Can you write a biography of a book?

That was what I found myself wondering as I reached the final chapters of this volume. Because author Derek Pearsall spent many, many pages speculating about the writing and plan of the Canterbury Tales. Of course, the Canterbury Tales is the main reason we care about Geoffrey Chaucer, but the book is not the man.

For a non-noble figure of the fourteenth century, we know a lot about Chaucer. We know when he died (although not when he was born, except that it was probably in the early 1340s). We know about certain government jobs he held, and some pensions he received. We have records of court cases in which he participated. We know something about his travels. It has even been suggested that we have samples of his handwriting.

Those don't add up to a biography. They don't tell us anything about his personality, or much about his family life, or about his wants and needs. We can form a very sketchy chronology of his life, but we cannot tell who he was.

The natural response is to turn to his writings, and glean what we can out of that. This is perfectly valid -- but extraordinarily tricky. And it can descend into what we see here: Literary analysis in the place of biographical data.

This must be particularly tempting when the author is, like Derek Pearsall, more a scholar of Middle English than an historian or biographer. He wants to explain The Canterbury Tales, and Troilus and Criseyde, and The House of Fame. So... he does.

The result is a book that is readable and quite interesting -- but isn't really a biography of Chaucer. It's hard to blame Pearsall for that, since it's not possible to write a biography. But because he's so interested in Chaucer's writings, he has a certain tendency to project the writings back into the life. And that really does strike me as wrong. ( )