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By Root 897 0

offers learned accounts of the historical roles played by various types represented among the Canterbury pilgrims, but adds to that information some insights drawn from modern—or transhistorical—times. Thus, in discussing Chaucer’s Prioress, he writes that the poet “describes her in terms borrowed from the stock descriptions of heroines of medieval romance—soft red mouth, gray eyes, well-proportioned nose, and broad forehead—and makes her, inevitably, sincere and demure, ‘simple and coy.’ ” But then without a pause, Donaldson goes on to say, “Such a woman naturally appeals to a man, and the narrator’s enthusiasm for her is aroused to so superlative a degree that a superlative modifies almost every one of her qualities. Of course he never does get around to speaking about her conscience … the Prioress’s charity—a word that in Chaucer’s time connoted the whole range of Christian love—gets lost among dogs and mice.”11

Donaldson’s observation “Such a woman naturally appeals to a man” is partly a version of the writing style that in fiction is known as free indirect discourse: he is projecting this thought, as the second half of his sentence makes clear, into the mind of Chaucer’s narrator, a personage often called “Chaucer the pilgrim,” since the poet deftly gives the intermittently naive figure a name identical to his own. It’s nominally the enthusiastic narrator who develops a crush on the Prioress, enough so that he overlooks her failings in charity to focus on her adorable ways. But there remains some residue in “Such a woman naturally appeals to a man” (notice, again, the present tense) that allows a twinkling suggestion that the scholar, too, is not immune to the Prioress’s charms. And if any readers bridle at “naturally” (or, indeed, at “to a man”), that is part of the tone achieved by this urbane account—an account that dares to transgress into the realm of the almost personal, and that, in doing so, makes the appeal of the Prioress, a fourteenth-century figure, both historical and contemporary. I should note that by “contemporary,” I mean the date of Donaldson’s text, originally published in 1958. Fifty years later, such an observation seems either bold, dated, or, charmingly, a little of both.

Now and Then

The word now is what linguists call a shifter: now in 1920 meant 1920; now in 2019 will, presumably, mean 2019. To put the case in literary-historical terms, Shakespeare’s Henry V exists in at least three time zones—the time in which it was written (the end of the sixteenth century), the time in which it is set (the medieval kingship of Henry V, 1413–22), and the time in which it is being read, interpreted, or performed. Moreover (and this will come as no surprise to anyone who follows the sinuous ins and outs of academic scholarship), the epithet presentist has now become a proud badge of identity. Titles of essays and essay collections now display the once disfavored term as an affirmative critical stance.12 After some intense years of historicizing, critics began to say that the “present moment had been obliterated” by some of the techniques used to focus attention on the past.13 “As what must be excluded from critical awareness to sustain historical contact,” wrote one scholar of English Renaissance literature, “the present may be considered the unconscious of new historicism.”14 Where the pejorative use pointed toward what was presumed to be an unbridgeable cultural gap between that time and this, the presentist critic asserts that older literature continues to shape ideas about identity, politics, gender, and power.

In fact, presentism, minus the -ism—indeed, minus any label at all—is what many, perhaps most, readers do when they pick up a book and read it. If Flaubert the author could say about the main character of his novel, “Madame Bovary, c’est moi!,” so indeed do many readers. Whether the book in question is Pride and Prejudice, Huckleberry Finn, The Bostonians, or Catch-22, readers tend to identify with the major characters and to measure their actions and thoughts by the degree to which they imagine