This collection is the culmination of V. A. Kolve's long and substantial engagement with the interrelation of text and image in Chaucer's writings. Its subtitle announces that Telling Images is intended to serve as the second installment of Kolve's most influential work, Chaucer and the Imagery of Narrative: The First Five Canterbury Tales (Stanford, CA, 1984). Unlike that earlier volume, however, which is a tightly focused study of the opening sequence of the Canterbury Tales, the current volume ranges more broadly, drawing together a collection of Kolve's lectures and essays produced over the last three decades: the earliest of the chapters, a classic and deeply insightful study of the “Second Nun's Tale” and an analysis of Cleopatra and Alceste in the Legend of Good Women, actually predate Kolve's 1984 volume but were excluded from it due to that book's exclusive focus on the opening sequence of the Canterbury Tales. Telling Images includes five previously published chapters on Chaucer's writings, including Troilus and Criseyde (2003), the Legend of Good Women (1981), the “Friar's Tale” (1990), the “Franklin's Tale” (1991), and the “Second Nun's Tale” (1981). A concluding essay, on the theme of the fool in medieval literature (1997), also addresses Chaucer's Troilus in addition to a range of other medieval literature. Original to this volume is a pair of interlinked chapters devoted to the “Merchant's Tale.”

The importance of Kolve's work lies in his ability to draw together a range of medieval images in order to provide a rich and detailed backdrop to literature of the period. By this means, Kolve exposes what he identifies as the “iconographic ‘literacy’” or “culturally shared habit of mind” (xvi) common to medieval readers and writers. This iconographic approach is sometimes compared to the allegorical reading practices associated with D. W. Robertson, but Kolve is careful to distinguish his methodology from those exegetical approaches even as he acknowledges his debt to Robertson (xxi–xxii, 258 n. 10). Kolve is consistent in his methodology, in the essays collected in Telling Images as in his 1984 volume, beginning with a rich and detailed overview of the possible forms of the iconographic image in question before turning to a reading of how that image is evoked in Chaucer's poetry. As Kolve puts it, the book “surveys, chapter by chapter, a range of images such as those the poet and his audience might have summoned to mind, before suggesting how Chaucer may have used that tradition within a specific poem” (xxiii). This approach invites the interesting question of how readers’ interpretations might sometimes have been at odds with the intentions of the poet, a topic Kolve only begins to address in his closing essay.

Kolve's focus on what he calls the “symbolic dimension” (1) of Chaucer's text causes him sometimes to give short shrift to the ways that medieval people talked about the acquisition of image-based knowledge. This is particularly apparent in the often shallow treatment of philosophical and scientific theories of vision and intellection, to which Kolve alludes but does not address in any substantial way (257 n. 5, 265 n. 38, 316 n. 50). He tends to rely on the important work of Mary Carruthers on medieval memory instead of engaging with the primary texts on imagination and perception that would be more directly relevant to his topic (2–3, 192, 261 n. 11). What Kolve does do extraordinarily well, however, is to first identify a key dramatic, vivid moment in Chaucer's text and then give a sense of the overwhelming profusion of iconographic options that were available to the poet and to his readers. This approach is particularly successful in the paired set of essays on the “Merchant's Tale,” written especially for this volume. One excavates the imaginative richness that underlies Chaucer's tale, focusing on not only the calendrical imagery underlying the aged January and his nubile young spouse May but also the Gemini twins motif. As Kolve shows in detail, the homoeroticism of the paired male Gemini image gave way in later medieval iconography to scenes of amorous heterosexual coupling. He goes on to relate these twin images to portrayals of the fecund tree of Jesse in order to produce a reading of the “Merchant's Tale” that brings out the natural imperatives that drive the work. Like the reading of the “Miller's Tale” in Kolve's 1984 book, Telling Images provides a reading of Chaucer's portrayal of the sexual coupling of youth and age that emphasizes the forward reproductive thrust of the natural order.

As a collection of essays produced over a long period of time, Telling Images sometimes misses opportunities to be synthetic: for example, the account of the paradise garden offered in chapter 6 as a context to the “Franklin's Tale” could easily have been linked to the focus on the Edenic garden of the “Merchant's Tale” featured in chapters 4 and 5. In spite of this lack of synthesis, the essays gathered here remain valuable for the way in which they illuminate the range of iconographic possibilities available to the medieval reader, vividly conjured up by both Kolve's descriptions and the 153 black-and-white illustrations. Perhaps the most stimulating aspect of this volume is the slightly audacious direction taken in its concluding essay, “God-Denying Fools.” In the preface, Kolve explicitly acknowledges both this audacity and his own level of personal engagement: in this chapter, he writes, “I privilege my personal situation for the first time, confessing to a dilemma I have never wholly resolved: how to teach and write ‘from within’ Christian systems of thought without appearing to acquiesce in beliefs I do not share” (xvii). Kolve shows how the figure of the fool who denies the existence of God was imagined by medieval people, but then he swerves away from a prescriptive, almost Robertsonian reading to instead produce a “resistant reading—a reading ‘against the grain’” (238). This mode of reading gives voice to the image of the God-denying fool, giving it a “dignity and importance” inconceivable to those who illustrated the manuscript. This striking direction whets the reader's appetite for Kolve's forthcoming publication of a book on this topic. Telling Images is the work of a master of the field, whose command of medieval iconography is profound and whose sense of Chaucer's poetry emerges from a lifetime dedicated to teaching his works.