Carolynn Van Dyke opens Chaucer's Agents with a discussion of The Pardoner's Tale, in which the three rioters who set out to kill Death persistently 'practice bad hermeneutics' (p.13), interpreting metaphors literally, fetishizing objects, and mistaking personifications for people. Their failure of comprehension extends even to themselves: 'fancying themselves to be autonomous individuals, they become figures in an exemplum' (p.14). The exemplum is, of course, that related by the Pardoner, but for Van Dyke the rioters also exemplify a tendency that she identifies throughout Chaucer's poetry: that of the characters to misunderstand agency and to attribute it wrongly. In this respect, the rioters are also like their creator the Pardoner, whose principal mistake is to recognize only his own agency but not that of his audience. The Pardoner himself is however opposed to his own creator, Geoffrey Chaucer, who 'subjects himself to his fiction, both self and fiction to his audiences, and all, ultimately, to patterns of agency beyond his texts' (p.35).
According to Van Dyke, in her introduction to Chaucer's Angels, a century and more of critics, from J.M. Manly, R.M. Lumiansky, G.L. Kittredge, and R.K. Root to D.W. Robertson, Lee Patterson, and H. Marshall Leicester, Jr, have followed the Pardoner and his rioters in misunderstanding or oversimplifying the question of agency in Chaucer's poetry. While biographical and allegorical readings have given way to a focus on selfhood, subjectivity, and voice, all of these approaches are, Van Dyke argues, reductive in similar ways, and do not capture the complexity of agency within the texts. Chaucer's Agents offers, then, an interpretation of Chaucer's work that systematically scrutinizes differing forms of agency and causation within a range of narratives. In offering a definition of agency, Van Dyke draws on modern as well as medieval theories, from a variety of disciplines, including law, philosophy, business studies, and politics. Agency, she concludes, can have confliciting meanings. To have agency can mean both to be autonomous (to be acting on one's own behalf, to be one's own principal), and to be subordinated to another (to be acting for another, to be their delegate). Agency can also be either human or non-human. These ambiguities inherent in modern ideas of agency are also manifest in late medieval political and philosophical discourses and in the ideas of authorship that were emerging in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. They are ambiguities of which Chaucer was aware and which he exploted in his writing.
The fact that a focus on the woman problem (do women like the Wife of Bath or Criseyde really have autonomy?) is simply one aspect of the analysis in Chaucer's Agents is also a strength of this book. In seven chapters that follow the introduction, Van Dyke offers a comprehensive survey of causation in Chaucer's poetry, looking also at allegory and personification, intelligent animals, pagan gods, ideas of authorship, and, of course, free will. Each scholarly and engaging chapter offers a nuanced and historically informed reading of a number of Chaucerian texts and the argument builds up steadily to its climax. While a figure such as Criseyde may be reduced in the final analysis to an 'avatar of fair "brotelnesse"' (p.221), Chaucer's own (somewhat liberal) message is, Van Dyke contends, that 'human freedom arises out of our ability to confer freedom on our own agents' (pg. 38). While not all readers may find this conclusion entirely satisfying or convincing, this informed and lively study offers some subtle new perspectives on Chaucer's poetry, and is certainly a useful contribution to what remains a central field of late medieval English literary criticism.
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