opening of the question interestingly does the opposite of what many
commentators do in their commentaries, which is to attempt to close down the
text, by allowing it only one meaning, as, for instance, Bernardus Silvestris (or the
pseudo Bernardus Silvestris) does in his analysis of the Aeneid, cited above, or as
Boccaccio does in his commentary on Dante.16 Indeed, even Nicholas Trevet tries
at times in his commentaries to close down or disallow the commentary of the
commentator he most relied on, Guillaume de Conches,17 whose gloss on the issue
of nature and the will seems to have posed such an interesting intellectual and
moral question for Chaucer. Alastair Minnis suggests, however, that while Trevet
may have at times referred to Guillaume as “wrong” or “frivolous,” in fact, it is
clear that Guillaume was “a thinker who stimulated Trevet’s own thought.”18
This seems to be the effect that absorbing the commentary tradition had on
Chaucer as well: in addition to being amused and stimulated by the commentators
such as the unknown author of the accessus to Ovid’s Heroides who offers half a
dozen conflicting interpretations of Ovid’s intention in the work,19 Chaucer seems
to have also been stimulated even by those commentators who attempted to au-
thoritatively nail down a single reading for a text. What happens, for instance, he
seems to ask, when we take such as statement as Guillaume’s that “Anyone who
follows nature acts rightly—it is the will that is evil and leads us astray” and then
watch a set of humans (or birds) grappling, even comedically, with nature and the
will? Where, why, how, and when does the auctoritas break down, if it does break
down? The questions become stimulating for the audience as well, who are se-
duced into the text not only through issues which touch them in a visceral way—
in this case the common human experience of dealing with nature and the will—
but also through the intellectual play of becoming engaged in a familiar type of
“The Doctrine of These Olde Wyse” 131

discourse, the commentary. The fact that Chaucer’s humor relies not only on the
audience’s grasping his allusions to earlier readings by commentators but also on
their familiarity with the structure and method of the commentary style and tradi-
tion suggests that a substantial part of his audience was as familiar with textual
commentary as it was with texts.
When Paul Strohm a number of years ago in his book Social Chaucer20
looked at the relationship of Chaucer’s work to his audience, he argued that “one
of the cornerstones” of the rhetorical system in which Chaucer’s work was lodged
was the “indispensability of attentive hearing to meaningful discourse” (48). Con-
sidering then Chaucer’s discourse in the Troilus and Criseyde, he says:
It presupposes an audience of some literary sophistication, which
shares literary expectations formed not only by the work at hand
but also by acquaintance with other major texts and genres of
antiquity and the newly flourishing vernaculars. (63)
While his expectations of his audience might have caused Chaucer to be regarded
by some as a difficult poet in a work such as the Troilus, within the rhetorical
realm and system in which he operated, according to Strohm, it would have made
little sense for him to create a text whose possible significances were entirely
beyond the scope of that audience.
As Strohm grappled with the audience for Chaucer’s Troilus, so have such
scholars as Ralph Hanna and Alastair Minnis grappled with the audience for
Chaucer’s Boece, his translation of Boethius’s Consolatione philosophiae, which
complexly, and often dryly, incorporates external Boethius commentary. Profes-
sor Minnis, at a recent conference,21 has suggested that perhaps Richard II was the
recipient of this glossed translation, since it clearly was not created for Chaucer’s
own use as a “pony,” and because the extraordinary effort that Chaucer expended
in creating it seems so out of proportion to the very small audience that could
appreciate it or use it. But the puzzlement over the Boece—as with the puzzle-
ment we may feel over Chaucer’s extensive references to the commentaries in the
dream visions—is lessened if we do not insist on the oddness or rarity of familiar-
ity with academic commentary. Given the fact that Chaucer himself read Boethius
with commentary and Jean de Meun demonstrably did also, and considering that
works such as the Ovide moralisé and the glossed Aeneid of Bernardus Silvestris
survive in multiple manuscripts, reading commentary might not actually have been
the rarified academic exercise that we have supposed. It might rather have been
normal practice of all those literate people with what Paul Strohm calls “a literary
disposition” (42).
132 Josephine Bloomfield

Notes
1 Peter Abelard, Sic et non: A Critical Edition, ed. Blanche Boyer and Richard
McKeon (Chicago, 1977), pp. 89-104; translated in A. J. Minnis, A. B. Scott,
eds., with David Wallace, Medieval Literary Theory and Criticism c1100-
c1375: The Commentary Tradition (Oxford, 1988), pp. 87-100.
2 Minnis and Scott, pp. 97-99.
3 All citations of Chaucer’s texts are from The Riverside Chaucer, 3rd edition,
ed. Larry D. Benson (New York, 1987).
4 Rita Copeland, Rhetoric, Hermeneutics and Translation in the Middle Ages.
Academic Traditions and Vernacular Texts (Cambridge, 1991), pp. 186-87;
Minnis and Scott, p. 23.
5 Accessus ad auctores, ed. R. B. C. Huygens (Leiden, 1970), p. 32. Quoted in
Copeland, p. 188; translated also in Minnis and Scott, p. 23.
6 See also John M. Fyler, Chaucer and Ovid (New Haven, 1979), particularly
Chapter 2, pp. 27-64, for an extended discussion of Chaucer’s sources here.
7 See also Walter Clyde Curry, Chaucer and the Mediaeval Sciences (New York,
1926), p. 207.
8 Macrobius’ Commentary on the Dream of Scipio, trans. William H. Stahl
(New York, 1952).
9 See in particular A. J. Minnis, “Chaucer’s Commentator: Nicholas Trevet and
the Boece,” in Chaucer’s Boece and the Medieval Tradition of Boethius, ed.
A. J. Minnis (Cambridge, 1993), pp. 83-166, and Mark J. Gleason, “Clearing
the Fields: Towards a Reassessment of Chaucer’s Use of Trevet in the ‘Boece,’”
in The Medieval Boethius, ed. A.J. Minnis (Cambridge, 1987), pp. 89-105.
10 Minnis, Chaucer’s Boece, p. 92.
11 George Economou, The Goddess Natura in Medieval Literature (Cambridge,
MA, 1972), p. 34.
12 Alan de Lille, De planctu naturae, ed. N. M. Häring, Studi Medievali, terza
serie, 19.2 (1978), pp. 797-879; Alan of Lille, The Plaint of Nature, trans. and
comm. James J. Sheridan (Toronto, 1980).
13 Alan of Lille, trans. Sheridan, p. 98. Book 2, Prose 1.
14 Alan of Lille, trans. Sheridan, pp. 220-221.
15 Guillame de Lorris and Jean de Meun, Le Roman de la Rose, ed. Ernst Langlois,
5 vols. (Paris, 1914-24). The Romance of the Rose, trans. Charles Dahlberg.
3rd ed. (Princeton, 1995), pp. 352-352, ll. 21617-21742.
16 A selection of Boccaccio’s commentaries on Dante have been translated by
Minnis and Scott. See for example his commentary on the Inferno, Minnis
and Scott, pp. 492-519.
“The Doctrine of These Olde Wyse” 133

17 See for example A. J. Minnis, “What Nicholas Trevet Really Did to William
of Conches,” in his Chaucer’s Boece, particularly pp. 19-20, 21-23, and for a
summary of the nature of Trevet’s disagreements with Guillaume, pp. 32-33.
18 Minnis, Chaucer’s Boece, p. 23.
19 Minnis and Scott, pp. 21-24.
20 Paul Strohm, Social Chaucer (Cambridge, MA, 1989).
21 “Absent Glosses: A Crisis of Vernacular Commentary in Late-Medieval En-
gland?” Keynote address at the 20th Annual Meeting of the Illinois Medieval
Association entitled “Texts and Commentaries,” DePaul University, Chicago,
Illinois, February 22, 2003.