ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

About the only thing to be said for the length of time it has taken me to write this book is that it has provided me with the help, generosity, and encouragement of so many friends, whose virtues, not the least of which was patience, have meant so much. Indeed, I fear I will not thank all who deserve it, and I am sure I cannot thank any as much as they deserve. But if mention here cannot suffice, it will have to do, and with all its limits it is a glad task.

First, to those who taught me. Thanks to my father, for all the usual role-model reasons, with the added bonus of a sense of humor and the fun of thinking, and to my mother for, among other things, some lessons in feeling for, with, and against others that have kept coming back to me. Thanks to Marie Borroff, who introduced me to the study of Chaucer and later directed my dissertation, and who encouraged me from the very beginning to do what I wanted and follow the thought where it led. Alvin Kernan and Martin Price had more to do with the beginnings of this project than they will remember, and so did A. Dwight Culler. Leo Braudy, Billy Hamilton, Ralph Hanna, Diane Janeau, Frank McConnell, Harry Schroeder, and Suzie Wood Leicester Urbick kept those times interesting in complicated ways that have lasted.

Of E. Talbot Donaldson what shall I say? I heard his voice in the notes to Chaucer's Poetry long before I met him, and I hear it still now that he is gone. His skepticism and taste have measured my intemperance for years, and the thought of his horselaugh has kept me from more and greater excesses than he would credit. I regret that he did not live to read this book, and I would gladly settle for having him with us still if he never read it.

My colleagues past and present at the University of California at Santa Cruz have put up with listening to me work things out for twenty years, though I am bound to say that they have often given at least as

good as they got. There are turns in my thoughts and my prose that would not be there without Sara Mack Amis, P. Reyner Banham, Murray Baumgarten, Jim Clifford, Teresa de Lauretis, Bob Durling, John Ellis, Floyd Estess, Angus Fletcher, Mary-Kay Gamel, John Halverson, Donna Haraway, Virginia Jansen, John Jordan, John Lynch, Paul Mann, Doug McClellan, Bob Meister, Gary Miles, Seth Schein, Tom Vogler, Michael Warren, and Hayden White. Kristine Brightenback and Cécile Schreiber didn't know that they were teaching me Old French in addition to everything else. George Amis and Tilly Shaw have read and talked about gender with me for years now, and though I may never forgive them for seeing less use in Lacan than I do (since both are stylists of extraordinary elegance), they have been the best of colleagues and the best of friends.

This book has been researched and written in a number of places around the country and outside it, and I have received shelter and sustenance for both body and mind from many friends and helpers. The John Simon Guggenheim Foundation provided support for a year's leave; I have had a sabbatical from UCSC; and the Research Committee of the Academic Senate at UCSC has dependably paid for research assistance and copying. Congenial surroundings in which to write in New York were provided by Virginia Clifford, Andrée Hayum, Richard Howard (who threw in what Stephen Koch calls the best library south of Fourteenth Street, to say nothing of giving us all Roland Barthes and the rest of it), Anne Lauterbach, Helen Rosenthal, and Lenore Rosenthal. Rosalind Krauss loaned me books no one else had when I needed them badly; Annette Michelson said things I kept remembering; and they both kept October coming out. I don't think Yvonne Rainer knows how much her wit, her seriousness, her work, and her friendship have meant to me, though she may be able to measure something of what I've learned from her by her knowledge of how much I needed to learn.

My students in Chaucer seminars over the years have done their best to keep me honest for the moment without suspecting how much I was stealing for the future, and Tom Cartelli, David Ehrman, Barbara Gottfried, Marina Leslie, Diane Manning, and Lori Nelson are in for a shock or two. Those of my students who have also been my research assistants know all too well where the bodies are buried—luckily they are too well mannered and too good friends to tell: Sylvia Huot, Rennie Coit, Beth Pittenger, and Ward Risvold have all given me far

more than bulging file cabinets. Wallie Romig, head of the Cowell steno pool and the best administrator of anything anywhere I have ever seen, kept daily life and the manuscript moving; Dan Wenger led me through UNIX with patience and elegance; and Marianna Alves and Sara Silva typed the book into the machine, Middle English and all, with preternatural accuracy.

Colleagues around the country have provided me with opportunities to try out preliminary versions and shorter forms of much that appears here: C. David Benson, Mary Carruthers, Carolyn Dinshaw, Avrom Fleishman, Alan Gaylord, Tom Hahn, David Lawton, Al Shoaf, and their colleagues have offered, listened, and responded with generosity. Earlier versions of material included here have appeared in PMLA, Studies in the Age of Chaucer , and Women's Studies . I am grateful to them for permission to reprint, and to D. S. Brewer Press.

And so I come to those who have read, commented on, shaped, and improved the manuscript. Thanks are due to Ralph Hanna, Constance Jordan, Bonnie Krueger, Laura Slatkin, and two anonymous readers for the University of California Press, for sympathetic and critical commentary of extraordinary intelligence and helpfulness; to Ted Irving, whose unreasonably testy refusal to believe that Palamon and Arcite "really" want to rape and/or kill Emelye forced me to think harder and more carefully about the relation of psychological structures to social ones; to Carolyn Dinshaw for innumerable good conversations, for showing me her work and reading mine, and for giving the book its final title; to John Fyler for his enormous learning, his unerring sense of the ridiculous even in his best friends, and for suggesting, at a crucial early stage, the book's present order and overall plan; to Bob Hanning for countless kindnesses, personal and professional, over the years, not least the welcome he gave me into his National Endowment for the Humanities seminar on Chaucer in the summer of 1985, when most of Part II was written out of the stimulation of the group. Judith Ferster, besides writing the best book to date on Chaucer and contemporary theory, and besides her elegant lucidity in print and in person, was also the third reader for the press and wrote a report so sympathetic, intelligent, and penetrating that I was able to use it as an outline for my revisions: she is more responsible than I am altogether comfortable admitting for a lot of what I like about the book. Doris Kretschmer shepherded the manuscript through the University of California Press with just the right blend of patience and

enthusiasm; she has gotten out of me more of the book I was trying to write (as opposed to the one I first wrote) than I would have believed possible. Rose Vekony and Richard Miller have socialized the text expertly and tactfully. Finally, thanks are due to Dan Kempton, my best student, my best reader, and my best critic, who understood what I was trying to do even when I didn't, showed me what could be done with The Pleasure of the Text , and on more than one occasion has helped me to know how to "go on."

I thank Walton T. Roth for "services, warious," as Sam Weller might have said. Though there is no German verb werken , the verb wirken (I looked it up) means to produce works, as in the cognate English expression to work a miracle . If much of the work (and the love) has been my own, there is enough of the feeling of the miraculous left here for gratitude to draw on and keep drawing. My daughter Elizabeth deserves gratitude for her lucidity and enthusiasm and for her ability to pick up what's essential in an argument about material she doesn't know and help the old man figure it out. The fact that I love her has nothing to do with these things, he said, and so I get to be grateful for that too. And thank you to Billie Harris for being around when I needed it and for being beautiful, funny, and smart whether I need it or not.

Concerning the two to whom this book is dedicated, I had hoped that the fact of the dedication would absolve me from having to say why, since there is no end to that saying. Readers who encounter them and their works only here should know that their names are Nan Rosenthal and Harry Berger, Jr., that they have been to me teachers, colleagues, friends, my significant others, and my other selves, that they have helped me to think and to feel and to love and to work as well as I am able, and that the dedication means what it says.