Chaucer Gentrified: The Nexus of Art and Politics in the Ellesmere Miniatures
The twenty-three miniatures of the Ellesmere Canterbury Tales (San Marino, Huntington Library MS 26 C 9) have been well studied, from Edwin Ford Piper's 1924 descriptive article to several essays in the 1997 The Ellesmere Chaucer: Essays in Interpretation, which was published in con junction with the sumptuous new facsimile of the manuscript and Mary C. Olson's chapter in Chaucer Illustrated.1 Among the issues debated over the decades has been the fidelity, or lack thereof, of the illustrations to the text. Piper, Martin Stevens, Malcolm Parkes, and A. I. Doyle have argued that the pictures are, in Stevens's words, "as faithful as possible to the verbal portraits."2 Conversely, Richard K Emmerson's close study of the miniatures denies that the artists attempted to reproduce Chaucer's verbal portraits. Olson concurs with Emmerson.3 Anyone who gives the Ellesmere miniatures more than a cursory glance must acknowledge that Emmerson and Olson are correct in stating that the artists' depictions deviate in varying degrees from Chaucer's descriptions. Such deviations generally do not detract from the pictures' ability to function as rubrics. On the contrary, the additions of the Physician's urinal, the Summoner's summons, the Reeve's keys, and the Clerk's books4 allow a reader to iden tify the characters quickly and so are included, even though (with the pos sible exception of the keys) they are inappropriate accoutrements to be carrying on horseback on a pilgrimage.5 Rendering images more easily recognizable was only one motivation for the artists' innovations, though. Taken together, the changes amount to a program seeking to deflect Chaucer's satire of the upper and upper-middle classes and of most of the religious figures while emphasizing the negative aspects of the lower orders. Whereas the text tends to the ambiguous and the equivocal, the illustrations consistently eliminate these qualities and instruct the reader/viewer in how to regard each pilgrim. The Ellesmere miniatures reveal that, within a decade of Chaucer's death, the Canterbury Tales was being turned into an icon of establishment values.
The Conclusion of the Marriage Group Chaucer and the Human Condition
ITTREDGE, in 1912, first defined the Marriage Group as a dramatically integrated unit within the Canterbury Tales. It begins, he suggested, with the Wife of Bath's Prologue and Tale; after an interruption it is resumed in the Clerk's treatment of the patient Griselda and the Merchant's cynical denial of happiness in marriage; and it is concluded, after the interruption of the Squire's Tale, by the Franklyn's compromise between Christian marriage and courtly love.' There followed a protracted discussion, in which some critics denied that these tales form any kind of a group, while others, accepting the notion, suggested that the Squire's Tale, the Nun's Priest's Tale, and the Melibee are also related to it.2 But in all this no one has questioned the fundamental premise, implicit in Kittredge's argument, that the Marriage Group has at base a radically secular cast which reflects the private opinion of the author: the group is thought to end with the Franklyn's suggestion for a method of establishing domestic concord, and this solution is believed, in Kittredge's words, to be "what Chaucer thought about marriage."3 This picture of the poet as a thinker disposed chiefly toward secular notions which were "ahead of his time" is-or should be-qualified by the fact that Chaucer wrote many works of a Christian and ascetic character. Putting to one side all those minor poems which might be considered conventional and perfunctory,4 we find that one of the greatest secular works, the Troilus, ends with an epilogue which counsels readers to turn from the love of worldly things; and recent scholarship has supported the opinion that the epilogue is seriously intended and integral with the poem. And the Canterbury Tales ends with the Parson's sermon on penitence, followed by Chaucer's retraction. Lately, however, this wholly justifiable view of Chaucer as a religious writer and thinker has been carried to an unprecedented extreme. Those critics who have come to be called "pan-allegorists" are interpreting notably secular tales, like the Nun's Priest's Tale, and even the Mer-
Characterization of Aqueous Dispersions and Gels Made of Sodium Caseinate and Basil Seed Gum: Phase Behavior, Rheology, and Microstructure
The interactions between sodium caseinate (NaCas) and basil seed gum (BSG) in the presence of calcium chloride (CaCl 2 ) were investigated. The phase behavior of the mixed aqueous dispersions and their gels revealed a homogeneous mixture, obtained at the higher concentrations of both CaCl 2 and BSG. The Herschel-Bulkley model sufficiently fitted the flow behavior of the mixture solution data. Apparent viscosity increased significantly ( p  < 0.05) by increasing the concentration of BSG, where the addition of CaCl 2 had no significant effect on the viscosity of the samples ( p  > 0.05). Furthermore, there was an increase in thixotropy due to the higher concentrations of BSG and CaCl 2 . Based on the frequency sweep test, at the low frequencies, a more gel-like behavior was observed in the case of the higher concentrations of either BSG or CaCl 2 . The rheological and SEM data suggested that the stronger structure of NaCas-BSG gel in the presence of the higher concentrations of CaCl 2 was related to the induction of complex formation between the two biopolymers.