In Chaucer's Visions of Manhood, Holly A. Crocker attempts to bring together two important recent strands of Chaucer criticism and, indeed, of medieval literary scholarship more generally: gender studies, specifically critical studies in masculinity, and historical vision theory. Her attempt is quite successful and will be of considerable interest to medievalists working in either or both of these areas.

The book consists of six sections: an introduction, four chapters offering readings of Chaucerian texts, and a final chapter on MS Harley 7333's post-Chaucerian collection of proverbs. Describing her project in the introduction, which links Chaucer's concern with vision and visibility to modern ones, Crocker outlines the masculine privilege that historically comes with “invisibility,” that is, with masculinity's presumption of an unmarked and unexamined universality. Chaucer, she suggests, regularly destabilizes this invisibility by depicting members of both sexes taking on both conventionally active, masculine roles and passive, feminine ones; his men and women therefore “pass” as masculine and feminine even when their actions suggest more complex gender positions and performances. Her subsequent chapters thus “pursue the ways in which men and women use performances of passing to maintain their affiliations with binary gender categories, even when their behavior visibly departs from those expectations in Chaucer's representations” (11). The introduction makes it clear that the terms “vision,” “visibility,” and “invisibility” are to be deployed metaphorically as well as literally and can signal not just physiological vision but knowledge—a metaphorical slippage familiar from medieval sources as well.

Crocker does not, however, neglect literal medieval vision. The first chapter, “Seeing Gender's Aspects: Vision, Agency, and Masculinity in the Tale of Melibee,” provides a compact and useful overview of the major theories of how vision operates that were available in the later Middle Ages, focusing on Roger Bacon's theory of visual reciprocity, in which the eye and the object of vision both possess agency in making vision possible. She thus helpfully moves beyond the contrast between extramissive and intromissive theories of vision that still structures much scholarly discussion of this topic and demonstrates how these differing visual agencies provide a model for gender agency as well. Her particular example, the Tale of Melibee, in its analysis of the gendered relationship between Melibee and Prudence, thus illustrates how “women's varied relations to agency and visibility give form to the different ways that men are seen in their communities” (48).

Chapters 2–4 offer further readings of Chaucerian texts that extend and develop this line of argument. The second, “Portrait of a Father as a Bad Man: Visible Pressure in the Physician's Tale,” relates the tale in question to conduct literature and political history as well as to visual theory. Crocker argues that this tale critiques the regime, represented by conduct books, that rigidly orders gendered behavior in visible fashion: “this tale takes on the regime of visibility, exposing its consequences in a new era when conduct was increasingly becoming subject to public scrutiny” (75). Chapter 3, “‘My first matere I wil yow telle’: Visual Impact in the Book of the Duchess,” finds an idealized reciprocity of gender in Chaucer's dream-vision, one that hints at the undoing of the rigid gender roles criticized in the Physician's Tale. The fourth chapter, “Which Wife? What Man? Gender Invisibility between Chaucer's Wife and Shipman,” suggests that the Shipman's Tale is Chaucer's most radical representation of the gendered negotiation of agency through invisibility, both in the open question of whether the tale “belongs” to the Shipman or the Wife of Bath and in the tale's own representations of the fluidly gendered agency enacted by the merchant's wife: she “opens opportunities for both [her and her husband] to cross borders of gender without being subject to punitive surveillance” (134).

Chapter 5, “Miscellaneous Chaucer: Proverbial Masculinity in Harley 7333,” moves back and forth between Chaucer's texts and their afterlife in one fifteenth-century manuscript. Its collection of pseudo-Chaucerian proverbs, which Crocker sees as referring more or less obliquely to various authentic Chaucerian works, reconstructs a conventional vision of manhood from Chaucerian materials that precisely challenge such conventions: “Chaucer's figure can be deployed for a purpose that markedly departs from the texture of his writings because Chaucer refuses to own, inhabit, or animate his works in a fully visible fashion” (151).

It is, of course, this typically Chaucerian ambiguity that makes it possible to argue with Crocker. Readers may well find themselves contesting each of her claims and identifying a Chaucer more historically aligned with the conventions deployed in Harley 7333 than with the postmodern gender fluidity that Crocker champions. Some readers may also question the effectiveness of Crocker's movement between literal and metaphorical vision: she does not always adequately acknowledge their difference or signal when she moves from one to the other. Nevertheless, Chaucer's Visions of Manhood is an important, original, and challenging contribution to several current scholarly conversations.

Unfortunately, this thought-provoking book is marred by a significant number of editing errors and oversights. The New Middle Ages is an important series in the dissemination of new critical approaches to medieval literature, and it is a shame that Palgrave Macmillan should not treat the books appearing in its series with greater editorial care.