Chaucer and Italian Culture (New Century Chaucer) 9781786836786, 9781786836793, 1786836785

Citation preview

‘The eight essays in this

intrigued by the nature and consequences

volume reinvigorate the study

of Chaucer’s exposure to Italian culture

of Chaucer’s reception and representation of Italian culture

during his professional visits to Italy in the

by reconceptualising the ways

1370s. In this volume, leading scholars take

in which we might approach

a new and more holistic view of Chaucer’s

his work. Chaucer’s relation to

engagement with Italian cultural practice,

Petrarch gains depth and nuance … and his acquaintance with

moving beyond the traditional ‘sources and

developments in Italian painting

analogues’ approach to reveal the varied

casts new light on both his

strands of Italian literature, art, politics and

political engagements and his

intellectual life that permeate Chaucer’s work.

interaction with Boccaccio’s works … Chaucer and Italian

Each chapter examines from different angles

Culture is a book anyone

links between Chaucerian texts and Italian

interested in cross-cultural

intellectual models, including poetics, chorography, visual art, classicism, diplomacy and prophecy. Echoes of Petrarch, Dante and

translation will want to read.’ Professor Warren Ginsberg, University of Oregon

Boccaccio reverberate throughout the book,

‘Addressing important topics

across a rich and diverse landscape of Italian

such as diplomacy, topography,

cultural legacies. Together, the chapters cover a wide range of theory and reference,

vision, painting and language, Chaucer and Italian Culture also offers unusual and illuminating

while sharing a united understanding of the

approaches to subjects such

rich impact of Italian culture on Chaucer’s

as the poetics of haunting,

narrative art.

prophecy and civic ritual. With essays by established scholars new generation of medievalists, the collection is a timely addition

HELEN FULTON is Chair and

to research on Chaucer’s

Professor of Medieval Literature

European identity.’ Emeritus Professor Nick Havely, University of York

Cover design: Olwen Fowler Cover images: Shutterstock

www.uwp.co.uk

Edited by H E L E N F U LTO N

alongside contributions from a

at the University of Bristol.

Chaucer and Italian Culture

Chaucerian scholarship has long been

Gwasg Prifysgol Cymru University of Wales Press

Chaucer-Italian.indd 1

16/12/2020 12:01

N E W

C E N T U R Y

C H A U C E R

Chaucer and Italian Culture

CIC_rev.indd 1

15/12/2020 10:56:33

N E W

C E N T U R Y

C H A U C E R

Series Editors Professor Helen Fulton, University of Bristol Professor Ruth Evans, Saint Louis University Editorial Board Professor Ardis Butterfield, Yale University Dr Orietta Da Rold, University of Cambridge Dr David Matthews, University of Manchester The works of Geoffrey Chaucer are the most-studied literary texts of the Middle Ages, appearing on school and university syllabuses throughout the world. From The Canterbury Tales through the dream visions and philosophical works to Troilus and Criseyde, the translations and short poems, Chaucer’s writing illuminates the fourteenth century and its intellectual traditions. Taken together with the work of his contemporaries and successors in the fifteenth century, the Chaucerian corpus arguably still defines the shape of late medieval literature. For twentieth-century scholars and students, the study of Chaucer and the late Middle Ages largely comprised attention to linguistic history, historicism, close reading, biographical empiricism and traditional editorial practice. While all these approaches retain some validity, the new generations of twenty-first-century students and scholars are conversant with the digital humanities and with emerging critical approaches – the ‘affective turn’, new materialisms, the history of the book, sexuality studies, global literatures, and the ‘cognitive turn’. Importantly, today’s readers have been trained in new methodologies of knowledge retrieval and exchange. In the age of instant information combined with multiple sites of authority, the meaning of the texts of Chaucer and his age has to be constantly renegotiated. The series New Century Chaucer is a direct response to new ways of reading and analysing medieval texts in the twenty-first century. Purpose-built editions and translations of individual texts, accompanied by stimulating studies introducing the latest research ideas, are directed towards contemporary scholars and students whose training and research interests have been shaped by new media and a broad-based curriculum. Our aim is to publish editions, with translations, of Chaucerian and related texts alongside focused studies which bring new theories and approaches into view, including comparative studies, manuscript production, Chaucer’s post-medieval reception, Chaucer’s contemporaries and successors, and the historical context of late medieval literary production. Where relevant, online support includes images and bibliographies that can be used for teaching and further research. The further we move into the digital world, the more important the study of medieval literature becomes as an anchor to previous ways of thinking that paved the way for modernity and are still relevant to post-modernity. As the works of Chaucer, his contemporaries and his immediate successors travel into the twenty-first century, New Century Chaucer will provide, we hope, a pathway towards new interpretations and a spur to new readers.

CIC_rev.indd 2

15/12/2020 10:56:33

N E W

C E N T U R Y

C H A U C E R

Chaucer and Italian Culture Edited by H E L E N F U LT O N

UNIVERSITY OF WALES PRESS CARDIFF 2021

CIC_rev.indd 3

15/12/2020 10:56:34

© The Contributors, 2021 All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any material form (including photocopying or storing it in any medium by electronic means and whether or not transiently or incidentally to some other use of this publication) without the written permission of the copyright owner except in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Applications for the copyright owner’s written permission to reproduce any part of this publication should be addressed to the University of Wales Press, University Registry, King Edward VII Avenue, Cardiff CF10 3NS. www.uwp.co.uk British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN 978-1-78683-678-6 eISBN 978-1-78683-679-3 The right of The Contributors to be identified as authors of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77, 78 and 79 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Typeset by Marie Doherty Printed by CPI Antony Rowe, Melksham.

CIC_rev.indd 4

15/12/2020 10:56:34

CONTENTS

The Contributors Introduction: Chaucer Imagines Italy Helen Fulton

CIC_rev.indd 5

vii 1

1 Chaucerian Diplomacy William T. Rossiter

17

2 The Haunting of Geoffrey Chaucer: Dante, Boccaccio and the Ghostly Poetics of the Trecento James Robinson

45

3 Chorography and Topography: Italian Models and Chaucerian Strategies Helen Fulton

91

4 Vision and Touch in Dante and Chaucer Robert S. Sturges

121

5 The Aesthetics of ‘Wawes Grene’: Planets, Painting and Politics in Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale Andrew James Johnston

145

6 The Prophetic Eagle in Italy, England and Wales: Dante, Chaucer and Insular Political Prophecy Victoria Flood

169

15/12/2020 10:56:34

7 ‘Trophee’ and Triumph in the Monk’s Tale 193 Leah Schwebel 8 From Imitation to Invention: Chaucer’s Journey from The House of Fame to the Nun’s Priest’s Tale Teresa A. Kennedy

217

Bibliography 241 Index 267

CIC_rev.indd 6

15/12/2020 10:56:34

THE CONTRIBUTORS

Victoria Flood is Senior Lecturer in the Department of English at the University of Birmingham. Her monograph, Prophecy, Politics and Place in Medieval England, a comparative study of the relationship between political prophetic production in England, Wales and Scotland, appeared in 2016. She previously held an Alexander von Humboldt postdoctoral fellowship at the Department of Celtic Studies, Philipps-Universität Marburg (2014–15). Helen Fulton holds the Chair of Medieval Literature at the University of Bristol. Her main research area is the comparative study of medieval Welsh and English literatures, including political poetry, prophecy and Arthurian literature. She is the co-editor of Anglo-Italian Cultural Relations in the Later Middle Ages (2018) and of The Cambridge History of Welsh Literature (2019). Andrew James Johnston is Chair of Medieval and Renaissance English Literature at the Freie Universität Berlin. His latest English-language monograph is Performing the Middle Ages from Beowulf to Othello (2008). His co-edited collections include The Medieval Motion Picture (2014), The Art of Vision: Ekphrasis in Medieval Literature and Culture (2015) and Love, History and Emotion in Chaucer and Shakespeare (2016). His most recent article is ‘Beowulf as Anti-Virgilian World Literature: Archaeology, Ekphrasis, and Epic’, in the festschrift for Roberta Frank, The Shapes of Early English Poetry (2019).

CIC_rev.indd 7

15/12/2020 10:56:34

New Centur y Chaucer

Teresa A. Kennedy is professor of English at the University of Mary Washington in Fredericksburg, Virginia. Her main research interests include fourteenth-century English, Italian and French literature and linguistics. She is currently working on a monograph, Boccaccio and the Making of the Modern Reader, and recent publications include a co-edited special issue of MLN, ‘Tra Amici: Essays in Honor of Giuseppe Mazzotta’ (2012), and the article ‘Boccaccio’s Greek Philology’ in the festschrift for Winthrop Wetherbee, Through a Classical Eye (2009). She contributed ‘The Tale of Madonna Oretta’ to volume VI of the Lectura Boccaccii series in 2020. James Robinson is the author of Joyce’s Dante: Exile, Memory, and Community (2016) and is currently working on a Leverhulme Trust funded monograph, Ted Hughes and Medieval Literature: ‘Deliberate Affiliation’. William T. Rossiter is Senior Lecturer in Medieval and Early Modern Literature at the University of East Anglia. His publications include the monographs Chaucer and Petrarch (2010) and Wyatt Abroad: Tudor Diplomacy and the Translation of Power (2014), and the co-edited collections Literature and Ethics: From the Green Knight to the Dark Knight (2010) and Authority and Diplomacy from Dante to Shakespeare (2013). He has also published a number of studies on Chaucer’s reception of the tre corone (Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio). He is currently working on a study of Pietro Aretino and the intersection of international diplomacy and print culture in the early sixteenth century. Leah Schwebel is Associate Professor of English at Texas State University. Her research focuses on the reception of classical poetry in the works of Chaucer, Dante, Petrarch and Boccaccio. She has published in The Chaucer Review, Medium Aevum, Mediaevalia, Dante Studies and Studies in the Age of Chaucer, and has co-edited a special issue of The Chaucer Review on the Legend of Good Women (2017). She is currently working on a monograph, tentatively titled Tropes of Engagement: Chaucer’s Italian Poetics.

viii

CIC_rev.indd 8

15/12/2020 10:56:34

Chaucer and Italian Culture

Robert S. Sturges is Professor of English at Arizona State University. His books include Medieval Interpretation: Models of Reading in Literary Narrative, 1100–1500 (1991), Chaucer’s Pardoner and Gender Theory: Bodies of Discourse (2000), Dialogue and Deviance: Male-Male Desire in the Dialogue Genre (Plato to Aelred, Plato to Sade, Plato to the Postmodern) (2005), The Circulation of Power in Medieval Biblical Drama: Theaters of Authority (2015) and a facing-page edition and translation of Aucassin and Nicolette (2015). He has also edited Law and Sovereignty in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance (2011), and has published numerous essays on medieval literature.

ix

CIC_rev.indd 9

15/12/2020 10:56:34

Thi spagei nt ent i onal l yl ef tbl ank

INTRODUCTION: CHAUCER IMAGINES ITALY Helen Fulton

T

his collection of essays is the result of many conversations and meetings among the contributors over a number of years, sharing conference platforms, trying out new ideas and exchanging areas of expertise. What unites our efforts in this book is a general mission to move beyond the ‘sources and analogues’ approach that has tended to characterise studies of Chaucer and the Italian tradition, and to explore new perspectives and methodologies that advance our understanding of the ways in which Chaucer, through his literary work, processed and re-mediated his contacts with Italian culture. For those who think there cannot be anything new to say about Chaucer and the Italian tradition, we hope this book will change your minds. Accounts of Geoffrey Chaucer’s engagements with Italy and Italian writing of the trecento have progressed from largely factual accounts to more subtle considerations of how Chaucerian meanings are made. In parallel with scholarly attention to Chaucer’s French influences, initiated by Charles Muscatine’s Chaucer and the French Tradition (1957) and continuing with more recent works such as Ardis Butterfield’s The Familiar Enemy (2009), critics have focused on the ‘Italian tradition’ as another cultural and intellectual milieu which can be used to explain and interpret Chaucer’s writing. Such accounts were grounded in the

CIC_rev.indd 1

15/12/2020 10:56:34

New Centur y Chaucer

empirical facts – Chaucer’s visits to Italy, his access to works by Italian writers, the undeniable presence of attributable influences and borrowings from specific texts. A certain reverence for the tre corone – Dante, Boccaccio, Petrarch – ensured that, for those critics who began in Italy and looked across to England, the Italian writers occupied the gold-star heights of originality while Chaucer was implicitly cast as the silvermedal beneficiary of these superior talents. Howard Schless’s book, for example, Chaucer and Dante: A Revaluation (1984), an early and not untypical study of Chaucer’s debt to Italian writers, begins with a chapter on ‘Chaucer and Fourteenth-Century Italy’ which stresses the linguistic and commercial links between England (or rather London) and Italy as a prolegomenon to a detailed study of likely influences passing more or less directly from Dante to Chaucer. More balanced approaches were taken by R. A. Shoaf (Dante, Chaucer and the Currency of the Word: Money, Images, and Reference in Late Medieval Poetry, 1983) and Karla Taylor (Chaucer Reads ‘The Divine Comedy’, 1989), both of whom consider Chaucerian poetics from the point of view of his interrogative reading of Dante, and indeed his critiques of Dante. Taylor says, for example, that ‘far from following docilely in his mentor’s wake, in the Troilus Chaucer uses the Commedia against itself’, a statement which Piero Boitani found ‘extreme’ but which certainly moves away from the reverential view of Dante as an author who exerted only positive influences on a semi-passive Chaucer.1 Boitani himself, coming from the context of Italian academic scholarship, revolutionised the study of Chaucer’s literary relationships with the tre corone. While Chaucer was (and to a large extent still is) the preserve of Anglo-American scholars who approached Italian writers from the outside, Boitani’s profound understanding of medieval Italian poetics brought a new dimension and a new discourse into the conversation. His book Chaucer and Boccaccio (1977) was the first full-length study of the two poets in dialogue with each other, while Chaucer and the Italian Trecento (1983), an edited collection which brought together many of the leading names in Chaucer/Italy scholarship, set an agenda for future work. A number of the essays in this collection considered Chaucer in relation to not just one writer, but to two or

2

CIC_rev.indd 2

15/12/2020 10:56:34

Chaucer and Italian Culture

more of them (for example, J. A. W. Bennett’s chapter on ‘Chaucer, Dante and Boccaccio’), while others focused on key texts from Italy such as the Filostrato, the Teseida, the Commedia and the Decameron, texts which are now established as crucial to a complete reading of Chaucer’s works. Interestingly, there is only one article in the collection that includes a reference to Petrarch (Robin Kirkpatrick’s ‘The Griselda Story in Boccaccio, Petrarch and Chaucer’), largely because Chaucer’s allusions to Petrarch’s works are quite slight in comparison with his references to the work of Dante and Boccaccio – only one sonnet (‘S’amor non è’, Sonnet 88, no. 132 in the Canzoniere), appearing in Troilus and Criseyde (I.400–13), and the Latin version of the Griselda story (one of the two main sources of the Clerk’s Tale) are directly adapted by Chaucer from works by Petrarch.2 However, as William T. Rossiter pointed out in his book Chaucer and Petrarch (2010), ‘what Chaucer translated from Petrarch and what he understood or read of him are not necessarily the same thing.’3 Rossiter’s book, the first to consider Petrarch’s influence on Chaucer in all its manifestations, direct and indirect, builds a compelling picture of the intertextual relations between Chaucer, Dante, Boccaccio and Petrarch in the context of ‘translation’, both literal and metaphorical. In some respects, his book continues a conversation begun by Warren Ginsberg in his Chaucer’s Italian Tradition (2002), which established a pattern of reception from one poet to another, Italian and English, informed by Walter Benjamin’s theories of meaning and translation. Unlike Rossiter, Ginsberg takes account of the politics of the city-states visited by Chaucer – Genoa, Florence, Milan – and how these may have affected Chaucer’s encounters with Italian material. Rossiter’s particular focus on Petrarch has a partly rehabilitative function, given that Petrarchan humanism, grounded in a desire to restore a politics of governance based on that of imperial Rome, is generally seen as politically conservative compared to the humanism of Boccaccio. This view was most clearly delineated by David Wallace in his influential book Chaucerian Polity: Absolutist Lineages and Associational Forms in England and Italy (1997), which drew a binary opposition between ‘absolutist’ and ‘republican’ ideologies manifested

3

CIC_rev.indd 3

15/12/2020 10:56:34

New Centur y Chaucer

in the competing city-states of northern Italy (especially Milan and Florence respectively). According to Wallace, Chaucer weighed up the merits of these two approaches to urban governance and came down in favour of the latter, which explained his preference for the communal values expressed by Boccaccio compared to the more hierarchical ideology espoused by Petrarch, servant of the Visconti lords of Milan.4 Wallace’s approach to the field of Chaucer/Italy studies was therefore a radical departure from the traditional ‘sources and analogues’ method, opening up new avenues for politicised readings of Chaucer’s work in the context of Italian humanist thought, though it has to be said that the traditional methods of close reading and textual comparison continue to hold their ground. Despite the limitations of the empirical method, it is worth summarising what we know so far about Chaucer’s engagement with Italy and Italian culture in order to decide how far this information is useful in reading Chaucer’s poetry. While working as an esquire in the King’s household, from 1368 to about 1378, Chaucer was sent on a number of missions to continental Europe, mainly to France, but in December 1372 he made his first visit to Italy, returning in May 1373.5 During this visit he went to Genoa, to negotiate a trade agreement, and to Florence, on a rather more secretive mission perhaps involving a loan to the King to support his wars in France.6 Chaucer made a second diplomatic visit to Italy in 1378, this time to Milan, to the court of Bernabò Visconti, ‘a tyrant who cowed the papacy’.7 Chaucer’s experience of Italian cities, especially Florence, twice the size of London and the heart of European trade, must have made a dramatic impression. During his visit to Florence, the name of Dante (who had died in exile in 1321) was still revered, while Boccaccio (d. 1375) and Petrarch (d. 1374) were still alive (Boccaccio living in Florence at least part of the time and Petrarch near Padua), though there is no evidence that Chaucer met either of them. It was quite likely in Florence, a city of books, that Chaucer acquired copies of the Italian works – in both Latin and the vernacular – that were to influence his own writing. As controller of customs in London from 1374 until 1386, Chaucer would have been almost constantly in touch with Italian bankers and

4

CIC_rev.indd 4

15/12/2020 10:56:34

Chaucer and Italian Culture

wealthy merchants who had based themselves in London and dominated international trade since the late thirteenth century.8 Through his knowledge of French and especially Latin, Chaucer would have had access to the Italian language which many writers acknowledged as being very close to Latin;9 he would also have had indirect access to Italian texts via French writers (such as the French version of the Griselda story which informed Chaucer’s version in the ‘Clerk’s Tale’).10 Particularly influential for Chaucer were Dante’s Divine Comedy, traces of which are found in Troilus and Criseyde, the Canterbury Tales, and some of the vision poems, especially Parliament of Fowls and House of Fame; and various works by Boccaccio including the Teseida (‘Knight’s Tale’, ‘Franklin’s Tale’, Parliament of Fowls, Anelida and Arcite), the Filostrato (Troilus and Criseyde), and the Decameron (Canterbury Tales). Petrarchan influences are relatively minor (as mentioned above, a sonnet from the Canzoniere appearing in Troilus and Criseyde and Petrarch’s Latin version of the tale of Griselda reworked for the ‘Clerk’s Tale’), but whereas Chaucer acknowledges the authority of Petrarch (‘Clerk’s Tale’, line 31) and Dante (House of Fame), he never mentions Boccaccio by name (unless the references to ‘Lollius’ in Troilus and Criseyde and House of Fame are coded references to Boccaccio).11 What is striking about Chaucer’s use of his Italian sources is the way in which he distributes the borrowed material throughout his work, smelting it, combining it with other elements and then refashioning it into new gold of his own making. This technique of incorporation, which creates a seamless immanent presence of themes and motifs which have various origins, is what makes the ‘sources and analogues’ approach to Chaucer’s Italian tradition (or indeed his French or Latin tradition) of limited value, often requiring us to make a very long stretch between a Chaucerian motif and its ‘origin’ in some other text (which may itself depend on others, in a chain of signification). The metaphor of translation used by some critics, or the theoretical concept of intertextuality, are both productive ways of understanding the process; but I prefer the term ‘re-mediation’, since Chaucer so often succeeds in taking one medium of expression – whether Latin exemplum or philosophical treatise or French fabliau or Italian fiction – and remaking it into

5

CIC_rev.indd 5

15/12/2020 10:56:34

New Centur y Chaucer

a different literary medium altogether. This is how Chaucer imagines Italy, not simply as memories of the physical places he visited but as a multifaceted location whose vibrant city life, urban politics and closeness to Latinate culture, both linguistically and intellectually, inspired him to change the angle of his own work.12 The physical presence of Italy as a geographical space is considered in different ways in the first three chapters of the book. In Chapter 1, ‘Chaucerian Diplomacy’, William T. Rossiter asks the question, ‘What was Chaucer doing in Italy?’, and proceeds to investigate Chaucer’s missions to Italy in terms of politics and diplomacy. Rossiter positions Chaucer as part of a network of mobile transnational ambassadors of various kinds, travelling around northern Europe on various commercial and political quests, so on one level Chaucer’s visits to Italy are normative. But Rossiter also stresses the unusualness of Chaucer’s mission of 1372 as a significant form of cultural exchange, in which host and visitor present and acknowledge each other’s intellectual achievements through a series of ritualised meetings. This was a new kind of diplomacy which had begun in Italy in the middle of the fourteenth century and thus predated what has been called ‘Renaissance diplomacy’, characterised by resident embassies and literary representations of the figure of the ambassador. Arguing for a medieval starting date for ‘Renaissance’ diplomacy (and thus against the traditional periodised binary between ‘medieval’ and ‘Renaissance’), Rossiter suggests that Chaucer built on his Italian experiences to represent ambassadorial figures and functions in his work. Referring to the Clerk’s Tale and its ambassador for the community, and to Troilus and Criseyde, where Chaucer first introduces the word into English usage (IV.140 and 145), Rossiter shows how Chaucer drew on the work of Petrarch and Boccaccio to experiment with fictionalised forms of the ambassadorial process. In this way, Chaucer transcends the specificity of his Italian experiences to present more generalised comments on Italian diplomacy and its relevance for English audiences. In Chapter 2, ‘The Haunting of Geoffrey Chaucer: Dante, Boccaccio and the Ghostly Poetics of the Trecento’, James Robinson uses the metaphor of ‘haunting’ to describe a particular kind of intertextuality

6

CIC_rev.indd 6

15/12/2020 10:56:34

Chaucer and Italian Culture

that links Chaucer with both Dante and Boccaccio. He begins by offering a critique of the spatial approach to literary criticism as a kind of ‘materialist poetics’ limited by the constraints of empiricism. Instead he offers an ‘immaterial’ poetics to sit alongside and expand the more materialist approaches, in which he explores ways in which trecento poetics ‘haunt’ Chaucer’s work just as traumatic memories of the past (such as the Black Death) leave ghostly traces in literary texts of the later fourteenth century. Robinson starts with a specific case study from Dante’s Inferno 10, where the persona of Dante-pilgrim converses with Cavalcante de’ Cavalcanti, a historical figure who was the father of Guido Cavalcanti, Dante’s own friend and fellow poet. Condemned by his heresy, Cavalcante urgently seeks his son, an absent presence invoked through the discussion about whether he is alive or dead; though technically the former, Guido is implicitly condemned, like his father, for his belief in a rationalist materialism that threatens Dante’s very project as a poet. In the next section of the essay, Robinson demonstrates Boccaccio’s intertextual incorporation of Guido Cavalcanti into his Decameron 6.9. It is even possible, as Robinson compellingly suggests, that Boccaccio imagines the adventures of Guido to be taking place simultaneously with Dante’s dialogue with Guido’s father ‘down in the dark under the Earth’. Thus Boccaccio engages with the ghostly presence of Dante, but in choosing to allow his character of Guido to escape from his enemies Boccaccio teasingly exposes Dante as someone who misjudged Guido and failed to understand his philosophy. The model of Boccaccio’s ghostly poetics is then extended to Chaucer’s strategies of engaging with the ghosts of both Dante and Boccaccio, strategies which are often far more subtle than simple borrowings or adaptations. Robinson views Anelida and Arcite as a ‘poetic workshop’ (originally David Wallace’s phrase) which can reveal Chaucer’s methods of absorbing elements of Italian literature into his work. In this poem, haunted by Boccaccio and Dante, Chaucer does not simply borrow or translate images and ideas but hermeneutically dissects and remakes his source material (particularly the Teseida) in order to move in a different direction entirely. Arguing for the ghostly presence of Dante’s Purgatorio 12 throughout

7

CIC_rev.indd 7

15/12/2020 10:56:34

New Centur y Chaucer

the poem, Robinson suggests that this palimpsestic text, re-inscribed in Chaucerian discourse, functions to illuminate the heretical implications of Anelida’s ‘Compleynt’. As a whole, Robinson’s essay is a powerful argument for Chaucer’s internalised understanding of his Italian source material and his ability to use it both purposefully and playfully. My own chapter, ‘Chorography and Topography: Italian Models and Chaucerian Strategies’, follows Robinson in rejecting a purely materialist and empirical approach to literary interpretation, with specific reference to the discourses of geography. Using examples from the classical genres of chorography and topography, the chapter argues that both these genres form part of an imperialist rhetoric which divides up the landscape along ideological as well as geographical lines. Though chorography has been categorised by modern critics as a specifically Renaissance recuperation of the classical genre, used in Britain in order to map the new boundaries of the Tudor kingdom, it has an unbroken line of usage from the classical through to late antique and medieval writing where it was employed to mark out and thus appropriate political territories. Chaucer’s preface to the Clerk’s Tale, based on the Latin version of the Griselda story by Petrarch, is a clear example of a chorographical description though it has not previously been described as such. The chapter explores what this might mean in relation to classical and encyclopedic prototypes and in relation to Petrarch’s deliberate use of the genre to introduce the story of Walter and Griselda. Comparing Petrarch’s imperialist motivations with Chaucer’s focus on urban commerce, the chapter suggests that Chaucer’s untypical use of chorography in the Clerk’s Tale draws attention to Italy’s international trade routes and thus the economic transaction that lies behind the marriage of Walter and Griselda. The two middle chapters of the book, 4 and 5, explore in different ways the phenomenon of vision and how it was understood by Chaucer and his Italian contemporaries. In Chapter 4, ‘Vision and Touch in Dante and Chaucer’, Robert S. Sturges makes further progress towards the book’s aim of reconceptualising Chaucer’s influences from Italian literature, from a transactional process of direct borrowing and imitation to a more complex relationship between ‘neighbouring texts’. The

8

CIC_rev.indd 8

15/12/2020 10:56:34

Chaucer and Italian Culture

focus of the chapter is Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde and its connections with Dante’s Convivio and Vita nova, the latter of which has not previously been noted as a possible source for Troilus. Sturges makes the case that, although there is no evidence for direct borrowing from the Vita nova, its indirect influence can be traced by examining affinities between all three texts, especially those that relate to the sensory aspects of love as presented by Chaucer and Dante in their respective texts. One of the most significant links between the three texts is the representation of visual theory in Troilus and Vita nova, both of which respond to the discussion of visual theory in the Convivio, particularly the role of touch in the experience of sight. Outlining theories of sight propounded by Plato, Aristotle and Aquinas, Sturges notes Dante’s apparent endorsement of the Aristotelian view while actually implementing in his own work the Platonic theory that sight is linked with touch. This connection between sight and touch is articulated by Dante as a spiritual metaphor, following Augustine, in which a religiously inspired vision of God can be sensed as a divine touch or imprint. Dante transfers this metaphor to his desire for Beatrice in the Vita nova: by gazing at Beatrice, Dante imagines himself to be gazing indirectly at God. This idea of the gaze as being both sight and touch links Dante’s work with Chaucer’s Troilus, where Troilus’ vision of Criseyde is similarly interpreted as a form of physical contact. But unlike Dante – and here is another example of Chaucer transforming his sources – Chaucer maintains a distinction between a genuinely spiritual vision of the divine and Troilus’ pagan vision of a mortal woman whom he has chosen to worship. Thus aspects of Troilus’ love ‘might be understood as an idolatrous parody of genuine vision’, a form of idolatry that leads inescapably to the tragic conclusion of the poem. Concepts of vision and representation, given a religious context in Sturges’s chapter, take on a more political significance in Chapter 5, ‘The Aesthetics of “Wawes Grene”: Planets, Painting and Politics in Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale’, where Andrew James Johnston explores the connection between astrology and governance, represented in Italy through astrological wall paintings displayed in urban public buildings. By means

9

CIC_rev.indd 9

15/12/2020 10:56:34

New Centur y Chaucer

of such paintings, exemplified by Giotto’s frescoes in Padua showing images of the planets and the Zodiac, republican cities celebrated the naturalness of their government while urban lords announced their status and justified their lordly ambitions as destinies laid out in the stars. In his description of the astrological illustrations in Theseus’ Theatre in the Knight’s Tale, influenced by Boccaccio’s Teseida, Chaucer is aware of the capacity of art to promote political positions but, as Johnston argues, he finds a way to resist the politicisation of art. In contrast to the public artworks of Italian cities, the meeting of astrology and politics in the Knight’s Tale is the opposite of celebratory: the planets, embodied by the ancient gods, are undisciplined and chaotic, threatening the success of Theseus’ political lordship. Moreover, there is a disjunction between the precision of Chaucer’s architectural description of the Theatre which, Johnston claims, anticipates linear perspective in art, and Chaucer’s description of the artworks in the temples, a striking example of ekphrasis which nonetheless privileges the allegorical over a secure sense of visual impression or pictoriality. Thus the geometrically precise aesthetics of the Theatre contrast with the ‘aesthetic of deliberate vagueness’ provided by the images, an aesthetic exemplified by the ‘wawes grene’, the green waves that are a feature of the painted statue of Venus. Johnston explains Chaucer’s ambiguity regarding the temple artworks as his way of avoiding or undermining the appropriation of visual art for political purposes, a motivation already present in Italian theories of art which had begun to seek an aesthetic that transcended political appropriation. In its use of ekphrastic description, the Knight’s Tale demonstrates Chaucer’s awareness of Italian traditions of visual art and his intuitive ability to see beyond them to a newly emerging aesthetic. The final three chapters of the book, 6, 7 and 8, focus on specific genres and motifs that Chaucer shared with his Italian contemporaries. Chapter 6, ‘The Prophetic Eagle in Italy, England and Wales: Dante, Chaucer and Insular Political Prophecy’ by Victoria Flood, looks at the significance of the eagle, a key figure in Chaucer’s work, as a common symbol of empire in medieval political prophecy. Rather than identifying specific examples of borrowing or transfer, Flood points

10

CIC_rev.indd 10

15/12/2020 10:56:34

Chaucer and Italian Culture

to the diffusion of prophetic themes that travelled across Europe and takes as her way stations Italy, England and Wales. In the Commedia, Dante engaged with prophecy through the character of the twelfthcentury monk Joachim of Fiore, whose prophecies, based in religious thought, also had a political application, articulating hopes of an idealised emperor who would usher in a golden age of peace and piety. In Chaucer’s House of Fame, strongly influenced by Dante’s Inferno, the Dantean figure of the Eagle, symbolic of the Holy Roman Empire, is transformed into a more humorous – and human – personality whose practicality works to dismiss any prophetic imaginings of apocalypse or imperial saviours. Yet elsewhere in Middle English literature, the eagle continued its Dantean role as a symbol of empire, appearing in a range of prophetic verses that were circulating in Chaucer’s lifetime, typically applied to the English kings of the period, Edward III and Richard II, and later to Henry IV. The imperial associations of the eagle were thus transferred to the English monarchy, suggesting its claims to imperial status and the continuing function of prophecy to endorse monarchical rule. Further west, the territory of Wales resisted a form of English imperialism which had only done it harm. Instead, the eagle of prophecy is associated with an entirely British king, Arthur, who at least for a time succeeded in holding the island of Britain against the Saxons and thus represented a native British imperialism. From Italy to England to Wales, the journey of the eagle inspired different interpretations of empire – and in Chaucer’s case, a rejection of it. In Chapter 7, ‘“Trophee” and Triumph in the Monk’s Tale’, Leah Schwebel discusses a particular example of a Latin (and Italian) genre adapted and re-mediated by Chaucer. Her chapter begins with the mystery of the unknown Latin source, ‘Trophee’, named by Chaucer in the Monk’s Tale. While a number of scholars over the course of the last century have offered explanations based on Chaucer’s misreading of a Latin text (as the name ‘Lollius’ has also been explained), Schwebel finds the solution in Chaucer’s intertextual poetics. The reference to Trophee, glossed as tropaeum, ‘war trophy’, occurs in the description of Hercules, who is closely connected with the ceremony of the

11

CIC_rev.indd 11

15/12/2020 10:56:34

New Centur y Chaucer

Roman ‘triumph’, in which military heroes are greeted on their return to Rome with celebratory rituals. This semantic link seems clear enough, if somewhat indefinite. Schwebel goes on to associate the Monk’s Tale with the very popular genre of the poetic triumph, a written account of the procession that marked a Roman triumph. Originating in classical literature, with examples found in Ovid and Virgil (two of Chaucer’s most popular Latin sources), the genre was revived by the trecento poets as a means of celebrating the city of Rome and its illustrious past. For Dante, writing of his hopes for the laurel, and Petrarch, celebrating the achievements of Scipio Africanus, the discourse of the Roman triumph works to glorify the poets themselves as worthy recipients of such a public acknowledgement of their talents. The Monk’s Tale, based largely on Boccaccio’s De casibus virorum illustrium, imitates the discourse of the Roman triumph to celebrate famous men and women against the shadow of the wheel of Fortune. In eulogising his examples, cataloguing their amazing talents and lasting fame, the Monk aims to immortalise himself in the context of the poetic triumph. The genre therefore works at one level to imply the crucial role of the poet in memorialising people and events who might otherwise be forgotten. In the act of memorialisation and the perpetuation of fame, the poet is himself immortalised and thus shares the triumph of his poetic heroes. Chaucer’s ‘Trophee’, like the spoils of war, is a symbol of triumph which defines the Monk’s Tale as part of an established poetic genre which formed part of Chaucer’s repertoire of source material. In the final chapter, Teresa A. Kennedy returns us to the issue of Chaucer as ‘translator’ or interpreter of his sources who goes beyond basic imitation to achieve a greater originality. In Chapter 8, ‘From Imitation to Invention: Chaucer’s Journey from The House of Fame to the Nun’s Priest’s Tale’, Kennedy reads both poems through their shared preoccupations with writing, reading and the problematic quest for ‘authority’ by vernacular texts. In both, the phenomenon of dreaming provides a model for hermeneutic analysis that potentially establishes authority of meaning amongst the noise of competing voices. In her analysis of House of Fame, Kennedy demonstrates Chaucer’s constant reframing of his source materials in order to obscure their specific

12

CIC_rev.indd 12

15/12/2020 10:56:34

Chaucer and Italian Culture

origins and thus disrupt the very process by which authority is established. Through intertextuality and juxtaposition, authority is kept at a distance and parodic humour looms. Chaucer uses the same strategic intertextuality to avoid engaging too obviously with the political agendas of his sources, especially Dante, while frequently invoking the unreliability of language as a conduit to absolute truths. Following a survey of Fragment VII of the Canterbury Tales which argues that the same concern regarding textual authority runs through these tales, Kennedy turns to the Nun’s Priest’s Tale to exemplify Chaucer’s growing confidence in his vernacular. Drawing again on the set-piece of the dream vision, as he did in the House of Fame, Chaucer sets a welter of authorial voices up against each other to dramatise the contingent and contextual relationship between language and meaning. Again he uses parody, the juxtaposition of ‘high’ and ‘low’ styles, from imperial eagle to farmyard cockerel, and repurposes Dante’s vision of Paradise to comment on the ways in which a community might go about the pursuit of knowledge. In both House of Fame and the Nun’s Priest’s Tale, allegory becomes a means by which language, articulated in the form of many different discourses, is separated from the external reality it attempts to describe. This is, perhaps, a fitting description of Chaucer’s treatment of his Italian sources which are figuratively converted into an array of Chaucerian discourses. Taken together, the eight chapters in this book cover a wide range of theory and reference while also sharing some common perspectives. They are united in their understanding of Chaucer’s use of Italian materials as something more complex than a simple case of borrowing and influence. Each chapter examines from a different angle the ways in which Chaucer re-formed, transformed and used his Italian sources to create new and original texts that are not reducible to a set of adaptations or translations. Each chapter has a different sense of the physical reality of Italy as a land mass, a set of regions and a collection of highly developed and wealthy cities, and how these physical features permeate Chaucer’s work in figurative and allegorical re-mediations. We have built our work on the varied resources of textual criticism, history, cultural theory and art history. We owe a debt to the rich tradition of

13

CIC_rev.indd 13

15/12/2020 10:56:34

New Centur y Chaucer

textual scholarship which has helped us to create new understandings of Chaucer’s relationship with Italy, the real and the imaginary.

Notes 1. Taylor’s comment is cited by Piero Boitani in his review of her book in Speculum, 67/3 (1992), 750–2 (p. 751). Karen Elizabeth Gross has gone a step further in arguing that ‘Chaucer consciously disregarded’ many of the features of trecento Italian literature that he might have been expected to embrace, in order to find his own voice as a poet. ‘Chaucer’s Silent Italy’, Studies in Philology, 109/1 (2012), 19–44. 2. Nick Havely points to what is likely to be the indirect influence of Petrarch’s lyric poetry in Troilus: ‘as the darkness closes in towards the end of the affair [Troilus] speaks in ways that recall the Petrarchan desolate and memory-haunted lover [of the lyrics].’ See ‘Dant(e), Daunte’, in Richard Newhauser (gen. ed.), The Chaucer Encyclopedia, 4 vols (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2020). 3. William T. Rossiter, Chaucer and Petrarch (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2010), p. 1. 4. On Rossiter’s challenge to Wallace’s view, see Chaucer and Petrarch, pp. 32–3. Gur Zak has described the often challenging relationship between Petrarch and Boccaccio in ‘Boccaccio and Petrarch’, in The Cambridge Companion to Boccaccio, ed. Guyda Armstrong, Rhiannon Daniels and Stephen J. Milner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), pp. 139–54. 5. On the possibility that Chaucer may have made an earlier visit to Italy, in 1368, see Chaucer Life-Records, ed. Martin M. Crow and Clair C. Olson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1966), p. 30. On Chaucer’s visit to Genoa and Florence in 1372–3, see Chaucer Life-Records, pp. 36–40. 6. This first visit to Italy by Chaucer is described by Marion Turner, Chaucer: A European Life (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019), pp. 145–66. 7. E. P. Kuhl, ‘Why was Chaucer sent to Milan in 1378?’, Modern Language Notes, 62/1 (1947), 42–4 (p. 42). Kuhl argues that Chaucer was sent on the mission to Lombardy following the death of Pope Gregory XI, ‘which would inevitably affect the outcome of the Hundred Years War’ (p. 43). Marion Turner highlights the political context of Chaucer’s visit to ‘this centralizing and terrifying state’, when ‘the empire and the split papacy were struggling for dominance’ (Chaucer: A European Life, p. 314). For a transcript of documents relating to Chaucer’s journey to Lombardy in 1378 (as one of a series of trips made between 1377 and 1381), see Crow and Olson (eds), Chaucer Life-Records, pp. 53–61. 8. Helen Bradley points out that both Chaucer and Boccaccio ‘were heavily immersed in the world of international commerce in their early years’. ‘“Saluti da Londra”: Italian Merchants in the City of London in the Late Fourteenth

14

CIC_rev.indd 14

15/12/2020 10:56:34

Chaucer and Italian Culture

and Early Fifteenth Centuries’, in Helen Fulton and Michele Campopiano (eds), Anglo-Italian Cultural Relations in the Later Middle Ages (York: York Medieval Press and Boydell and Brewer, 2018), pp. 103–27 (p. 103). See also Nick Havely, ‘The Italian Background’, in Steve Ellis (ed.), Chaucer: An Oxford Guide (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), pp. 313–31 (pp. 315– 17). On Chaucer as ‘first and foremost a European’ and his engagements with Italian literature, see David Wallace, Geoffrey Chaucer: A New Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), pp. 11–19 (p. 12) and pp. 54–8. 9. Havely, ‘The Italian Background’, p. 314. Crow and Olson surmise that Chaucer was chosen for the mission of 1372–3 because he already knew Italian through his contact with Italians in London (Chaucer Life-Records, p. 40). 10. Michael Hanly, ‘Courtiers and Poets: An International Network of Literary Exchange in Late Fourteenth-Century Italy, France and England’, Viator, 28 (1997), 305–32. 11. Gross, ‘Chaucer’s Silent Italy’, pp. 19–20. 12. Kenneth P. Clarke has demonstrated that Chaucer’s encounters with the work of Boccaccio, especially the Decameron, were crucially shaped by Boccaccio’s own control over the circulation of early manuscripts of the Decameron, thus exposing Chaucer to ‘a complex mode of authorial self-presentation’. See Chaucer and Italian Textuality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), chapter 3 (p. 128).

15

CIC_rev.indd 15

15/12/2020 10:56:34

Thi spagei nt ent i onal l yl ef tbl ank

1

CHAUCERIAN DIPLOMACY William T. Rossiter

W

hat was Chaucer doing in Italy, really? We are of course familiar with the narratives attendant upon Chaucer’s Italian missions of 1372/3 and 1378. The superlative studies by Piero Boitani, David Wallace, Warren Ginsberg and K. P. Clarke, to name but a few, have informed us of the kinds of Italy Chaucer encountered on these occasions – both familiar and alien, a kind of cultural uncanny – and the key points of social, political, material and textual interaction.1 Yet despite the differences underpinning these narratives, criticism tends to adhere, understandably, to two central positions: (i) it emphasises Chaucer’s uniqueness in being an English poet in trecento Italy absorbing the works of the tre corone, and in consequence his uniqueness qua poet, and (ii) it prioritises Chaucer above the mechanisms and objectives that sent him to Italy in the first place, and the offices and roles he held as determined by those mechanisms.2 In relation to the first point, it would be wilfully obtuse to deny the singularity of Chaucer’s individual Italian experience. The fact remains that his contemporaries and successors did not visit Milan or Florence, as far as we know. They did not engage critically with Dante, Petrarch and Boccaccio, and how the latter two read the former’s work, and each other’s, as Chaucer did; not Gower, not Clanvowe, not Hoccleve, not Lydgate.3 Chaucer’s response to the trecento, and his fifteenth-century successors’ responses to his response, is ground that has been and

CIC_rev.indd 17

15/12/2020 10:56:34

New Centur y Chaucer

continues to be covered, and as such I would not wish to go over it again here, not least of all because of the work of colleagues included in the present volume, who address these issues far more expertly than myself. Rather, I wish in this brief discussion to depersonalise Chaucer’s experience slightly by means of the second point, and in doing so suggest a line of inquiry that might enable a different way of reading how Chaucer’s successors and imitators responded to his Italian itinerary. Chaucer was twice sent to Italy as a member of a diplomatic mission. In this he was not unique. He was part of a transnational network of ambassadors, secretaries, nuncii, procurators, esquires, envoys, heralds, merchants and more generally what Filippo de Vivo has termed ‘professionals of intelligence’.4 Yet if a royal servant being sent abroad in service of the crown was not unique, the mission of 1372 was nevertheless novel, the remit of the envoys was exceptional (albeit not unprecedented), and the specific moment in diplomatic history was significant. Chaucer as a poet-clerk being commissioned on the king’s business was part of a new understanding of diplomacy as being, on the one hand, a means of reinforcing the ius gentium of a pre-nationstate European Christendom through treaties and trade agreements, and on the other, a significant cultural event, both in terms of revelation and production.5 The purpose of an embassy, in other words, was not only so that trained professionals could ratify agreements and memoranda of understanding, but also to perform the magnificence and sophistication of the host culture, and for the visiting diplomats to acknowledge those qualities and respond in such a way as to confirm their own culture’s reciprocal refinement, a refinement which made sensible and apt the relationship that was being facilitated by the secretaries, lawyers and clerics on each side.6 Diplomacy was gradually taking on a new texture. It had always been textual, of course, but the kind of text that it constituted – if we are thinking of texts as predicated upon and partaking of a given delimited semiotics – was changing and expanding, and our critical view of it as medievalists must do the same. This new conception of the cultural event as being a significant and ritualised constituent of embassy had developed in Italy around the mid-fourteenth century.7 And whilst European poets had been

18

CIC_rev.indd 18

15/12/2020 10:56:34

Chaucer and Italian Culture

employed prior to this period in the office of ambassador avant la lettre – Jean de Meun, Guillaume de Machaut or Dante, for example – they were employed not because they were poets, but because they were clerics and notaries. When Petrarch was sent as diplomatic orator by the Visconti of Milan to intervene in the Venetian–Genoese war in 1354, something different was taking place.8 Petrarch, unlike his predecessor Dante, was no politician or civic elder. He was sent to Venice to deliver an oration in the classical manner to the ducal council, whereby his humanist credentials and faith in rhetorical suasion would move his audience to virtue, appealing to Petrarch’s wider ideal of a unified Italy free from division and foreign mercenaries, and the Augustinian principle that peace is the telos of all wars.9 Whether his intervention actually achieved anything politically is entirely beside the point – the lawyers and notaries still worked away in the private chambers of power.10 As a public event, a performance of representation orchestrated by the Visconti, however, it was hugely significant. The diplomat Giannozzo Manetti addressed his oration to an audience of hundreds in the Venetian council chamber in 1448 when seeking military support against Milan, so the poet laureate delivering an oration on behalf of the rulers of Milan to the Venetian Council was no small affair.11 It was a display of cultural cachet by the Scourge of Lombardy and God of delight, Bernabò Visconti – he had the premier intellectual of the day in his service – and it was also a performance of Visconti’s disingenuous claim to be a peace-broker acting on behalf of the greater good.12 Even though Petrarch believed in that greater good, the Visconti interest in resolving the war was not free from self-interest. Importantly, it marked the onset of the humanist ambassador, whereby the rhetorical performance became part of the language of diplomatic ceremony. Indeed, it was Petrarch’s eight-year service in the pay of the despotic rulers of Milan (1353-–61), sworn enemies of republican Florence, which led to his being rebuked by Boccaccio: You also bring up that I wasted a good part of my time in the service of princes. So that you may not err in this, here is the truth: I was with the princes in name, but in fact the princes were with

19

CIC_rev.indd 19

15/12/2020 10:56:34

New Centur y Chaucer

me; I never attended their councils, and very seldom their banquets. I would never approve any conditions that would distract me even for a short while from my freedom and from my studies.13

Petrarch proceeds to detail ‘the seven months I lost in the service of princes’, including how ‘once I was sent to Venice to negotiate the reestablishment of peace between that city and Genoa’.14 Petrarch had obliquely lined up this theme at the outset of the letter when, commenting on Boccaccio’s poverty, he provides a parable of ‘someone rich in virtues [who] had perchance entered the service of a particular prince who treated him harshly and avariciously’, but then does not return to Boccaccio’s claims over serving the Visconti until near the end of the letter.15 Bookending the letter in this way confirms that refuting the charge of his services to tyranny constitutes its primary matter, as the important matter is supposed to be placed at the beginning and end according to the ars epistolandi.16 Indeed, as a riposte to charges that he has wasted time, and in response to Boccaccio’s request that owing to age he should now lay down his pen and enjoy repose, Petrarch adds that ‘the next letter to you will be a sign of how far I am from counsels of idleness’.17 Petrarch’s response is important not only for what he considers the good of learning and the good of diplomatic exchange, but for how this response determines our understanding of Petrarch’s Latin adaptation of the final tale in Boccaccio’s Decameron, and more importantly for how it initiates the representation of humanist diplomacy in late medieval literature and the wider cultural imaginary. This brings me to the core of the present chapter, and why it is necessary to consider Chaucer’s Italian missions in the context of the changing diplomatic texture discussed above. I am not suggesting that we should understand Chaucer’s experience as constituting the first English attempts to emulate the Italianate form of cultural diplomacy that had been instituted two decades earlier – it may well have been, but framing Chaucer as the English Petrarch is not an immediate concern – rather I am arguing that Chaucer is the first English poet to represent the new diplomatic moment and its practices and make them part of the cultural legacy he bequeathed to his readers and poetic

20

CIC_rev.indd 20

15/12/2020 10:56:34

Chaucer and Italian Culture

successors. It is, for Chaucer, a moment of evaluative representation which he came to understand through his own experience, through his reading of Petrarch’s response to Boccaccio as informed by that experience, and by his own response to Boccaccio. So rather than approaching Chaucer’s diplomatic expertise as a means to an end – expediting his entire Italian experience, providing him with relazioni or ‘tydynges’, or even with Italian manuscripts – I am viewing it as an end in itself, which nevertheless reveals itself in his Italian-inflected works. The experience of diplomacy provided a new perspective upon forms of representation and authority, inviting its own representation. Diplomacy serves as a metaphor for mediated authority, being one of the core principles of late medieval textuality.18 I am thus using Chaucer as a case study in order to propose a direction that might be taken in late medieval literary studies that will provide a necessary augmentation of the diplomatic turn in early modern studies. The diplomatic turn has been in process for some time now. It has proved enormously effective in excavating the cultural capital of diplomatic exchange between sovereignties, the diverse registers and languages of diplomatic exchange (including the non-verbal), and the various ways in which early modern authors created what Timothy Hampton terms Fictions of Embassy.19 However, that turn is still dependent upon what James Simpson termed ‘the disabling logic of periodization’, and is informed by Garrett Mattingly’s still influential 1955 study Renaissance Diplomacy, even when refuting or rejecting it.20 Mattingly claimed that the new diplomacy was dependent on two key coordinates: the nation-state and the resident embassy.21 He posited the Peace of Lodi of 1454 as being the watershed moment, entered into with ‘the purpose of stabilizing the status quo and guaranteeing existing Italian powers against aggression from within or without the peninsula’.22 Mattingly set the new developments in Italian statecraft against a monolithic medieval conception of Christendom: From the point of view of diplomacy the chief difference was that the West, in 1400, still thought of itself as one society. Christendom was torn by the gravest internal conflicts … But Latin Christendom

21

CIC_rev.indd 21

15/12/2020 10:56:34

New Centur y Chaucer

still knew itself to be one … Our modern notion of an international society composed of a heterogeneous collection of fictitious entities called states, all supposed to be equal, sovereign and completely independent, would have shocked the idealism and common sense of the fifteenth century. Such a society would have seemed to philosophers a repulsive anarchy …23

There have been many holes picked in Mattingly’s arguments, but overall the emphasis upon a shift from medieval to Renaissance diplomacy, defining the one against the other, has been maintained, with the corollary that it was early modern authors who were the first to incorporate diplomatic representation in their works. As Hampton notes, ‘with the rise of new diplomatic practices [during the fifteenth, sixteenth and seventeenth centuries] a new figure made an appearance on the stage of European literature – that of the ambassador.’24 I am in complete agreement with Hampton’s argument that literary texts provide a means of interrogating the languages of diplomacy, and concomitantly that the changes in diplomatic texture can be traced in the development of literary history, but I would push the dateline for the stage debut of the fictional ambassador back into the fourteenth century, and in doing so refute the familiar periodisation underpinning Mattingly’s argument.25 There are, of course, dissenting voices within the early modern camp, such as Isabella Lazzarini and John Watkins. Indeed, Watkins argues that the ‘emergence of the resident embassy as the primary locus of diplomatic exchanges occupies a position in Mattingly’s thought analogous to the emergence of the individual in Burckhardt’s’, and that this commitment to crude periodisation – which ignores the way in which the concept of medieval Christendom that Mattingly is describing is itself the discursive product and tool of a particular historical moment, an imagined ideal like Petrarch’s Italia, born of the fear of Ottoman expansionism – needs to be overturned.26 This is now happening, and a more precise diplomatic history is emerging as a result. However, the bias is still towards the early modern as the privileged site of cultural value, at least in literary studies. Building on Watkins’s call to arms,

22

CIC_rev.indd 22

15/12/2020 10:56:34

Chaucer and Italian Culture

and aligning it with Lazzarini’s retrodatazione of substantial changes in diplomatic history which can be traced to c.1350, I am proposing the potential benefits of a diplomatic turn in late medieval literary studies, using Chaucer as the first example of a poet who represented the figure of the ambassador and cognate roles in a number of his works, although this is in no way to propose the limitation of the diplomatic turn to Chaucer and Chaucer studies.27 Chaucer’s case is interesting and useful in that he was a poet-diplomat who was engaging, in the Clerk’s Tale at least, with another poet-diplomat who was also implicated in the shifting texture of diplomatic history. Indeed Petrarch headed the Venetian embassy of 1354. He was not just the cultural attaché. As Lazzarini notes, ‘from the second half of the fourteenth century almost every autonomous polity [in Italy] expressed at some stage a diplomatic agency formally defined and clearly recognizable’, an agency which went beyond the major centres of power, such as Florence, Milan, Naples and Venice, to include minor polities.28 For example, in July 1375 the Marquis of Saluzzo sent his advocatus to Avignon to complain to Pope Gregory XI about the aggression of the Count of Savoy.29 The following year, Gregory returned the papacy to Rome, instituting the Great Schism which was to be one of the shaping factors of the new diplomacy. Urban V had made a failed attempt to return the papacy permanently to Rome in 1367, but the pressures placed upon him by his largely French cardinalate saw the See returning to Avignon in 1370 until Gregory’s counter-turn six years later. So when Petrarch translated Decameron X.10 in 1373, the Popes were still in their Babylonian exile, despite Petrarch’s own agency and his disgust.30 However, Petrarch’s tale of Griselda, like its Boccaccian model, is set many years earlier and so locates the pope in his rightful place, as Petrarch saw it, when the fictional Marquis of Saluzzo, Valterius, sends his advocatus to the pope in order to dupe his faithful peasant wife: And so when the twelfth year from the birth of his daughter had passed, he sent messengers to Rome [nuncios Romam misit], who brought back counterfeit papal letters. These, it was commonly believed, gave him permission from the Pope to put aside his first

23

CIC_rev.indd 23

15/12/2020 10:56:34

New Centur y Chaucer

wife, for the contentment of himself and his people, and to marry another; it was by no means difficult to persuade the ignorant peasants of any story.31

The earlier setting of the tale thus accords entirely with Petrarch’s anti-Avignonese agenda, situating the See in Rome, although there is a slight anachronism in that the term nuncio was no longer used exclusively by the papacy at the time of Petrarch writing his translation, but also by secular rulers. By the time Chaucer comes to translate Petrarch’s Latin following his 1378 mission the papacy has returned to Rome – the return Petrarch had spent his life not just waiting for but fighting for, but which he never saw, dying in 1374 – and so Chaucer’s close translation resituates the political landscape in the present diplomatic moment: He to the court of rome, in subtil wyse Enformed of his wyl, sente his message, Comaundynge hem swiche bulles to devyse As to his crueel purpos may suffyse, How that the pope, as for his peples reste, Bad hym to wedde another, if hym leste. I seye, he bad they sholde countrefete The popes bulles, makynge mencion That he hath leve his firste wyf to lete, As by the popes dispensacion, To stynte rancour and dissencion Bitwixe his peple and hym; thus seyde the bulle, The which they han publiced atte fulle.32

The key point however is that the Marquis of Saluzzo has already in situ a level of ‘formally defined and clearly recognizable’ diplomatic representation – the practice of minor polities such as Saluzzo sending diplomatic agents to the Curia being a relatively new diplomatic phenomenon, as we have seen – so much so that his representative can request and be granted counterfeit papal bulls, a term Petrarch does

24

CIC_rev.indd 24

15/12/2020 10:56:34

Chaucer and Italian Culture

not actually use (using instead the official term litteras apostolicas), but which Chaucer recognises carried diplomatic weight for his audience. However, this image of the nuncio who is not empowered to go beyond his specific remit represents only one diplomatic process, and one which is part of the familiar machinery of medieval statecraft, as confirmed by his title. There is nevertheless a potential ambiguity over the medium, as to whether the message is delivered orally or by letter – it is interesting that Chaucer chooses to translate Petrarch’s term ‘nuncio’ as ‘message’. As Lazzarini notes: In the thirteenth century, once it had been agreed by the king, the prince, or the urban government to send ‘an oral message rather than a letter’, the suitable man was provided with certain documents: a safe-conduct would guarantee his safety, a letter of credence his reliability, and a grant of power in due form the legal extent of his agency. In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries instructions developed from this kind of document into different, and most crucial, texts.33

The distinction between messages delivered orally or by letter requires some elaboration, and requires also that we reconsider the official titles Chaucer was given in his Italian missions, as the diversity of these titles and his expanded remit illustrate the shifting diplomatic terrain that underpins Chaucer’s representations. In relation to England, confidential letters of state, whilst they might have been protected within the bounds of their own polity owing to the respect shown to the monarch’s seal – the Great Seal, the privy seal or the king’s personal signet – were liable to interception once they passed the ports.34 The standard practice adopted by English rulers sending diplomatic messages abroad in the later Middle Ages was to provide a letter of little substance to be augmented by an oral message, as Pierre Chaplais complains of ‘the tedious frequency with which their [the later medieval English kings’] diplomatic correspondence keeps alluding to subjects which could not be explained in writing either propter viarum pericula or, more specifically, for secrecy’.35 This is exactly the mixed medium

25

CIC_rev.indd 25

15/12/2020 10:56:34

New Centur y Chaucer

Chaucer was charged with in 1372. The entry in the Issue Roll detailing payment of Chaucer’s expenses incurred on this trip, dated 1 December 1372, relates that Chaucer, as an esquire of the royal household, was sent abroad to discuss the king’s secret matters (‘Galfrido Chaucer, armigero regis, misso in secretis negociis domini regis versus partes transmarinas’).36 However it is the commission of 12 November found in the Treaty Roll, together with an undated warrant detailing the mission, that provide – by their form and in their content – a mass of detail concerning Chaucer’s office and role, and the possibilities of diplomatic rhetoric. In the first instance there is the question of Chaucer’s title, and hence his office and role. On the expenses document of 1 December he is ‘armigero regis’, on the undated warrant he is ‘scutifero domini regis’ and on the commission likewise ‘nostri scutiferi’.37 Scutifero and armigero are semantically cognate, translating as esquire, and indeed in an Exchequer document of 11 November 1373, which is written in French, Chaucer is described as ‘nostre ame esquier Geffrey Chaucer’.38 Both terms convey permission to bear a coat of arms. As Chaplais notes, from the mid-thirteenth century onwards a distinction was drawn between royal messengers with and without robes, the former on horseback, the latter on foot: nuncius and cursor. In the 12 November document Chaucer and his fellow emissaries, Sir James de Provan, and John de Mari, both Genoese, are also entitled ‘nuncios et procuratores’, entrusted with a special mandate (mandatum speciale) and present powers (presencium potestatem) to negotiate. This was exceptional, albeit not unprecedented: ‘As a rule, however, nuncii and cursores of the [royal] household simply carried the letters abroad; the task of presenting them was left to more dignified persons, often an English diplomatic envoy or proctor who had already reached the court concerned.’39 This was clearly not the case in the 1372/3 mission. Whilst James de Provan by virtue of his rank (‘Jacobi [de] Provan militi’) was the most senior member, and John de Mari was the most crucial, both ranked highly as servants to Edward III and all three were nominated as ‘nuncios et procuratores’, so were not handing over power to a proctor

26

CIC_rev.indd 26

15/12/2020 10:56:34

Chaucer and Italian Culture

already stationed in Genoa (or Florence). All of these details suggest haste. Servants of the royal household were sent as nuncii because of their speed. The precedent for Chaucer as esquire-nuncius being granted powers of negotiation was John de Waltham in 1330, who was endowed with the said powers precisely for reasons of urgency.40 It is not impossible that the arrangement of a seaport in England for use by the Genoese related to the French wars, and specifically to James de Provan’s agreement to obtain Genoese ships a year earlier, the payment for which would have been arranged via the king’s bankers, the Bardi of Florence, to which Chaucer travelled directly after Genoa.41 The importance here is that Chaucer was designated nuncius, and when he came to translate the same term in Petrarch’s Latin Griselda he did so as ‘message’, which tells us about his conception of the ambassadorial role. Moreover, the roles Chaucer occupied illustrate succinctly in microcosm the macro-developments in diplomatic history. Across the thirteenth to the fifteenth century the envoy evolved ‘from a simple instrument of his master’s authority (nuntius), first to an agent provided with autonomy defined by mandate (procurator), and finally to an official with a public role granted full decision-making autonomy (orator or ambassador)’.42 Chaucer in 1372 is at an appropriate intermezzo in this trajectory. We can briefly compare the 1372/3 documents with those attendant upon his 1378 mission in order to distinguish between exceptional process that became the new normative and the status quo. Sir Edward de Berkeley as a knight outranks Chaucer, who again is esquire (‘­nostre cher et feal chivaler Edward de Berkle et a nostre feal esquier Geffray Chaucer’), and they are licensed to deliver Richard’s ‘message’ to Bernabò Visconti and his son-in-law the English mercenary Sir John Hawkwood, touching the matter of the war with France (‘sont ordenez … nostre guerre’).43 The distinction here is that de Berkeley is designated first as nuncio regis, whilst Chaucer follows as armigero regis, being sent to the same place as the aforementioned nuncio (‘ad easdem partes in nuncio regis predicto’).44 The exceptional circumstances of the previous mission are absent, the powers of negotiation are not mandated, the roles are clearly separated by virtue of rank,

27

CIC_rev.indd 27

15/12/2020 10:56:34

New Centur y Chaucer

and so Chaucer has experience of both standard and non-standard diplomatic protocols on which to draw.45 Following this excursus we can return to the Clerk’s Tale. The ‘message’ sent by Walter appears to have been a missive but supplemented by oral delivery, given that this was the practice not only reserved for confidential matters – and Walter’s cruel ruse is highly confidential, hence ‘in subtil wyse’ – but in use more generally. The letter itself, because of the secretis negociis being presented by the ‘message’, a term metonymic of the nuncius, of both content and means of delivery – as shown in the French document of 1378 – does not need to be secret, as secret letters could be intercepted. Thus Edward’s letters to Duke Fregoso of Genoa, are letters patent (littere patentes) and not letters close, because the nuncio is also procurator, and able to speak to the matter.46 The papal response to Walter’s bullish commaundemant, however, given in the form of the counterfeit bull and dispensation, is epistolary or textual, which is not unsurprising given the emphasis of the Curial cursus upon elegance of style and standard forms of expression. This is a diplomatic exchange that follows the correct procedure to incorrect ends.47 This procedure became increasingly formalised across Europe, in no small part owing to the developments in centralised chanceries and growing territoriality in trecento Italy.48 Yet it was not in itself a radical break with existing practices. What we saw in Chaucer’s own circumstances reflected both standard and non-standard late medieval practice, but part of the overall argument of this chapter is that there was no Burckhardtian cultural shift which immediately ended medieval forms of representation. Rather Chaucer was enmeshed in a network of diplomatic exchange that was constituted by a variety of overlapping jurisdictions and practices at a time when diverse parts of that network and those practices were beginning to change, a change first represented by Petrarch and developed by Chaucer well in advance of the usual period in which it is claimed that literature first began to represent official forms of representation. We do not have to deal in the temporal monoliths of medieval and Renaissance because the practical and cultural shifts which collectively and accretively mark a

28

CIC_rev.indd 28

15/12/2020 10:56:34

Chaucer and Italian Culture

turning point in diplomatic history have to be identified in the specific instance and moment. The representation of just such a moment can be found earlier in the tale, and is crucial to Petrarch’s reframing of Boccaccio’s Italian. It is necessary to recall Petrarch’s attempt to justify his time in service to the Visconti in the 1350s when examining one of his most significant additions to the tale, because the translation is an extension of Petrarch’s apologia for his service as Visconti orator that illustrates the virtuous role of the eloquent and learned servant to a tyrant who seeks to protect the bonum commune. Petrarch has inserted a representation of his own position into Boccaccio’s story of Griselda in order to show his friend that he served a tyrant for the greater good. In Boccaccio’s version, Gualtieri’s vassals approach him en masse and speak, not unexpectedly, as an undifferentiated collective: ‘suoi uomini … il pregaron che moglie prendesse’ (‘His followers … begged him to marry’).49 Petrarch, with his Ciceronian humanist anxiety over the threat posed by the vulgus to reasoned thought, adds an orator, being the standard early modern term for ambassador, the vox populi who is trained to speak truth to power: [U]nus cui vel auctoritas maior erat vel facundia maiorque cum suo duce familiaritas, Tua, inquit, humanitas, optime marchio, hanc nobis prestat audaciam; ut et tecum singuli quociens res exposcit devota fiducia colloquamur, ut nunc omnium tacitas voluntates mea vox tuis auribus invehat, non quod singulare habeam ad hanc rem, nisi quod tu me inter alios carum tibi multis indiciis comprobasti … Moverunt pie preces animum viri … One of them, either more assured or more eloquent, and better acquainted with his lord, spoke. ‘Because of your great kindness, O great marquis, we dare, whenever the need demands it, to approach you individually and speak in firm confidence. Now let my voice deliver to your ears the silent wishes of all. Not that I have any special role in this matter, but with many signs you have shown me to be dear to you among the others … These pious prayers moved the heart of the man …50

29

CIC_rev.indd 29

15/12/2020 10:56:34

New Centur y Chaucer

As Mattingly noted, it was not uncommon in the fourteenth century for communities to send ambassadors to their rulers by way of mediation.51 Ambassadors were not solely to act between states or potentates. It is this role of people’s ambassador that Petrarch adds, the interpretation of which character is determined in part by Petrarch’s framing of his translation in Seniles XVII.2, discussed above. Chaucer would not have known of this framing had he read only the tale of Griselda (Seniles XVII.3); however, as Anne Middleton noted, it was more likely that Chaucer read the four letters that comprise Seniles XVII rather than a detached version of the tale, on the basis of the manuscript transmission of the translation.52 Indeed, the close of Chaucer’s tale shows him responding to Petrarch’s account of how two of his and Boccaccio’s mutual friends, one a Paduan, the other a Veronese, responded to the tale in divergent ways, as historia and as fabula respectively, as I have shown elsewhere.53 It is even less likely that Chaucer read Seniles XVII.3 and XVII.4 and not XVII.2 than the prospect of his having read XVII.3 only. Chaucer thus would have noted the correspondence between Petrarch’s defence of his time spent as public orator for the Visconti and the efficacy of the people’s ambassador’s rhetorical suasion in his Latin Griselda: the virtuous man who moves his ruler to pity and moral action by rhetorical force. There is not the space here to examine the orator’s speech, save to note that it completely accords to the standard Ciceronian model that was used to structure both diplomatic correspondence and orations, as follows: salutatio (‘O noble markys’, IV.92), exordium via captatio benevolentiae (‘youre humanitee / Assureth us (…) oure hevynesse’, IV.92–5), narratio stating the facts and continuing the captatio (‘Accepteth, lord (…) in sovereyn hertes reste’, IV.96–112), followed by the petitio (‘Boweth youre nekke under that blisful yok (…) And taak a wyf, for hye goddes sake!’, IV.113–35), rounded off with a conclusio warning of ‘the disastrous consequences that might ensue, should the request be turned down’ (‘For if it so befelle […] Wherfore we pray you hastily to wyve’, IV.136–40).54 That Chaucer understood the representation of the role of the humanist diplomat or civic humanist is reinforced by the fact that he clarifies the role more than Petrarch himself had done. Chaucer takes

30

CIC_rev.indd 30

15/12/2020 10:56:34

Chaucer and Italian Culture

the three qualities of Petrarch’s orator – auctoritas, facundia, familiaritas – and expands upon them: And oon of hem, that wisest was of loore – Or elles that the lord best wolde assente That he sholde telle hym what his peple mente, Or elles koude he shewe wel swich mateere – He to the markys seyde as ye shul heere: ‘O noble markys, youre humanitee Asseureth us and yeveth us hardinesse, As ofte as tyme is of necessitee, That we to yow mowe telle oure hevynesse. Accepteth, lord, now of youre gentillesse That we with pitous herte unto yow pleyne, And lat youre eres nat my voys desdeyne. ‘Al have I noght to doone in this mateere Moore than another man hath in this place, Yet for as muche as ye, my lord so deere, Han alwey shewed me favour and grace I dar the bettre aske of yow a space Of audience, to shewen oure requeste, And ye, my lord, to doon right as yow leste …’ … Hir meeke preyere and hir pitous cheere Made the markys herte han pitee.55

Petrarch’s auctoritas is separated correctly into ‘wisest was of loore / Or elles that the lord best wolde assente’, the second element of which also informs Chaucer’s understanding of familiaritas: ‘Ye … han alwey shewed me favour and grace.’ Chaucer’s ‘koude he shewe wel swich mateere’ confirms facundia as a common synonym of eloquentia, whilst his half-glossed translation of Petrarch’s ‘non quod singulare habeam ad hanc rem’ as ‘Al have I noght to doone in this mateere /

31

CIC_rev.indd 31

15/12/2020 10:56:34

New Centur y Chaucer

Moore than another man hath in this place’ seems absolutely right, despite Petrarch’s ambiguity. We see Chaucer’s precision if we compare it to Farrell’s translation (‘Not that I have any special role in this matter’), which could be read as the self-negation of false modesty but undermines the function of the vox populi, or even to Aldo Bernardo’s rendering as ‘not because I have anything unique to say on this matter’. Chaucer’s understanding of the statement as befitting the role – equivalent to ‘not because this matter is singular to me’ – maintains the function and consistency of the figure. The selection of the right ambassador for the specific job in hand was crucial, and the court of Saluzzo has chosen wisely.56 It is worth pausing here to consider the issue of overlapping jurisdictions, both literal and figurative. Indeed, part of what characterises the changes that took place in diplomatic practice from the mid-fourteenth century onwards stemmed from such overlapping, which led to enlarged ambassadorial roles and functions. So the function of the vox populi in Petrarch’s tale of Griselda looks not unlike that of counsel, and thus the representation of diplomatic oratory might be seen to resemble the ‘advice to princes’ genre. To illustrate this we can turn to that masterclass in counsel provided by Dame Prudence in the tale of Melibee: ‘Lat calle,’ quod Prudence, ‘thy trewe freendes alle and thy lynyage whiche that been wise. Telleth youre cas, and herkneth what they seye in conseillyng, and yow governe after hire sentence … Thanne, by the conseil of his wyf Prudence, this Melibeus leet callen a greet congregacion of folk, / as surgiens, phisiciens, olde folk and yonge, and somme of his olde enemys reconciled as by hir semblaunt to his love and into his grace; / and therwithal ther coomen somme of his neighebores that diden hem reverence moore for drede than for love, as it happeth ofte. / Ther coomen also ful many subtille flatereres, and wise advocatz lerned in the lawe.57

There are two points to be made here. The first is obvious: the people’s ambassador in the Clerk’s Tale is sent on behalf of a ‘power’, the community, to another power, the ruler, with a specific petitio, as opposed

32

CIC_rev.indd 32

15/12/2020 10:56:34

Chaucer and Italian Culture

to summoning an undifferentiated mass who do not speak with one voice. In the Clerk’s Tale the exchange results in a diplomatic bargain being struck between ruler and ruled: ‘they sworen and assenten to al this thyng’ (IV.176–7). There is no such bargain in the Melibee, which is concerned with how, when and from whom one should take counsel, and what constitutes good counsel. It is a different dynamic, with a different cause and a different end, even if the jurisdictions overlap at their respective peripheries. After all, Chaucer’s source for the Melibee is a French translation of the Liber consolationis et consilii of Albertanus of Brescia, a thirteenth-century notary, the secretary class that constituted the elite legal corps of late medieval diplomatic personnel. However, and this constitutes the second point, the discussion of counsel in the Melibee can be considered as part of Chaucer’s development of his response to diplomatic representation, and both – good counsel and good diplomacy – are part of his wider concern with the best form of government, the commune profit, and the ius gentium. Indeed, Chaucer’s Italian experience, the diversity of peninsular polities, as Wallace has shown, provided him with the materials whereby he could think seriously about and play with ideal forms of rule and representation. Chaucer is, then, the first English poet to represent the new cultural practices of what Mattingly termed ‘Renaissance diplomacy’, and Hampton ‘fictions of embassy’, both being textual forms of representation. Yet we are still lacking a key feature of the terminology which was discussed earlier. In the first handbook on diplomacy, Bernard du Rosier’s Ambaxiator brevilogus (Short Treatise on Ambassadors, 1436), the question of what to call and how to differentiate the myriad levels of state representatives, messengers and mouthpieces is addressed, some of which terms are familiar to us from Chaucer’s own documentation. Du Rosier notes that ‘Legatus and ambaxiator are two words for the same office, the one used by classical antiquity, the other of more recent origin … Minor officials, once also called legati, are now called “nuncios” and “procurators” according to their function.’58 The term legatus had been preserved by the representatives of the papal see, and was revived by the humanists, but the Italian humanists

33

CIC_rev.indd 33

15/12/2020 10:56:34

New Centur y Chaucer

in particular came to prefer orator, which soon spread across the European states, although not to the eradication of legatus, as diverse late medieval and early modern documents attest. A nuncio, as we have seen, is usually sent to deliver a message in the voice of the power he represents (homodiegetic) but cannot negotiate; a procurator speaks of, not as, his ruler (heterodiegetic) and has the powers of negotiation. As Chaucer’s 1372/3 mission illustrated, the medieval office of envoy could blur the lines between nuncio and procurator, whilst being of lesser status than an official ambassador, the very term that does not appear in any of Chaucer’s missions. As Mattingly notes, discussing Du Rosier’s comment that ambaxiator is of more recent provenance, ‘the term he preferred, “ambassadors”, though it had been in use since the thirteenth century, was not accepted as quickly or as universally as he expected.’59 Indeed the word ambassador is not used in English until the early 1380s, when it is introduced by Chaucer. The term is first used in book IV of Troilus and Criseyde, after Criseyde’s treacherous father Calchas has successfully sued for her to be exchanged for the newly captured Greek hero Antenor so that she may be reunited with him. Chaucer uses the term twice, in both instances drawing the term directly out of the equivalent point in Boccaccio’s Filostrato: Tellyng his tale alwey, this olde greye, Humble in his speche, and in his lokyng eke, The salte teris from his eyen tweye Ful faste ronnen down by either cheke. So longe he gan of socour hem biseke That, for to hele him of his sorwes soore, They yave hym Antenor, withouten more. But who was glad ynough but Calkas tho? And of this thyng ful soone his nedes leyde On hem that sholden for the tretis go, And hem for Antenor ful ofte preyde To bringen hom kyng Toas and Criseyde.

34

CIC_rev.indd 34

15/12/2020 10:56:34

Chaucer and Italian Culture

And whan Priam his save-garde sente, Th’embassadours to Troie streight they wente. The cause itold of hire comynge, the olde Priam, the kyng, ful sone in general Let her-upon his parlement to holde, Of which th’effect rehercen yow I shal. Th’embassadours ben answered for final; Th’eschaunge of prisoners and al this nede Hem liketh wel, and forth in they procede.60

Chaucer here, following and augmenting Boccaccio, details for his readers the diplomatic process, just as he had traced the selection of the ambassador for his qualities and experience in the Clerk’s Tale. The terms of the diplomatic proposal are given by Calchas to the agents, whose objective is the ratification of that proposal by a treatise (‘his nedes leyde / On hem that sholden for the tretis go’), following Boccaccio’s ‘Calcas … la bisogna impose a’ trattatori.’61 In Chaucer, but not in Boccaccio, messengers are sent first to Priam requesting safe passage for the Greek ambassadors, and once granted the ambassadors can travel from the Greek camp to the Trojan court: ‘whan Priam his savegarde sente, / Th’embassadours to Troie streight they wente’ (italics added). Upon arrival their mission objective is recited (the ambassador subsuming the role of nuncio), parliament is summoned to consider the terms, and its verdict is delivered to the Greek ambassadors who return to make arrangements for the exchange (the ambassador subsuming the role of procurator), in this again following Boccaccio:           un parlamento, di ciò si tenne, ed agli ambasciatori risposer brieve se gli addomandati rendesser loro, i lor fosser donati.62

However, the procedure is not straightforward: Hector repeatedly opposes the exchange, with good reason, but ‘It was for nought, it

35

CIC_rev.indd 35

15/12/2020 10:56:34

New Centur y Chaucer

moste been, and sholde; / For substaunce of the parlement it wolde’ (IV.216–17). Chaucer, unlike Boccaccio at the time he wrote Filostrato, had served on diplomatic missions, and so could add procedural details such as the seeking out of the preliminary safeguard from Priam or the formal announcement of the mission’s objective, which we do not find in Boccaccio, and which conforms exactly with the enlarged diplomatic role that developed across the latter half of the fourteenth century. Yet where in this instance is the oration that we find in the Clerk’s Tale? It is present, just not in the right place. Pandarus might be the tale’s go-between, but his political counterbalance is Calchas. It is his speech, appealing to pathos, that constitutes the rhetorical performance that should be given at the other end of the mission, a speech appealing to mercy which he could not be shown were he to return to Troy due to his treachery (‘That Calkas traytor fled was’).63 Thus the order is inverted, the oration which should appear following the arrival of the ambassadors is delivered a priori in order to create and frame their mission. In this sense, Calchas appears as a kind of Trojan ambassador to the Greeks even as he formulates the proposal of the Greek tretis for the Trojan parlement: Than seyde he thus, ‘Lo, lordes myne, ich was Troian, as it is knowen out of drede; And, if that yow remembre, I am Calkas, That alderfirst yaf comfort to your nede, And tolde wel how that ye shulden spede … … Ye have now kaught and fetered in prisoun Troians ynowe; and if your willes be, My child with oon may han redempcioun. Now for the love of god and of bounte, Oon of so fele, allas, so yive hym me! What nede were it this preiere for to werne, Sin ye shul bothe han folk and toun as yerne?64

Through occupying both sides of the exchange – ‘ich was / Troian’, ‘Ye have now caught and fetered in prisoun / Troians ynowe’ – Calchas

36

CIC_rev.indd 36

15/12/2020 10:56:34

Chaucer and Italian Culture

represents a particular anxiety that would emerge alongside the resident ambassador: the double agent, who crosses from one side to the other. This fear was bound up in one early, spurious etymology of the term ambassador, detailed by Du Rosier, whereby the term has its origins in ambo on account of the practice of sending two ambassadors on one mission.65 As such, the ambassador is fundamentally double; as Jessica Wolfe notes, in the early modern period ‘the ambassador is often imagined as figuratively, if not literally double, from the twofold secrecy of his secret codes to his potential for deceit.’66 Chaucer, through the pseudo- or even anti-ambassadorial figure of Calchas, suggests this etymology and prefigures the role’s capacity for duplicity: ‘Calkas lede us with ambages – / That is to seyn with double wordes slye, / Swiche as men clepen a word with two visages.’67 Despite – or perhaps because of – his ambages, it is Calchas who dictates the terms of the treatise proposed by the Greek ambassadors (‘his nedes leyde / On hem that sholden for the tretis go’), a fact Hector reminds us of in his response when he ‘sobrely answerde: / “Syres, she nis no prisoner”, he seyde; “I not on yow who that this charge leyde …”’, which deliberately recalls Calchas’ action.68 We do not hear the terms of the treatise spoken by the Greek ambassadors, or their oration, because we have already heard both through Calchas’ rhetorical performance before the Greek ‘consistorie’.69 Chaucer has no need to repeat it, so it is treated cursorily as a post-factum narrated action: ‘The cause itold of hire comynge … Th’embassadours ben answerd for final; / Th’eschaunge of prisoners and al this nede / Hem liketh wel, and forth in they procede.’70 Calchas as a representation of diplomatic duality, like Petrarch’s vox populi, reminds us that the distinction between Renaissance and medieval diplomacy follows the faultlines of a periodisation now largely discredited but not entirely displaced. Rather than argue for a sea change that occurred at a specific point in the mid-fifteenth century, whereby the practices of diplomatic exchange transformed overnight, there were precursors and exempla in situ from at least the mid-fourteenth century, and in particular within the cultural imaginary borne witness to by literary representation and its rhetorical

37

CIC_rev.indd 37

15/12/2020 10:56:34

New Centur y Chaucer

strategies. The diversity of Chaucer’s fictions of embassy speak to the late medieval polygenesis of early modern diplomacy, and again critical responses to fictional treatments of medieval diplomatic practice might augment the existing turn by emphasising in literary history the kinds of continuities and transformations that are now being traced in diplomatic history. In her survey of early modern diplomatic history, Tracey Sowerby argues that the ‘“New Diplomatic History”, no longer so new, has become a broad church’.71 Yet that church needs to be broadened further to incorporate the perspective of late medieval literature, and in doing so renew itself again. As stated at the outset, this essay is not just a reading of Chaucer, but an attempt to situate him, his diplomatic experience and his complex practices of representation within those equally complex and emergent reconfigurations of diplomacy as cultural, textual event. In this way we can go beyond the uniqueness of Chaucer’s Italian experience. If Chaucer was separated from his contemporaries through that experience, and kept apart by critical tradition, he and his successors might be reconnected through shared diplomatic experience, given that the ‘new diplomatic history’ encourages a more expansive and detailed view of embassy – beyond the resident ambassadors, the principal authorities and the hard powers such as treaties and alliances, to the clerics, the notaries, the peripheral figures and the soft powers such as orations and memorials. There are numerous possibilities when considering localised instances of post-Chaucerian diplomacy: Paris’ dream of Mercury, the ambassadorial icon, in Lydgate’s Troy Book, or the embassy of the Fox and the Wolf to the Mare in Henryson’s Morall Fabillis (‘The wolff is better in ambassatry / And mair cunning in clergie fer than I’) on the one hard, to the wealth of material in Hoccleve’s Formulary or the diplomatic function of Lydgate’s commemorative account of Henry VI’s entry into London, to name but a few that spring immediately to mind.72 None of these episodes are ostensibly in debt to Chaucer’s Italian experience, but they reflect in different forms the diplomatic experience that took him there, producing a different kind of legacy, with different forms of representation.

38

CIC_rev.indd 38

15/12/2020 10:56:34

Chaucer and Italian Culture

Notes 1. Piero Boitani (ed.), Chaucer and the Italian Trecento (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983); David Wallace, Chaucerian Polity: Absolutist Lineages and Associational Forms in England and Italy (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997); Warren Ginsberg, Chaucer’s Italian Tradition (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002); K. P. Clarke, Chaucer and Italian Textuality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). There is not the space here to list all the key works on Chaucer in Italy, but of course the present volume incorporates and updates much of that canon. 2. A. C. Spearing, Medieval to Renaissance in English Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985; repr. 1990), p. 89. 3. In relation to the Dante anecdote in Confessio Amantis VII, Elisabetta Tarantino has ruled out the old interpretation that Gower learned the anecdote by reading Petrarch’s Rerum memorandarum libri, arguing instead for ‘the likelihood that Gower had recourse to oral sources based upon a received synthesis of the two main strands of the anecdote’. See ‘The Dante Anecdote in Gower’s Confessio Amantis, Book VII’, The Chaucer Review, 39 (2005), 420–35. As for Lydgate’s version of Boccaccio’s vision of Petrarch in the prologue to Book VIII of the Fall of Princes, he was following Laurent de Premierfait’s French translation of Boccaccio’s De casibus virorum illustrium (1373). Whilst I agree that Lydgate is far more nuanced than previous generations of critics allowed, I am less confident in his understanding of the dynamics of Italian poetry than, for example, David Lawton, who argues that ‘Lydgate openly faces Boccaccio (as Chaucer had not), and through Boccaccio, Petrarch and Dante’. See Voice in Later Medieval English Literature: Public Interiorities (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), p. 143. Whilst Lydgate understands Dante, Petrarch and Boccaccio as auctours, he does not share Chaucer’s awareness of the complex interplay between them: a mixture of imitation, negation and competition. See chapter 2 of my Chaucer and Petrarch, Chaucer Studies, 41 (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2010) or ‘Chaucer Joins the Schiera: The House of Fame, Italy and the Determination of Posterity’, in Isabel Davis and Catherine Nall (eds), Chaucer and Fame: Reputation and Reception (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2015), pp. 21–42. 4. Filippo de Vivo, Information and Communication in Venice: Rethinking Early Modern Politics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), pp. 74–86. See also Isabella Lazzarini, Communication and Conflict: Italian Diplomacy in the Early Renaissance, 1350–1520 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), pp. 45–6. 5. By revelation is meant the diverse showcases of ceremonial and cultural magnificence by the host court, and by production is meant the embassy itself as a site of cultural production.

39

CIC_rev.indd 39

15/12/2020 10:56:34

New Centur y Chaucer

6. See Daniela Frigo, ‘Prudence and Experience: Ambassadors and Political Culture in Early Modern Italy’, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, 38/1 (2008), 15–34 (p. 22). 7. On the chronology of diplomatic change see Lazzarini, Communication and Conflict, pp. 45–8, and also her discussion of ritual: ‘Ambassadors were always in the front row in great ritualized events … as both witnesses and members of a selected political elite that by these events elaborated, displayed, and imposed a distinctive language of power’ (p. 161). Ambassadors, as information professionals, would of course report these events, which would pass back into cultural representation (for example through poetry). 8. Control of Genoa was handed over to Giovanni Visconti, archbishop of Milan, in October 1353, following a period of civil unrest. I am indebted to Alexander Lee’s study of ‘Petrarch and the Venetian–Genoese War of 1350–1355’, in Jason Powell and William T. Rossiter (eds), Authority and Diplomacy from Dante to Shakespeare (Farnham and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2013; repr. London: Routledge, 2016), pp. 39–56 (p. 41). Orator became the standard term for ambassador in the early modern period. 9. The famous expression of this is in Rvf 128 (‘Italia mia’), to which Lee (‘Petrarch and the Venetian–Genoese War’) adds Fam. XI.8. Rvf refers to Petrarch’s sonnet sequence (Rerum vulgarium fragmenta). His two major epistolary collections Rerum familarium libri and Rerum senilium libri are abbreviated as Fam. and Sen., respectively. 10. As Daniela Frigo notes, ‘the most celebrated missions [were] often entrusted for the purposes of propaganda to “literati” ambassadors’, but we cannot ignore ‘the patient day-to-day work carried out by envoys, secretaries, chancellors, and informers’. See her ‘Introduction’ to Daniela Frigo (ed.), Politics and Diplomacy in Early Modern Italy: The Structure and Practice of Diplomatic History, 1450–1800, trans. Adrian Belton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 1–24 (p. 10). 11. Brian J. Maxson, ‘Diplomatic Oratory’, in Monica Azzolini and Isabella Lazzarini (eds), Italian Renaissance Diplomacy: A Sourcebook (Durham: Institute of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, University of Durham; Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 2017), pp. 27–41 (p. 27). 12. ‘Off melan grete barnabo viscounte, / God of delit, and scourge of lumbardye’ (MkT VII.2399–40). 13. Sen. XVII.2.650. All quotations of this letter are taken from Aldo S. Bernardo, Saul Levin and Reta A. Bernardo (eds), Letters of Old Age (Rerum senilium libri), 2 vols (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992). 14. Sen. XVII.2.650. See Lee, ‘Petrarch and the Venetian–Genoese War’, p. 39. 15. Sen. XVII.2.645. 16. Petrarch says as much in his framing letter to Boccaccio (Sen. XVII.3). 17. Sen. XVII.2.653.

40

CIC_rev.indd 40

15/12/2020 10:56:35

Chaucer and Italian Culture

18. Consider Petrarch’s famous closing words to Boccaccio concerning the Griselda text: ‘It returns to where it began, knowing its judge, its home, and the way there.’ Quotations of Sen. XVII.3 in both Latin and English are taken from Thomas J. Farrell’s version in Robert Correale and Mary Hamel (eds), Sources and Analogues of The Canterbury Tales, 2 vols (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2002), I, 110. The tendency is to view this statement through a scriptural lens, owing to its playful echo of Griselda’s own echoing of Job in the tale, but given that this is Petrarch’s envoy, it works equally well as a configuration of the returning ambassador, the instrument of authority returning to its source. 19. Timothy Hampton, Fictions of Embassy: Literature and Diplomacy in Early Modern Europe (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2009). 20. James Simpson, Reform and Cultural Revolution, Oxford English Literary History, 2: 1350–1547 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 44. Frigo, even as she identifies the diversity and complexity of the changes that took place, situates the sixteenth century as the point of division between medieval and Renaissance in diplomatic history, confirming the tenacity of Mattingly’s narrative. This division she characterises by ‘the weakening of universal powers; the rupture of European religious unity; the beginning of European colonization in the New World; the differentiation of politics and government from morality and religion; and the formation of a “system” of interconnected states’ (‘Prudence and Experience’, p. 15). This is not to negate the shifts themselves, it is to question the association of the privileged component of the binary opposition with the term ‘Renaissance’. 21. Garrett Mattingly, Renaissance Diplomacy (Baltimore and London: Penguin, 1964), p. 10. 22. Mattingly, Renaissance Diplomacy, p. 81. 23. Mattingly, Renaissance Diplomacy, pp. 16, 24. 24. Hampton, Fictions of Embassy, p. 1. 25. It needs to be made clear also that anyone wishing to consider medieval and early modern diplomacy needs to engage with Mattingly. I am not taking potshots at a conveniently dead author – Mattingly’s study remains a tour de force, and attractively convincing, but it requires the now familiar denigration of the medieval, even whilst appearing to praise its ‘common sense’, which the evidence forces one to reject, as Lazzarini’s revised chronology attests. 26. John Watkins, ‘Toward a New Diplomatic History of Medieval and Early Modern Europe’, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, 38/1 (2008), 1–14 (p. 2). 27. I am aware of the limitations of setting a terminus a quo, and following Lazzarini’s proposal of 1350 is not to suggest a temporal Big Bang that occurred at a specific point, whereby the culture of diplomatic exchange transformed everywhere at once. Indeed, Lazzarini’s own term, polygenesis, is a useful means of offsetting such a position.

41

CIC_rev.indd 41

15/12/2020 10:56:35

New Centur y Chaucer

28. Lazzarini, Communication and Conflict, p. 17. 29. Arturo Segre (ed.), ‘I dispacci di Cristoforo da Piacenza, procuratore mantovano alla corte pontificia (1371–1383)’, Archivio storico italiano, 43 (1909), 27–95 (pp. 75–8). 30. On Petrarch’s disgust at the Babylonian exile see Rvf 136–8 and his Liber sine nomine; on his Roman agenda see the Invectiva contra eum qui maledixit Italie and his letters to Urban V urging and celebrating his return to Rome (Sen. VII.1; IX.1). The displacement of the papacy and the Great Schism were of course significant contributing factors to changes in diplomatic practice (see for example Lazzarini, pp. 14, 42–5). 31. Correale and Hamel (eds), Sources and Analogues, I, 122–3. For further discussion of this episode see Larry Scanlon, ‘What’s the Pope Got to Do with It? Forgery, Didacticism, and Desire in the Clerk’s Tale’, New Medieval Literatures, 6 (2003), 129–66. 32. ClT IV.737–49. All quotations of Chaucer are taken from The Riverside Chaucer, gen. ed. Larry D. Benson, third edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988). Petrarch was born in 1304. The papacy departed from Rome in 1309. 33. Lazzarini, Communication and Conflict, p. 54. 34. On the uses of the different seals available to the English monarch see Pierre Chaplais, English Diplomatic Practice in the Middle Ages (London and New York: Hambledon and London, 2003), pp. 94–102. 35. Chaplais, English Diplomatic Practice, p. 78. 36. See Martin M. Crow and Clair C. Olson, Chaucer Life-Records (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1966), p. 33. 37. Crow and Olson, Chaucer Life-Records, pp. 32–3. 38. Crow and Olson, Chaucer Life-Records, p. 34. 39. Chaplais, English Diplomatic Practice, p. 137. 40. Chaplais, English Diplomatic Practice, p. 137 n. 400. 41. England had signed a peace treaty with Genoa in February 1371, followed by commercial treaties in September 1372. The certificate for the vessels obtained by de Provan was dated 18 December 1371. See Crow and Olson, Chaucer Life-Records, pp. 39–40. Genoa was famous for its naval fleet, which increasingly was used in the fourteenth century to protect trade routes. 42. Isabella Lazzarini, ‘The Preparatory Work: From Choice to Instructions’, in Azzolini and Lazzarini (eds), Italian Renaissance Diplomacy, pp. 11–36 (pp. 12–13). 43. Crow and Olson, Chaucer Life-Records, p. 54. 44. Crow and Olson, Chaucer Life-Records, p. 56. The warrant for payment (13 May) is in French, whilst the Issue Roll entry of payment (28 May) is in Latin. 45. It might be a question of standard protocol, although in diplomatic practice Chaucer was equivalent to de Berkeley, as in a separate document associated with the mission Chaucer is also entitled nuncio regis. See Crow and Olson,

42

CIC_rev.indd 42

15/12/2020 10:56:35

Chaucer and Italian Culture

Chaucer Life-Records, pp. 57–8. However, protocols of hierarchy can be observed in the fact that Berkeley received 20s. a day compared to Chaucer’s 13s. 4d. 46. Chaplais, English Diplomatic Practice (p. 95) notes that in cases of interception letters close stood a greater chance of being opened, thus losing their seals, and so letters patent would be preferable. Confidential material was not usually for correspondence but to be delivered by the envoy. 47. For an overview of the cursus as a stylistic model see Chaplais, English Diplomatic Practice, p. 113. 48. See Lazzarini, Communication and Conflict, pp. 14–15. 49. All quotations from the Decameron are taken from the edition of Vittore Branca, Tutte le opere di Giovanni Boccaccio, vol. IV (Milan: Mondadori, 1976), p. 893. All translations of the Decameron are taken from G. H. McWilliam’s second edition (London: Penguin, 1995), p. 784. 50. Sen. XVII.3 in Correale and Hamel (eds), Sources and Analogues, I.112–13. 51. Mattingly, Renaissance Diplomacy, p. 23. 52. Anne Middleton, ‘The Clerk and His Tale: Some Literary Contexts’, Studies in the Age of Chaucer, 2 (1980), 121–50 (pp. 130–2). 53. See Rossiter, Chaucer and Petrarch, pp. 172–3. 54. See Chaplais, English Diplomatic Practice, pp. 102–27 (p. 112), and Maxson, ‘Diplomatic Oratory’. 55. ClT IV.87–105, 141–2. 56. On the choice of diplomat see Frigo, ‘Prudence and Experience’, p. 22. 57. VII.1000–8. Chaucer’s reference to ‘wise advocatz lerned in the lawe’ reminds us that the Marquis of Saluzzo sent his advocatus to the pope in 1375. 58. Du Rosier, cited in Mattingly, Renaissance Diplomacy, p. 25. 59. Mattingly, Renaissance Diplomacy, p. 26. 60. Tr. IV.127–47. 61. Filostrato IV.13.1–2. All quotations of Filostrato are taken from Vittore Branca’s edition in Tutte le opere di Giovanni Boccaccio, vol. II (Milan: Mondadori, 1964). 62. Filostrato IV.13.5–8. 63. Tr. I. 67. Calchas is, moreover, a traitor who is seeking to return to Troy the person who will ultimately cause the city’s destruction: ‘Antenor, that broughte hem to mischaunce! / For he was after traytour to the toun // Of Troye’ (IV.203–5). There is an interesting intertextual node here: Chaucer’s depiction of Calchas’ deceit and the exchange of Antenor for Criseyde was clearly influenced by the Dares/Dictys tradition of the treachery of Antenor and Aeneas, in particular the version by Guido Colonna. When Lydgate translates the episode from Colonna in his Troy Book (IV.4536–4636) he draws on Chaucer’s Calchas. See Henry Bergen (ed.), Lydgate’s Troy Book, 4 vols, Early English Text Society (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner & Co. and Oxford University Press, 1906–35), III, 697–700. 64. Tr. IV.71–5, 106–12.

43

CIC_rev.indd 43

15/12/2020 10:56:35

New Centur y Chaucer

65. Du Rosier, pp. 4–5, cited in Donald E. Queller, The Office of Ambassador in the Middle Ages (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1967), p. 60. 66. Jessica Wolfe, Humanism, Machinery, and Renaissance Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 91. 67. Tr. V.897–9. 68. Tr. IV.178–80. 69. Tr. IV.85. 70. Tr. IV.141, 145–7. 71. Tracey A. Sowerby, ‘Early Modern Diplomatic History’, History Compass, 14/9 (2016), 441–56 (p. 456). 72. See ‘The Trial of the Fox’, in Denton Fox (ed.), The Poems of Robert Henryson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981), ll. 997–8. Derek Pearsall describes Lydgate’s de luxe account of Henry VI’s entry as ‘a souvenir programme’, prompting one to ask what is the diplomatic function and value of such works. See Pearsall’s John Lydgate (1371–1449): A Bio-bibliography (Victoria, BC: University of Victoria Press, 1997), p. 170. Indeed, why stop with the dead white males? Some of the most interesting work taking place in early modern diplomatic studies is based around female diplomats and diplomacy beyond Europe – as both Watkins and Sowerby note in their respective surveys – both of which areas medievalists are apt to expand in a number of exciting ways.

44

CIC_rev.indd 44

15/12/2020 10:56:35

2

THE HAUNTING OF GEOFFREY CHAUCER: DANTE, BOCCACCIO AND THE GHOSTLY POETICS OF THE TRECENTO James Robinson

Burying the Dead – Towards an Immaterial Poetics By the summer of 1349 a young boy from the prosperous Vintry ward of the city of London has, somewhat miraculously, lived through a cruel spring. For much of the previous year his life has been divided between two places; whilst the family kept their large tenement on Thames Street, his father has taken a job in Southampton as a deputy to the king’s butler.1 But by the hot summer months of June and July, the boy is back full-time in the streets where, since his birth there, he has lived as part of a close-knit, well-known family; however, whilst the place is the same, everything else has changed.2 For in the weeks between April and May of that year, most of his family has died. His grandfather, who had raised the boy’s father (his wife’s son from a previous marriage) as his own; his uncle (his father’s half-brother, colleague and old army buddy); most of the relatives on his mother’s side of the family – all have succumbed to the plague which has, for the last nine months, been ravaging London, leaving the streets of the city and the population in disarray.3

CIC_rev.indd 45

15/12/2020 10:56:35

New Centur y Chaucer

By necessity, one of the functions of social life that continued in the devastated city was the burial of the dead.4 The impetus for this was both coldly logistic but also emotional; as Jean-Claude Schmitt has discussed, funerary practices at this point in the Middle Ages served to perform an essential work of cultural memory; or rather, a work of forgetting in which burial rites and the accompanying culture of postmortem ‘remembrance’ in fact functioned ‘to help the living separate from the dead, to shorten the latter’s stay in purgatorial punishment … and finally, to enable the living to forget the deceased’.5 Given which function, it is perhaps not surprising that even in the spring and summer of 1349, when the plague was at its height, this memorative ritual was not wholly abandoned. As Christopher Dyer has observed, there is a need to shift the ‘lurid’ tone of cultural imagining around the plague of 1349 away from images of ‘plague pits’ and ‘corpses being tipped hastily into great holes’ and towards a view of ‘a civilized and organized society’ creating and expanding cemeteries where the dead were buried, often in coffins, in ‘an orderly and dignified fashion side by side’.6 For the wealthier of London’s citizens, more elaborate funerary practices than simple coffin burial continued that year. Alongside the concern for the material care of dependants, in the 104 surviving wills written in the city in April 1349 we can see a commitment to the continuing practice of the kinds of cultural memorial and remembrance that Schmitt has identified as key facets of medieval mortuary culture.7 This holds true for the family of the little boy from the Vintry ward: on 12 April 1349, Easter Day, his grandfather left instructions in his will for the establishment of a chantry at the church of St Mary Aldermary for the purgatorial benefit of his son Thomas (the boy’s uncle, who had died sometime in the few days since making his own will on 7 April) and his late wife, Mary.8 From Schmitt’s perspective, this desire to maintain the singing of a memorial mass fulfilled both an eschatological and a social function. It was expressive of the desire, in effect, to ensure that the dead stayed dead: to enable their existential transition within the emotional and imaginative lives of the living and to prevent their absence becoming a lasting presence in these lives, triggering their emergence, in these terms, as ‘ghosts’.9

46

CIC_rev.indd 46

15/12/2020 10:56:35

Chaucer and Italian Culture

Unfortunately for the little boy, well intentioned though his grandfather’s attempt to lay the dead through ritual and social convention may have been, a stronger magic of social consequence was at work. As has long been remarked, the tenacity of the English economy in the face of the plague of 1349 was considerable.10 Everything from labour practices to upland settlement patterns may have shifted, but ultimately the social and economic fabric (which had already been intractably altered by the Great Famine of 1315–22) held firm after what Dyer has justifiably termed the ‘unimaginable catastrophe’ of the mortality rate of the Black Death.11 And so, once their relatives were dead and buried, the boy from the Vintry ward’s remaining family prospered. Their wealth increased, as did their material possessions and – most importantly – their opportunities for advancement in life. In short, the boy who lost his grandfather and uncle at the age of eight or nine benefited handsomely from their deaths.12 Thus, for all that the chantry and the masses and the burial rites might have helped distance him from the loss of his relatives to the plague, their absence would be clearly inscribed in his new material circumstances. In this respect, their memory was not to be ‘gradually sent on to oblivion’, but would remain a ghostly presence in his life’s trajectory, and he – like many others whose circumstances changed after the plague – would be haunted by the trauma on which his new life was built.13 The emotional effect of this present absence on the little boy from the Vintry ward who would, of course, grow up to be the poet Geoffrey Chaucer, is at once both obvious and incalculable. In her recent, thoroughly researched biography, Marion Turner has argued that ‘the horrors of the Black Death must be seen in the context of a society in which death routinely struck people down’, and which led to a different ‘horizon of expectation’ for family relations in Chaucer’s England.14 Whilst commendably historicist in its social conditioning of the understanding of mourning, this position is of a piece with Turner’s more problematic framing of the scope of her study through the metaphor of Chaucer’s ‘spaces and places’, and her contention that this methodology will allow access to Chaucer’s ‘imaginative development’ whilst leaving his ‘emotional life’ necessarily

47

CIC_rev.indd 47

15/12/2020 10:56:35

New Centur y Chaucer

‘beyond the biographer’s reach’.15 That distinction – between imagination and emotion – seems a little incoherent (indeed, Turner speculates freely elsewhere on the psychological and emotional experiences of Chaucer and medieval people more widely), and it is certainly hard to sustain, particularly given how Turner’s rationale – that Chaucer left no ‘personal correspondence, diaries, or records of conversations’ – would seem to locate the material archive as the sine qua non of the ‘emotional life’.16 In this respect, we can see that Turner’s ‘spatial’ biography arises out of a dominant trend in Chaucer studies – and in medieval studies more widely – which, for the last twenty-five years or so has tended to privilege the reading of medieval culture through the material context of spatial dynamics. This is a trend which finds its intellectual foundation in the phenomenology of Martin Heidegger – a foundation almost universally unacknowledged by its adherents but on which the whole edifice stands.17 In Heidegger’s conception of the interrelation of what he terms ‘building’ and ‘dwelling’, we find the originary expression of the notion that interaction with the material world is simultaneously determined by and determinative of the intellectual, emotional and spiritual structures of a society.18 Or, as Turner puts it: ‘the arrangement of space participates in the very construction of identity: our understanding of the nature of selfhood is contingent upon our understanding of private and public spaces.’19 Perhaps the most characteristic and lastingly important expression of this materialist poetics within Chaucer studies is David Wallace’s comparative historicism of place and space in his reading of Chaucer’s Italian engagements.20 This work arguably established a dominant mode of Chaucerian reading in which spatial poetics became the key metaphor, and in turn led to the tradition of which Turner’s study and its commitment to read Chaucer’s life through the spaces and places he inhabited is the latest, and most exhaustive, example.21 At its strongest this materialist poetics can re-energise and rejuvenate stale readings, directing our attention to rewarding historical complexities which would otherwise have been obscured, and can even helpfully return us to the overlooked material contexts of Chaucerian textuality.22 But with its relentless emphasis on empiricism, this poetics

48

CIC_rev.indd 48

15/12/2020 10:56:35

Chaucer and Italian Culture

can also become overly narrow, and even risk reading contemporary forms of materialism back onto the Middle Ages in ways which – whilst empirically exciting – can ultimately seem interpretatively thin and even, at times, poetically myopic. However, it is not my intention to indulge in polemic against the materialist poetics which have been demonstrably successful in reading a wide variety of Chaucer’s works. Instead, I simply want to consider whether we can broaden the terms of our critical metaphors once more and offer a complementary ‘immaterial’ poetics which can work alongside the current empiricist paradigm to put the ‘ghost’ back in the materialist machinery without necessarily breaking or replacing it.23 In this respect, the notion of Chaucer as shaped not only by the places and spaces he inhabited but also by the trauma of his youth – haunted, in fact, by the present absence of his deceased relatives and the other victims of the plague – seems a useful place to start. In doing so, I’m not suggesting that we simply see Chaucer through a twentiethcentury lens as a ‘traumatised writer’, but rather that consideration of the notions of absence and presence, of ghosts and haunting that we have seen surface already, might offer a route by which to develop an understanding of another aspect of Chaucerian poetics which can both respond to and widen the materialist approach.24 After all, in Chaucer’s own usage in The Romaunt of the Rose (l. 6080) ‘hauntyng’ conveys both a sense of action and a place of dwelling. And so, by pursuing the possibility of a haunted poetics for Chaucer, we may well find that the emotional experience of the death of almost his entire family was every bit as poetically resonant as the sexually suggestive tunics worn during his teenage years.25 To explore an immaterial approach to Chaucer’s poetics, we might consider what were – after the plague bacilli – perhaps the second most life-changing Italian imports he encountered: the works of Dante and Boccaccio.26 Other essays in this book illuminatingly explore the circumstances of Chaucer’s travels to and literary and diplomatic interactions with Italy, and so rather than revisit these issues, I will instead be exploring the ways in which Chaucer’s early experience of the presence of loss and absence would have left him uniquely receptive to

49

CIC_rev.indd 49

15/12/2020 10:56:35

New Centur y Chaucer

the ghostly dynamics of a trecento poetics in the works of Dante and Boccaccio which revolves around a form of textual haunting. In this respect, the focus of my discussion is not on the substance of Chaucer’s literary response to the Black Death (or the supposed ‘lack’ thereof), but rather on how the dynamics of present absence encoded by this formative experience impacted both his reading and creative engagement with Italian literature.27 We will thus first consider how Chaucer would have observed the development of a poetics of present absence in a key exchange between Dante and Boccaccio, before then considering what the implications might be of uncovering the inscription of these same poetics within one of Chaucer’s key Italianate texts.

‘Mio figlio ov’ è?’ – Dante and the Poetic Ghost of Guido Cavalcanti The Commedia has been called a ghost story before; but if it is a ghost story, then it is a significantly inverted one.28 In the otherworld of the Commedia it is the living who are the ‘ghosts’ – they represent the presence of an absence felt by the shades of the dead, the absence, indeed, of the material form of life.29 This present absence is a recurrent theme throughout the Inferno and Purgatorio, such as when Charon identifies Dante-pilgrim as ‘anima viva’ (Inf. 3.88) as he waits on the shore of the Acheron, or in the encounter with Casella in Purgatorio 2 where both pilgrim and shades are moved by the ‘maraviglia’ of each other’s presence. But the point at which this ‘ghosting’ by the living of the dead touches most deeply into the heart of Dante’s poetics is in one of the most celebrated cantos of the whole Commedia, Inferno 10. In the sixth circle of Hell, Dante-pilgrim and Virgil find themselves in amongst the ‘sepolcri’ of a group of a shades whose entombment is an elegant example of the contrapasso meted out for their sin of heresy. As Virgil tells the inquisitive pilgrim:   Suo cimitero da questa parte hanno con Epicuro tutti suoi seguaci, che l’anima col corpo morta fanno.30

50

CIC_rev.indd 50

15/12/2020 10:56:35

Chaucer and Italian Culture

Epicurus and his followers have their cemetery in this part, who make the soul die with the body. (Inf. 10.13–15)

The relevance of this heretical doctrine of Epicurean mortalism, which denies the immortality of the soul, to the issue of ghosts and the manifestation of present absence is immediate and clear.31 If there is no survival of the soul after the death of the body, then there can be no ghosts, whether in the form of shades on the Earth, or living presences like Dante-pilgrim walking in the otherworld. Indeed, the threat which this doctrine poses to the basic tenets of Dante’s project in the Commedia is obvious, and his refutation of this poetic threat is a topic to which we will return later. The canto then proceeds to explore the flaws of both perception and understanding which Dante sees as underlying this mortalist heresy through two of the most celebrated encounters in the whole poem. Firstly, with the famously prideful and disdaining Ghibelline leader Farinata degli Uberti, whose voice suddenly rises out of one of the tombs or ‘arche’ (Inf. 10.29) and accosts Dante-pilgrim with another marker of his ‘ghostly’ presence in the otherworld:   ‘O Tosco che per la città del foco vivo ten vai così parlando onesto piacciati di restare in questo loco.’ ‘O Tuscan, who through the city of fire, alive, walk along speaking so modestly, let it please you to stop in this place.’ (Inf. 10.22–4)

After which address, Farinata engages Dante-pilgrim in a discourse surfacing issues of civic identity, heredity and – most importantly – exile within the poem. However, it is the second encounter which is the focus of our concern:   Allor surse a la vista scoperchiata Un’ombra, lungo questa, infino al mento: credo che s’era in ginocchie levata.

51

CIC_rev.indd 51

15/12/2020 10:56:35

New Centur y Chaucer

  Dintorno mi guardò, come talento avesse di veder s’altri era meco, e poi che ’l sospecciar fu tutto spento,   piangendo disse: ‘Se per questo cieco carcere vai per altezza d’ingegno, mio figlio ov’ è? e perché non è teco?’ Then a shade rose up, discovered to sight as far as the chin, alongside the first one; I think it had risen to its knees. It looked around me, as anxious to see whether another were with me, and after its peering was entirely spent, weeping it said: ‘If through this blind prison you are going because of your high genius, where is my son, and why is he not with you?’ (Inf. 10.52–60)

The commentary tradition – working with the elliptic statements here and the exchange of recognitions which follow in the poem – has established the identity of the unnamed shade as Cavalcante de’ Cavalcanti. In his Esposizioni sopra la Comedia di Dante, Boccaccio filled in the backstory: il quale qui parla con l’autore, fu un cavalier fiorentino chiamato messer Cavalcante de’ Cavalcanti, leggiadro e ricco cavaliere, e seguì l’oppinion d’Epicuro in non credere che l’anima dopo la morte del corpo vivesse e che il nostro sommo bene fosse ne’ diletti carnali; e per questo, sì come eretico, è dannato.32 The one who speaks with the author was a Florentine knight called Messer Cavalcante de’ Cavalcanti, a graceful and rich knight, who followed the opinion of Epicurus in not believing that the soul lives after the death of the body, and in believing that the height of perfection lies in carnal delights; because of this, as a heretic, he is damned.

Placed amongst his (allegedly) fellow Epicureans, Cavalcante is a striking figure, but not one that Dante-pilgrim – working without the benefit

52

CIC_rev.indd 52

15/12/2020 10:56:35

Chaucer and Italian Culture

of Boccaccio’s gloss – immediately recognises. Instead, we are told that after this initial exchange the pilgrim requires an act of deduction to work out who is speaking: ‘Le sue parole e ’l modo de la pena / m’avean di costui già letto il nome’ (‘his words and the manner of his punishment had already read to me his name’) (Inf. 10.64–5). This act of reading on the part of the pilgrim not only emphasises Dante’s connection of the historical figure of Cavalcante de’ Cavalcanti with the heresy of Epicureanism, but also turns on the most significant words in the initial exchange: ‘mio figlio, ov’ è?’ (Inf. 10.60). It is Dante-pilgrim’s recognition of this ‘son’ as his own friend, the poet Guido Cavalcanti, which enables him to infer the absent identity of Guido’s father, Cavalcante de’ Cavalcanti. And it is through the treatment of Guido Cavalcanti that a poetics of present absence works most directly within the canto. Cavalcanti has been called an ‘absence’ in the Commedia, a ‘great nonpresence among the poets’ with whom Dante engages; and yet, he has also been characterised as a ‘stubbornly subterranean presence, even in the moment of his most manifest absence’, a kind of hidden stratum in Dante’s poetics.33 That these seemingly divergent characterisations of Cavalcanti’s place within the poem should all have come from so careful and astute a reader as Teodolinda Barolini is indicative of the ghostly tension that marks the passage of the duecento poet through the otherworld of the Commedia. And it is a tension that manifests clearly in Cavalcanti’s presentation within Inferno 10, where his spectral presence is signalled most starkly by Dante-pilgrim’s naming of him in answer to what Robert Durling has perceptively called the ‘central question’ of the whole canto – ‘mio figlio, ov’ è?’:   E io a lui: ‘Da me stesso non vegno: colui ch’attende là per qui mi mena forse cui Guido vostro ebbe a disdegno.’34 And I to him: ‘I do not come on my own: he who is waiting over there leads me through here, perhaps to one your Guido had in disdain.’ (Inf. 10.61–3)

53

CIC_rev.indd 53

15/12/2020 10:56:35

New Centur y Chaucer

This naming of ‘Guido vostro’ bestows a somewhat ‘negative privilege’ on Cavalcanti, as Barolini has observed, rendering him the only love poet to be mentioned by name in the Inferno (and by the familiar name, furthermore, by which, in the earlier Vita Nuova, Dante had identified him as the ‘primo de li miei amici’, VN 3.14).35 And once we are alerted to Guido as the subject of the exchange between Dante-pilgrim and Cavalcante, we realise that the first marker of Guido Cavalcanti’s presence in Inferno 10 was the observation of his absence:   Dintorno mi guardò, come talento avesse di veder s’altri era meco … It looked around me, as anxious to see whether another were with me … (Inf. 10.55–6).

Cavalcante’s searching for the absent ‘altri’ initiates a discourse on the presence of the absence of Guido Cavalcanti which extends through one of the most discussed cruces in the whole Commedia:   E io a lui: ‘Da me stesso non vegno: colui ch’attende là per qui mi mena forse cui Guido vostro ebbe a disdegno.’   Le sue parole e ’l modo de la pena m’avean di costui già letto il nome; però fu la riposta così piena.   Di sùbito drizzato gridò: ‘Come dicesti? “elli ebbe”? non viv’ elli ancora? non fiere li occhi suoi il dolce lume?’   Quando s’accorse d’alcuna dimora ch’io facëa dinanzi a la risposta, supin ricadde e più non parve fora. And I to him: ‘I do not come on my own: he who is waiting over there leads me through here, perhaps to one your Guido had in disdain.’ His words and the manner of his punishment had already

54

CIC_rev.indd 54

15/12/2020 10:56:35

Chaucer and Italian Culture

read to me his name; therefore was my reply so full. Of a sudden risen to his feet, he cried: ‘How did you say? “he had”? Is he no longer alive? Does the sweet light no longer strike his eyes?’ When he perceived a certain delay I made before replying, he fell back supine and appeared no more outside. (Inf. 10.61–72)

This passage works through a chain of functioning absences. Firstly, the absence of understanding on the part of Cavalcante, whose interpretation of Dante-pilgrim’s hesitation as indicating the death of his son emphasises the canto’s concern with heretically impaired perception.36 Then there is a concomitant absence of clarity on the part of Dante-pilgrim who, once Farinata has hijacked the conversation again for some thirty-six lines, will ask the Ghibelline to clarify to Cavalcante ‘che ’l suo nato è co’ vivi ancor congiunto’ (‘that his son is still joined with the living’) (Inf. 10.111). And finally there is even an absence of grammatical certainty in Dante-pilgrim’s initial reply, with the strange grammatical forms of ‘ebbe’ and ‘cui’ in the line ‘forse cui Guido vostro ebbe a disdegno’ opening the kind of profitable ambiguity that has left readers discussing this moment for nearly seven hundred years.37 But the most striking feature of this moment is the imaginative presence of the absent figure of Guido Cavalcanti himself. To clarify the complexity of the representation happening in these lines of the canto, we should consider the fictive frame of the Commedia itself. The events related in the poem, beginning with Dante-pilgrim’s losing of himself in the ‘selva oscura’ (Inf. 1.2), are traditionally dated to Easter week, 1300.38 At which point, the historical Guido Cavalcanti was indeed still alive and feeling the ‘dolce lume’ strike his eyes in his native city of Florence, although this would not be the case for much longer. In May 1300, Cavalcanti was numbered amongst a list of members of the Black and White Guelf factions who were exiled from Florence in yet another doomed attempt to quell the city’s internecine conflict. In the days following Cavalcanti’s exile, Dante himself would be elevated to the position of one of the six priors of Florence, and by August 1300 Cavalcanti would die of illness whilst still in exile from the city which his friend now – briefly – ruled.39

55

CIC_rev.indd 55

15/12/2020 10:56:35

New Centur y Chaucer

From this account we can see the care with which Dante sets and constructs the encounter between the Pilgrim and Cavalcante de’ Cavalcanti; within the fiction of the Commedia, nothing that Dante-pilgrim says is untrue: Guido Cavalcanti is still living at the moment that his father asks after him. But from the textual perspective of the Inferno (which was composed c.1307–10), the margins are extremely close: within months of the moment Dante writes about, Guido will indeed be dead. So, at the balance point of Inferno 10, Cavalcanti is made imaginatively present but existentially absent within the otherworld; a tension which introduces a further absence into this moment in the text: the absence of judgement.40 Dante, who passes a poetic verdict on hundreds of souls encountered throughout the three cantiche of the Commedia (a judgement which he somewhat blithely ascribes to the ‘somma sapïenza’ and ‘giustizia’ (Inf. 3.6, 3.4) of God), here goes out of his way to reserve it. As Durling has observed, the issue of Cavalcanti’s possible damnation or salvation ‘haunts Dante’; he isn’t willing to condemn Guido either by placing him in the ‘sepolcri’ of Inferno 10 alongside his father and father-in-law (Cavalcanti was married to Farinata’s daughter Beatrice), or by signalling his death and thus inferring his presence elsewhere in the otherworld of the Inferno or Purgatorio.41 Instead, Guido is kept an absence, present only through the characters’ speculations on this absence. There is a delicacy on Dante’s part in his eschatological treatment of Cavalcanti which can be read as expressive of guilt over his own part in causing Guido’s death by refusing to reverse his friend’s exile.42 Certainly Dante’s reserve over Cavalcanti would seem to contravene what has previously been suggested as a reason for Chaucer’s apparent resistance to an otherworldly Dantean project in his own work, or even inferred as a distaste characterising his reading of the Italian poet: that ‘passing off your own opinions as eternal divine judgement’ was verging on heresy and ‘not the task of the poet’.43 However, Dante complicates matters further by contravening this resistance to judgement through another aspect of Cavalcanti’s imaginative presence within Inferno  10. As we will see presently, it was a commonly held view in trecento Florence that Guido Cavalcanti, like his father Cavalcante de’ Cavalcanti, was an Epicurean mortalist, or at

56

CIC_rev.indd 56

15/12/2020 10:56:35

Chaucer and Italian Culture

least such was Boccaccio’s sense some forty years later when he came to write the Decameron. And so, through the way in which ‘Guido vostro’ imaginatively haunts the encounter with Cavalcante in the Inferno, Guido Cavalcanti is made a presence through his absence in the sixth circle, placed – on a representational level – among the other Epicurean heretics. Such ghostly metatextual inclusion is wholly necessary to the discursive defence of his poetic project which Dante mounts in the canto. As Barolini has astutely shown, the doctrine of rationalist materialism embodied in Cavalcanti’s canzone ‘Donna mi prega’ wherein love is seen as simply ‘a natural passion incapable of accommodating significance, metaphor, or beatitude’ poses a fundamental danger to Dante’s project.44 As we saw earlier, Epicurean mortalism already embodied a severe threat to the fictional scheme of the Commedia as a journey through the otherworld, and now Cavalcanti’s materialism threatened to usurp Dante’s transcendental presentation of Beatrice and to deny the possibility of earthly access to the transcendent altogether. Barolini has discussed how ‘Donna mi prega’ is both poetically ‘invoked’ and discursively ‘condemned’ within Inferno 10 through the echoing of its rhyme words, and we might add to that now the sense in which Cavalcanti is imaginatively ‘presenced’ amongst the heretics – and thus imaginatively condemned alongside them – through the very discussion of his absence. In this respect, Dante fashions a form of poetics which functions through present absence to banish the ghost of Guido Cavalcanti. The poem turns in Inferno 10 on the presence of a figure whose significance lies wholly in his absence; indeed, we could note further that the naming convention ‘Guido’ which works to identify Cavalcanti’s presence requires us to reach beyond the text of the Inferno in order to decode it, and draw on either the Vita Nuova or on Cavalcanti’s own rime – a source which will be even more closely implicated in a game of ‘present absence’ surrounding the further appearance of ‘Guido’ in Purgatorio  11.45 The example of a poetics which thus functions on both a representational and discursive level through the present absence of other texts and figures would in turn be observed and developed by perhaps the single most influential author Chaucer ever

57

CIC_rev.indd 57

15/12/2020 10:56:35

New Centur y Chaucer

encountered. But, as we’ll now see, when Boccaccio responded to the ghostly dynamics of Inferno 10, he did so in a way which both demonstrated an elaboration of these Dantean poetics of present absence but also fundamentally called Dante’s conclusions into question.

From ‘Guido vostro’ to ‘casa vostra’ – Dante in the Brigata, Cavalcanti in the Graveyard Whilst Boccaccio’s most direct response to Inferno 10 was his discussion of the canto in the Esposizioni, his most creative response – and the one which best embodies the ghostly poetics we have been tracing – was completed some forty years earlier in the form of Decameron 6.9. There is a long critical tradition of seeing this ‘strategically placed’ novella – in which Boccaccio relates the encounter of Brunetto Brunelleschi and his brigata of toffs with Guido Cavalcanti in the graveyard around the Baptistery in Florence – as being in dialogue with Inferno  10.46 Interestingly, according to Martin Eisner, this tradition seems to have originated with the surprisingly modernist figure of Ezra Pound who, in 1932, pointed out – in typically elliptical fashion – a connection between Boccaccio’s story and Dante’s canto in a foreword to his edition of translations from Cavalcanti.47 As we will see, the function of the connection that Pound thus established between the novella and Inferno 10 draws upon the same poetics of present absence which we have been discussing. In the introduction to Decameron 6.9, the novella is offered as an example of a bon mot (‘un sì fatto motto’, Dec. 6.9.3), and as we will see, the significance of the story does indeed turn on ‘la maggior villania del mondo’ (‘the worst insult in the world’) which Boccaccio puts into the mouth of Guido Cavalcanti.48 But this significance is unlocked through the way in which the insult reaches beyond the circumstance of the text, and implicates an otherwise absent presence. Indeed, much as Cavalcanti is marked ‘absent’ from Inferno 10, Dante’s manifestation in Boccaccio’s novella is evoked through the spectral presence of the Commedia, a presence indicated not so much through direct quotation or allusion but rather through imaginative engagement and negation.

58

CIC_rev.indd 58

15/12/2020 10:56:35

Chaucer and Italian Culture

At the outset of the encounter between Guido and Betto Brunelleschi’s brigata of glitterati the cemetery in which they corner him is described by Boccaccio in terms which subtly echo the setting of Inferno 10: Ora avvenne un giorno che, essendo Guido partito d’Orto San Michele e venutosene per lo Corso degli Adimari infino a San Giovanni, il quale spesse volte era suo cammino, essendo arche grandi di marmo, che oggi sono in Santa Reparata, e molte altre dintorno a San Giovanni, e egli essendo tralle colonne del porfido che vi sono e quelle arche e la porta di San Giovanni, che serrata era, messer Betto con sua brigata a caval venendo su per la piazza di Santa Reparata, vedendo Guido là tra quelle sepolture. Now, one day, Guido had walked from Orsanmichele along the Corso degli Adimari as far as San Giovanni, which was a favourite walk of his because it took him past those great marble arks, now to be found in Santa Reparata, and the numerous other graves that lie around San Giovanni. As he was threading his way among the arks, between the porphyry columns that stand in that spot and the door of San Giovanni, which was locked, Messer Betto and his friends came riding through the piazza of Santa Reparata, and saw Guido there among the sepulchres. (Dec. 6.9.10, translation modified)

Durling has observed that the novella can be thought of as a ‘tissue of allusions’ to Inferno 10, but if this is the case then here the tissue is particularly fine.49 We might note the geographical specificity that Boccaccio employs in tracing the path of Guido’s habitual walk and remember how Dante patterned the City of Dis in the Inferno on the cityscape of Florence.50 But the most striking aspect of Boccaccio’s evocation of Inferno  10 is perhaps the subtlety of his lexis in this passage. ‘Arca’ is a relatively rare word in the Commedia, occurring only eight times in the whole work, and only in reference to the stone tombs of the heretics in Inferno (Inf. 9.125, 10.29) does Dante use it in

59

CIC_rev.indd 59

15/12/2020 10:56:35

New Centur y Chaucer

a mortuary sense.51 And so it is difficult not to see Boccaccio’s choice of ‘arche’ over the more common ‘tombe’ (occurring five times in the Inferno alone) as a deliberate lexical alignment, raising the spectre of the ‘sepolcri’ of Inferno 10 and establishing an otherworldly character for the graveyard of Decameron 6.9. However, it is in the presentation of the character of Guido Cavalcanti himself that Boccaccio most directly presences Dante’s canto. After filling us in about the tradition of brigate and their festive celebrations in Florence, the novella proceeds to introduce Cavalcanti as a refusenik from this tradition: Tralle quali brigate n’era una di messer Betto Brunelleschi, nella quale messer Betto e’ compagni s’erano molto ingegnato di tirare Guido di messer Cavalcante de’ Cavalcanti, e non senza cagione: per ciò che, oltre a quello che egli fu un de’ miglior loici che avesse il mondo e ottimo filosofo naturale (delle quali cose poco la brigata curava), si fu egli leggiadrissimo e costumato e parlante uom molto e ogni cosa che far volle e gentile uom pertenente seppe meglio che altro uom fare; e con questo era ricchissimo, e a chiedere a lingua sapeva onorare cui nell’animo gli capeva che il valesse. Among these various companies, there was one that was led by Messer Betto Brunelleschi, into whose ranks Messer Betto and his associates had tried cunningly to draw Messer Cavalcante de’ Cavalcanti’s son, Guido. And not without reason, for apart from the fact that he was one of the finest logicians in the world and an expert natural philosopher (to none of which the company attributed very much importance), Guido was an exceedingly graceful and well-dressed man, with a marked gift for conversation, and he outshone all his contemporaries in every activity pertaining to a gentleman that he chose to undertake. And he was very rich and, so to speak, he knew how to honour those he knew at heart were worth it. (Dec.  6.9.7–8, translation modified)

60

CIC_rev.indd 60

15/12/2020 10:56:35

Chaucer and Italian Culture

In an echo of the filial relations which are the key to Guido’s identity in Inferno 10, Cavalcanti is here identified through his relation to his father Cavalcante; however, it is in the focus on Guido as philosopher and logician that we find the closest evocation of the Dantean perspective on Cavalcanti. In his presentation of Guido as ‘un de’ miglior loici’, Boccaccio not only follows the exegetical approach he would later write into his Esposizioni where, in the gloss on Cavalcanti, we are first told that ‘fu nel suo tempo reputato ottimo loico e buon filosofo’ (‘in his time he was reputed to be the best logician and a good philosopher’), and only later that ‘fu buon dicitore in rima’ (‘he was a good writer of verse’), he also echoes the transformation between how Dante presents the ‘primo de li miei amici’ in the Vita Nuova (3.14) and ‘Guido vostro’ in the conversation with Cavalcante in Inferno 10.52 As we saw, whilst Guido’s ‘lyric identity’ will be somewhat restored in Purgatorio 11, the focus of his earlier presence-through-absence is on Cavalcante’s claim that his son possesses an ‘altezza d’ingegno’ (‘a high genius’) (Inf. 10.59) at least the equal of Dante’s: a prideful emphasis on intellect which left the absent Guido implicated in the damnation of the heretical Epicureans.53 Boccaccio makes the Inferno’s implicit association of Guido Cavalcanti and Epicurean heresy tellingly specific in the Decameron: Ma a messer Betto non era mai potuto venir fatto d’averlo, e credeva egli co’ suoi compagni che ciò avvenisse per ciò che Guido alcuna volta speculando molto abstratto dagli uomini divenia; e per ciò che egli alquanto tenea della oppinione degli epicuri, si diceva tralla gente volgare che queste sue speculazioni erano solo in cercare se trovar si potesse che Iddio non fosse. However, Messer Betto had never succeeded in winning him over, and he and his companions thought that this was because of Guido’s passion for speculative reasoning, which occasionally made him appear somewhat remote from his fellow men. And since he tended to hold the opinions of the Epicureans, it was said among the common people that these speculations of his were

61

CIC_rev.indd 61

15/12/2020 10:56:35

New Centur y Chaucer

exclusively concerned with whether it could be shown that God did not exist. (Dec. 6.9.9, translation modified)

There are a number of intensifications at work in this passage which encourage the establishment of a connection between the novella and Cavalcanti’s haunting of Inferno 10, from the way in which Boccaccio ascribes to Guido the Epicureanism that his Esposizioni will only attribute to his father Cavalcante, to the elevation – through the agency of the ‘gente volgare’ – of this mortalist heresy to the level of atheism. However, there is also a connection subtly woven into the narrative frame of the novella. At the opening we are told that brigate such as Betto’s tend to ride out ‘massimamente per le feste principali o quando alcuna lieta novella di vittoria o d’altro fosse venuta nella città’ (‘most of all at the high feasts or when any news of victory or other things had come to the city’) (Dec. 6.9.6). No event in the calendar would seem better to fit these conditions of being a ‘high feast’ and also bringing tidings of (eschatological) victory to the city than Easter. In which case, when we remember the care with which Boccaccio has located the action within the graveyard of the Florentine baptistery, we are presumably witnessing an event which took place in the city prior to Cavalcanti’s exile in May 1300, a chronological alignment which would potentially locate the chronology of Decameron 6.9 in the same frame as the Inferno at Easter 1300. Given this, it is very tempting to consider the novella as a kind of ‘top side’ version of the chthonic Inferno 10, chronicling the adventure which ‘Guido’ was engaged on in the ‘dolce lume’ (Inf. 10.69) whilst Dante-pilgrim was down in the dark under the Earth, talking to Cavalcanti’s father. The notion that the fiction of Decameron 6.9 might be playing out at the same moment as the fiction of Inferno 10 strengthens the sense of Boccaccio’s story as being in ironic, questioning discourse with Dante’s ghostly presence. As Durling has perceptively highlighted, Boccaccio locates the authority for the view of Cavalcanti as an atheist ‘della oppinione degli epicuri’ (Dec. 6.9.9) in the rumour and speculation of the ‘gente volgare’.54 There is a tension within this ‘vulgar’ opinion of Guido as Epicurean which, as we saw, Boccaccio surfaces further in

62

CIC_rev.indd 62

15/12/2020 10:56:35

Chaucer and Italian Culture

his Esposizioni, where he observes of Cavalcante de’ Cavalcanti that he believed ‘che il nostro sommo bene fosse ne’ diletti carnali (‘that the height of perfection lies in carnal delights’).55 The contrast between Boccaccio’s sense of an Epicurean as someone committed to carnal delights and the withdrawn, abstracted figure of Guido in the novella is marked. Indeed, if any figures would seem to be Epicurean it would be the partying brigate whose ranks Guido staunchly refuses to join, and who number among the ‘gente volgare’ who believe him to be a heretic when they tormentingly ask him ‘quando tu avrai trovato che Idio non sia, che avrai fatto?’ (‘When you have found that God doesn’t exist, what will you do?’) (Dec. 6.9.11). This Epicurean implication certainly underlies the turn at the end of the story where the set-upon Cavalcanti confronts his accusers directly: A’ quali Guido, da lor veggendosi chiuso, prestamente disse: ‘Signori, voi mi potete dire a casa vostra ciò che vi piace;’ e posta la mano sopra una di quelle arche, che grandi erano, sì come colui che leggerissimo era, prese un salto e fusi gittato dall’altra parte, e sviluppatosi da loro se n’andò. To which Guido, finding himself surrounded, promptly replied: ‘Gentlemen, in your own house you may say whatever you like to me.’ Then placing a hand on one of the arks, which were very tall, and, like one who was very light, he vaulted over the top of it, and having escaped from them he went on his way. (Dec. 6.9.12, translation modified)

Guido’s leap is a famous crux in literary history, and there is not sufficient space here to elaborate on it at any great length; however, we might note that it does seem to carry a connotation of discursive escape when Guido lands on the ‘altra parte’ and runs away.56 The sense that Guido might be escaping a discourse beyond the persecution of Betto and the brigata is strengthened when we consider the character of his leap: Boccaccio writes that he moves ‘sì come colui che leggerissimo era’. The syntax of that phrase is somewhat Dantean in its Latinate

63

CIC_rev.indd 63

15/12/2020 10:56:35

New Centur y Chaucer

reversals, and as such is an odd expression to convey the explicit meaning of ‘leggerissimo’, of moving lightly and gracefully. But when we notice that hidden within ‘leggerissimo’ is the ghost of the verb ‘leggere’ then we can see the way in which Boccaccio’s formulation manages to suggest a sense of lightness of reading and playfulness of interpretation which is immediately relevant to this moment in the story. For Betto’s reaction to Guido’s insulting response has long been seen as the summation of a discourse of interpretation and reading within the story.57 Responding to the brigata’s amused response that Guido clearly ‘era uno smemorato’ (‘was a madman’), Betto proclaims: ‘Gli smemorati siete voi, se voi non l’avete inteso: egli ci ha onestamente e in poche parole detta la maggior villania del mondo, per ciò che, se voi riguarderete bene, queste arche sono le case de’ morti, per ciò che in esse si pongono e dimorano i morti; le quali egli dice che son nostra casa, a dimostrarci che noi e gli altri uomini idioti e non letterati siamo, a comparazion di lui e degli altri uomini scienziati, peggio che uomini morti, e per ciò, qui essendo, noi siamo a casa nostra.’ ‘You’re the ones who are out of your minds, if you can’t see what he meant. In a few words he has neatly given us one of the worst insults in the world, because when you come to consider it, these arks are the houses of the dead, this being the place where the dead are laid to rest and where they dwell. By saying that this was our house, he wanted to show us that we and all the other idiotic people and the unlettered are, by comparison to him and the other learned people, worse off than the dead. So that, being here in a graveyard, we are in our own house.’ (Dec. 6.9.14, translation modified)

Whether Betto is correct in his interpretation, or rather what his interpretation of Guido’s insult might tell us about Boccaccian theories of reading, has been the subject of much debate.58 But we can simply note that in this final moment of the story there is an alignment drawn

64

CIC_rev.indd 64

15/12/2020 10:56:35

Chaucer and Italian Culture

between the brigata and the ‘gente volgare’ who supposed Guido to be an Epicurean heretic, and their final manifestation as the ‘uomini idioti’ who have not understood Cavalcanti’s burning joke. That alignment with the ‘uomini idioti’ should make us think again about the ‘gente volgare’; as we saw, Boccaccio locates the attribution of Epicurean mortalism to Guido Cavalcanti in the mouths of these ‘vulgar people’, an opinion which, as his Esposizioni of Inferno  10 made clearer, he also seems to attribute to Dante. Certainly, Boccaccio would have seen this opinion on Cavalcanti clearly implied by Guido’s haunting imaginative presence amongst the ‘arche’ of the sixth circle of Hell. In which case, we shouldn’t miss the joke in Decameron 6.9 that perhaps the particular ‘vulgar person’ whom Boccaccio had in mind when writing a story that turns on the misunderstanding of Cavalcanti was the author of De Vulgari Eloquentia. From this perspective we can detect the absent presence of Dante (who, according to the fiction of the Commedia, was busy elsewhere that day) riding in Betto’s brigata, persecuting a man he cannot understand and ultimately ending up as tarred as they are by Betto’s proclamation of them as ‘uomini idioti’ who risk spiritual death through prejudice and a lack of proper understanding. In this respect, we can see Boccaccio as adopting Dante’s ghostly poetics to make present the poet himself in the text of Decameron 6.9, suggesting that in aligning himself with the ‘gente volgare’ in his treatment of Guido Cavalcanti in Inferno 10, Dante risks subjecting himself to a form of his own contrapasso and finding himself trapped alongside them in the ‘arche’ which are ‘le case de’ morti’ (Dec. 6.9.14). The view of Dante that thus emerges from Decameron 6.9 is a playfully ironic one, able to see the poet as both simultaneously the great author of the Commedia and also a bit of a judgemental idiot. Or certainly someone who can have fun poked at him and – most importantly – whose texts can be approached on a creative level, functioning less as a cultural monolith and more as a source for textual play and invention. Indeed, through the poetics of present absence which Boccaccio observed in Inferno 10, he seems to have found a way to use the Commedia as a way to introduce irony and multiplicity of perspective into his own

65

CIC_rev.indd 65

15/12/2020 10:56:35

New Centur y Chaucer

story. This, as we will now see, was a Boccaccian lesson in ghostly poetics from which Chaucer was to learn much.

‘The Slye Wey’: Chaucer Ghosting Dante and Boccaccio Boccaccio’s observation of a poetics of present absence within the Commedia, and his engagement of Dante in a teasing, ironic conversation, clearly demonstrate a perceptiveness which, as Robert Durling has pointed out, belies ‘the traditional view of Boccaccio as an amiable but essentially dull-witted reader’ of the poet’s work.59 Interestingly, a similar view has sometimes haunted discussion of Chaucer’s engagement with Dante, which has caused some Italianists, as Helen Cooper has put it, to think of Chaucer as being ‘a bit thick’, able to raid the Commedia as a kind of storehouse of images but unable to work with the whole.60 From this view arises the notion that Chaucer somehow refused to imitate Dante structurally, to write the ‘Dante in Inglissh’ which Lydgate attributed to him, and so arrived at a view of the Italian poet which necessitated that his Dante ‘had to be a Dante of fragments’.61 Whilst discussion of Chaucer’s reading of Boccaccio has been more willing to see substantial engagement and dialogue, there arguably remains a sense that this engagement more frequently took the form of stylistic modelling and narrative derivation, rather than the kind of careful engagement on the level of poetics which we saw Boccaccio achieve with Dante in Decameron 6.9.62 A reappraisal of Chaucer’s entire Dantean and Boccaccian engagements is arguably a task beyond any single reader, and all we can do at this juncture is consider whether Chaucer can be observed engaging with the kind of ghostly poetics which we’ve traced through the two earlier Italian texts. Nor is there space here to rehearse the developments in the last twenty years of the perennial question whether Chaucer knew the Decameron or not. But we could certainly observe that Nick Havely’s perceptive sense of the Decameron as forming a kind of ‘substrata of several of the Canterbury Tales’ suggests that ‘present absence’ might be a productive way of considering the apparent ‘lack’ of the kind of textual engagement with the Decameron that we

66

CIC_rev.indd 66

15/12/2020 10:56:35

Chaucer and Italian Culture

find with the Filocolo or the Filostrato.63 So the most pressing question at this point is where to look for signs of Chaucer’s engagement with the poetics we have been discussing. Returning briefly to materialistic and spatial metaphors, one of the richest resources for archaeological inquiry is the discovery of a workshop: from its remains we get a sense of materials taken in, techniques experimented with and developed, and the function to which the products are put. As David Wallace first noticed, the obvious ‘poetic workshop’ in relation to Chaucer’s engagement with Italian literature is the short poem Anelida and Arcite.64 This poem is more often encountered through discussion of what it is not rather than what it is: it is not (yet?) the Knight’s Tale, it is not (yet?) the Squire’s Tale, it is not finished, it is not convincing, it is not really all that experimental, it does not have a multiplicity of perspective; at times, Anelida and Arcite seems a poem defined through negation.65 It is certainly uncertain, with substantial debate existing as to that most fundamental characteristic of the Chaucerian canon, its date. But whether the poem – comprising an ‘Invocation’, a narrative ‘Story’ section, Anelida’s stylised ‘Compleynt’ and a short continuation – is an early 1370s work, a late attempt to write a George Lucas-style ‘prequel’ to give us the backstory of Arcite in the Knight’s Tale, or part of the ‘braided’ thread of works from the 1380s, ever since the work of Wallace and Boitani the Anelida has been a convincing location for exploring Chaucer’s stylistic, metrical and narrative experiments.66 As such, it is the perfect poem through which to consider Chaucer’s engagement with the ghostly trecento poetics of present absence which – as we saw at the start of this chapter – would have resonated so strongly with his early experience of trauma. For, as we will now see, Anelida and Arcite is haunted by both Boccaccio and Dante in ways which challenge both the sense of the poem’s incompleteness and the uniformly sympathetic way in which the figure of Anelida has been read, and which can open further discussion of Chaucer’s narrative, authorial and readerly engagement with Italian literature. The influence of Boccaccio’s Teseida delle Nozze di Emilia on the Anelida is uncontroversial. Indeed, the ‘stiff-jointed’ translation of passages from the Teseida in the opening ‘Invocation’ of Anelida and

67

CIC_rev.indd 67

15/12/2020 10:56:35

New Centur y Chaucer

Arcite has been pointed to as both a limitation and an indication of the poem as a site of stylistic experiment.67 But from the perspective of the poetics of present absence which Chaucer would have encountered in his reading of Inferno 10 and Decameron 6.9, it is also the location of the first textual haunting in the poem. Thou ferse god of armes, Mars the rede, That in the frosty contre called Trace, Within thy grisly temple ful of drede Honoured art as patroun of that place; With thy Bellona, Pallas, ful of grace, Be present and my song contynue and guye; (Anelida, ll. 1–6)

The opening line of the poem at first closely follows the invocation of Mars in Teseida 1.3: ‘Siate presenti, o Marte rubicondo, / nelle tue armi rigido e feroce’ (‘Be present, fiery Mars, in your arms, fierce and unyielding’).68 However, there is then what might seem a confusion of two parts of Boccaccio’s poem, with the vision of Mars’ temple blurring with the presentation of Theseus visiting the temple of Pallas Athene later in the Teseida:   e con esso in Attene rientrati: diritto andò al tempio di Pallade a reverir di lei la deitade. And they escorted him back to Athens, where he went straight to the temple of Pallas to honour her divinity.69 (Tes. 2.23)

But the poetics of present absence should cause us to question whether this conflation of Teseida 1.3 and 2.23 is really a Chaucerian muddling or awkward collocation, or whether it might be pointing us towards a haunting presence in the opening of the Anelida. In attempting to follow the Teseida in presenting a tale of love within an epic, martial setting, the invocation of ‘Mars the rede’ makes

68

CIC_rev.indd 68

15/12/2020 10:56:35

Chaucer and Italian Culture

perfect sense, but in his movement to ‘Bellona, Pallas, ful of grace’, Chaucer introduces a notable absence from Boccaccio’s text:   Siate presenti, o Marte rubicondo, nelle tue armi rigido e feroce, e tu, madre d’Amor, col tuo giocondo e lieto aspetto … Be with me, fiery Mars, fierce and unyielding in battle, and you, mother of Love with your joyful and happy appearance. (Tes. 1.3)

Through the removal of the figure of the ‘madre d’Amor’ whom Boccaccio calls on to ‘sostenete e la mano e la voce’ (‘assist both my hand and my tongue’) at the start of his poem, Chaucer presences an absence within the Anelida which is in turn filled by a ghostly figure himself made absent within the text: Be favorable eke, thou Polymya, On Parnaso that with thy sustres glade, By Elycon, not fer from Cirrea, Singest with vois memorial in the shade, (Anelida, ll. 15–18)

The invocation here of Polyhymnia and the other muses and the naming of Parnassus inevitably draws into the spectral plane of the text the most traditional figure of poetic invocation, Apollo. The sense of this god’s ghostly presence at the poem’s opening strengthens when we note that the Teseida is not the only trecento text which clearly haunts the poem’s opening: For hit ful depe is sonken in my mynde, With pitous hert in Englyssh to endyte This olde storie, in Latyn which I fynde, Of quene Anelida and fals Arcite, (Anelida, ll. 8–11)

69

CIC_rev.indd 69

15/12/2020 10:56:35

New Centur y Chaucer

There is a well-attested echo here of Paradiso 1.8, which – when we consider the passage from which it is drawn – works to further establish the ghostly presence of Apollo in the ‘Invocation’:   perché appressando sé al suo disire nostro intelletto si profonda tanto che dietro la memoria non può ire …   … O buono Appollo, a l’ultimo lavoro fammi del tuo valor sì fatto vaso come dimandi a dar l’amato alloro.   Infino a qui l’un giogo di Parnaso assai mi fu, ma or con amendue m’è uopo intrar ne l’aringo rimaso:70 For as it draws near to its desire, our intellect goes so deep that the memory cannot follow it … O good Apollo, for this last labour make me such a vessel of your power as you require to bestow the beloved laurel. Until now one peak of Parnassus has been enough for me, but now with both of them I must enter upon what of the field remains. (Par. 1. 7–9, 13–18)

The ghostly alignment of the ‘Invocation’ with the opening iconography of the Paradiso and the poetic ambition which this indicates points us towards the issue of Anelida and Arcite’s supposed state of incompletion.71 In having ‘buono Appollo’ haunt his poem, is Chaucer showing an overweening ambition which tumbles into the collapse of the poem in the final abortive stanza after the ‘Compleynt’ section (Anelida, ll. 351–7), where the English poet fails to achieve a grander structure he should never have attempted? Or does it point to a hyperbolic, ironic element of the text? This aspect will become clearer as we approach the ‘Compleynt’ and the presentation of Anelida herself, but for now we should note that the ‘Invocation’ is not without its own playful irony. The authorial discourse encoded in Anelida and Arcite has been read as embodying everything from a convoluted patterning of the presence of female authorship within the poem to a continuation of

70

CIC_rev.indd 70

15/12/2020 10:56:35

Chaucer and Italian Culture

Chaucer’s seemingly perverse – if theoretically sustainable – unwillingness ever to acknowledge Boccaccio as a source of his writing.72 But the explicit inclusion of a discourse of authority in the poem’s ‘Invocation’ points to a playful instance of Chaucer presencing an absence in his text: For hit ful depe is sonken in my mynde, With pitous hert in Englyssh to endyte This olde storie, in Latyn which I fynde, Of quene Anelida and fals Arcite, (Anelida, ll. 8–11)

These lines, in which a clear statement of the Latinate auctoritas for Chaucer’s made-up story of Anelida (whose name has never been convincingly shown to derive from any other source text), are haunted by a similarly pointed auctoritas topos in the Teseida:   E’ m’è venuto in voglia con pietosa rima di scrivere una istoria antica, tanto negli anni riposta e nascosa che latino autor non par ne dica, per quel ch’io senta, in libra alcuna cosa; It is now my wish to re-tell in melancholy verse an ancient tale which the years have rendered so remote and obscure that no Latin author to my knowledge seems to mention it. (Tes. 1.2)

In Chaucer’s transposition of Boccaccio’s ‘pietosa rima’ onto his ‘piteous hert’ and in the way in which he positions his text as drawing on the ‘latino autor’ who eluded Boccaccio, there is a playful engagement with a source which seems to echo the ‘leggerissimo’ reading of Inferno 10 in the Decameron, and introduces a delicious metatextual irony which is present only through the absence of the Boccaccian version of the topos. The notion of irony would also seem profitably to underpin the arraying of Chaucer’s supposed source of auctoritas at the close of the

71

CIC_rev.indd 71

15/12/2020 10:56:35

New Centur y Chaucer

‘invocation’: ‘First folowe I Stace, and after him Corynne’ (l. 21). The poetics of present absence seem to work triply in this moment of the poem. On one level, there is a potential continuation of what we might call the ‘Lollius joke’ in which ‘Corynne’ seems simply to presence Boccaccio’s absence in the text.73 On another level, the metatextual irony of the echoing of the Teseida continues, supplying the name of a Latinate auctoritas and implying that Chaucer has found the identity of the ‘latino autor’ of the story of the Teseida whose ancient identity defeated Boccaccio.74 And on a third level the exegetical movement written into the line seems to raise the ghostly presence of Dante, moving as it does from ‘Stace’ or Statius to a Romance-language inflected feminine figure; a trajectory which is followed in Purgatorio 33 where the shade of Statius, who has been guiding the Pilgrim up the last terraces of Purgatory, is led away by Matelda and replaced by the guiding presence of Beatrice (Purg. 33.130–5). From this level of the ironic poetics of Anelida there is an indication that we might look to Dante and the Purgatorio as a new guiding presence in the later stages of the poem. But Chaucer doesn’t simply make the elusive ‘Corynne’ a figure – or ghost – of Dante; there is a complex interweaving of spectral presence and originality within the structural progress of the next stanzas of the poem. After Chaucer’s declaration that ‘folowe I Stace, and after him Corynne’, the opening stanza of the poem’s ‘Story’ section does indeed follow both narrative and imagery drawn from Statius’ Thebaid (ll. 22–35). Then in turn the next stanza (ll. 36–42) follows the Teseida (2.22) closely (perhaps strengthening the ghostly, joking alignment of Boccaccio and ‘Corynne’), before the poem departs into a transitional Chaucerian stanza of striking originality and narrative control, demonstrating a creative experiment with a kind of narrative haunting: With his tryumphe and laurer-corouned thus, In al the flour of Fortunes yevynge, Let I this noble prince Theseus Toward Athenes in his wey rydinge, And founde I wol in shortly for to bringe

72

CIC_rev.indd 72

15/12/2020 10:56:35

Chaucer and Italian Culture

The slye wey of that I gan to write, Of quene Anelida and fals Arcite. (Anelida, ll. 43–9)

Just as with Guido’s leap in the Decameron (6.9.12), there is significant complexity in the syntax through which the doubled notion of the ‘slye wey of that I gan to write’ is expressed, a complexity which seems to wash back some meaning onto the discourse of auctoritas in the poem, connoting not just the ‘slye wey’ of Arcite’s falsity, but also the sly way in which Chaucer is writing in this passage. Theseus and his train are deliberately left in motion in the passage – riding out of the poem’s narrative on a ‘wey’ themselves that suggests that this aspect of the Teseida is going underground, becoming a subliminal and subterranean narrative presence which may re-emerge at a later point in the poem. This sense of Anelida and Arcite as being narratively haunted by the Teseida – and the Theseus narrative in particular – is strengthened as the story of Thebes reaches its close and the narrative transitions to the story of Anelida. In the next three stanzas (ll. 49–70) the poem follows the narrative of Thebes presented in Teseida 2.10–12 closely, with some typically Chaucerian elaborations offered on the desolating effects of the wars.75 Yet the end of the passage narrating the ascendancy of the tyrant Creon to the throne of Thebes represents both an elaboration and a diversion from the path of the Teseida: And when the olde Creon gan espye How that the blood roial was broght a-doun, He held the cite by his tyrannye And dyde the gentils of that regioun To ben his frendes and wonnen in the toun. So, what for love of him and what for awe, The noble folk were to the toun idrawe. (Anelida, ll. 64–70)

In presenting Creon’s rule as being authorised not ‘per fiera crudeltà da lui usata, / mai da nullo altro davanti pensata’ (‘through savage cruelty

73

CIC_rev.indd 73

15/12/2020 10:56:35

New Centur y Chaucer

that no-one before him had ever contemplated’) (Tes. 2.12) but rather through the gathering of nobles into Thebes to be the tyrant’s friends, Chaucer presences within the imaginative frame of his narrative the absent passages of the Teseida in which, far from being (admittedly conflicted) friends with the Thebans, Creon forbids the burial of his victims, a cruelty that leads to the entreaty of ‘le donne argoliche’ (‘the Argive women’) (Tes. 2.14) to Athens. In turn, this absence imaginatively resurfaces the figure of Theseus and his subterranean narrative, establishing an expectation that eventually Theseus – as in the Teseida – will arrive in Thebes and emerge as a narrative and structural principle of justice. That this narrative expectation, arising as it does at the moment of Chaucer’s transition from an epic mode into the courtly romance of Anelida and Arcite, should be left frustrated by the existing text of the poem again points us towards a discussion of the Anelida’s fragmentation. Did Chaucer plan the narrative re-emergence of Theseus as he did in the Knight’s Tale, and then just give up before he got it written? Or is there a discursive significance in the conscious haunting and frustration of the Teseida narrative? To explore the question of the discursive pattern of the poem, we need to return to the faint Dantean resonance we saw in the ‘Corynne’ passage and consider the haunting presence of the Purgatorio in the poem. In doing so, we will return later to the narrative of Anelida and Arcite, and for now concentrate on the opening of Anelida’s ‘Compleynt’ as the point at which the spectre of Dante most prominently enters Chaucer’s text: So thirleth with the poynt of remembraunce The swerd of sorowe, ywhet with fals plesaunce, Myn herte, bare of blis and blak of hewe, That turned is in quakyng al my daunce, (Anelida, ll. 211–14)

As Nick Havely has observed, ‘So thirleth with the poynt of remembraunce’ is an ‘undisputed allusion’ to Purgatorio 12.20, but so far it has tended to be discussed in terms reminiscent of Ginsberg’s ‘Dante of

74

CIC_rev.indd 74

15/12/2020 10:56:35

Chaucer and Italian Culture

fragments’ and seen as a source for a striking image and little more.76 But if we pause and consider the context of the line which Chaucer quotes here, then we can realise how, through it, Purgatorio 12 may be seen to haunt the whole of Anelida and Arcite:   ed el mi disse: ‘Volgi li occhi in giùe: buon ti sarà, per tranquillar la via, veder lo letto de le piante tue.’   Come, perché di lor memoria sia, sovra i sepolti le tombe terragne portan segnato quel ch’elli eran pria,   onde lì molte volte si ripiange per la puntura de la rimembranza, che solo a’ pïi dà de le calcagne:   sì vid’ io lì – ma di miglior sembianza secondo l’artificio – figurato quanto per via di fuor del monte avanza.77 And he said to me: ‘Turn your eyes downward: it will be good for you, to smooth your path, to see the bed where the soles of your feet are resting.’ As, over the buried dead, to preserve their memory, the tombs in the pavement are signed with what they were in life, so that often we weep again because of the pricking of memory, which drives its spurs only into the devoted: so I saw carvings there – but of better appearance, thanks to the workmanship – over all that projects from the mountain path. (Purg. 12.13–24)

This passage establishes the ekphrastic technique of the canto, introducing the carved images of fallen pride which will serve as purgative exegeses for the souls expiating the sin of pride as they trudge up the lowest terrace of the mountain. Dante’s envisaging of the function of memoria through ‘la puntura de la rimembranza’ as a kind of emotional rejuvenation leading to ‘ripiangere’ or ‘weeping again’, represents a fundamental inversion of Jean-Claude Schmitt’s conception of medieval

75

CIC_rev.indd 75

15/12/2020 10:56:35

New Centur y Chaucer

funerary practice.78 Interestingly, in formulating his notion that memorial practice functioned as a form of cultural forgetting designed to keep the dead absent, Schmitt draws upon examples of exactly the kind of ‘tombe terragne’ or slab burials that Dante here evokes.79 This oversight on Schmitt’s part points us to a realisation that he also wholly overlooks the imaginative function of memoria in medieval models of cognition and that, whilst his notion of ghosts as representing the absent dead made present is suggestive, his understanding of medieval funerary practice is in truth fundamentally rooted in an Annaliste commitment to elevate materialist social process over emotional or imaginative engagement.80 This leads to an understanding of the culture of remembrance which underestimates the persistence of medieval emotion; indeed, as we see in Purgatorio 12, Dante presents funerary imagery as capable of enacting a reversal of Schmitt’s forgetting process, instead restoring the absent dead as presences to the living and rendering them, in the terms we have been using, ‘ghosts’. When we consider the detail of this passage of the Purgatorio – which we know Chaucer had read closely – we see that it is haunted by another familiar moment in the Commedia, with Virgil’s description of the carved images which Dante likens to ‘sepolti’ as a ‘letto’ or bed, recalling the ‘sepolcri’ of the Epicureans in Inferno 10, and the ‘letto’ in which Farinata is tormented (Inf. 10.78). In this respect, the lexis of Purgatorio 12 presences Inferno 10 and the ghostly discourse which we saw swirling around the prideful Farinata and Cavalcante de’ Cavalcanti in that earlier canto. Indeed, Cavalcante’s assertion of his son’s ‘altezza d’ingegno’ we can now see again as bearing a sinful degree of pride and assurance, a surety of misreading in fact which underpins the sin of heresy.81 So here we find a drawing together – in a part of the Purgatorio that we know Chaucer read – of some of the key passages and concepts which have so far underwritten our discussion of ghostly trecento poetics. Furthermore, not only do the images of humbling in Purgatorio 12 present a disquisition on pride, but through the figure of the angel which the Pilgrim encounters at the end of the canto, Dante also includes an ironic perspective on the sin:

76

CIC_rev.indd 76

15/12/2020 10:56:35

Chaucer and Italian Culture

  Le braccia aperse, e indi aperse l’ale: disse: ‘Venite: qui son presso i gradi, e agevolemente omai si sale.   A questo invito vegnon molti radi: o gente umana, per volar sù nata, perché a poco vento così cadi?’ He opened his arms and then he opened his wings; he said: ‘Come: near here are the steps, and the climb now is easy. To this invitation they rarely come: O human race, born to fly upward, why do you fall at so little wind?’ (Purg. 12.91–6)

The angel’s notion that pride represents but a ‘poco vento’ here introduces an ironic note of pathos to the canto, undercutting the grandiosity of the images of fallen heroes and gods carved in the terrace, and emphasising that pride – the sin expurgated on the lowest terrace – should be the easiest of all to resist, and thus is the worst reason to fall into sin. If we thus consider Chaucer’s placing of Purgatorio 12.20 – ‘So thirleth with the poynt of remembraunce’ – in Anelida’s voice as preserving within his poem the absent ironic perspective on pridefulness in Dante’s canto, how might that alter our reading of Anelida’s ‘Compleynt’ and her story? And does it demonstrate a further level to Chaucer’s engagement with the poetics of present absence? We could start to answer those questions by first of all noting how Purgatorio 12 further strengthens the sense of Apollo as haunting the poem’s ‘Invocation’. J. Norton-Smith has already noticed that the image of fallen pride conveyed in Purgatorio  12.31–3 provides a non-Boccaccian source for Chaucer’s connection of Mars and Pallas Athene at the start of the Anelida, ll. 1–5).82 Yet in the line ‘Vedea Timbreo, vedea Pallade e Marte’ (‘I saw Thymbraeus, I saw Pallas and Mars’) (Purg. 12.31), there is a ghostly figure made present through the absence of his usual naming as ‘buono Appollo’ (Par. 1.13) and given here instead his more obscure Trojan identity as Timbreo. Through this trick of nomenclature, Apollo is rendered both there and not there in the line, in much the

77

CIC_rev.indd 77

15/12/2020 10:56:35

New Centur y Chaucer

same way as we saw the allusions to Paradiso 1 presence his absence in the Anelida’s ‘Invocation’. But more central to the reading of Anelida and Arcite as a whole is the way in which these ghostly Dantean poetics reconfigure our sense of Anelida herself. Tracing the spectre of Purgatorio 12 reveals the appositeness of the sin of pride to the understanding of Anelida’s predicament. Her self-presentation within her ‘Compleynt’, which has long drawn critical sympathy and derived generic authority through its relation to dits amoureux and other Chaucerian ‘complaints’, is, we now see, rooted in a prideful assertion of self-knowledge: ‘I wot myself as wel as any wight, / For I loved oon with al myn herte and myght’83 (Anelida, ll. 220–1). This assertion underpins the rhetoric of Anelida’s complaint throughout; her certainty of her guiltlessness is the rock on which the rest of her rhetorical edifice stands. But the theological instability of such a position is highlighted throughout the ‘Compleynt’ by her uncertainties. Whilst gesturing towards reflection (‘Now merci, swete, yf I mysseye!’, l. 317), Anelida is both certain of the justness of her objections and caught between courtly and confessional traditions, and thus struggles to find a coherent object for her entreaty: ‘And of al this I not to whom me pleyne’ (l. 237).84 When she does eventually locate an authority who can underwrite her petition to Arcite, her phrasing once again emphasises her prideful premise: Now, certis, swete, thogh that ye Thus causeles the cause be Of my dedly adversyte, Your manly resoun oghte hit to respite To slen your frend, and namely me, That never yet in no degre Offended ye, as wisly He That al wot, out of wo my soule quyte! (Anelida ll. 256–63)

With this invocation of God (‘He / That al wot’) as epistemological sanction, we can see that Anelida’s claim to ‘wot myself’ and her repeated

78

CIC_rev.indd 78

15/12/2020 10:56:35

Chaucer and Italian Culture

assertions of purity and blamelessness – of the ‘causeles cause’ of Arcite’s apparent betrayal – represent a quasi-heretical usurpation of a divine perspective both rooted in and demonstrative of a sinful degree of pride; she has, in the terms of Purgatorio 12, simply been blown over by the ‘poco vento’. This heretical strategy is then further underlined when later Anelida addresses both Arcite and God within the same line, appealing to the latter to be the guarantor of her self-knowledge, telling Arcite that she is the one ‘That love yow most – God, wel thou wost’ (l. 277). Interestingly, once an ironic perspective on Anelida’s prideful ‘Compleynt’ is thus established, it also seems to unsettle aspects of her presentation within the ‘Story’ section of the poem as well. From her introduction as surpassing ‘Penelope and Lucresse’ in the virtue of ‘stidfastnesse’ (ll. 81–2) to the assertion that ‘So ferforth upon trouthe is her entente’ (l. 132), there is a repeated emphasis on an unsustainable purity in the character of Anelida; or at least a purity which – when we remember the gradual ablutions of Dante-pilgrim and the souls ascending Mount Purgatory – we realise is decidedly unlikely within a secular, non-eschatological setting. Furthermore, the epistemological pride which we detected in the ‘Compleynt’ is also present in Anelida’s narrative: For in her sight to her he bar hym lowe, So that she wende have al his herte yknowe; But he was fals; hit nas but feyned chere – As nedeth not to men such craft to lere. (Anelida, ll. 95–8)

The whole of Anelida’s narrative turns on this supposition (‘wende’). Her belief that she can know all of Arcite’s feelings and intentions – can in effect read his outward actions and appearance with the surety of ‘He / that al wot’ – is the prideful conceit which underpins her descent into what the narrator of the poem will later hyperbolically call ‘the helle / That suffreth fair Anelida the quene’ (ll. 166–7). The irony that Chaucer immediately underscores the failure of her prideful

79

CIC_rev.indd 79

15/12/2020 10:56:35

New Centur y Chaucer

assumption of omniscience with the simple statement that Arcite ‘was fals’ should surely cause us to question the notion that Anelida and Arcite is a poem without multiplicity of perspective.85 But it is the notion of Anelida’s grief as being tantamount to Hell – coupled with the histrionics we have already seen in the ‘Compleynt’ – that makes present another significant absence within Anelida’s characterisation, an absence of emotional perspective. To equate disappointment in love with the torments of Hell in a poem which directly quotes from Dante’s Commedia is both ironically hilarious and indicative of the kind of epistemological tension which has been identified in others of Chaucer’s Boccaccian poems of antiquity.86 However, in drawing together a ‘Compleynt’ which is rooted in courtly traditions of the dits amoureux with a narrative ostensibly set in the pagan history of Thebes – and in which Anelida will eventually address ‘Almyghty God, of trouthe sovereyn’ (l. 311) – Chaucer seems to be questioning the elevation of emotion in courtly poetry to the level of epistemological or theological extremity. Indeed, as Anelida’s ‘Compleynt’ proceeds towards her direct petition to God, the tone of her imagination starts to darken when she tells Arcite: For either mot I have yow in my cheyne Or with the deth ye mote departe us tweyne; Ther ben non other mene weyes newe. (Anelida, ll. 284–6)

There is some ambiguity in the syntax here, but Chaucer seems to be indicating that, from Anelida’s perspective within a pagan and/or courtly tradition, the wounding of her pride might reasonably evoke the reaction of murder or suicide, an ambiguity which will lessen when in the next stanza she will declare, ‘Myself I mordre with my privy thoght’ (l. 291). The notions of wounding and pride are obviously relevant to the haunting presence of the Purgatorio. Dante’s poem traces a purgative process of healing, initiated figuratively by his washing among the reeds of Purgatorio 1, and achieved through the gradual expunging,

80

CIC_rev.indd 80

15/12/2020 10:56:35

Chaucer and Italian Culture

in the course of his steady climb, of the peccati (‘sins’) inscribed on Dante-pilgrim’s brow by the angel of Purgatorio 9 (112–14). Yet this notion of purgative healing seems almost entirely absent from both Anelida’s ‘Compleynt’ and her narrative; instead she clings to her pride and its painful wound throughout, and in doing so underlines some inconsistencies in her story. For instance, is she restless – as she suggests when she tells Arcite ‘I wepe, I wake, I faste; al helpeth noght’ (l. 293) – or does she ‘slepe a furlong wey or tweye’ (l. 328) as she will later claim when she needs to introduce the notion of seeing a ‘dream vision’ of Arcite as ‘clad in asure’ and a figure of constancy (l. 330)?87 If, as Dante suggests, healing is a process of letting go of negative emotions, then the only figure who seems to heal at all in the course of the poem is Arcite, whose new lover keeps him on a tight leash: ‘But lest that he were proud, she held him lower. / Thus serveth he withoute fee or shipe’ (Anelida, ll. 192–3). Far from the heedless cad Anelida tends to present him as, here we can see ‘fals Arcite’ as a figure able to let go of his pride and genuinely humble himself for love; a fidelity to emotion which, for all her voluble complaining, Anelida never manages to let go of her pride long enough to emulate. Indeed, in that notion of Arcite as able to serve ‘withoute fee or shipe’ we seem to get a glimpse of the salt in Anelida’s wound: that she should have risked her pride and received no lasting reward. Ultimately, the ironic perspective on Anelida as fundamentally prideful and thus heretically condemned is structurally assured by Chaucer. The ‘Compleynt’ ends as it began, with an evocation of Purgatorio 12.20: So singe I here my destinee or chaunce, How that Arcite Anelida so sore Hath thirled with the poynt of remembraunce. (Anelida ll. 348–50)

In this moment (when, we may note, Anelida’s voice most closely approaches that of the poet himself, no longer writing but rather singing her complaint), Chaucer’s verse form and his rhetoric are closely

81

CIC_rev.indd 81

15/12/2020 10:56:35

New Centur y Chaucer

aligned, with Anelida evidently demonstrating no spiritual or emotional progression through the course of her ‘Compleynt’ and still stuck in the piercing pain with which she started. When we consider that this effect of circularity is signed through the re-presencing of the haunting text of Purgatorio 12 and its ‘puntura de la rimembranza’, the significance is clear: Dante presented a process of ambulatory healing and progression, with the Pilgrim walking around the terrace and being admitted – absolved of pride once he reaches the angel of the stairs (Purg. 12.97–136) – into the next stage of healing. In contrast, Anelida’s ‘Compleynt’ has led her round in circles and left her, unchanged and unchanging, in the same place; a form of motion that has more in common with the punitive metamorphoses of the Inferno than the salving progression of the Purgatorio. The stasis in which Chaucer’s final ghosting of Dante leaves Anelida raises once more the issue of the poem’s completion. The arguments for seeing the stanza which promises a continuation of Anelida’s narrative through her visit to the temple of Mars (ll. 351–5) as inauthentic and non-Chaucerian are rooted in careful analysis of the poem’s manuscript tradition, and they seem, on the whole, to be sound.88 In which case, the text as we currently have it would end in Anelida’s moment of infernal, textually haunted stasis, stuck in ‘the helle’ (l. 166) of her emotional suffering and with no evident way to escape.89 In this respect, we can see the final frustration of the narrative expectation which Chaucer established through the Boccaccian passages of the ‘Invocation’ and ‘Story’ sections, the re-emergence of the Teseida registering here as a final present absence as Theseus singularly fails to arrive and save the day. Indeed, even if we were to accept the final stanza of Anelida and Arcite as Chaucerian then we would simply introduce a final significant, haunting absence to the poem in the ghost of the ‘missing’ continuation. And so we can see that, in this poem of Anelida’s wounded pride, Chaucer has drawn upon the ‘slye wey’ of the ghostly poetics he observed within his reading of Dante and Boccaccio carefully to craft a thought-provoking, playful and delightfully ironic text. In which case, if Anelida and Arcite is not complete, then Chaucer’s trecento poetics have shown us that we certainly do not need any more of it.

82

CIC_rev.indd 82

15/12/2020 10:56:35

Chaucer and Italian Culture

Notes 1. See Lister M. Matheson, ‘Chaucer’s Ancestry: Historical and Philological Re-Assessments’, The Chaucer Review, 25 (1991), 171–89 (pp. 182–4); Marion Turner, Chaucer: A European Life (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019), pp. 22–32; Derek Pearsall, The Life of Geoffrey Chaucer: A Critical Biography (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), pp. 17–23. 2. Pearsall claims that the family did not return to London from Southampton until autumn 1349, but offers no evidence for this assertion; see Life of Geoffrey Chaucer, p. 28. Turner’s sense of the family as living between the cities at this time is much more convincing; see Chaucer: A European Life, pp. 31–2. 3. On the dates of these deaths see Vincent B. Redstone and Lilian J. Redstone, ‘The Heyrons of London: A Study in the Social Origins of Geoffrey Chaucer’, Speculum, 12 (1937), 182–95 (p. 189). On the participation of the boy’s father and uncle in ‘a shambolic campaign against the Scots’ in 1327 and the death of the boy’s mother’s relatives see Turner, Chaucer: A European Life, pp. 25, 36; Redstone and Redstone, ‘The Heyrons of London’, pp. 186–7. For more on the condition of London at the height of the plague see Barney Sloane, The Black Death in London (Stroud: The History Press, 2011), pp. 62–3; ‘The Black Death Digital Archive Project’, http://globalmiddleages.org/project/ black-death-digital-archive-project (accessed 30 November 2019). 4. Pearsall’s claim that ‘in London the ceremonies of burial were abandoned’ at this time is not borne out by the archaeological record (Pearsall, Life of Geoffrey Chaucer, p. 25). 5. Jean-Claude Schmitt, Ghosts in the Middle Ages: The Living and the Dead in Medieval Society, trans. Teresa Lavender Fagan (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), p. 5. 6. Christopher Dyer, Making a Living in the Middle Ages: The People of Britain 850–1520 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002), p. 273; see also Sloane, The Black Death in London, pp. 90–103 for details of the excavation of one of these cemeteries at East Smithfield. 7. Sloane, The Black Death in London, p. 57. 8. Redstone and Redstone, ‘The Heyrons of London’, p. 189; see also Turner, Chaucer: A European Life, pp. 35–6. 9. For more on the figure of the ghost as the presence of absence and the undoing of cultural rites of transition see Schmitt, Ghosts in the Middle Ages, pp. 5, 218–19. 10. See Dyer, Making a Living, pp. 272–3; Pearsall, Life of Geoffrey Chaucer, pp. 27–8; and Turner, Chaucer: A European Life, pp. 33–7. 11. Dyer, Making a Living, p. 233. 12. See Turner, Chaucer: A European Life, p. 36. 13. Schmitt, Ghosts in the Middle Ages, p. 219.

83

CIC_rev.indd 83

15/12/2020 10:56:35

New Centur y Chaucer

14. Turner, Chaucer: A European Life, pp. 33–4. 15. Turner, Chaucer: A European Life, p. 3. 16. Turner, Chaucer: A European Life, p. 3 n. 8, pp. 21, 36. 17. A notable exception to this is Matthew Boyd Goldie’s recent Scribes of Space: Place in Middle English Literature and Late Medieval Science (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2019), pp. 210–11, which briefly discusses Heidegger in connection with Merleau-Ponty. The overlooking of Heidegger’s originary status in regard to this discourse has perhaps been exacerbated by the influence of Gaston Bachelard’s La poétique de l’espace (Paris: Presses Universitaires, 1957), a later work which – without acknowledgement – seems to derive from Heidegger and Husserl, but which has reasonably been characterised as rooted in ‘ahistorical blindspots … oversights and insupportable claims’, and seen as demonstrative of ‘the dangers of extrapolating general theories from singular phenomena’; see Gerry Smyth and Jo Croft, ‘Introduction: Culture and Domestic Space’, in Gerry Smyth and Jo Croft (eds), Our House: The Representation of Domestic Space in Modern Culture (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2006), pp. 14–15. On Bachelard as responding to Heidegger’s work see Edward S. Casey, Getting Back into Place: Toward a Renewed Understanding of the Place-World (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), p. xv. For Bachelard as the root of Turner’s approach see Chaucer: A European Life, p. 3 n. 9. 18. See Martin Heidegger, ‘Building, Dwelling, Thinking’, in Basic Writings: From ‘Being and Time’ (1927) to ‘The Task of Thinking’ (1964), ed. David Farrell Krell, second edn (London: Routledge, 1993), pp. 347–63. For a good discussion of Heidegger’s place in phenomenological theories of space, see Edward S. Casey, ‘Heidegger In and Out of Place’, in Heidegger: A Centenary Appraisal (Pittsburgh: Silverman Phenomenology Center, 1990), pp. 62–98. 19. Turner, Chaucer: A European Life, p. 4. 20. David Wallace, Chaucerian Polity: Absolutist Lineages and Associational Forms in England and Italy (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997). 21. For the most recent additions to this tradition see Goldie, Scribes of Space; and Kathryn McKinley, Chaucer’s ‘House of Fame’ and its Boccaccian Intertexts: Image, Vision, and the Vernacular (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 2016), pp. 70–1. 22. See, for instance, David Wallace (ed.), Europe: A Literary History, 1348–1418, 2 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016). For one excellent example of reading Chaucer’s Italian engagements through the material context of the literature, see K. P. Clarke, Chaucer and Italian Textuality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), pp. 97–128. 23. For a reflexive discussion of the implication of metaphor and interpretation in Chaucer studies see Helen Cooper, ‘After Chaucer’, Studies in the Age of Chaucer, 25 (2003), 3–24 (p. 5).

84

CIC_rev.indd 84

15/12/2020 10:56:35

Chaucer and Italian Culture

24. On the ‘traumatised writers’ of the twentieth-century see Tom Shippey, J. R. R. Tolkien: Author of the Century (London: HarperCollins, 2000), pp. xxix–xxx. 25. On Chaucer’s ‘paltok’ (‘tunic, doublet’), see Turner, Chaucer: A European Life, p. 48. 26. The Black Death has traditionally been thought to have reached western Europe through the arrival of a Genoese merchant vessel into Messina in October 1347; see Pearsall, Life of Chaucer, p. 24. 27. On the ‘small’ impact of the plague on the subject matter of Chaucer’s poetry see Pearsall, Life of Chaucer, p. 28. 28. On the Commedia as ‘ghost story’ see Patrick Boyde, Dante, Philomythes and Philosopher: Man in the Cosmos (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), pp. 43–4. 29. Compare Boyde’s claim that the shades represent ghosts. Dante, Philomythes and Philosopher, pp. 43–4. 30. Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri, vol. 1: Inferno, ed. and trans. Robert M. Durling (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), p. 154; all further quotations and translations from the Inferno are from this edition. 31. For more on Dante and Epicureanism see J. A. Mazzeo, ‘Dante and Epicurus’, Comparative Literature, 10 (1958), 106–20; and Robert M. Durling, ‘Epicureans’, in Richard Lansing (ed.), The Dante Encyclopedia (New York: Garland Publishing, 2000), pp. 346–7. 32. Giovanni Boccaccio, Esposizioni sopra la Comedia di Dante, ed. Giorgio Padoan, in Tutte le opere di Giovanni Boccaccio, vol. VI (Milan: Mondadori, 1965), p. 526. 33. Teodolinda Barolini, Dante’s Poets: Textuality and Truth in the ‘Comedy’ (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), pp. 123, 126, 135. For more on the interaction of Dante and Cavalcanti see Nick Havely, Dante (Oxford: Blackwell, 2007), pp. 117–21; Gianfranco Contini, Varianti e altra linguistica (Turin: Einaudi, 1970), pp. 348–51, 433–46. 34. See Robert M. Durling, ‘Boccaccio on Interpretation: Guido’s Escape (Decameron VI.9)’, in Aldo S. Bernardo and Anthony L. Pellegrini (eds), Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio: Studies in the Italian Trecento in Honor of Charles S. Singleton (Binghamton, NY: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1983), pp. 273–304 (p. 284). 35. Dante Alighieri, Vita Nuova, ed. Manuela Colombo (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1993), p. 46; all further references are to this edition. In this respect Cavalcanti’s presence in Inferno represents a condemnatory inversion of his treatment in the Vita Nuova where, as Barolini has pointed out, he was ‘the only contemporary vernacular poet to be overtly cited’ (Dante’s Poets, pp. 124, 126). 36. See Barolini, Dante’s Poets, p. 147; Durling, ‘Boccaccio on Interpretation’, pp. 283–4. 37. For examples see Barolini, Dante’s Poets, p. 146 n. 66; Durling, ‘Boccaccio on Interpretation’, p. 284; Boccaccio, Esposizioni, p. 526.

85

CIC_rev.indd 85

15/12/2020 10:56:35

New Centur y Chaucer

38. For a brief account of the thorny issue of dating the fictional events of the Commedia see Aldo Vallone, ‘Commedia: 1. Introduction’, in Lansing (ed.), The Dante Encyclopedia, pp. 181–4 (p. 183). 39. For more details see Havely, Dante, pp. 19, 118. 40. See Durling, ‘Boccaccio on Interpretation’, p. 284. 41. Durling, ‘Boccaccio on Interpretation’, p. 284. For Dante as refusing to ‘close Guido within the limits’ of Inferno 10 see Barolini, Dante’s Poets, p. 147. 42. Durling, ‘Boccaccio on Interpretation’, p. 284. 43. Cooper, ‘After Chaucer’, p. 12. 44. Barolini, Dante’s Poets, p. 146. 45. On the ‘presence’ of Cavalcanti and his lyric poetry in Purgatorio 11 see Barolini, Dante’s Poets, pp. 127–9. 46. On Boccaccio’s novella as ‘strategically placed’ at the heart of the Decameron and as requiring reading through Inferno 10 see Durling, ‘Boccaccio on Interpretation’, pp. 286, 281–2. See also Martin Eisner, Boccaccio and the Invention of Italian Literature: Dante, Petrarch, Cavalcanti, and the Authority of the Vernacular (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), p. 109. 47. See Eisner, Boccaccio and the Invention of Italian Literature, pp. 96, 103–4. The modernist influence on this connection can be further extended when we note that Pound’s attention was almost certainly drawn to Decameron 6.9 by Joyce’s playful quotation of the novella in Ulysses (3.317–20); see James Joyce, Ulysses: The Corrected Text, ed. Hans Walter Gabler et al. (London: Penguin, 1986), p. 38. For discussion of Joyce’s response to Dante, Boccaccio and Cavalcanti in this moment see James Robinson, Joyce’s Dante: Exile, Memory, and Community (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), pp. 104–8. 48. Giovanni Boccaccio, Decameron, ed. Vittore Branca, 2 vols (Milan: Mondadori, 1989), pp. 536, 538; all further references to the Decameron are to this edition and all translations (with modifications noted) are from Giovanni Boccaccio, The Decameron, trans. G. H. McWilliam, second edn (London: Penguin, 1995). 49. Durling, ‘Boccaccio on Interpretation’, p. 281. 50. See Nick Havely, ‘The Self-Consuming City: Florence as Body Politic in Dante’s Commedia’, Deutsches Dante Jahrbuch, 61 (1986), 99–113. 51. All further uses of ‘arca’ or ‘arche’ – two in the Purgatorio and four in the Paradiso – refer either to vessels for grain or coinage, or to the Ark of the Covenant, including the important parallel usage of the word in Purgatorio 10.56. 52. Boccaccio, Esposizioni, p. 526. 53. See Durling, ‘Boccaccio on Interpretation’, pp. 282–3. 54. Durling, ‘Boccaccio on Interpretation’, pp. 282–3. 55. Boccacio, Esposizioni, p. 526. 56. For a discussion of responses to the leap from figures including Pound, Borges and Calvino see Eisner, Boccaccio and the Invention of Italian Literature, pp. 103–4.

86

CIC_rev.indd 86

15/12/2020 10:56:35

Chaucer and Italian Culture

57. See Durling, ‘Boccaccio on Interpretation’, pp. 273–4, 278–9; Eisner, Boccaccio and the Invention of Italian Literature, pp. 107–10. 58. Eisner’s argument for Betto’s intelligence in this moment, whilst rooted in a fascinating intertextual connection to Dante’s Rime, is not wholly convincing; see Boccaccio and the Invention of Italian Literature, pp. 108–10. 59. Durling, ‘Boccaccio on Interpretation’, p. 286. 60. Cooper, ‘After Chaucer’, p. 13. 61. Warren Ginsberg, Chaucer’s Italian Tradition (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002), p. 30. For more on Lydgate and ‘Dante in Inglissh’ see Nick Havely, ‘The Italian Background’, in Steve Ellis (ed.), Chaucer: An Oxford Guide (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), p. 327. 62. For some interesting examples of this kind of Boccaccian discussion see Robert R. Edwards, Chaucer and Boccaccio: Antiquity and Modernity (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002); McKinley, Chaucer’s ‘House of Fame’; Piero Boitani, ‘Style, Iconography and Narrative: The Lesson of the Teseida’, in Piero Boitani (ed.), Chaucer and the Italian Trecento (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), pp. 185–99. 63. Havely, ‘The Italian Background’, p. 326. On Chaucer reading the Decameron see also Clarke, Chaucer and Italian Textuality, pp. 95–128; Peter G. Beidler, ‘Just Say Yes, Chaucer Knew the Decameron: Or, Bringing the Shipman’s Tale Out of Limbo’, in Leonard Michael Koff and Brenda Deen Schildgen (eds), The ‘Decameron’ and the ‘Canterbury Tales’: New Essays on an Old Question (London: Associated University Presses, 2000), pp. 25–46. 64. David Wallace, ‘Chaucer’s Italian Inheritance’, in Piero Boitani and Jill Mann (eds), The Cambridge Companion to Chaucer, second edn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 36–57 (p. 43). 65. See Wallace, ‘Chaucer’s Italian Inheritance’, pp. 43–4; Alfred David, ‘Recycling Anelida and Arcite: Chaucer as a Source for Chaucer’, Studies in the Age of Chaucer, Proceedings, 1 (1984), 105–15; Boitani, ‘Style, Iconography and Narrative’, pp. 189–90; J. Norton-Smith, ‘Chaucer’s Anelida and Arcite’, in P. L. Heyworth (ed.), Medieval Studies for J. A. W. Bennett: Aetatis Suae LXX (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981), pp. 81–99 (pp. 86–7); Pearsall, Life of Geoffrey Chaucer, p. 121. 66. On ‘braiding’ as a metaphor for Chaucer’s compositional overlap and Anelida as ‘backstory’ see Kathryn L. Lynch, ‘Dating Chaucer’, The Chaucer Review, 42 (2007), pp. 1–22 (p. 16). 67. David Wallace, Chaucer and the Early Writings of Boccaccio (Woodbridge: D. S. Brewer, 1985), p. 22. Piero Boitani has observed that Chaucer’s translations even try to imitate Boccaccio’s rhythms; see Chaucer and Boccaccio (Oxford: Society for the Study of Mediaeval Languages and Literature, 1977), p. 73. 68. Giovanni Boccaccio, Teseida delle Nozze di Emilia, ed. Alberto Limentani, in Tutte le opere di Giovanni Boccaccio, vol. II, ed. Vittore Branca (Milan:

87

CIC_rev.indd 87

15/12/2020 10:56:35

New Centur y Chaucer

Mondadori, 1964), pp. 229–664 (p. 254); all further references to the Teseida are to this edition. 69. Translations from the Teseida are taken from N. R. Havely, Chaucer’s Boccaccio: Sources for ‘Troilus’ and the ‘Knight’s’ and ‘Franklin’s Tales’: Translations from the ‘Filostrato’, ‘Teseida’ and ‘Filocolo’ (Woodbridge: D. S. Brewer, 1992). 70. Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri, vol. 3: Paradiso, ed. and trans. Robert M. Durling (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), pp. 22–3; all further quotations and translations from the Paradiso are from this edition. 71. On the debate over the poem’s incompleteness see Norton-Smith, ‘Chaucer’s Anelida’, p. 82; A. S .G. Edwards, ‘The Unity and Authenticity of “Anelida and Arcite”: The Evidence of the Manuscripts’, Studies in Bibliography, 41 (1988), 177–88. 72. On ‘Corynne’ and female authorship see Jennifer Summit, Lost Property: The Woman Writer and English Literary History, 1380–1589 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), pp. 43–4. For Chaucer as lying about Boccaccio through the use of ‘Corynne’ see Edwards, Chaucer and Boccaccio, p. 10. 73. On ‘Corynne’ and ‘Lollius’ see Dale A. Favier, ‘Anelida and Arcite: Anti-Feminist Allegory, Pro-Feminist Complaint’, The Chaucer Review, 26 (1991), 83–94 (p. 85). 74. For an account of ‘Corynne’ in relation to Ovid’s Corinna, see Norton-Smith, ‘Chaucer’s Anelida’, pp. 95–7. 75. Piero Boitani has pointed to this moment in the poem as most closely demonstrating the stylistic lessons Chaucer took from the Teseida; see ‘Style, Iconography and Narrative’, p. 189. On Chaucer’s elaborations of the Teseida in the Knight’s Tale see Turner, Chaucer: A European Life, pp. 85–6. 76. Nick Havely, ‘Introduction’, in Geoffrey Chaucer, The House of Fame, ed. Nick Havely, second edn (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies; Durham: Institute of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, Durham University, 2013), pp. 1–35 (p. 20); Ginsberg, Chaucer’s Italian Tradition, p. 30. The most substantial discussion of Purgatorio 12 in Anelida is that of Norton-Smith, ‘Chaucer’s Anelida’, pp. 91–2. 77. Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri, vol. 2: Purgatorio, ed. and trans. Robert M. Durling (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), pp. 188–9; all further quotations and translations from the Purgatorio are from this edition. 78. See Schmitt, Ghosts in the Middle Ages, pp. 217–19. 79. Schmitt, Ghosts in the Middle Ages, pp. 217–18. 80. On memoria and its co-implication with fantasia see Mary Carruthers, The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), pp. 18–19, 24–37, 56–7. 81. On the pride of the heretics of Inferno 10, see Durling, ‘Boccaccio on Interpretation’, p. 282.

88

CIC_rev.indd 88

15/12/2020 10:56:35

Chaucer and Italian Culture

82. Norton-Smith, ‘Chaucer’s Anelida’, pp. 91–2. 83. For the influence of the dits amoureux on the poem see James I. Wimsatt, ‘Anelida and Arcite: A Narrative of Complaint and Comfort’, The Chaucer Review, 5 (1970), 1–8 (pp. 3–8). 84. On the rhetorical gesture in Anelida’s petition see Barry Windeatt, ‘Plea and Petition in Chaucer’, in Gerald Morgan (ed.), Chaucer in Context: A Golden Age of English Poetry (Bern: Peter Lang, 2012), pp. 189–216 (p. 198). 85. See Pearsall, Life of Geoffrey Chaucer, p. 121. 86. See Norton-Smith, ‘Chaucer’s Anelida’, p. 98; Edwards, Chaucer and Boccaccio, pp. 1–10. 87. For an unconvincing reading of the whole poem as ‘the beginning of some sort of dream-vision’ see Michael D. Cherniss, ‘Chaucer’s Anelida and Arcite: Some Conjectures’, The Chaucer Review, 5 (1970), 9–21 (pp. 13–17). 88. For the best summary of these arguments see Edwards, ‘Unity and Authenticity of Anelida’, pp. 181–5. For another view of the poem as definitively complete see Norton-Smith, ‘Chaucer’s Anelida’, pp. 83–6. 89. See Edwards, ‘Unity and Authenticity of Anelida’, p. 181.

89

CIC_rev.indd 89

15/12/2020 10:56:35

Thi spagei nt ent i onal l yl ef tbl ank

3

CHOROGRAPHY AND TOPOGRAPHY: ITALIAN MODELS AND CHAUCERIAN STRATEGIES Helen Fulton

I

n critical discussions of the work of Geoffrey Chaucer, his wide knowledge and application of rhetorical and narrative strategies drawn from the Latin and vernacular sources available to him is almost taken for granted as a mark of his artistic distinction. One such rhetorical genre which has attracted very little critical attention in relation to Chaucer is that of topographic description and its more specific type, chorography. The description of the Italian peninsula which forms the spectacular opening to Geoffrey Chaucer’s Clerk’s Tale is a perfect example of the classical Greek and Latin genre of chorography or regional description. Practised by early Greek and Latin geographers and ethnographers, chorography was used by medieval British historians writing in Latin, including Bede, Geoffrey of Monmouth and Ranulph Higden, to inscribe the various regions of Britain as part of a single nation. The aim of this chapter is to examine the context of Chaucer’s use of chorography and its links to the classicism and humanism that marked the early stages of what became the Italian Renaissance.

CIC_rev.indd 91

15/12/2020 10:56:35

New Centur y Chaucer

The Discursive Function of Chorography The development of a ‘new materialism’ in literary studies is sometimes associated with an empirical stance that eschews ‘theory’ (that is, theories of discourse and representation) and prefers to engage with material phenomena – manuscripts, printed books, actual places, historical figures, physical artefacts – as proxies for historical ‘truth’ and objectivity.1 New materialist approaches often applaud their own interdisciplinarity as they plough the fields of the sciences and social sciences to find empirical explanations for the material phenomena described in literary texts. As John Frow has observed, the concept of the material is sometimes made to act as a ‘shorthand that shores up a truth claim rather than doing serious intellectual work’; and yet, ‘it is not the materiality of meanings and practices that gives them their social force but rather the particular social and cultural frameworks that govern how they are deployed.’2 The discipline of geography is one such source of empirical evidence that is mined to reveal material aspects of the literary landscapes of the past. Ways in which the landscape is divided up – into town and country, nation and empire, inside and outside the city walls, farmland and wilderness – are not simply material topographic markers, however, but ways of making meaning, as much for the communities living in the landscape as for readers of texts about the landscape.3 In studies of pre-modern texts, the language of geography and topography has become increasingly a critical tool of materialist analyses, while the rediscovery by modern critics of chorography as a pre-modern textual strategy has begun to recognise the significance of its classical origins and its later applications.4 Chorography and topography formed part of the imperialist rhetoric used by Greek and Latin writers of the classical and late antique periods. Located within an epistemology committed to describing and mapping the known world, as a prelude to colonisation or commercial exploitation, classical geographical treatises reveal a theory of geography as the appropriation of political territory (that is, a region defined by the political jurisdiction of a lord). This was a model which

92

CIC_rev.indd 92

15/12/2020 10:56:35

Chaucer and Italian Culture

was particularly appealing to medieval writers and their patrons. Constructing the borders of territory, historically and geographically, was one of the major projects of medieval Latin writers. As kings and magnates – both secular and religious – competed for regional and imperial dominance across the face of Europe, the production and reiteration of territorial boundaries by means of privileged discourses was essential to their hegemonic claims. Geography, then, is not simply empirical description but a language of empire, republic and state, a discourse which brings into being the very concepts – country, region, state, city, estate – which it purports to describe. The purpose of Greek geographies, such as those of Strabo and Posidonius, was historical and ethnographic, as well as descriptive, invoking the myths and legends of the historical past to explain the landscape and social organisation of the present. Geography merged with ethnography, ethics and ‘political sociography’ in order to provide accounts of a normative Greek world in contrast to other cultures of Europe and the Mediterranean.5 Writing in the third century BC, Heraclides Criticus compiled a topographical description of Greece (Hellas) that attempted to map its boundaries.6 The provincial towns of Greece are itemised and described for the inhabitants of Athens and the larger cosmopolitan cities, offered to them as points of comparison and for commercial exploitation. Heraclides’ urban descriptions are geared towards the tourist and the economic visitor, commenting on the trade, produce and way of life of the inhabitants. He says of Thebes, for example: It is the type of city best visited in summer time. This is because it has a plentiful supply of cold water and gardens. What is more, there is a refreshing breeze and the city offers a pleasant outlook over green fields, while the land is fruit-bearing and plentiful with respect to summer produce. But it is a region without forests, and the worst kind of place to be in the winter because of both the rivers and the winds. For it also snows and is very muddy.7

Such descriptions construct the subject position of the outsider, the traveller approaching the cities from the landscape beyond, seeing

93

CIC_rev.indd 93

15/12/2020 10:56:35

New Centur y Chaucer

them laid out as if on a map. But the descriptions are also informative, advising the visitor of the good and bad points of particular cities and regions so that they can travel at the most advantageous times and come prepared. Heraclides’ descriptions can be considered as examples of chorography or regional geography. Like school students writing their address, in which their town and country are followed by ‘The World, The Universe’, Greek scientific thought identified a hierarchy of spatial areas: the topos or individual place, the khôros, or region, the gê, the earth, and the cosmos, the whole universe. Strictly speaking, a geography therefore describes the whole world, while a cosmography locates the earth in relation to the planets, such as Ptolemy’s treatise from the second century AD which described the earth in terms of a system of latitude and longitude based on the positions of the stars. Chorography, identified by Ptolemy as a form of regional description which often included historical and ethnographic detail, functioned as a verbal map creating a region or group of countries as a single knowable area. The earliest surviving geographical work in Latin, written by Pomponius Mela about AD 44, drew extensively on earlier geographies such as those by Strabo and Pliny.8 The treatise was given the title De Chorographia in a ninth-century manuscript, though the work sits somewhere on the boundary between geography and chorography.9 Mela himself calls it a description of the known world (‘de situ orbis’), and he begins the treatise with an account of the earth as a sphere divided into northern and southern hemispheres. From this large-scale view, he then focuses on the northern zone (‘noster orbis’, ‘our world’) and the continents, countries and cities which it comprises. Starting with Africa, he works his way counterclockwise around the Mediterranean, moving on to Gaul, Germany, Scythia, the islands (including Britain), India, and the Persian gulf. As he travels back around the outer coastlines of the three continents – Europe, Asia and Africa – his work forms a verbal map of the northern hemisphere, in a perfect prefiguring of the ‘TO’ maps of the world made by Ptolemy in the second century AD and Isidore of Seville in the seventh century.

94

CIC_rev.indd 94

15/12/2020 10:56:35

Chaucer and Italian Culture

Through the rediscovery of Ptolemy’s Geography in the fourteenth century, the kind of chorographical description practised by Mela and by Ptolemy himself found its way into the geographical discourses of medieval and early modern Britain.10 Like the earlier Greek geographers, Mela provides mythological, ethnographic and historical details to flesh out what would otherwise be a formulaic listing of seas, mountains, rivers and towns. He describes national characteristics and customs, scenery and natural phenomena, battlefields and other places of historical interest. Legendary explanations for geographical and topographical features – such as the rocks on the Gaulish coast which were sent by Jupiter to help Hercules when he ran out of arrows – alternate with more technical references to measurements and orientations. The point of the De Chorographia is to delineate the boundaries of the Roman Empire from the point of view of Roman citizens located, like Mela himself, in Rome. As Catherine Connors has commented, ‘a long-standing punning juxtaposition of orbis (world) and urbs (city) enacts a Roman fascination with measuring the city of Rome against the world.’11 Mela’s description of Italy, a place well known to his readers, is enthusiastic compared to his discussions of more outlying sections of the empire, while those lands lying beyond the reach of the empire are depicted as strange, alien, almost beyond comprehension. Writing just at the time of Claudius’ invasion of Britain in AD 43, Mela portrays Britain as a land beyond the margins of civilisation, incapable of selfgovernment and ripe for conquest: Plana, ingens, fecunda, uerum iis quae pecora quam homines benignius alant. Fert nemora saltusque ac praegrandia flumina, alternis motibus modo in pelagus, modo retro fluentia et quaedam gemmas margaritasque generantia. Fert populos regesque populorum, sed sunt inculti omnes, atque ut longius a continenti absunt, ita magis aliarum opum ignari, tantum pecore ac finibus dites … Causas tamen bellorum et bella contrahunt ac se frequenter inuicem infestant, maxime inperitandi cupidine studioque ea prolatandi quae possident.12

95

CIC_rev.indd 95

15/12/2020 10:56:35

New Centur y Chaucer

Britain is flat, huge, fertile, but more generously so for what feeds sheep than for what sustains humans. It supports groves and meadows and colossal rivers that sometimes flow to the sea, sometimes back again, with alternating currents, and certain other rivers that produce gems and pearls. It supports peoples and their kings, but all are uncivilized. The farther from the sea, the more ignorant they are of other kinds of wealth, being wealthy only in sheep and land … They produce, nevertheless, the causes of war and actual wars, and they take turns harassing one another constantly, mainly because they have a strong desire to rule and a strong desire to expand their holdings.13

In contrast to this, Mela describes the Italian peninsula as a land of wealthy cities and diverse peoples, dominated by its sea coasts, rivers, lakes, and mountains: Superiora late occupat litora Padus. Namque, ab imis radicibus Vesuli montis exortus, paruis se primum e fontibus colligit, et aliquatenus exilis ac macer, mox aliis amnibus adeo augescit atque alitur, ut se per septem ad postremum ostia effundat. Vnum de eis magnum Padum adpellant. Inde tam citus prosilit, ut discussis fluctibus diu qualem emisit undam agat, suumque etiam in mari alueum seruet, donec eum, ex aduerso litore Histriae, eodem impetu profluens Hister amnis excipiat. Hac re per ea loca nauigantibus, qua utrimque amnes eunt, inter marinas aquas dulcium haustus est. A Pado ad Anconam transitur Rauenna, Ariminum, Pisaurum, Fanestris colonia, flumen Metaurus atque Aesis. Et illa, in angusto illorum duorum promunturiorum, ex diuerso coeuntium, inflexi cubiti imagine sedens, et ideo a Grais dicta Ancon, inter Gallicas Italicasque gentes quasi terminus interest.14 The Padus [Po] occupies the upper coast over a considerable expanse. In fact, where it rises from the very roots of Mt Vesulus [Monte Viso], it first gathers itself from small springs and is

96

CIC_rev.indd 96

15/12/2020 10:56:35

Chaucer and Italian Culture

somewhat scant and meager. Then the river increases and is fed by other rivers so much that at the end it lets into the sea through seven mouths. One of these mouths they call the Great Padus. Once it begins, the river rushes forward with such speed that for a long time it drives, with waves breaking, the same waters it began with and preserves its own bed even in the sea until the Ister River, flowing in with the same force from the opposite shore of Istria, meets it. Because of this phenomenon, for those sailing through that vicinity, where the rivers meet from both sides, a drink of fresh water is possible in the midst of salty sea. The route from the Padus to Ancona crosses Ravenna, Ariminum [Rimini], Pisaurum [Pesaro], the colony of Fanum [Fano], the Metaurus River, and the Aesis River. And in fact, the terminus sits in the narrow joint – like a bent elbow [Grk. ankôn] – of those two famous promontories that meet there from opposite sides, and thus it was called Ancon by the Greeks; Ancona lies between the Gallic and Italic peoples like a boundary stone.15

In Mela’s view of the known world, towns beyond Rome are reference points on the map, as much a part of the topographical landscape as rivers and mountains. But they are also reference points for the demographic spread of the various peoples encompassed by Rome’s dominion, marking the boundaries which are monitored and patrolled by Roman hegemony. In this account of territorial regions, the function of rivers is particularly significant – they act as borders and boundaries, marking the limits of one territory and the beginning of another. They also represent the precondition for towns and cities which have to be situated near a navigable river which can provide both a water supply and a conduit for trade. Mela’s chorography was widely cited by Latin historians of late antiquity, most significantly by the third-century writer Solinus whose work, along with that of encyclopedists such as Isidore of Seville, was instrumental in transferring geographical knowledge to the medieval world.16 In particular, Mela’s spatial hierarchy, of sphere, hemispheres, known world, countries of the empire and lands on the margins, suited

97

CIC_rev.indd 97

15/12/2020 10:56:35

New Centur y Chaucer

the Christian interpretation of the world as a map of divine creation and intention. In a Christian context, marginal and ‘uncivilised’ lands became the spaces beyond Christendom, itself metaphorically figured as an empire. Geography as a discourse of territory and empire now had a dual semiotic, addressing itself to marking out both the Christian empire and the secular territories of kings and magnates. In its role as ‘an imperial product constructed by the mechanisms of travel, trade, and military campaigns, and authenticated by myth’,17 geographic discourse utilised both the myths of landownership and the myths of Christendom. The topographic legacies of Pliny, Mela and Solinus were brought together most influentially by Isidore of Seville (560–636), who drew on all three writers (together with many more) for his Etymologiae sive origines, compiled towards the end of his life.18 A cross between a universal history and an encyclopedia, the Etymologiae focused particularly on the natural order, including the known countries of the world, and was hugely influential as a work of reference kept in most monastic libraries.19 Isidore’s encyclopedia provided another kind of template for medieval historians. Starting with a taxonomy of space not unlike that of Mela – earth, world, continents, islands – Isidore then introduces a new larger-scale focus on cities and their built environment. In his chapter, ‘De Aedificiis Publicis’ (‘On Public Buildings’, XV.ii), he lists monuments and topographical features including temples, fortifications, amphitheatres, towers, fields and agriculture, among others, which indicate the normative expectation of what a city should be – that is, very much on the late Roman model. Isidore’s list of the major Greek and Italian cities, combined with his parameters of urban architecture and landscape, defined what could be considered a city, and therefore provided an authoritative pattern for later writers to follow. According to the work of both Mela and Isidore, towns and cities identified peoples and their territories. For Christian writers in the early medieval period, towns also bore witness, through their churches and monasteries, to another source of power: the rule of God and the presence of Christ on earth. Here is what Isidore says about the Italian peninsula:

98

CIC_rev.indd 98

15/12/2020 10:56:36

Chaucer and Italian Culture

Italia olim a Graecis populis occupata Magna Graecia appellata est, deinde a regis nomine Saturnia; mox et Latium dicta eo quod idem Saturnus a Iove sedibus suis pulsus ibi latuerit; postremo ab Italo Siculorum rege ibi regnante Italia nuncupata est. Cuius situs longitudine amplius quam latitudine a Circio in Eurum extenditur, a meridie Tyrrheno mare, ab Aquilone Adriatico clauditur, ab occiduo Alpium iugis finitur, terra omnibus in rebus pulcherrima, soli fertilitate, pabuli ubertate gratissima. Habet lacus Benacum, Avernum atque Lucrinum; fluvios Eridanum et Tiberim; et tepentes fontibus Baias … Tuscia pars Italiae; Vmbria vero pars Tusciae. Tuscia autem a frequentia sacrorum et turis vocata … Vmbria vero, historiae narrant, eo quod tempore aquosae cladis imbribus superfuerit … Est enim in iugis Appennini montis sita, in parte Italiae iuxta meridiem.20 (18) In times past Italy was called Magna Graecia by the Greeks who occupied it, and then Saturnia, from the name of its king. Later it was also called Latium, because it was here that Saturn hid after Jupiter had pushed him from his throne. Finally it was called Italy (Italia) after Italus, king of the Sicilians, who reigned there. Its territory is of greater length than width, extending from west-north-west to south-east. Enclosed by the Tyrrhenian Sea to the south and the Adriatic Sea to the north it is bounded in the west by the mountain range of the Alps. It is the most beautiful land in all respects, most pleasing in the fertility of its soil and the richness of its pasture. (19) It has Lake Garda (Benacus), Lake Avernus and the Lucrine Lake, the rivers Po (Eridanus) and Tiber, and the warm springs of Baiae … (20) Tuscia (cf. Tuscany) is a part of Italy, Umbria a part of Tuscia. Tuscia is named from its frequent use of religious rites and incense (tus) … (21) Umbria, as the histories tell, survived the rains (imber) during the time of a disastrous flood … It is located in the mountain range of the Apennines, in the part of Italy toward the south.21

Isidore’s fascination with etymology as the source of all knowledge (hence the title of his great work) and his habit of creating taxonomies

99

CIC_rev.indd 99

15/12/2020 10:56:36

New Centur y Chaucer

are exemplified here in his presentation of geography as etymology, but even so, he attempts the kind of verbal mapping that characterised the earlier tradition of chorography and was as interested in regions as he was in individual countries. Medieval descriptions of landscapes and the towns located within them evolved mainly from Latin texts of late antiquity, themselves belonging to an earlier Greek tradition of spatial organisation and geographical description. What characterises such descriptions of landscape, up to and including the modern practices of geographical discourse, is the elision of viewpoint. When mountains, rivers, towns and agricultural lands are laid out in a verbal (or diagrammatic) map, it is hard to discern where the writer or map-maker is positioned, except somewhere vaguely above or outside the contours of the landscape being described. Apparently detached from their authors, such descriptions can claim an objectivity, a lack of agenda, which authorises their picture of the world as a simple reflection of physical reality. Territory appears to be naturally produced by the landscape itself – by the topographical arrangement of land and water – as if political territories pre-existed any description or mapping of their limits. This effect of naturalness obscures the discursive production of territory and detaches those considerations of power and politics which invariably motivate both verbal and visual maps. Many modern critics give an impression that the genre of chorography in Britain is an entirely early modern phenomenon, appearing as an innovation in works such as William Camden’s Britannia (1586) and John Stow’s Survey of London (1598).22 These Tudor chorographies and topographies have clear models in late medieval Italian works such as Flavio Biondo’s (1392–1463) Italia illustrata, which circulated in manuscript in England.23 Yet chorography and other forms of topographical description were already central to many medieval Latin histories of Britain and served much the same purpose as their classical predecessors, to map the boundaries of the English kingdom. In the eighth century, Bede opened his Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum (Ecclesiastical History of the English People) with a geographical description of Britain as an island:

100

CIC_rev.indd 100

15/12/2020 10:56:36

Chaucer and Italian Culture

Brittania Oceani insula, cui quondam Albion nomen fuit, inter septentrionem et occidentem locata est, Germaniae, Galliae, Hispaniae, maximis Europae partibus, multo interuallo aduersa. Quae per miliapassuum DCCC in Boream longa, latitudinis habet milia CC, exceptis dumtaxat prolixioribus diuersorum promontoriorum tractibus, quibus efficitur, ut circuitus eius quadragies octies LXXV milia conpleat.24 Britain, formerly known as Albion, is an island in the ocean, lying towards the north west at a considerable distance from the coasts of Germany, Gaul, and Spain, which together form the greater part of Europe. It extends 800 miles northwards, and is 200 in breadth, except where a number of promontories stretch further, so that the total coastline extends to 3600 miles.

Bede’s description of the island of Britain was drawn largely from Solinus, the fourth-century writer whose Collectanea rerum memorabilium (also known as Polyhistor) was itself indebted to works by Pliny the Elder (especially his Historia Naturalis, c. AD 77–9) and Pomponius Mela. From Bede, the device of the topographic description was copied by a number of later British writers, including Geoffrey of Monmouth, Gerald of Wales, Henry of Huntingdon, William of Malmesbury and Ranulph Higden.25 Together with the renewed circulation of Ptolemy’s Geography from the late Middle Ages, these models of topographic and chorographic description provided medieval and early modern writers with a literary mechanism for re-inscribing the contours of the kingdom. Functioning as a way of producing a ‘united kingdom’ for a succession of centralised royal dynasties – Anglo-Saxons, Normans, Plantagenets, Tudors – the genre of topography worked to authorise the kingdom of England as co-terminous with the island of Britain. Ranulph Higden used Isidore’s Etymologiae as one of his main sources for his Polychronicon (first drafted in the 1320s and finalised between 1340 and 1352), particularly for his description of the different countries of Europe and Asia, including Parthia, Judaea, Egypt and Scythia. Higden’s description of the rivers and mountains of Italy (in

101

CIC_rev.indd 101

15/12/2020 10:56:36

New Centur y Chaucer

Book I, chapter 23) is also based largely on Isidore’s account.26 The Etymologiae was directly responsible for numerous medieval encyclopedias, including the De rerum natura of Bartholomaeus Anglicus (c.1240) and the Speculum maius of Vincent of Beauvais (c.1260). More significantly from the point of view of this chapter, the first encyclopedia based on Isidore’s work to be written in a vernacular language was Li Livres dou trésor (c.1265) by Brunetto Latini, the guardian and teacher of Dante, and Latini’s work was circulating in London from the early fourteenth century.27 Derived either from Latini’s book or directly from Isidore, the influence of the Etymologiae seeped into the work of Dante, Boccaccio and Petrarch.28 In England, Isidore was known to Chaucer and to Gower as one of their standard Latin authorities.29 There is also some evidence that Chaucer knew Higden’s Polychronicon (more likely in its original Latin rather than through John Trevisa’s translation into English which dates from 1387)30 and he certainly drew on Pliny’s Historia Naturalis, which contained, among other things, detailed descriptions of the countries and regions of the known world.31 Considering the great extent of Chaucer’s source material and the wide range of reference material at his disposal, he would have had access to a number of different models of chorographic description.

Chaucer’s Clerk’s Tale Geoffrey Chaucer’s Clerk’s Tale is his version of the story of ‘Patient Griselda’, born on the wrong side of the tracks and then forced to endure her husband’s cruel behaviour in order to prove the nobility of her nature. Critical reception of the tale, woven into the Canterbury Tales in the voice of the scholarly Clerk, has understandably focused on its moral complexities and its Italian influences. Chaucer himself alludes to his debt to Petrarch when he has the Clerk claim to the Host that he heard the tale in Padua directly from ‘Fraunceys Petrak, the lauriat poete’, while Petrarch translated the tale into Latin from a vernacular Italian version composed by Boccaccio as the last story in his Decameron.32 The issue of Chaucer’s sources for the Clerk’s Tale is undoubtedly complex;

102

CIC_rev.indd 102

15/12/2020 10:56:36

Chaucer and Italian Culture

yet the mode of discourse which strikes me as most distinctive about the tale, appearing first in the Petrarchan Latin version and adapted very closely by Chaucer, is that of chorography, appearing principally in the preface to the tale. The chorographical description of Lombardy which sets the scene for the tale of Griselda’s marriage to Walter is key to Chaucer’s use of sources, his interpretation of the tale, and his debt not simply to Petrarch but to a pre-existent tradition of classical and late antique topographic description by Latinate writers. The description is almost certainly Petrarch’s own addition to the fable and indicates his interest in classical Latin exemplars and the value he placed on Latin rhetoric and style. In Chaucer’s vernacular version, however, the chorographical introduction draws attention to the importance of urbanised northern Italy as a hub of international trade and commerce and, by association, to the economic basis of the marriage between Walter and Griselda. The use of chorography to identify the territories dominated by commercialising cities, practised by Greek and Latin geographers from Strabo to Mela, was a technique that could be transferred to literary texts. In addition, the outsider viewpoint constructed by chorography is a useful strategy for posing a moral debate: the reader is obliged to take up an apparently objective perspective shaped by the natural world from which to consider the complexities of a highly socialised marriage scenario. Chaucer, a writer who knew and deployed the full range of literary styles and genres available to men of letters in fourteenth-century England, was unlikely to ignore the rhetorical potential of Latin and vernacular traditions of regional description. Even so, his consciously geographical opening to the Clerk’s Tale is innovative in English literature where chorography is rarely found outside the Latin historiographical tradition before the early modern period. In the Prologue to the tale, the Clerk is constructed as a learned man. The Host asks him to stop thinking about his studies, to hold back his fancy language and rhetorical ‘high style’, and to tell a plain story in words they can all understand – which, as a master of discourse and register, he is perfectly able to do.33 By way of introduction, however, the Clerk describes where his tale is to be set, in the Italian town of Saluzzo, and, in a direct

103

CIC_rev.indd 103

15/12/2020 10:56:36

New Centur y Chaucer

snub to the Host, he gives us a textbook example of a chorographical description, worthy of Pomponius Mela himself:   But forth to tellen of this worthy man 40

That taughte me this tale, as I bigan, I seye that first with heigh stile he enditeth, Er he the body of his tale writeth, A prohemye, in the which discryveth he Pemond and of Saluces the contree,

45

And speketh of Apennyn, the hilles hye, That been the boundes of West Lumbardye, And of Mount Vesulus in special, Where as the Poo out of a welle smal Taketh his firste spryngyng and his sours,

50

That estwards ay encresseth in his cours To Emele-ward, to Ferrare, and Venyse, The which a long thyng were to devyse. And trewely, as to my juggement, Me thynketh it a thyng impertinent,

55

Save that he wole conveyen his mateere; But this his tale, which that ye may heere. Heere bigynneth the Tale of the Clerk of Oxenford   Ther is, at the west syde of Ytaille, Doun at the roote of Vesulus the colde, A lusty playn, habundant of vitaille,

60

Where many a tour and toun thou mayst biholde, That founded were in tyme of fadres olde, And many another delitable sighte, And Saluces this noble contree highte.   A markys whilom lord was of that lond,

65

As were his worthy eldres him bifore.34

The Clerk begins with a verbal map of Italy, referring to the regions, rivers, mountains and cities down the western and eastern coasts of the

104

CIC_rev.indd 104

15/12/2020 10:56:36

Chaucer and Italian Culture

country, echoing Mela’s sea-borne approach but also Solinus’ regional methodology which creates clusters of towns and habitations in the landscape, similar to a visual map.35 When the Clerk has given us our bearings, so to speak, he then zooms in on the town of Saluzzo in its fertile location on the plains of Lombardy. This description, starting with the big picture before locating an individual town, is entirely in keeping with the Latin tradition of late antique topography, and the Clerk’s use of such conventions is proof of his scholarly persona and also of his skill as a communicator. Though he acknowledges the Host’s instruction to keep it simple, he nevertheless draws on Latin rhetoric – with an explicit acknowledgment to ‘Fraunceys Petrak’ – to provide an elegant opening for his story. Chaucer took this chorographical opening directly from Petrarch’s Latin version of the tale. This text, and an anonymous French translation of Petrarch, Le Livre Griseldis, were Chaucer’s two main sources, and although he relied substantially on the French translation it is clear that in this opening section he is adapting the Latin text directly.36 The description is almost certainly Petrarch’s own invention: it does not occur in Boccaccio’s vernacular Florentine version from which Petrarch was working, nor does it occur in the French translation of Petrarch which Chaucer used. Echoes of Pliny, Dante and of other Petrarchan landscapes, the world of the ‘peregrinus ubique’ and the searcher after moral truths, rise up from Petrarch’s Latin opening: [Est] ad Ytalie latus occiduum Vesulus ex Appennini iugis mons unus altissimus, qui, vertice nubila superans, [liquido sese] ingerit etheri, mons suapte nobilis natura, Padi ortu nobilissimus, qui eius a latere fonte lapsus exiguo, orientem contra solem fertur, mirisque mox tumidus incrementis brevi spacio decurso, non tantum maximorum unus amnium sed fluviorum a Virgilio rex dictus, Liguriam gurgitem violentus intersecat; dehinc Emiliam atque Flamineam Veneciamque discriminans, multis ad ultimum et ingentibus hostiis in Adriaticum mare descendit. Ceterum pars illa terrarum de qua primum dixi, que et grata planicie et interiectis collibus ac montibus circumflexis, apta pariter ac iocunda est, atque ab eorum

105

CIC_rev.indd 105

15/12/2020 10:56:36

New Centur y Chaucer

quibus subiacet pede montium nomen tenet, et civitates aliquot et oppida habet egregia. Inter cetera, ad radicem Vesuli, terra Saluciarum vicis et castellis satis frequens, marchionum arbitrio nobilium quorundam regitur virorum, quorum unus primusque omnium et maximus fuisse traditur Walterus quidam, ad quem familie ac terrarum omnium regimen pertineret.37 On the western side of Italy, a lofty mountain named Vesulus reaches its peak out of the Apennines and into the rarefied air above the clouds. This mountain, famous in its own right, is most renowned as the source of the Po. The river falls from a small spring on the mountainside and, carried toward the rising sun, is quickly swollen in a brief space by numerous tributaries. Thus it becomes not only one of the great streams but (as Virgil calls it) the king of rivers. It rushes through the Ligurian rapids; from there it bounds Emilia, Flaminia, and Venice and finally descends to the Adriatic Sea in a great delta. That part of the country about which I spoke first, surrounded by a graceful plain and scattered hills and mountains, is both pleasant and happy. Taking its name from those mountains whose foot it lies under, it contains many towns and notable cities. The land of Saluzzo lies among the others at the root of Vesulus, full enough of villages and castles ruled by the will of certain noble marquises. The first and greatest, it is said, was a certain Walter, to whom the rule of his estate and the whole land belonged.

In drawing on classical Latin exemplars to construct this bird’s-eye view, Petrarch displays his erudition and also his deep sense of identification with the Latin masters and the value he placed on rhetoric and style.38 Topography and landscape are at the heart of much of Petrarch’s work, particularly the Africa, marking out literal and metaphorical spaces of human desire and agency within an explicitly Christian geography. In his description of Italy he has been influenced, directly or indirectly, by the imperialist rhetoric of chorographers such as Pomponius Mela, who also mentions the tributaries of the river Po, and Isidore, who refers to

106

CIC_rev.indd 106

15/12/2020 10:56:36

Chaucer and Italian Culture

the cities and towns of Italy. In his emphasis on the mountain and the river as the key topographical features Petrarch was perhaps remembering his reading of Augustine’s Confessions where he found this inspiring admonition: ‘And they go to admire the summits of mountains and the vast billows of the sea and the broadest rivers and the expanses of the ocean and the revolutions of the stars and they overlook themselves.’39 Whatever Chaucer’s purpose was in borrowing Petrarch’s preface to the tale of Griselda, such a Christian and imperialist understanding of the landscape was probably not the main rationale. The function and meaning of the chorographic preface in Chaucer’s poem (though surprisingly it has not been categoriesd as such), and its source in Petrarch’s Latin version, have received a certain amount of critical comment, though none of it particularly conclusive. William T. Rossiter considers Petrarch’s opening landscape to be an example of a locus amoenus, and one of Petrarch’s allegorical strategies: ‘The actual region of Saluzzo thus becomes edenic, a paradis terrestre, and thereby sets the tone for Petrarch’s blurring the generic boundary between historia and fabula.’40 Rossiter cites Emilie Kadish, who also saw the preface as basically allegorical, saying: ‘The natural phenomena described in the proem represent not geography but poetry, in the sense that Petrarch understood poetry: a veil which tantalizingly conceals truth.’41 Kadish also argues that a literal reading of the preface ‘as a physical description and consequently as a superfluity’ is a ‘misreading’ since the preface is ‘an integral part of the narrative (i.e., as the proper framework for the sense of the sequence of events narrated)’.42 She concludes that ‘the kinetic quality of the description symbolizes the soul’s aspiration toward union with the will of God’.43 It is certainly possible to read the proem allegorically, in both the Petrarchan and the Chaucerian versions, as foreshadowing the striving of the soul (Griselda) to accommodate itself to the will of God (Walter), a conservative Christian interpretation which Petrarch encouraged.44 Warren Ginsberg suggests that Petrarch’s description of the mountain and the river ‘foreshadow the deeds and character of Gualterius and Griselda [respectively]’, with the mass of the mountain controlling the course of the river whose passage from small spring to raging torrent

107

CIC_rev.indd 107

15/12/2020 10:56:36

New Centur y Chaucer

foreshadows Griselda’s journey from ‘poor peasant to illustrious marchioness’.45 But it is also possible to read the preface, especially in Chaucer’s version, ideologically, in which the physical description is neither irrelevant nor a ‘superfluity’ but a statement about the ‘political economy of urban territoriality’ in northern Italy, the land of the independent city-states.46 Mapping territory, either visually or verbally, is itself a political act since it calls into being each territory as a particular political entity, separated from others by its governance and lordship. David Wallace interprets the proem as a gesture expressive of Petrarch’s love for Boccaccio, since the latter ‘was famous as a Latinate geographer’, but Wallace also points out that ‘the space mapped out is Lombardy, the territory where Petrarch served Visconti princes during the most intensive phase of his political life’.47 We need to dig a little deeper, perhaps, to find reasons why Chaucer first imitated and then re-theorised Petrarch’s chorographic preface to the Griselda story. Chorography was not one of his regular rhetorical or Latinate strategies; the nearest comparison is with some of the landscape descriptions in the House of Fame, especially the bird’seye view of the topography seen from the perspective of the narrator clutched in the claws of the Eagle (HF, ll. 896–903). Chaucer could have followed Boccaccio or the French version, neither of which has the chorographic opening, but instead he deliberately chose to follow Petrarch. He even has his Clerk grumble about the irrelevance of the opening (‘Me thynketh it a thyng impertinent’, l. 54), as if to draw attention to its oddity. Warren Ginsberg interprets this as Chaucer’s own imperviousness to the Petrarchan landscape and indeed to Petrarch’s intellectual positioning: Some aspects of Petrarch’s project clearly escaped Chaucer. A Clerk who ‘unto logyk had longe ygo’, and who was a devoted follower of ‘Aristotle and his philosophie’ is precisely the wrong man to make [Petrarch’s] disciple, considering the contempt Petrarch heaped on Aristotelian dialectitians in general … And someone who dismisses the geographical prohemium to the tale as ‘thyng impertinent’ does not see in the landscape what Petrarch saw.48

108

CIC_rev.indd 108

15/12/2020 10:56:36

Chaucer and Italian Culture

Surely it is the Clerk, rather than Chaucer, who fails to appreciate Petrarch’s artful rhetoric, and it is Chaucer who is poking fun at the Clerk’s misunderstanding of Petrarch’s philosophical leanings. As Jerome Taylor has pointed out, It may strike one as odd that Chaucer should have chosen to make his Clerk of Oxenford, on the one hand, a long-time student of logic and devotee of Aristotle and his philosophy, and, on the other hand, a one-time student and devotee of Petrarch, who, from early till late in life, was a consistent critic of scholastic logic, of self-styled Aristotelians, and, within limits, of Aristotle himself.49

Taylor concludes that Chaucer’s Clerk is a follower of Petrarchan ‘logyk’ in the sense of argument based on rhetoric and poetry ‘which recognizes a civic and moral responsibility’, as opposed to the pointless debates of idle dialectitians claiming to be Aristotelian thinkers.50 But it is possible that Chaucer, an Aristotelian thinker himself, was taking a sly dig at Petrarch’s fastidious rejection of Aristotle. Chaucer’s humanism, including his engagement with the natural world, was certainly more Aristotelian than that of Petrarch, who used the ancient writers to examine his own selfhood, so it is interesting that Chaucer chose to keep the chorographic opening which, in Petrarch’s version, works to naturalise the rightness of royal authority in a Christian world.51 The tale of Griselda, as the Clerk tells it, is undeniably about Petrarchan ideals of truth and virtue, and how these should be taught by example, but Chaucer’s own humanism, grounded in urban commerce and politics, queries the ethical terms in which the Clerk offers the debate, and relocates it on the more materialist ground of class and commerce, the two major, if largely implicit, themes of the narrative. It is noticeable that Chaucer’s chorographical description is divided into two parts, the first announced by the Clerk as the ‘proheme’ which he got from his source, a ‘worthy clerk’ at Padua (ll. 39–52), and the second introducing the tale itself (ll. 57–63). The first part describes the regional topography of northern Italy, including a number of regions

109

CIC_rev.indd 109

15/12/2020 10:56:36

New Centur y Chaucer

(the Apennines, Piedmont, Saluzzo, Lombardy) and the two main features of the landscape, Mount Vesulus (Monte Viso) and the River Po. The second part focuses on a particular area – the west side of Italy – where there is to be found the ‘noble contree’ of Saluzzo (l. 63) with ‘many a tour and toun’ (l. 60). Between these two sections of the chorography, the regional and the urban, there are four lines interjected by the Clerk which form a transition between the preface and the tale (ll. 53–6). In other words, the Clerk takes no responsibility for the first part of the chorography, which he reluctantly passes on from his source, but the second part, with which he begins the tale, is presented as his own version. Yet there are elements of Petrarch’s description in both sections – the references in the first section to the Apennines and to the Po starting as a small spring and getting bigger as it flows east are from Petrarch (and found also in Mela), while the references in the second section to the west side of Italy and the fertile plain of Saluzzo with its many towns and dwellings are also from Petrarch’s description. Repeated in both sections are ‘Vesulus’, the mountain that dominates this region of the landscape and nurtures the River Po; and Saluzzo, the location of the story. Chaucer has in some sense taken Petrarch’s description apart and put it back together in a different order while retaining the discourse of chorography. In so doing, he has created two different topographical maps on different scales. The first is the large-scale map of northern Italy, with its mountains, rivers, regions, and major towns, Ferrara and Venice. It is noteworthy that, whereas Petrarch refers to Flaminia, a topgraphical region, Chaucer replaces this with Ferrara, another city, like Venice, made wealthy from trade.52 The second is a smaller-scale map of one particular region, that of Saluzzo, dotted with towns and settlements. While Petrarch’s description follows the landscape in a logical linear direction, Chaucer’s follows the logic of the story from the larger chorographic context to the specific urban location. It is this device of moving from the general to the specific that suggests the story of Griselda and Walter might represent a specific example of a more general situation, namely the commercialisation of marriage in order to preserve the ruling authority (the lordship of Saluzzo, represented

110

CIC_rev.indd 110

15/12/2020 10:56:36

Chaucer and Italian Culture

by Walter) and ensure the continued commercial wealth of the region accruing from its fortunate geographical position. Petrarch’s engagement with topography operates at a more figurative level than does Chaucer’s. Petrarch imbues the landscape with moral virtues, calling the plain ‘iocunda’, ‘happy’, and the cities ‘egregia’, ‘notable’, creating a symbolic realm which idealises the natural world and justifies princely authority over the region. Chaucer’s engagement with the landscape, voiced through the Clerk, is more pragmatic and materialist. Cities need to be located near rivers; the plain of Saluzzo is ‘habundant of vitaille’, providing food for the citizens; Saluzzo is a ‘noble contree’ because of the richness of its fertile lands. Land masses, like the Italian peninsula, need to be subdivided into economic territories where jurisdiction is clear to ensure the smooth passage of commerce. In the Clerk’s Tale, the chorographical introduction emphasises the fertility and wealth of the region, along with the number of cities and their antiquity, providing an implicit contrast (as Mela did) to the small and relatively undeveloped landscape of Britain. Italy, familiar to Chaucer’s audiences as the heart of trade and banking, was also the bridge between the two commercial territories of west and east, moving western exports through the Mediterranean via Venice (mentioned by Chaucer) and across to Greece, Turkey and North Africa, and bringing luxury goods and essential industrial supplies, such as alum and dyes needed for the cloth-making trades, to western Europe. The topography of Italy is described in terms of the natural world, with its mountains and rivers, but it also includes towns and cities, implicitly negating a simple binary between nature’s sublime and the mundanity of urban life, and suggesting instead the necessary merging and interdependence of country and city as part of the same economic system.53 Such a specific location for the story, mapped on to one of the great trade routes of the European world, alerts us to the economic significance of Walter and Griselda’s marriage as a union between a wealthy and powerful man and a poor and disempowered woman. This union is not obviously symbolised by the mountain and the river, which join together equally to provide the richness of the landscape which serves

111

CIC_rev.indd 111

15/12/2020 10:56:36

New Centur y Chaucer

the towns, but is represented as a necessary, and necessarily unequal, union between urban and peasant economies in order to oil the wheels of commerce. There are not only gender politics at work here, but class politics, the politics of international trade, and the inevitable commercial exploitation of labour, represented by Griselda and her two children, who are produced by her but owned entirely by her husband, as she is herself.54 As in other examples of chorography, the subject position of this opening discourse is that of the outsider, suggesting a detachment that is suspect. We are presented with the larger landscape of Italy before being brought to the relevant region, which we approach from the outside and from which human habitation is elided. It is as if the Clerk wants us to retain some distance from the characters in the story, the better to appreciate the ethical issues that are his focus in the tale. But the technique of taking us on an armchair journey to an ostensibly distant place has the effect of holding up a mirror to our own ways of life and giving us a new perspective on what we already know. This is what the opening narrative achieves for Chaucer’s London audiences. Italy, and especially Lombardy, are already a site of meaning from a London perspective, from which ‘negative connotations of greed [are] attached to the Lombards as a result of their mercantile activity’.55 Though Chaucer’s audiences are highly urbanised, he achieves the denaturalising of urban life by locating it elsewhere, in a foreign country, giving his audiences the opportunity to assess their own urban practices. Once he has brought us into the town of Saluzzo from the outside, showing us its place on the map of Italy, we have taken up the position of the topographical gaze, decentred from an interior urban perspective. From this subject position, the symbolic value of the town as metaphor can be deployed: the town of Saluzzo in its fertile plain is not only a literal space; it is positioned as a figurative space where urban values – the values of the market in which all transactions, including marriage, are commodified – can be inspected and social roles interrogated. Walter’s anxiety about Griselda’s lack of noble birth, a lack which he tries to overcome with material display, then punish with tyranny, before accepting that a noble spirit can equal or trump

112

CIC_rev.indd 112

15/12/2020 10:56:36

Chaucer and Italian Culture

a noble birth, is a story made for the emergent mercantile gentry of Chaucer’s London.

Conclusion Chorography and related forms of topographical description are materialist genres, but it does not follow that they are ‘realistic’ or objective accounts of the physical world. As Chris Otter has said, ‘Materiality is not “outside” power, any more than it is “outside” the economic.’56 From its earliest classical origins to the flourishing of Renaissance chorography in Britain and Italy, chorography is a discourse of power, working to naturalise systems of territorial division and authority. Despite the Clerk’s grumbling about the irrelevance of his description, Chaucer’s use of Petrarch’s chorographic opening to the tale of Griselda is as far from being redundant as is possible: both the preface and the tale work in tandem to comment on relations of power based on commercial exchange. Chaucer’s use of Latinate chorography, along with other vernacular examples such as the Travels of John Mandeville, contributed to a process of reconfiguring and remapping the empire of Christendom as a series of interdependent marketplaces channelling goods and services from one end of the northern hemisphere to the other. In the Latin tradition of late antique and early medieval learning, chorography was applied to the map of the known world. It was a literary strategy for defining the two territories of the western and eastern Empires, both as competing religious arenas and as maps of royal and papal control. Chorography not only defined the borders of where one land ended and another began, it legitimised a hierarchy of places according to its own taxonomy of space and geographic significance. Applied to Britain as a self-contained island, chorographical description, such as that of Bede or William of Malmesbury, celebrated the singularity of its borders which inscribed a space contested by Christian and royal rulers. In mapping the terrain of this contested space, chorography positioned towns as the sites of struggle between Church and state. Seen only from the outside, their urban culture ignored or

113

CIC_rev.indd 113

15/12/2020 10:56:36

New Centur y Chaucer

suppressed by clerical writers, the towns of Britain were imagined merely as the vehicles in which Christian power could be monumentally displayed and royal might could be aggressively asserted. It was left to the vernacular writers of the fourteenth century, to Boccaccio, Petrarch and Chaucer, to reconfigure urban spaces as the products of commerce rather than Christianity.

Notes 1. This is not to say that new materialist analyses always proceed from a primarily empirical context, though many of them do. For an overview of this aspect of new materialism, see Diana Coole and Samantha Frost, ‘Introducing the New Materialisms’, in Diana Coole and Samantha Frost (eds), New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), pp. 1–43. In contrast, more theorised considerations of materialism as a site of institutional discursive power relations can be found among the essays in Tony Bennett and Patrick Joyce (eds), Material Powers: Cultural Studies, History and the Material Turn (New York and London: Routledge, 2010). 2. John Frow, ‘Matter and Materialism: A Brief Pre-History of the Present’, in Bennett and Joyce (eds), Material Powers, pp. 66–90 (pp. 68–9). 3. This approach is associated particularly with the work of Henri Lefebvre, who analysed space, particularly urban space, as a site of, and a product of, social relations within capitalism. See The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991); also David Harvey, Spaces of Capital: Towards a Critical Geography (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2001). 4. Chorography as a classical discourse began to be retrieved as a tool of modern criticism, unsurprisingly, by scholars of maps and cartography; see for example, Howard Marchitello, ‘Political Maps: The Production of Cartography and Chorography in Early Modern England’, in Margaret J. M. Ezell and Katherine O’Brien O’Keeffe (eds), Cultural Artifacts and the Production of Meaning: The Page, the Image, and the Body (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994), pp. 13–40. 5. The phrase ‘political sociography’ comes from Christiaan van Paassen, The Classical Tradition of Geography (Groningen: J. B. Wolters, 1957), p. 244. 6. As Jeremy McInerney writes, ‘The question of where the borders of Greece were to be found increasingly assumed a metageographical value in the Hellenistic period as the actual land of Greece was subordinated to the power of Macedonian kings and Roman generals.’ See ‘Callimachus and the Poetics of the Diaspora’, in Greta Hawes (ed.), Myths on the Map: The Storied

114

CIC_rev.indd 114

15/12/2020 10:56:36

Chaucer and Italian Culture

Landscapes of Ancient Greece (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), pp. 122–40 (p. 122). 7. ‘Herakleides Kritikos (369A), Description of Greece’, ed. and trans. Jeremy McInerney, in Ian Worthington (ed.), Brill’s New Jacoby, second edn, online database, F.1.21, https://referenceworks-brillonline-com.bris.idm.oclc.org/ entries/brill-s-new-jacoby-2/herakleides-kritikos-369a-a369A?s.num=3 (accessed 30 November 2019). McInerney explains in his commentary on the text that this ‘Description of Greece’ was once attributed to Dikaiarchos ‘but the attribution to Herakleides should be regarded as firm’. 8. Roger Batty speculates that Mela drew on work by Strabo and Herodotus. See ‘Mela’s Phoenician Geography’, Journal of Roman Studies, 90 (2000), 70–94 (p. 72). 9. F. E. Romer (trans.), Pomponius Mela’s Description of the World (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1998), pp. 4–5. The ninth-century manuscript, the primary source of the text, is Vatican MS lat. 4929, described by Romer on pp. 27–8. 10. On the recovery of Ptolemy’s Geography (c. AD 150) in Constantinople from about 1300, see Renate Burri, ‘The Rediscovery of Ptolemy’s Geography (End of the Thirteenth to End of the Fifteenth Century)’, Imago Mundi, 61/1 (2009), 124–7. 11. Catherine Connors, ‘Imperial Space and Time: The Literature of Leisure’, in Oliver Taplin (ed.), Literature in the Greek and Roman Worlds (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 492–518 (p. 509). 12. De Chorographia, Book III, 50–3. Text from Pomponius Mela: Chorographie, ed. A. Silberman (Paris: Société d’Édition Les Belles Lettres, 1988), pp. 81–2. 13. Romer (trans.), Pomponius Mela’s Description of the World, p. 116. 14. De Chorographia, Book II, 62–4 (Silberman, Chorographie, pp. 51–2). 15. Romer (trans.), Pomponius Mela’s Description of the World, pp. 86–7. 16. On the influence of Mela’s work in the Middle Ages, see Silberman (ed.), Chorographie, pp. lii–liii; C. Gormley et al., ‘The Medieval Circulation of the De Chorographia of Pomponius Mela’, Medieval Studies, 46 (1984), 266–320. Mela and Pliny the Elder were Solinus’ main sources for the geographical descriptions in his Collectanea, including his description of Italy. Kai Brodersen estimates that about three-quarters of Solinus’ work comes from Pliny. See Brodersen, ‘Mapping Pliny’s World: The Achievement of Solinus’, Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies, 54/1 (2011), 63–88 (p. 70). 17. Connors, ‘Imperial Space and Time’, p. 510. 18. The most recent translation of Isidore’s work is by Stephen A. Barney, W. J. Lewis, J. A. Beach and Oliver Berghof, The Etymologies of Isidore of Seville (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). The translators discuss Isidore’s influence on later medieval writers on pp. 24–6 of the Introduction. Anca Criva˘t, has done a lexical comparison of Isidore’s work with Solinus’ Polyhistor to demonstrate Isidore’s debt to Solinus. See ‘Isidore of Seville – Reader of Solinus’, Bucharest Working Papers in Linguistics, 15/1 (2013), 113–32.

115

CIC_rev.indd 115

15/12/2020 10:56:36

New Centur y Chaucer

19. Michael Twomey describes the Etymologies, and Isidore’s shorter work, De natura rerum (composed in 612–14), as ‘monastic texts used in the studium’. Twomey, ‘Encyclopaedias’, in Nigel J. Morgan and Rodney M. Thomson (eds), The Book in Britain: vol. II: 1100–1400 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), pp. 244–9 (p. 245). 20. Isidori Hispalensis Episcopi, Etymologiarum sive Originum Libri XX, ed. W. M. Lindsay, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1911), XIV.iv.18–21 (Lindsay, vol. 2). 21. Isidore of Seville, The Etymologies, trans. Barney et al., p. 291. 22. See for example Bernard Klein, Maps and the Writing of Space in Early Modern England (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001); Richard Helgerson, Forms of Nationhood: The Elizabethan Writing of England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992); Anthony W. Johnson, ‘Shakespeare, Architecture, and the Chorographic Imagination’, Shakespeare, 13/2 (2017), 114–35. 23. Helen Fulton, ‘Urban History in Medieval and Early Modern Britain: The Influence of Classical and Italian Models’, in Helen Fulton and Michele Campopiano (eds), Anglo-Italian Cultural Relations in the Later Middle Ages (York: York Medieval Press for Boydell and Brewer, 2018), pp. 150–78 (p. 152). 24. Bede, Ecclesiastical History of the English People, ed. and trans. Bertram Colgrave and R. A. B. Mynors, Oxford Medieval Texts (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969), Book I.i. 25. The wide influence of Solinus is discussed by Bernard Guenée, Histoire et culture historique dans l’Occident médiéval (Paris: Aubier Montaigne, 1980). Paul Dover notes that ‘Solinus was particularly popular as an authority on geographical knowledge’. See ‘Reading “Pliny’s Ape” in the Renaissance: The Polyhistor of Caius Julius Solinus in the First Century of Print’, in Jason König and Greg Woolf (eds), Encyclopaedism from Antiquity to the Renaissance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), pp. 414–43 (p. 419). 26. John Taylor, The Universal Chronicle of Ranulf Higden (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1966), p. 82. Higden also used Pliny and Paul the Deacon’s Historia Langobardorum. See Margaret Bridges, ‘Writing, Translating and Imagining Italy in the Polychronicon’, in Fulton and Campopiano (eds), Anglo-Italian Cultural Relations in the Later Middle Ages, pp. 8–39 (p. 18). 27. Bridges, ‘Writing, Translating and Imagining Italy’, p. 26. See also Fulton, ‘Urban History in Medieval and Early Modern Britain’, p. 151. 28. The Etymologies, trans. Barney et al., p. 27. On Chaucer’s familiarity with encyclopedias, see Peter Brown, Chaucer and the Making of Optical Space (Bern: Peter Lang, 2007), pp. 119–23. 29. Chaucer’s references to Isidore occur in the Parson’s Tale X.89 (a reference to the Sententiae) and X.551, referring to Isidore’s description of the juniper tree in Etymologiae XVII.vii.35. Gower’s knowledge of Isidore is evident in both Miroir de l’omme (composed 1376–9) where Gower calls him ‘clerc parfait’ (line 10405) and alludes to Isidore’s taxonomy of women (lines 17245–437)

116

CIC_rev.indd 116

15/12/2020 10:56:36

Chaucer and Italian Culture

from Etymologiae IX.vii.29; and Confessio Amantis (composed 1386–90), which draws on some of the religious issues discussed in Etymologiae VIII. See Confessio Amantis, vol. III, ed. Russell A. Peck (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, Western Michigan University, 2004), Book 5, ll. 732– 1302 and notes. 30. Andrew Galloway has suggested that Chaucer’s Legend of Lucrece drew on Higden’s Polychronicon, where Higden incorporated an account of the legend based on that of the Oxford friar John Ridevall (c.1340). See ‘Chaucer’s Legend of Lucrece and the Critique of Ideology in Fourteenth-Century England’, ELH, 60/4 (1993), 813–32 (pp. 822–5). 31. One of Chaucer’s debts to Pliny is his description of the magic sword in The Squire’s Tale, ll. 156–67. See Vincent DiMarco, ‘The Squire’s Tale’, in Robert M. Correale and Mary Hamel (eds), Sources and Analogues of the Canterbury Tales, 2 vols (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2003), I, 169–209 (p. 201). 32. Geoffrey Chaucer, Clerk’s Tale, IV.31–2, in The Riverside Chaucer, gen. ed. Larry D. Benson, third edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), p. 137. All references to work by Chaucer are from this edition. Petrarch’s Latin prose version of Boccaccio’s tale, ‘Historia Griseldis’, was sent by Petrarch as the third of four letters addressed to Boccaccio and can be dated to c.1373. For an edition and translation, see ‘Historia Griseldis: Petrarch’s Epistolae Seniles XVII.3’, ed. and trans. Thomas J. Farrell, in Correale and Hamel (eds), Sources and Analogues of the Canterbury Tales, I, 108–29. For a discussion of the four letters comprising Book 17 of Petrarch’s Rerum senilium libri, ‘Letters of Old Age’, see Kenneth P. Clarke, ‘On Copying and Not Copying Griselda: Petrarch and Boccaccio’, in Piero Boitani and Emilia Di Rocco (eds), Boccaccio and the European Literary Tradition (Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 2014), pp. 57–71. Boccaccio’s tale of Griselda was included as the last story in his Decameron (Giornata X, Novella 10), which he completed by 1354. For the text, see the edition by Vittore Branca, Tutte le opere di Giovanni Boccaccio (Milan: Mondadori, 1976), IV, 942–58; for a translation, see Giovanni Boccaccio: The Decameron, trans. Guido Waldman with introduction and notes by Jonathan Usher, The World’s Classics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), pp. 668–78. Chaucer’s other main source for the Clerk’s Tale, apart from Petrarch, was an anonymous French translation of Petrarch’s version, Le Livre de Griseldis, ed. and trans. Amy W. Goodwin in Correale and Hamel (eds), Sources and Analogues of the Canterbury Tales, I, 140–67. The extent to which Chaucer drew on Boccaccio’s version is a matter of debate since there is no indisputable evidence that Chaucer had direct access to the Decameron. According to Farrell, Boccaccio’s tale of Griselda was very likely ‘present in Chaucer’s memory as he worked on the Clerk’s Tale [giving] the Decameron a relevance greater than that of any other analogue’ (‘The Griselda Story in Italy’, in Sources and Analogues, I, 103–6, p. 103). William T. Rossiter argues for an indirect, intertextual influence from Boccaccio via Petrarch (Chaucer and Petrarch, Chaucer Studies, 41

117

CIC_rev.indd 117

15/12/2020 10:56:36

New Centur y Chaucer

(Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2010), p. 173), while Jessica Harkins has traced some linguistic parallels between the two texts which, she argues, provide definitive proof that Chaucer used Boccaccio’s text as one of his sources (‘Chaucer’s Clerk’s Tale and Boccaccio’s Decameron X.10’, The Chaucer Review, 47/3(2013), 247–73). A brief comparison between the versions of the tale by Boccaccio and Petrarch is made by Warren Ginsberg, ‘“And Speketh so Pleyn”: The Clerk’s Tale and its Teller’, Criticism, 20 (1978), 307–23. For an assessment of the complexity surrounding Chaucer’s sources, see Kenneth P. Clarke, ‘Chaucer and Italy: Contexts and/of Sources’, Literature Compass, 8/8 (2011), 526–33 (p. 527). 33. Charles F. Briggs characterises the Clerk as a ‘university scholar’, steeped in ‘the advanced Latin grammar, formal logic, and rhetoric of the classroom, and a knowledge of Aristotelian philosophy’ – the latter, ironically, rejected by Petrarch. Briggs concludes that ‘by having the “scholastic” Clerk tell a tale by the “humanist” Petrarch perhaps Chaucer meant both gently to criticize the Clerk’s brand of education while at the same time defending it’. Briggs, ‘The Clerk’, in Stephen H. Rigby (ed. with the assistance of Alastair J. Minnis), Historians on Chaucer: The ‘General Prologue’ to the Canterbury Tales (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), pp. 187–205 (p. 203). 34. Chaucer, Clerk’s Tale, IV.39–52, 57–63. 35. Brodersen argues persuasively that, in adapting his geographical material from Pliny the Elder, Solinus takes a more regional approach, working through the descriptions of countries in the form of ‘areas’ rather than using the linear methodology of Pliny and Mela. See ‘Mapping Pliny’s World’, p. 79. Chaucer may have received traces of Solinus’ work via the twelfth-century theologian Alain de l’Isle. See Dover, ‘Reading “Pliny’s Ape” in the Renaissance’, p. 420. 36. Germaine Dempster considered which one of the manuscripts of Petrarch’s Latin version of the tale Chaucer might have worked from, in ‘Chaucer’s Manuscript of Petrarch’s Version of the Griselda Story’, Modern Philology, 41 (1943), 6–16. 37. Text and translation by Farrell, ‘Historia Griseldis’, in Correale and Hamel (eds), Sources and Analogues, I, 108–29. 38. Petrarch’s proem may well have been influenced by Dante’s use of geographical description in his Inferno, such as the journey through Malice’s borderland (Inferno, XVI.94–105). See Warren Ginsberg, ‘From Simile to Prologue: Geography as Link in Dante, Petrarch, Chaucer’, in Andrew Galloway and R. F. Yeager (eds), Through a Classical Eye: Transcultural and Transhistorical Visions in Medieval English, Italian, and Latin Literature in Honour of Winthrop Wetherbee (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009), pp. 145–64 (p. 145). Ginsberg argues that ‘Petrarch’s preface refashions Dante’s simile of the Acquacheta’ (p. 161 n. 5). 39. Quoted by Petrarch in Rerum familiarium libri, IV.1 (his account of his ascent of Mount Ventoux, near Avignon, with his brother in April 1336) and cited by Christopher Celenza, ‘Petrarch and the History of Philosophy’,

118

CIC_rev.indd 118

15/12/2020 10:56:36

Chaucer and Italian Culture

in Igor Candido (ed.), Petrarch and Boccaccio: The Unity of Knowledge in the Pre-Modern World (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2018), pp. 78–90 (p. 78). For Petrarch’s letter in English translation, see Rerum familiarum libri I–VIII, trans. Aldo S. Bernardo (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1975), pp. 172–80. It is also worth noting that Petrarch refers to Pomponius Mela, the ‘cosmographer’, in this letter (p. 172). 40. Rossiter, Chaucer and Petrarch, p. 146. 41. Cited by Rossiter, Chaucer and Petrarch, p. 147. For the original, see Emilie P. Kadish, ‘The Proem of Petrarch’s Griselda’, Mediaevalia, 2 (1976), 189–206. 42. Kadish, ‘The Proem’, p. 191. 43. Kadish, ‘The Proem’, p. 195. 44. The thirteenth-century handbook for nuns, Ancrene Riwle, instructs its readers to accept the terms of their ‘marriage’ to Christ, however harshly he tests them, just as a wife has to accept the behaviour of her husband who tests her love, often cruelly, before ‘he understont ðet heo is al wel ituht’ (‘he is convinced that she has been fully trained’). See Helen Fulton, ‘The Performance of Social Class: Domestic Violence in the Griselda Story’, AUMLA: Journal of the Australasian Universities Language and Literature Association, 106 (2006), 25–42 (pp. 33–4). 45. Ginsberg, ‘From Simile to Prologue’, pp. 156–7. See also Ginsberg, ‘“And Speketh so Pleyne”’, where he finds in Petrarch’s preface an echo of Christ’s suffering as part of the Christian morality of Petrarch’s tale (pp. 311–12). 46. The phrase comes from Saskia Sassen, who describes different kinds of medieval territories including the ‘urban territoriality’ of the larger cities of Europe, where cities had jurisdiction over their own territories in cooperation with, or in defiance of, the prince or monarch: ‘French towns became the king’s allies, Germans set up city leagues allying with neither king nor lords, and Italians set up autonomous city-states, some of which had their own vast armies.’ Territory, Authority, Rights: From Medieval to Global Assemblages (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), p. 58. 47. David Wallace, ‘Griselde before Chaucer: Love between Men, Women and Farewell Art’, in Galloway and Yeager (eds), Through a Classical Eye, pp. 206–20 (p. 211). On Boccaccio as a geographer, see David Wallace, Premodern Places: Calais to Surinam, Chaucer to Aphra Behn (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006), pp. 212–13. 48. Warren Ginsberg, ‘Petrarch, Chaucer and the Making of the Clerk’, in James J. Paxson, Lawrence M. Clopper and Sylvia Tomasch (eds), The Performance of Middle English Culture: Essays on Chaucer and the Drama in Honor of Martin Stevens (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1998), pp. 125–41 (pp. 139–40). 49. Jerome Taylor, ‘Fraunceys Petrak and the Logyk of Chaucer’s Clerk’, in Aldo Scaglione (ed.), Francis Petrarch, Six Centuries Later: A Symposium, North Carolina Studies in the Romance Languages and Literatures: Symposia 3 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina; Chicago: Newberry Library, 1975), pp. 364–83 (p. 364).

119

CIC_rev.indd 119

15/12/2020 10:56:36

New Centur y Chaucer

50. Taylor, ‘Fraunceys Petrak’, p. 372. 51. Gur Zak refers to Petrarch’s ‘crisis of the narrative self’ in Petrarch’s Humanism and the Care of the Self (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010). Ronald Witt describes Petrarch’s criticisms of Aristotle, and of the scholastic curricula based on Aristotelian thought, and Petrarch’s avowed preference for Latin writers, especially Cicero. See ‘Petrarch, Creator of the Christian Humanist’, in Petrarch and Boccaccio, ed. Candido, pp. 65–77, especially pp. 66–8. 52. The commercial wealth of Ferrara under its Este lords is described by C. M. Rosenberg, The Este Monuments and Urban Development in Renaissance Ferrara (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). 53. Lee Patterson, drawing on the work of Rodney Hilton, describes this interdependence of the agrarian and commercial economies as a channelling of goods and capital from the country to the city: ‘The city … served primarily as a site for the circulation of capital generated in the country, extracted by the landowning class, and spent by them in large parts on luxury goods [and] warfare.’ Chaucer and the Subject of History (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press; London: Routledge, 1991), p. 326. 54. María Bullón-Fernández provides a useful discussion of the medieval status of women as the property of their husbands, forming the context for a consideration of Griselda’s poverty and lack of property which, in Petrarch’s version, elides her selfhood and renders her merely an allegorical virtue. In contrast, Chaucer’s implicit critique of this attitude recuperates Griselda as a person who retains some agency despite her poverty and lack of power. See ‘Poverty, Property, and the Self in the Late Middle Ages: The Case of Chaucer’s Griselda’, Mediaevalia, 35 (2014), 193–226. 55. Bridges, ‘Writing, Translating and Imagining Italy in the Polychronicon’, p. 38. 56. Otter, ‘Locating Matter: The Place of Materiality in Urban History’, in Bennett and Joyce (eds), Material Powers, pp. 91–137 (p. 126).

120

CIC_rev.indd 120

15/12/2020 10:56:36

4

VISION AND TOUCH IN DANTE AND CHAUCER Robert S. Sturges

T

his essay is an attempt to show how several medieval texts that share common concerns but whose genealogical relationship is problematic can still be mutually illuminating on the subject of medieval concepts of vision and touch. Chaucer’s admiration for Dante is well known, but evidence for it is derived primarily from his references to the Commedia.1 I am concerned with a less studied set of comparisons, those between Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde and Dante’s Convivio and Vita nova. While, in spite of intriguing similarities, no direct link between the Vita nova and Troilus has been demonstrated, their complementary approaches to the role of the senses in the experience of love, especially the mutually reinforcing senses of vision and touch, are both influenced by long traditions linking these two senses. And indeed, another of Dante’s texts, the Convivio, with which Chaucer can be shown to have been familiar, takes up that connection, at a slightly later date than the Vita nova, on a theoretical level.2 Despite their common influence by varied sources on the senses, and Chaucer’s probable familiarity with Dante’s own contribution to the theoretical debate, Chaucer’s Troilus and Dante’s Vita nova represent sensory experiences in quite different fashions, for reasons to be explored, and their differences may prove to be as illuminating as their similarities.

CIC_rev.indd 121

15/12/2020 10:56:36

New Centur y Chaucer

Rather than considering these texts in a line of influence or filiation, it may be more appropriate to think of them as ‘neighbouring texts’ in the sense employed by George Edmondson, following Kenneth Reinhard. This different form of relationality among texts ‘pursues a mode of reading … in which texts are not so much grouped into “families” defined by similarity and difference, as into “neighborhoods” determined by accidental contiguity, genealogical isolation, and ethical encounter.’3 Edmondson’s example of such a neighbourhood, the various versions of the Troilus story by Boccaccio, Chaucer and Henryson, includes texts linked by lineage, but he treats them not as a family, but as neighbours: ‘What makes them neighboring texts is their shared concern with the matter of Troy.’4 A number of scholars, including Stephen Barney and Barry Windeatt, have pointed out suggestive parallels between the Vita nova and the Troilus. Barney, in his explanatory notes to Troilus in The Riverside Chaucer, mentions parallel plot points, such as the initial meetings between the respective pairs of lovers in a church or temple, as well as common ideas, such as the notion that ‘[l]ove stimulates courage and virtue’,5 while Windeatt observes Chaucer’s use of the Dantean dolce stil nuovo.6 Both authors, however, like others who have investigated the relationship between the two texts, are quick to point out that these parallels do not demonstrate that Chaucer had necessarily read the Vita nova or used it as a source: Barney’s parallels are late medieval commonplaces, and he lists other works likely to have been known by Chaucer that also make use of them, while Windeatt points out that the dolce stil nuovo most likely came to Chaucer filtered through his major source for Troilus and Criseyde, Boccaccio’s Filostrato. As Warren Ginsberg observes, ‘We have no evidence that Chaucer read or even knew of this indispensable introduction to Beatrice and the poetry Dante wrote about her.’7 If influence there be, then, it is indirect. Even an indirect link between the two texts is of interest, however, and Jeffrey Helterman, in a 1974 essay, one of the few to take the possibility of such a link seriously, suggested that comparisons between the two may be fruitful even if direct influence cannot be demonstrated:

122

CIC_rev.indd 122

15/12/2020 10:56:36

Chaucer and Italian Culture

It is uncertain whether or not [Chaucer] had read the Vita Nuova; since he was an admirer of Dante and had visited Italy, it is possible that he was acquainted with it … Dante’s great treatise on love sheds much light on the nature of love in Chaucer. Troilus passes through successive stages which form a secular analogue to Dante’s progress toward the love of Beatrice.8

Helterman’s suggestion that Chaucer secularises Dante’s Christian vision of love, and that their contrasting viewpoints can be illustrated through a comparison of Troilus with the Vita nova, regardless of whether the latter influenced the former, is useful, and I will draw on his comparative method in making my own observations about the connections between the two texts. Rather than pursuing a direct influence, I want to trace an indirect connection through the affinity both books have with another work of Dante’s, the Convivio, and the long debate on sense perception to which it makes a contribution. And rather than investigating the structure of the love experience, spiritual or secular, as a whole, I focus on the specifically sensory aspect of love as each poet understands it, and on the relationship between vision and touch in particular. Unlike the possible but unlikely influence of the Vita nova, that of the Convivio on Chaucer has been attested by scholars dating back to a seminal 1915 essay by John Livingston Lowes concerning the gentillesse lecture in the Wife of Bath’s Tale and its source in the Convivio’s Book IV, an essay that continues to be cited.9 Of Dante’s minor works, for that matter (i.e., those other than the Commedia), according to the judgement of Howard Schless in Chaucer and Dante, the one that Chaucer seems to have known best is the Convivio: indeed, Schless lists only the Commedia and the Convivio in his ‘Index of Comparisons’ between the two poets, citing thirty-seven occasions on which Chaucer’s oeuvre as a whole makes use of the latter.10 Furthermore, there is evidence for his use of the Convivio particularly in the Troilus: Schless cites four specific comparisons between them.11 In addition to those scholars cited by Schless, several contributors to Piero Boitani’s collection of essays on Chaucer and the Italian Trecento find evidence of

123

CIC_rev.indd 123

15/12/2020 10:56:36

New Centur y Chaucer

such influence. John Larner specifies Chaucer’s familiarity again with Book IV of the Convivio, finding it ‘rather remarkable’, given that the manuscripts were not widely disseminated in the fourteenth century.12 Robin Kirkpatrick similarly mentions Book IV,13 while Boitani himself also cites Book IV of the Convivio14 but additionally suggests that Chaucer could have found much to interest him in the remainder as well.15 More recently, Kara Gaston has moved outside Dante’s Book IV, arguing for the Convivio’s Book I as a source for Chaucer’s meditation on linguistic change in the Troilus.16 (And if it is true that Chaucer was familiar with Book I, he would also have been aware of the existence and general tenor of the Vita nova, which is discussed there, even if he had not read it.17) The possibility that Chaucer knew the Convivio as a whole, and not Book IV alone, is an intriguing one for the present essay, which begins with the Convivio, Book III; but as ‘neighbouring’ texts their mutual concerns are of interest regardless of whether Chaucer knew it. This section is of particular interest because it informs the reader of the varied long-standing philosophical traditions that attempt to explain the nature of vision, demonstrating Dante’s at least passing awareness of, if not expertise in, the explanations attempted by Plato and Aristotle. Starting with the Convivio, then, I would like to examine the relationship between vision and touch as it is explored by Dante and Chaucer, and by the sources Dante himself cites (Plato and Aristotle) as well as some he doesn’t. The highly visual Vita nova and Troilus, Dante’s and Chaucer’s neighbouring texts, both respond to long traditions of visual theory discussed in the Convivio, and they take complementary approaches to the same problem: the role of physical sight in both earthly and spiritual love, and the role of the sense of touch in that of sight itself. A touchstone for this essay in thinking about medieval theories of vision is Dante’s formulation in the Convivio, which contrasts what Dante considers Plato’s allegedly extramissive views with the intromissive ones of Aristotle (‘il Filosofo’, ‘the Philosopher’). Extramissive theories of vision, briefly, suggest that vision occurs when the eye sends forth visual rays that touch the visible object, returning an image

124

CIC_rev.indd 124

15/12/2020 10:56:36

Chaucer and Italian Culture

to the mind; intromissive theories claim, on the other hand, that vision originates with external light rays that penetrate the eye.18 Dante seems to find the latter more congenial. In Convivio 3.9, he remarks: Veramente Plato e altri filosofi dissero che ’l nostro vedere non era perché lo visibile venisse a l’occhio, ma perché la virtù visiva andava fuori al visibile: e questa oppinione è riprovata per falsa dal Filosofo in quello del Senso e Sensato.19 Plato and other philosophers, however, said that our sight was not a result of the visible entering the eye but of the visual power going out to the visible, but this opinion is rejected as false by the Philosopher in his book On Sense and Sensibles.20

In my earlier work on the Vita nova I accepted Patrick Boyde’s reading of this passage as a rejection of the Platonic view (as enunciated in the Timaeus) and an endorsement of Aristotle’s.21 But Dante does not claim that he himself rejects the Platonic view, only that Aristotle rejects it: the verb riprovare, unlike, for instance, confutare or contraddire, does not suggest that the Platonic position has been disproved by Aristotle, only rejected or refused. Indeed, Aristotle’s text as well as the commentary on it by St Thomas Aquinas are both harsher in their appraisal of the theory propounded in the Timaeus: ‘The central Aristotelian idea is that the senses are perceptual powers which are causally activated by the things which are the objects of perceptions.’22 Aristotle, in Aquinas’ version, claims: [q]uoniam si ignis esset, ut dicit Empedocles et in Tymeo scribitur, et accideret uidere exeunte quemadmodum ex lucerna lumine, quare non et in tenebris uideret utique uisus? Dicere autem quod extunguatur in tenebris egrediens, sicut Tymeus dicit, uanum est omnino. If it were fire, as Empedocles says, and as is written in the Timaeus, and seeing took place by a light going out, the way it does from

125

CIC_rev.indd 125

15/12/2020 10:56:36

New Centur y Chaucer

a lamp, why does sight not also see in darkness? To say that in going out it is ‘extinguished’ in darkness is completely foolish.23 Irrationabile uero omnino est exeunte quodam uisum uidere. It is altogether irrational that sight should see by something going out.24

Aquinas’ commentary on these passages is similarly dismissive of extramission: Deinde cum dicit: Quoniam si ignis esset etc., accedit ad inprobandum ipsam positionem. Et primo quantum ad hoc quod uisum attribuebant igni; secundo quantum ad hoc quo ponebant uisum uidere extramittendo, ibi: Irrationabile uero omnino etc. … Deinde cum dicit: Dicere autem quod extinguatur etc., excludit responsionem Platonis … Aristotiles dicit hanc causam esse uanam. Then when he says If it were fire, he proceeds to disprove the position itself: first inasmuch as those philosophers assigned sight to fire; second inasmuch as they held that sight sees by extromission, where he says It is altogether irrational … when he says To say that in going out, he disproves the response of Plato … Aristotle says that to give this cause is foolish.25

Aristotle’s accusations of foolishness and irrationality are taken by Aquinas to constitute a confutation of the Platonic position, a position that Dante reports without exactly endorsing it. While Dante does seem to prefer what he designates as the Aristotelian view, this reading allows for a further degree of nuance in his appropriation of it, an ambiguity that is reflected elsewhere in the Convivio as well in the Vita nova and the Commedia: as Dallas G. Denery II has pointed out, Dante ‘accepted the truth of intromissionist theories of vision and yet, when imagining the effect that the beloved’s glance has on her lover or how God is present to the beatified in heaven, he was more than

126

CIC_rev.indd 126

15/12/2020 10:56:36

Chaucer and Italian Culture

happy to deploy more traditional extramissionist models of vision.’26 We may now turn to the Platonic and Aristotelian theories that underlie Dante’s statements in the Convivio. Plato’s consideration of how vision operates can be found in the Timaeus 45b–d, which would have been familiar in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries only in Calcidius’ partial Latin translation, and which is actually a bit more complex than Dante allows. In a discussion of how the gods created the human senses, Plato’s spokesman Timaeus suggests: Duae sunt, opinor, virtutes ignis, altera edax et peremptoria altera mulcebris innoxio lumine. Huic igitur ex qua lux diem invehens panditur domesticum et familiare corpus oculorum divinae potestates commentae sunt, intimum siquidem nostri corporis ignem, utpote germanum ignis perlucidi sereni et defaecati liquoris, per oculos fluere ac demanare voluerunt, ut per leves congestosque et tamquam firmiore soliditate probatos orbes luminum, quorum tamen esset angusta medietas subtilior, serenus ignis per eandem efflueret medietatem. Itaque cum diurnum iubar applicat se visus fusioni, tunc nimirum incurrentia semet invicem duo similia in unius corporis speciem cohaerent, quo concurrunt oculorum acies emicantes quoque effluentis intimae fusionis acies contiguae imaginis occursu repercutitur. Totum igitur hoc similem eandemque sortitum passionem et ob indifferentem similitudinem eiusdem passionis effectum, cum quid aliud tangit vel ipsum ab alio tangitur, tactuum motu diffundens se per omne corpus perque corpus usque ad animam porrigens sensum efficit qui visus vocatur. Fire, I suppose, has two powers, one consuming and destructive and the other soothing due to its harmless light. The divine powers, then, devised an ocular body that was akin and related to the power from which the light that ushers in the day emanates, for they determined that as the sibling of the brightly shining fire and the unmuddied fluid the fire within our body should flow and stream through the eyes such that the bright fire would flow

127

CIC_rev.indd 127

15/12/2020 10:56:36

New Centur y Chaucer

through the smooth, dense orbs of light, which had been tested, as it were, for a higher degree of firm solidity but whose narrow center was nevertheless of a subtler consistency, and such that it would flow through that center. And so when daylight makes contact with the stream of vision, then on encountering one another the two like entities undoubtedly cohere in the form of a single body where the rays emanating from the eyes meet and the ray of the effluent inner stream rebounds after encountering a contiguous image. When this whole, therefore, on receiving a like or identical affection and becoming [assimilated] because of the undifferentiated likeness of an identical affection – when it comes into contact with another thing or is itself drawn into contact by another, then spreading throughout the body under the stimulus of the contact and extending through the body all the way to the soul, it produces the form of sense perception called vision.27

Plato, in the version produced by Calcidius, does not simply suggest that the visual fire moves out to encounter its object; rather, the light-producing fire moving through the eye mixes with the natural outer light falling on the object of vision: the daylight actively ‘makes contact with the stream of vision’ and both entities ‘cohere’. ‘[T]his whole’ may in turn actively ‘come into contact’ or passively be ‘drawn into contact’ with another thing, extending into the soul and causing the phenomenon of sight. The double option of activity or passivity is particularly interesting in the context of Dante’s critique: Plato (or Calcidius) seems to imply that the body formed by a visual fire emanating from the eye mixed with natural light, on the one hand, and the object of vision, on the other, mutually interact, and thus that the object of vision is not as purely passive in Plato’s theory as Dante suggests. As David Lindberg points out, vision thus results from ‘an encounter between the emanation from the object and the “single homogeneous body” already formed by coalescence of the ocular emanation and daylight’, neither of which is taken into account in Dante’s statement in the Convivio.28

128

CIC_rev.indd 128

15/12/2020 10:56:36

Chaucer and Italian Culture

Dante, indeed, seems to understand Plato/Calcidius in the purely extramissionist terms used by Calcidius in the latter’s commentary on this passage: Evidenter visum fieri dicit quotiens intimi caloris lumen, quod inoffense per oculos fluit, aliquam visibilem materiam, quam contiguam imaginem appellat, incurrit ibidemque iuxta materiae qualitatem formatum et coloratum; sensus visusque confit ex lumine, qui contiguae imaginis occursu repercussus reditu facto ad oculorum fores usque ad mentis secreta porrigitur. His point is evidently that vision occurs when the light of the internal warmth, which flows unimpeded through the eyes, encounters some visible material, which he calls the contiguous image, and, depending on the quality of the material, there receives form and color; and from this light visual perception emerges, which rebounding after encountering a contiguous image and after returning to the double doors of the eyes extends as far as the hidden depths of the mind.29

Calcidius too ignores the interplay between activity and passivity in the roles played by the Platonic internal and external ‘fires’, and thus finds Plato to be an exponent of the extramissionist view of vision, along with other physici quam etiam medici, ‘natural philosophers and physicians’.30 Of particular interest for the purposes of this essay is the linkage Plato and Calcidius draw between vision and touch. The repeated language in which the eye’s emissions ‘come into contact’ with the object of vision suggest a highly concrete conceptualisation of the sense of vision, a tangibility that is taken up by both Dante and Chaucer in their literary accounts of vision in love. Aristotle and Aquinas, on the other hand, reject this understanding of vision in a tactile fashion, and indeed reject the notion of vision as contact, specifically in the text Dante cites in disagreement with other aspects of the Platonic theory. In Aquinas’ explanation,

129

CIC_rev.indd 129

15/12/2020 10:56:36

New Centur y Chaucer

Sunt autem et alia quibus predicta positio ostenditur esse falsa. Primo quidem quia, si uisio fieret per contactum, tunc sensus uisus non distingueretur a tactu, quod patet esse falsum: uisus enim non est cognoscitiuus contrarietatum tactus … Quarto quia uisus non indigeret lumine ad uidendum, ex quo uisio fieret per contactum uisibilis. But there are also other considerations that show the abovementioned position to be false. First because if vision occurred by contact, the sense of sight would not be distinct from touch, which is clearly false, for sight is not apprehensive of the contraries of touch … Fourth because sight would not need light for seeing, since vision would occur through contact of the visible.31

Aquinas is anxious to preserve the distinctions between the five senses and their modes of operation, whereas other Christian thinkers, as we shall see, were more amenable to overlaps. Although the passage cited earlier does not exactly disprove Plato’s view as Dante understands it, Dante does present himself more as a follower of Aristotle’s De sensu et sensato, which indeed criticises Plato’s views, as we have seen, but which does not offer a coherent Aristotelian intromissive theory to counter them; Aristotle does, however, come closer to enunciating a theory in his discussion of colour perception in On the Soul 419a: ‘[S]i quis enim ponat habens colorem super ipsum uisum, non uidebitur; set color mouet dyafanum, puta aerem, ab hoc autem iam continuo existente mouetur sensitiuum’ (‘If one places on the sight itself a colored object, it is not seen. But color moves the transparent medium (say, air); and the sensitive organ is moved by this extended continuum’).32 For Aristotle, in Aquinas’ version, it is the continuity of the transparent medium that allows contact between the sense organ and its object, initiated by the former. Aristotle thus does seem to insist, intromissively, on the primacy of the object seen: it moves the medium, which in turn moves the eye.33 As Aquinas suggests,

130

CIC_rev.indd 130

15/12/2020 10:56:36

Chaucer and Italian Culture

oportet autem quod color moueat dyaphanum in actu, puta aerem uel aliquod aliud huiusmodi, et ab hoc mouetur sensitiuum, id est organum uisus, sicut a corpore sibi continuato; corpora enim non se inmutant, nisi se tangant. There has to be a medium, say air or something of the kind, which, being actualized by color, itself acts upon the organ of sight as upon a body continuous with itself. For bodies only affect one another through actual contact.34

In both Plato and Aristotle, then, the sense of sight is intimately related to the sense of touch, though perhaps more so in Plato, and Plato may seem somewhat less doctrinaire than Aristotle about exactly how touch operates as an intermediary between the organ of vision and its object. Both also agree on the importance of the intermediary medium, the light of day or ‘what is transparent’: what touches the eye is the medium, not the object of vision itself, an emphasis that can be used to stress the faultiness of physical vision. Dante’s own theory, explained in the Convivio 3.9 shortly before the critique of Plato mentioned earlier, also links vision with touch, at least metaphorically. Queste cose visibili … vengono dentro a l’occhio – non dico le cose, ma le forme loro – per lo mezzo diafano, non realmente ma intenzionalmente, sì quasi come in vetro transparente … Di questa pupilla lo spirito visivo, che si continua da essa, a la parte del cerebro dinanzi, dov’è la sensibile virtude sì come in principio fontale, subitamente sanza tempo la ripresenta, e così vedemo. The objects of vision … pass through a transparent medium into the eye, as though into a piece of clear glass: it is, of course, not the objects themselves that travel, but their forms, and their presence is not ‘real’ but incomplete or ‘intentional’… The spirit in the optic nerve, which is in unbroken contact with the pupil, immediately and instantaneously carries the visible form away

131

CIC_rev.indd 131

15/12/2020 10:56:36

New Centur y Chaucer

from the pupil and presents it for a second time in the front part of the brain, which is the seat of the power of sensation; and this is how we see.35

This difficult statement, which I have already condensed, claims that species, or what Dante calls le forme as opposed to the actual objects, le cose, pass from the object of vision through the ‘diaphanous’ medium of air or daylight and come to rest in the eye, but not ‘really’. The ‘optic spirit’, in contact with the pupil, instantly transmits the forma to the front portion of the brain, where the seat of sensation is to be found. Here, as in the Convivio passage I cited previously, Dante insists on distancing himself from an extramissionist position: the visible things themselves are carefully distinguished from their forms or species, and only the latter pass into the eye; and once having made this distinction, he again insists that this process is ‘intentional’ rather than ‘real’. This very insistence, however, perhaps indicates some awareness of just how easily the merely intentional can come to seem real, and indeed how easily the species could be mistaken for the objects of vision themselves. This impression of potential confusion is reinforced by the imagery Dante uses to describe the process as a whole: whereas the Perspectivists write of the species as representations being multiplied across space, each species derived from the one before, Dante, as Patrick Boyde points out (pp. 70–1), represents the ‘forms’ as if they were moving objects passing through the air and into the eye, where they are stopped by the physical boundary of the ‘acqua ch’è nella pupilla dell’occhio’, the ‘water that is in the pupil of the eye’.36 It is difficult not to understand Dante as continuing to think in metaphors of tangibility even as he disclaims the tangible reality of the ‘forms’. Turning, as Dante himself regularly does, from physical vision to spiritual, another metaphor of touch comes to dominate medieval theories of intellectual vision, the metaphor of mental imprinting derived from St Augustine. Augustine’s work on spiritual vision in De Trinitate, chapter 11, was informed by the extramissive model, which recent writers on the visuality of the medieval spiritual life, such as

132

CIC_rev.indd 132

15/12/2020 10:56:36

Chaucer and Italian Culture

Jennifer Bryan and Michelle Karnes, like Dante, identify as Platonic or Neoplatonic.37 Scholars have recently noted that late medieval devotional writers also drew on Augustinian visual theory, especially as elaborated in De Trinitate, to describe an inner-directed vision that, through desire, imprinted an image of God in the desiring soul, thus rendering them similar. As Bryan puts it, ‘[s]ubject and object touch only momentarily, but the cumulative effect of such moments was a lasting impression.’38 This metaphorical touch or imprint is also attributed to Aristotelian theory by his commentators, as Michelle Karnes has recently shown39 – but it should be noted that exactly how this imprinting works is less clear, since it is a physical metaphor for a virtual or, in Augustine’s case, spiritual process. That it is only a metaphor seems to me significant, given the distrust of the sense of touch in some later medieval work on the senses. If sight is, for Aquinas in the Summa, maxime spiritualis, ‘the most spiritual’ and least material sense, perfectior inter omnes sensus, et communior, ‘the most perfect, and the most universal of all the senses’, touch, along with taste, are maxime materiales, ‘the most material of all’.40 According to C. M. Woolgar, Bartholomaeus Anglicus makes a similar point: touch is ‘the least subtle of the wits – by which he meant it was the most earthly and beast-like sense’,41 while sight was the ‘most worthy’, and, for Isidore of Seville, ‘quicker and more vigorous than the other senses’.42 The linkage of sight and touch might, then, be expected to carry certain dangers, as is also suggested by the possibility of vision’s deformation by the multiplication of species. Dante’s desire, in the Vita nova, for an unmediated vision of Beatrice, one that Suzanne Conklin Akbari in particular has explored, is thus understandable: as she says, ‘[i]n the Vita nuova, Dante dramatizes the problem of mediated vision: how subject and object can never be truly linked as long as some “mezzo” or “simulacrum” comes between them.’43 As I have argued elsewhere,44 the passage in chapter 15 in which Dante extramissively imagines the desire that ‘uccide e distrugge’ (‘kills and obliterates’)45 anything that resists his desire to see Beatrice is a phallic fantasy, but only a fantasy: if the desire to see involves an extramissively violent, phallic touch, what he must

133

CIC_rev.indd 133

15/12/2020 10:56:36

New Centur y Chaucer

destroy is actually his own memory of having been unmanned by the sight of Beatrice; he imagines his desire as powerful in this way only on the condition that ‘s’io non perdesse le mie vertudi’ (‘I hadn’t lost my powers’) when he saw her.46 Understandable as the desire for a powerful, unmediated visual touch may be, in normal experience unmediated vision is not possible, though Dante does suggest that visionary experience in the mystical sense might provide a solution, as in the ‘forte imaginazione’ (‘intense imagining’) of section 28,47 a vision which, however, is only temporary and cannot be expressed in language. What we find at the end of the Vita nova instead is the transformation of the vision of Beatrice herself into a medium for the contemplation of God: E poi piaccia a colui che è sire della cortesia che la mia anima sen possa gire a vedere la gloria della sua donna, cioè di quella benedetta Beatrice, la quale gloriosamente mira nella faccia di Colui ‘qui est per omnia secula benedictus’. Then, if it be pleasing to Him who is the Lord of benevolence and grace, may my soul go to contemplate the glory of its lady – that blessed Beatrice, who gazes in glory into the face of Him qui est per omnia secula benedictus.48

Dante here imagines himself looking at Beatrice looking at God: like Christ in the Bonaventuran contemplative system described by Karnes, Beatrice, in the language of optical theory, serves as the intermediary medium which allows Dante his indirect vision of the divine. Transforming Beatrice into the medium rather than the object of vision is a necessary step towards her intermediary role in the Commedia. Here Sarah Stanbury’s work will help me make a transition to Chaucer. In her classic essay on ‘The Lover’s Gaze in Troilus and Criseyde’, she points out that for Chaucer too, optical species both emanate from and penetrate the eye, specifically at the moment Troilus first sees, and falls in love with, Criseyde, and thus that ‘the gaze seems to fracture the boundaries of the private self’, even as this fracturing

134

CIC_rev.indd 134

15/12/2020 10:56:36

Chaucer and Italian Culture

disguises Troilus’ masculine agency and Criseyde’s feminine victimisation.49 This secret pleasure in dissolution and abjection – in the refusal of phallic mastery – resonates clearly with Dante’s text as it does with Chaucer’s. Like Dante, Chaucer too associates vision and touch in a way that suggests a flexible approach to the intromissive and extramissive models. Troilus himself seems to understand his own experience of sight extramissively in Book IV, when he compares himself to the blind Oedipus because his eyes are useless without Criseyde’s illumination: But ende I wol, as Edippe, in derknesse My sorwful lif, and dyen in distresse … … O woful eyen two, syn youre disport Was al to sen Criseydes eyen brighte, What shal ye don but, for my discomfort, Stonden for naught, and wepen out youre sighte, Syn she is queynt that wont was yow to lighte? In vayn fro this forth have ich eyen tweye Ifourmed, syn youre vertu is aweye. (IV.300–1, 309–15)50

He sees his own eyes as animated by the object of their vision, and without her, he becomes a passive victim. But Troilus deploys intromission in a similar fashion in the consummation scene of Book III, when he imagines Criseyde’s gaze as having reached out and trapped him like a net: This Troilus ful ofte hire eyen two Gan for to kisse, and seyde, ‘O eyen clere, It weren ye that wroughte me swich wo, Ye humble nettes of my lady deere! Though ther be mercy writen in youre cheere, God woot, the text ful hard is, sot, to fynde! How koude ye withouten bond me bynde?’ (III.1352–8)

135

CIC_rev.indd 135

15/12/2020 10:56:36

New Centur y Chaucer

In a reversal of the phallic fantasy indulged by Dante’s narrator, whether his gaze searches for Criseyde to illuminate it or her gaze reaches out to entrap him, Troilus perceives himself as powerless, as being touched by the gaze rather than as touching. But as Stanbury points out, Chaucer’s narrative, again like Dante’s, is decipherable in other terms as well. In the scene in Book I in which Troilus first sees and falls in love with Criseyde, his gaze is precisely the extramissive, active, indeed phallic one, that Dante’s narrator fantasises: Troilus’ eye ‘pierced’ deeply through the crowd in the temple until it ‘smote’ Criseyde (I.271–3). Unlike the two stanzas I just mentioned, this one does not represent Troilus’ fantasy of abjection, but the voice of the narrator; Troilus himself, as usual, does understand this moment in terms of his own abjection: Love, we are told, dwelt in the streams emanating from Criseyde’s eyes, and their effect is that Troilus, in a nice turn of phrase, ‘thoughte he felte dyen, / Right with hir look, the spirit in his herte’ (I.306–7): unlike Dante’s narrator, Troilus does not feel his spirit dying, but thinks he feels it dying. Here again it may be helpful to refer to the tradition of late medieval, post-Augustinian devotional vision, of which Dante may be considered an early exemplar. As noted above, scholars like Jennifer Bryan point out that late medieval devotional writers drew on Augustinian visual theory, especially as elaborated in Augustine’s De Trinitate, to describe an inner-directed vision that, through desire, imprinted an image of God in the desiring soul, thus rendering them similar. Bryan notes that Augustine Christianises the extramissive model, finding in the tripartite structure of vision (the object of vision, vision itself and the mind’s attention to the object) one of his interior models of the Trinity in De Trinitate 11.2.2. Furthermore, Bryan finds that even as this model was discredited as a physical phenomenon, ‘it became even more ubiquitous and influential as a way of understanding the operation of the spiritual eye.’51 The way this spiritual understanding works also has something in common with an intromissive model, because it involves the influence of the object of contemplation upon the self: ‘the soul … could be transformed by what it reflected, and by what it reflected upon. The

136

CIC_rev.indd 136

15/12/2020 10:56:36

Chaucer and Italian Culture

darkened image of God could be reimprinted as a better likeness; the soul could reflect more accurately by seeing more intensely.’52 This metaphorical imprint or touch in the soul comes about through the deployment of the will and desire. As Augustine himself suggests, [v]oluntas … ut et sensum formandum admoveat ei rei quae cernitur, et in ea formatum teneat. Et si tam violenta est, ut possit vocari amor, aut cupiditas, aut libido, etiam ceterum corpus animantis vehementer afficit. the will … moves the sense to be formed to that thing which is seen, and keeps it fixed on it when it has been formed. And if it is so violent that it can be called love, or desire, or passion, it likewise exerts a powerful influence on the rest of the body of this living being.53

For Augustine and his followers, desire is thus a violent form of the will, which directs the senses, and indeed the living being itself, to conform to what is seen: the divine visual object captured by the seeing self also causes the self to conform to the object. In some sense, touch cannot be separated from sight, and as I suggested earlier, extramission cannot be separated from intromission: the Augustinian spiritual gaze may move out and touch the objects of desire, but only so that the object, God, may re-form the soul. Art historians such as Margaret Miles and historians of spirituality such as Elizabeth Bailey have found evidence of comparable visual movements in high and late medieval Italy, as Jessica Brantley has also done in late medieval England – and Bailey links them directly to Dante.54 We find such scenes of reflection on a divine image in Troilus and Criseyde as we do in Vita nova. But whereas Dante renders Beatrice genuinely sublime in a Christian context, Chaucer, working in the context of pagan antiquity, is careful to distinguish Troilus’ idolisation of Criseyde from the reality of Christian vision. Stanbury’s recent work has touched on the ways in which Chaucer’s language in Troilus and Criseyde resonates with the Lollard polemics surrounding images and

137

CIC_rev.indd 137

15/12/2020 10:56:36

New Centur y Chaucer

idolatry,55 and I would add that, in the context of Augustinian vision theory informing late medieval English devotional writing, Troilus’ mental image of Criseyde might be understood as an idolatrous parody of genuine vision. As soon as he has seen her for the first time, for instance, Troilus returns home to contemplate a mental image of her, much as the Augustinian reader contemplates in his soul the image of God. Troilus’ vision, however, metaphorically imprints his mind with the image of Criseyde rather than God: ‘Thus gan he make a mirour of his minde, / In which he saugh al holly hir figure’ (I.365–6). We might note the Augustinian manner in which the will is deployed here: he actively makes his mind into a mirror reflecting Criseyde’s physical image. That this image is idolatrous is clear in the preceding stanza: as he sat and wook, his spirit mette That he hire saugh a-temple, and al the wise Right of hire look, and gan it newe avise (I.362–4)

Criseyde’s image is in the temple in which her first saw her, and indeed she is a temple herself. This moment in Book I is balanced and reinforced by a moment in Book V, when Troilus is ‘Refiguryng hire shap, hire wommanhede, / Withinne his herte’ (V.473–4) just before his visit to Criseyde’s house with Pandarus: at the house itself, ‘farwel shryne’, he says, ‘of which the seynt is oute!’ (V.553). As in Book I, the visual image imprinted on his mind is a physical one, and is associated immediately with worship, suggesting the faulty workings of the pagan senses. We may observe here the dangers of that most physical and least spiritual of the senses, touch, when it is unmodified by the spirit. It is perhaps no accident that the scene of consummation on Book III is so heavily invested in the sense of touch rather than focusing on the more spiritual sense of vision, as the opening and closing books do: Criseyde, which that felte hire thus itake, As writen clerkes in hire bokes olde,

138

CIC_rev.indd 138

15/12/2020 10:56:36

Chaucer and Italian Culture

Right as an aspes leef she gan to quake, Whan she hym felte hir in his armes folde. But Troilus, al hool of cares colde, Gan thanken tho the bryghte goddes sevene; Thus sondry peynes bryngen folk in hevene. (III.1198–1204)

If we see the use of the imprinted mental image in the context of Augustinian vision theory, we may also see the repeated allusions to Criseyde’s heavenly beauty as a reinforcement of Troilus’ idolatry: as in this stanza, she is also elsewhere ‘an hevenyssh perfit creature, / That down were sent in scornynge of nature’ (I.104–5), ‘Paradis stood formed in hire yen’ (V.817), and so on. The simultaneous condemnation of the ‘worldly vanyte’ of human love and of ‘payens corsed olde rites’ (V.1837, 1849) that concludes the poem should, then, come as no surprise: that Troilus’ love is idolatrous, specifically in terms of vision and the imprint it leaves on the mind, has been implied throughout. It is also perhaps no accident that in the stanza quoted above, it is Criseyde who is the recipient of the sensation of touch at Troilus’ hands, as she was the recipient of his piercing gaze in Book I. Here, too, as Stanbury suggests, the deployment of touch, like that of sight, situates Criseyde as object rather than subject. Her own subjective impressions tend to be more practical and less idolatrous than those of Troilus: as I have suggested elsewhere, her choice of lovers tends to focus on her evaluation of their potential as protectors rather than on mental images.56 In the Vita nova, Dante’s extramissive, phallic gaze disguises a desire for abjection before the object of vision and desire, a reformation of the self in which the self is lost in contemplation of the other. In spiritual terms, the physical vision of Beatrice ultimately gives way to the contemplation of the divine object. It is therefore no surprise that the ‘New Life’ concludes with the anticipation of death, as in the passage quoted above. Death is there associated with the ultimate attainment of desire, an eternity of gazing upon the beloved object.

139

CIC_rev.indd 139

15/12/2020 10:56:36

New Centur y Chaucer

For Troilus in death, however, vision goes in both directions: first he sees, not a sublimated Criseyde, but rather ‘[t]he erratik sterres’ and hears their ‘hevenysshe melodie’ (V.1811–13). Then he turns his gaze earthward, and despises what he sees there. As a pagan, Troilus cannot achieve the true Augustinian vision; but the ending of Troilus and Criseyde functions in the way Bryan finds devotional literature functioning, imprinting a genuine vision on the heart of the reader, an image in which readers may indeed find themselves touching the divine: And of youre herte up casteth the visage To thilke god that after his ymage Yow made. (V.1838–40)

Notes 1. On Chaucer’s indebtedness to Dante, see in particular Howard H. Schless, Chaucer and Dante: A Revaluation (Norman OK: Pilgrim Books, 1984). Many other scholars have noted the indebtedness of specific passages in Chaucer’s poetry to specific ones in the Commedia, including, among those concerned with Troilus and Crisyde, Bonnie Wheeler, ‘Dante, Chaucer, and the Ending of “Troilus and Criseyde”’, Philological Quarterly, 61/2 (1982), 105–23; Karla Taylor, ‘A Text and Its Afterlife: Dante and Chaucer’, Comparative Literature, 35/1 (1983), 1–20; Melvin Storm, ‘Troilus and Dante: The Infernal Center’, Yearbook of English Studies, 22 (1992), 154–61; Winthrop Wetherbee, ‘Chaucer and the Tragic Vision of Life’, Poetica, 55 (2001), 29–53; Jill Mann, ‘In Defense of Francesca: Human and Divine Love in Dante and Chaucer’, Strumenti Critici, 28/1 (2013), 3–26. 2. Piero Cudini dates the Vita nova (or Vita nuova) to 1292–3, and the Convivio to 1304–7, in the introduction to his edition of the latter. See Dante, Convivio, ed. Piero Cudini, seventh edn (Milan: Garzanti, 2008), pp. ix–x. The text of this edition reproduces that of the second edition of the Convivio by G. Busnelli and G. Vandelli (Florence, 1964). 3. Kenneth Reinhard, ‘Kant With Sade, Lacan With Levinas’, Modern Language Notes, 110/4 (1995), 785–808 (p. 785), quoted in George Edmondson, The Neighboring Text: Chaucer, Boccaccio, Henryson (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2011), p. 11. 4. Edmondson, Neighboring Text, p. 21. 5. Stephen A. Barney, ‘Troilus and Criseyde’ (explanatory notes), in Larry D. Benson (gen. ed.), The Riverside Chaucer, third edn (Oxford: Oxford

140

CIC_rev.indd 140

15/12/2020 10:56:36

Chaucer and Italian Culture

University Press, 2008), pp. 1020–58 (p. 1026, n. to Book I.162–315, and p. 1027, n. to Book I.250–2). 6. Barry Windeatt, ‘Chaucer and the Filostrato’, in Piero Boitani (ed.), Chaucer and the Italian Trecento (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983), pp. 163–83 (p. 183 n. 11). 7. Warren Ginsberg, Chaucer’s Italian Tradition (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002), p. 107. Ginsberg makes a similar observation on p. 17. 8. Jeffrey Helterman, ‘Masks of Love in Troilus and Criseyde’, Comparative Literature, 26/1 (1974), 14–31 (p. 15). 9. John Livingston Lowes, ‘Chaucer and Dante’s Convivio’, Modern Philology, 13/1 (1915), 19–33. Alastair Minnis, ‘“Dante in Inglissh”: What Il Convivio Really Did for Chaucer’, Essays in Criticism, 55/2 (2005), 97–116, takes up the same issues addressed by Lowes. 10. Schless, Chaucer and Dante: A Revaluation, p. 252. 11. Schless, Chaucer and Dante: A Revaluation, p. 252. See also his discussions of the four passages common to the two texts (pp. 115, 118, 121, 140). 12. John Larner, ‘Chaucer’s Italy’, in Boitani (ed.), Chaucer and the Italian Trecento, pp. 7–32 (p. 21). 13. Robin Kirkpatrick, ‘The Wake of the Commedia: Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales and Boccaccio’s Decameron’, in Boitani (ed.), Chaucer and the Italian Trecento, pp. 201–30 (pp. 214–15). 14. Piero Boitani, ‘What Dante Meant to Chaucer’, in Boitani (ed.), Chaucer and the Italian Trecento, pp. 115–39 (pp. 116, 122). 15. Boitani, ‘What Dante Meant to Chaucer’, p. 130. 16. Kara Gaston, ‘“Save oure tonges difference”: Translation, Literary Histories, and Troilus and Criseyde’, The Chaucer Review, 48/3 (2014), 258–83. 17. Dante discusses the Vita nova as an immature work in Convivio, Trattato Primo, I.16. See Convivio, ed. Cudini, p. 9. 18. On ancient theories of extramission and intromission, see, among many other sources, David C. Lindberg, Theories of Vision from Al-Kindi to Kepler (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976), pp. 1–17. 19. Convivio, ed. Cudini, Trattato Terzo, IX.10, p. 180. 20. Dante, Il Convivio (The Banquet), trans. Richard Lansing (New York: Garland, 1990), Book 3, Chapter 9, 115. I have discussed this passage elsewhere, taking a somewhat different approach: see Robert S. Sturges, ‘Visual Pleasure and La Vita nuova: Lacan, Mulvey, and Dante’, in Corine Schleif and Richard Newhauser (eds), Pleasure and Danger in Perception: The Five Senses in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, special issue of The Senses and Society, 5/1 (2010), 93–105 (p. 98); Robert S. Sturges, ‘Desire and Devotion, Vision and Touch in the Vita nuova’, in Manuele Gragnolati, Tristan Kay, Elena Lombardi and Francesca Southerden (eds), Desire in Dante and the Middle Ages (Oxford: Legenda, 2012), pp. 101–13 (pp. 103–4).

141

CIC_rev.indd 141

15/12/2020 10:56:36

New Centur y Chaucer

21. Patrick Boyde, Perception and Passion in Dante’s Comedy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 72. See Sturges, ‘Desire and Devotion’, p. 103; Sturges, ‘Visual Pleasure’, p. 98. 22. Simo Knuuttila and Pekka Kärkkäinen, ‘Preface’, in Simo Knuuttila and Pekka Kärkkäinen (eds), Theories of Perception in Medieval and Early Modern Philosophy, Studies in the History of Philosophy of Mind, 6 (Heidelberg: Springer, 1998), pp. vii–x (p. vii). See also Simo Knuuttila, ‘Aristotle’s Theory of Perception and Medieval Aristotelianism’, in Knuuttila and Kärkkäinen (eds), Theories of Perception, pp. 1–22 (pp. 4–5). 23. Aristotle, De sensu et sensato, in St Thomas Aquinas, Sentencia libri de sensu et sensato, ed. René-Antoine Gauthier, OP, Leonine edition, vol. 45, part 2 (Rome: Commissio Leonina; Paris: Vrin, 1985), 437b10–14, p. 16; On Sense and What Is Sensed, in St Thomas Aquinas, Commentaries on Aristotle’s ‘On Sense and What Is Sensed’ and ‘On Memory and Recollection’, trans. Kevin White and Edward M. Macierowski (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2005), p. 31. 24. Aristotle, De sensu, 438a25, p. 22; On Sense, p. 39. 25. Aquinas, Sentencia libri de sensu et sensato, 437b10–14, pp. 19–20; Aquinas, Commentary on Aristotle’s ‘On Sense and What Is Sensed’, in Aquinas, Commentaries, pp. 36–7. 26. Dallas G. Denery II, Seeing and Being Seen in the Later Medieval World: Optics, Theology, and Religious Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), p. 272. 27. Calcidius, On Plato’s Timaeus, ed. and trans. John Magee, Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library, 41 (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2016), pp. 90–3. 28. Lindberg, Theories, p. 6. 29. Calcidius, On Plato’s Timaeus, pp. 514–15. 30. Calcidius, On Plato’s Timaeus, pp. 512–13. 31. Aquinas, Sentencia libri de sensu et sensato, 440a15, p. 44; Aquinas, Commentary on Aristotle’s ‘On Sense and What Is Sensed’, p. 69. 32. Aristotle, De anima, in St. Thomas Aquinas, Sentencia libri de anima, Leonine edition, vol. 45, part 1 (Rome: Commissio Leonina; Paris: Vrin, 1984), 419a7, p. 131; Aquinas, Commentary on Aristotle’s De anima, trans. Kenelm Foster, OP and Silvester Humphries, OP (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1951; repr. Notre Dame, IN: Dumb Ox Books, 1994), p. 135. 33. On activity and passivity in Aristotle’s theory of perception, see Knuuttila, ‘Aristotle’s Theory’, pp. 2–3. 34. Aquinas, Commentary on Aristotle’s De anima, p. 137. 35. Convivio, ed. Cudini, Trattato Terzo, IX.7–9, pp. 179–80; Boyde, Perception, p. 71. I quote Boyde’s translation of this and the following passage because it is clearer than Lansing’s in his complete translation of the Convivio. See also my earlier discussions of this passage in the two essays cited in n. 20.

142

CIC_rev.indd 142

15/12/2020 10:56:36

Chaucer and Italian Culture

36. Convivio, ed. Cudini, Trattato Terzo, IX.8, p.179; Boyde, Perception, 71. For another reading of visual theory in the Convivio, see Simon A. Gilson, Medieval Optics and Theories of Light in the Works of Dante (Lewiston ME: Mellen, 2000), pp. 58–72. 37. Jennifer Bryan, Looking Inward: Devotional Reading and the Private Self in Late Medieval England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), p. 66; Michelle Karnes, Imagination, Meditation and Cognition in the Middle Ages (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), pp. 26–7. 38. Bryan, Looking Inward, p. 123. Knuuttila, ‘Aristotle’s Theory’, also discusses imprinting as an aspect of Avicenna’s theory of vision (p. 9). 39. Karnes, Imagination, pp. 43–4. 40. St Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae (Rome: Editiones Paulinae, 1962), I, Qu. 78, Art. 3, p. 372; Summa theologica, trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province, 5 vols (New York: Benziger Brothers, 1948), vol. 1, p. 393. 41. C. M. Woolgar, The Senses in Late Medieval England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006), p. 29. 42. Woolgar, Senses in Late Medieval England, p. 147. 43. Suzanne Conklin Akbari, Seeing Through the Veil: Optical Theory and Medieval Allegory (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004), p. 115. 44. See Sturges, ‘Visual Pleasure’, pp. 96–9; ‘Desire and Devotion’, p. 106. 45. Dante, Vita nova, ed. Guglielmo Gorni, in Opere, vol. 1, 2nd edn (Milan: Mondadori, 2015), 745–1063 (p. 882); Vita nova, trans. Andrew Frisardi (Evanston IL: Northwestern University Press, 2012), p. 19. Gorni and Frisardi number the section in which this passage occurs as 8, but some earlier editions and translations number it 15. 46. Dante, Vita nova, p. 882; trans. Frisardi, p. 19. 47. Dante, Vita nova, p. 1042; trans. Frisardi, p. 54. This section is alternatively numbered 39. 48. Dante, Vita nova, p. 1062; trans. Frisardi, p. 58. Section 31 in Gorni’s and Frisardi’s numbering system is alternatively numbered 42. 49. Sarah Stanbury, ‘The Lover’s Gaze in Troilus and Criseyde’, in R. A. Shoaf (ed.), Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde: ‘Subgit to alle Poesye’: Essays in Criticism (Binghamton NY: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1992), pp. 224–38 (p. 227). 50. Geoffrey Chaucer, Troilus and Criseyde, ed. Stephen A. Barney, in Benson (gen. ed.), The Riverside Chaucer, pp. 471–585. Citations of this edition by book and line numbers appear in the text. 51. Bryan, Looking Inward, p. 123. 52. Bryan, Looking Inward, p. 124. 53. St Augustine, De Trinitate libri quindecim (Patrologia Latina, 42), 11.2.5, available online: http://www.augustinus.it/latino/trinita/index2.htm, accessed 19 November 2019); The Trinity, trans. Stephen McKenna (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1963), p. 321.

143

CIC_rev.indd 143

15/12/2020 10:56:36

New Centur y Chaucer

54. See Margaret Miles, Image as Insight: Visual Understanding in Western Christianity and Secular Culture (Eugene OR: Wipf and Stock, 1985); Elizabeth Bailey, ‘Raising the Mind to God: The Sensual Journey of Giovanni Morelli (1371–1444)’, Speculum, 84 (2009), 984–1008; Jessica Brantley, Reading in the Wilderness: Private Devotion and Public Performance in Late Medieval England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007). 55. See Sarah Stanbury, The Visual Object of Desire in Late Medieval England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), pp. 106–10. 56. See Robert S. Sturges, ‘The State of Exception and Sovereign Masculinity in Troilus and Criseyde’, in Tison Pugh and Marcia Smith Marzec (eds), Men and Masculinity in Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2008), pp. 28–42.

144

CIC_rev.indd 144

15/12/2020 10:56:36

5

THE AESTHETICS OF ‘WAWES GRENE’: PLANETS, PAINTING AND POLITICS IN CHAUCER’S KNIGHT’S TALE Andrew James Johnston

D

uring the night of 20 January 1277, the forces of Milan’s Ghibelline faction, led by the archbishop, Ottone Visconti, himself, launched a surprise attack on the forces of the Milanese Guelphs at Desio. In the ensuing battle, the Ghibellines triumphed absolutely. The leader of the enemy forces, Napoleone della Torre, and the most important members of his family were taken prisoner. This victory initiated more than 150 years of Visconti rule over Milan. And if we add to that the tyranny of the Sforzas, the Viscontis’ ultimate heirs and successors, then this victory saw the beginning of a dictatorial political system that lasted nearly two and a half centuries. To commemorate his victory the now safely established archbishop and ruler of the city commissioned a series of frescoes in the castle of Angera, the Rocca di Angera, at the southern end of Lago Maggiore. The paintings depicted not only his victory and subsequent leniency to the vanquished, but also the planets as astrological powers.1 This commission was to have a momentous impact on the world of Italian civic art. Throughout the next two centuries, Italian city-states and city

CIC_rev.indd 145

15/12/2020 10:56:36

New Centur y Chaucer

governments again and again expressed their sense of identity through astrological wall paintings conspicuously displayed in public places. In the Trecento, examples quickly appeared in Italy’s most important cities regardless of their constitutional or political make-up. Thus, we find this kind of painting in contemporary Signorie, that is in cities ruled by a single person or family, such as Milan, but also in aristocratic or patrician political systems like that of Venice, in oligarchical republics like Siena, and even in republics controlled by craft guilds, such as Florence. By the early fourteenth century, the astrological had come to epitomize the rationality and power of modern statecraft, and this modern statecraft was presented in public paintings with a high degree of visibility. The rise of medieval astrology was still a fairly recent phenomenon, triggered as it had been by the influx of Arab learning during the Renaissance of the twelfth century.2 By choosing astrological imagery to illustrate their political aspirations and identities, the Italian city-states were following the example of thirteenth-century rulers of imperial status or imperial ambitions. The two most obvious examples that spring to mind are the Holy Roman Emperor and Hohenstaufen king of Sicily, Frederick II, and the Castilian king and contender for the imperial throne, Alfonso X, the Wise. Yet whereas these monarchs had primarily pronounced their astronomical claims to grandeur in terms of complex and costly astronomical instruments and magnificently illuminated volumes accessible only to the chosen few, Italy’s desire for civic self-expression centred on frescoes and murals because of their capacity for addressing large audiences. But if astrology signalled an emphatically modern discourse of statecraft, then that emphatically modern scientific discourse was visualised in terms of an equally modern aesthetic discourse, that of painting, which had become one of the subjects through which early Italian humanists measured the achievements of their own age as opposed to the dark centuries that had preceded it. Thus, in Decameron VI.5 Boccaccio famously praises Giotto’s artistic innovations, a practice adopted by many other early humanists.3 And it is no coincidence that some of the most formative examples of planetary imagery were actually produced by that selfsame artist.

146

CIC_rev.indd 146

15/12/2020 10:56:36

Chaucer and Italian Culture

It is these issues that this article discusses in the context of Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale.4 What is dealt with here, in particular, is Chaucer’s response to the possibility of appropriating images, of reinterpreting visual representations or of recontextualising them politically. In Theseus’ Theatre, Chaucer does not merely show us art serving political purposes, being conscripted into propagandistic uses, as it were. He goes further and investigates the question of how changing circumstances actually alter the meaning of art, how visual representations depend on contexts for their decoding, and, therefore also for their recoding, and how formal and aesthetic innovation in the field of artistic production can itself be interpreted in political terms.5 In order to provide the framework for such a reading, a few remarks both on the specifically Italianate design of Theseus’ Theatre and on contemporary Italian painting and its discursive contexts are in order. When it comes to his Italian experience, Chaucer, the notorious fence-sitter, the author who lived through one of the most dramatic reigns in England’s history and never even raised a poetic eyebrow, suddenly makes surprisingly vociferous statements on the ‘tirauntz of Lumbardye’ (The Legend of Good Women, F, l. 374), referring directly and harshly to contemporaneous political figures like Bernabò Visconti whom he called ‘God of delit and scourge of Lumbardye’ (The Monk’s Tale, l. 2400).6 Hence, my principal argument here is that for Chaucer Italian painting and Italian astrology had entered into a problematic unity with Italian politics and humanism and that this problematic unity forms an important subtext of the Knight’s Tale, and especially of the Theatre and the temples it contains. Chaucer’s description of Theseus’ Theatre differs in crucial respects from its model in Boccaccio’s Teseida. In the Teseida the theatre is already standing, whereas Chaucer actually has Theseus specially build his for the occasion. Hence, the whole construction process and its principles are laid out before us, while at the same time we are reminded of the fact that the commissioning and construction of this magnificent and decidedly classicising building are presented as a testimony to Theseus’ superior statecraft. Indeed, Chaucer refers to the fact that the building is being erected at considerable expense by saying:

147

CIC_rev.indd 147

15/12/2020 10:56:36

New Centur y Chaucer

‘Wel koude he peynten lifly that it wroghte; / With many a floryn he the hewes boghte’ (Knight’s Tale, ll. 2087–8).7 By mentioning the florin, a gold coin of pan-European relevance originating in Florence, Chaucer draws explicit attention to the Italian context of his tale. Most importantly in our context, Chaucer’s temples with their wallpaintings are actually inserted into the structure of the theatre. Not only do they form a seamless whole with the rest of the building, but they, too, serve to illustrate and propagate Theseus’ political claims. At least, that is what one would expect, if one were to view them in the context of Chaucer’s Italian experience. After all, the frescoes in the temples contain astronomical/astrological images, pictures illustrating the workings and powers of the planetary deities. Although the trecento vogue for planetary frescoes initially derived from the Visconti propaganda scheme mentioned at the beginning, the most impressive and widely noted example of this fashion was to be found in Padua.8 Here, in the Palazzo della Ragione, the seat of the city’s government, Giotto himself had painted the planetary frescoes in the great Hall from 1306 to 1309. This date is of considerable importance since it means that Giotto’s activities took place during a period when Padua was still ruled by a civic elite and not yet by the Carrara family who established their Signoria, i.e an autocratic form of city government, only a few years later in 1318. The Carraresi effectively ruled Padua with minor interruptions – brought about amongst other things by the Milanese Visconti – until 1405.9 In his design, Giotto was apparently inspired by a famous local scholar and astronomer, Pietro d’Abano, whom the city chronicles credited with having been the inventor of the whole scheme: the ‘institutor huius ordinis’.10 Unfortunately, Giotto’s original paintings have not survived. What we see today is the result of a series of restorations which took place between the early fifteenth and the mid-eighteenth centuries and which, amongst other things, betray the fact that, to later generations, the meaning of the original scheme was no longer transparent. But art historians have succeeded in recovering the general idea of the project, not least because a number of fourteenth- and fifteenth-century descriptions and references survive that enable us to establish a fairly clear notion of what was intended.

148

CIC_rev.indd 148

15/12/2020 10:56:36

Chaucer and Italian Culture

Giotto’s original frescoes consisted of a variety of sets of images, two sets of which are of central importance in this context. The first set contained images of the planets themselves; the second is a set of 360 images, each depicting one of the 360 degrees of the circle of the zodiac. Each degree is represented through a picture visually explaining the special effect that this degree of the zodiac will inevitably have on any event under its influence. This is because – as the German art historian Peter Blume, the major expert on this subject, has shown – Pietro d’Abano was a supporter of the then relatively novel theory that the ascendant was the crucial element in calculating a valid horoscope.11 Pietro d’Abano himself refined this theory and helped to promote it. Instead of relying merely on the combination of the planets and the zodiac, as conventional astrology had hitherto done, this considerably more sophisticated theory aimed for a much greater degree of precision. The reason I stress this here is not so much because I wish to become embroiled in the intricacies of late medieval astrological theory, but rather because in his architectural ekphrasis of Theseus’ Theatre, Chaucer’s narrator insists that because of the building’s perfectly round shape everyone was granted an ideal, i.e. uninhibited, view. And this perfect view is described through the term ‘degree’: ‘Round was the shap, in manere of compas / Ful of degrees’ (Knight’s Tale, ll. 1889–90). For the meantime, it seems sufficient to state that the collaboration between Giotto and Pietro d’Abano produced something like an illustration, one might even say a visual handbook, of the most sophisticated version of astrological science available in the early fourteenth century. Moreover, this visual handbook of state-of-the-art astrology formed the principal decoration of what constituted the most important room in the city’s most important building. We witness, therefore, the intimate relationship between contemporary Italian painting and contemporary Italian science, a relationship that is celebrated, moreover, in the realm of communal politics. After Padua had set the standard, other Italian cities hastened to follow suit and began to express their political identities through astrological imagery. From 1334 to his death in 1337 Giotto himself

149

CIC_rev.indd 149

15/12/2020 10:56:36

New Centur y Chaucer

designed and oversaw the construction of the free-standing bell tower of Florence’s cathedral, the Campanile di Giotto that still bears his name. Giotto was responsible for designing the reliefs that decorated the lower part of the building, while the actual sculptural work was executed by the workshop of Andrea Pisano. Here, too, we find depictions of the planets in the form of reliefs. Only a few years later, Ambrogio Lorenzetti decorated the Great Hall of the Palazzo Pubblico in Siena not only with the famous images of good and bad government, but also with an astrological design once again expressing the scientific rationality that civic politics were increasingly laying claim to. The Venetians, too, entered the race when, from 1341 to 1355, they added the southern wing to the Doge’s palace, adorning the capitals of the open loggia’s columns with allegorical images, one of which was dedicated to an astrological scheme now believed to represent the key to all the other carvings on the capitals.12 But precisely because the astrological was becoming the dominant way for city rulers and city elites to celebrate their sense of a rationally organised polity, this particular form of political self-expression did not go unchallenged. Ironically, it was in Padua itself that a sense of opposition developed, and it was conveyed in a fashion entirely consistent with contemporary politics’ new visual language. From about 1360 onwards, the Augustinian Friars of Padua had the choir of their church of St Philippus and St James the Lesser, commonly called the Chiesa degli Emeritani, decorated with an ambitious pictorial scheme in which the planets once again played an important, albeit pointedly subordinate role. Besides, the composition of the frescoes displayed a decidedly citational character. The Augustinian Friars clearly wanted viewers to realise that their paintings were deliberately responding to those in the Palazzo della Ragione. But while in the Palazzo della Ragione the astrological images completely covered the hall’s upper walls, and thus claimed centre stage, in the Augustinian Friars’ church the planets were situated on the base of the wings of a huge triptych-like set of images representing not only the lives of the church’s patron saints and important incidents from the life of St Augustine, the order’s supposed founder, but also Doomsday and

150

CIC_rev.indd 150

15/12/2020 10:56:36

Chaucer and Italian Culture

the Passion of Christ, whereby the latter subjects were located at the very centre of the scheme. Moreover, in the Chiesa degli Emeritani the allegorical representations of the seven planets are each accompanied by two human figures, one male and one female, together representing the familiar concept of the Ages of Man. In other words, by being integrated into the agesof-man scheme the planets are effectively subjected to what one might call an act of ‘de-astrologisation’. Instead of displaying a context where each planet, or possibly even each degree of the zodiac according to the theory of the ascendant, is shown to exercise its particular influence, the images in the Chiesa degli Emeritani reduce the planets to symbols of the natural cycle of life. Such a cycle must inevitably end in old age and death – regardless of what the planets might foretell. The only thing that literally interrupts that cycle is the depiction of Christ’s passion at the centre of the triptych. Precisely because the fresco visually quotes the imagery in the Palazzo della Ragione do we understand the extent to which the planets have been reinterpreted. Largely deprived of their astrological power, they illustrate no more than the normal course of human life, a course to be broken only by the work of Christ’s passion.13 At first glance, what I have described here looks like a fairly conventional religiously inspired critique of astrology. This critique would seem to make especial sense given that the Augustinian Friars were consciously invoking their supposed founding father St Augustine, who had himself been a determined enemy of astrology. And no doubt, this religious and philosophical element is fully present in this debate. Petrarch, too, was sceptical of astrology and he was friends with leading members of the Augustinian convent at Padua who were also central figures at the university’s theological faculty. Indeed, an interpretation along the lines of a religiously inspired disdain for astrology could easily be supported by a similar programme of frescoes in the chapter house of the Dominican convent of Florence, Santa Maria Novella. Here, the planets are paired not with the Ages of Man, but with the Seven Liberal Arts, and again this reduces the supremacy of their specifically astrological relevance, subordinating them to an overarching

151

CIC_rev.indd 151

15/12/2020 10:56:36

New Centur y Chaucer

allegorical scheme which views astrology as only one of various intellectual human achievements.14 While the interpretation thus offered is, in itself, entirely plausible, I believe that it does not completely exhaust the significance of the cultural struggles thus witnessed. After all, if one were to concentrate only on the religious and philosophical arguments over astrology one would lose sight of the conflict’s political aspect. And this aspect, as we have seen, is one that seems to have captured Chaucer’s imagination especially. Just as, for Shakespeare, classical Rome presented a stage on which to discuss political issues with a high degree of freedom, a mildly Italianised ancient Athens seems to have provided Chaucer with just the scenery for depicting political questions. For if we look at Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale as a specifically Italianate version of Athens then the tale’s political elements make especial sense – and Italianate Chaucer’s Athens certainly is, down to the very title of its ruler, which echoes fairly recent political history: Walter IV, Count of Brienne and Duke of Athens, if only in name, had exercised a tyrannical rule in Florence in 1342–3. But his attempt at establishing a Signoria in Florence had failed and he was driven out by an uprising.15 Yet even if we do not place too much emphasis on Chaucer’s topical allusions to Italy, trecento Italian literature and culture nevertheless provided a basis on which to develop a complex and consistent sense of antiquity as a contextual phenomenon marked by historical distance and similarity, and above all by historical specificity. More generally, as David Wallace explains, Chaucer’s Italian experience was one that enabled him to understand both culture and cultural history as ineluctably social and political phenomena, embedded in the specific contexts they were responding to and also participating in shaping: But Chaucer’s visits to Italy in the 1370s are of particular importance for three good reasons. First, they allowed him not only to discover the texts of Dante, Boccaccio, and Petrarch but also to situate them within the wider cultural and political contexts that they were designed to affirm or critique; he was thus able to imagine them at work, as cultural forces, before translating them to England as written or remembered texts.16

152

CIC_rev.indd 152

15/12/2020 10:56:36

Chaucer and Italian Culture

And Chaucer’s ability to understand cultural and literary phenomena as both historically specific and embedded in complex contextual relations is what characterises his particular ‘modernity’, a notion of modernity that becomes most apparent in his entangled negotiations both of Italian literary culture and of the classical past.17 Let us take a second look at the political context of Padua: As Peter Blume explains, though the new frescoes in Padua’s Augustinian church were paid for by patrons, the mendicant orders tended to maintain tight control over their visual self-presentation.18 Innocuous as Blume’s observation may seem, it would appear to rule out a larger political context – or at least, his reading subjects the political to the philosophical. On the other hand, precisely because planetary images had become a central element of contemporary political propaganda and civic self-definition, it seems inconceivable that planetary images should have been deployed without any political interpretations offering themselves. After all, the fourteenth century saw a rapid change in the political climate in northern and northern central Italy. In the overwhelming majority of the Italian city-states, the communal form of republican government widely dominant at the beginning of the century was steadily being supplanted by the authoritarian Signoria. This is exactly what had happened in Padua a mere nine years after Giotto had completed his pictorial tribute to communal civic pride. Before the backdrop thus outlined, then, it seems that Chaucer is particularly interested in probing the ways in which the humanistic and the scientific, the artistic and the political intersect. The visual imagery of his planetary paintings in the temples matters not simply because it displays certain philosophical or ethical concepts, but because public paintings had become a specific medium and discourse linked to a specific intellectual and political climate. As Giotto’s frescoes in Padua demonstrate, the meaning of any imagery depends on that imagery’s context. With the political take-over by the Carrara family, what had originally been designed as a tribute to communal republican government suddenly turns into a celebration of the superior rationality and order of authoritarian rule. In this context, the role of astrology ceases to be merely a philosophical issue and turns into a political question.

153

CIC_rev.indd 153

15/12/2020 10:56:36

New Centur y Chaucer

And the particular aesthetic terms in which this astrological imagery is presented, too, must inevitably become drawn into the vortex of political recontextualisation. Chaucer displays an acute awareness of these connections between art, politics and astrology in contemporary Italy.19 In his fascinating book, Manmade Marvels in Medieval Culture and Literature, Scott Lightsey explains how Chaucer’s diplomatic mission to the court of Bernabò Visconti in 1378 coincided with a visit by Giovanni Dondi, named dall’Orologio, i.e. ‘of the Clock’.20 Dondi had spent a large part of his life in Padua enjoying the special favour of the Carrara family. Amongst other things this prodigious scientist and scholar, but also humanist and diplomat, had constructed a world-famous astronomical clock, the astrarium, which was put on display in the principal marketplace of Padua. On his visit to Lombardy in 1378 Chaucer would have been sure to have heard of – and possibly even seen with his own eyes – Dondi’s technological marvel, an intricate piece of machinery ‘combining the tradition of the astronomical models of the universe with the fairly recently invented clockwork’.21 By the time of Chaucer’s visit in 1378, Giovanni Dondi had in fact left Padua because he had fallen out of favour with his Carrara masters and was now working for the different branches of the Visconti family in Milan and Pavia. And the Visconti rulers of Milan and Pavia, too, were interested in laying their hands on the kind of technological marvels that Dondi was capable of providing, not least because they were the political rivals of the Carraresi, as their take-over of Padua in 1388 amply demonstrates. Chaucer’s interest in these matters is manifest at a variety of levels. As Marijane Osborn has demonstrated, Chaucer’s description of Theseus’ Theatre bears a remarkable resemblance to a giant model of the universe or a huge astronomical clock, with its concentric circles of rising tiers and their perfectly calculated degrees, and the oratories set into the wall, like planets in their spheres.22 In his description of the Theatre, it seems, Chaucer succeeds in combining the whole range of contemporary Italian astrological propaganda machinery. Theseus’ Theatre thus literally embodies the union of the three discursive fields

154

CIC_rev.indd 154

15/12/2020 10:56:36

Chaucer and Italian Culture

of visual art, politics and astrology; indeed, the building yokes the three of them together so tightly as to create the impression of a dangerously seamless discursive whole. Hence, what affects one must automatically impinge upon the other: whatever happens at the political or the planetary level must inevitably result in important repercussions on the level of painting, and vice versa. And while, at first glance, it is not so easy to tease out the complex implications of Chaucer’s poetic evocation of visual art, it seems quite obvious that what happens at the astrological/planetary level happens, concomitantly, at the political level, too. In both cases we witness failure. Far from representing the happy union of astronomical/astrological rationality with carefully calculated political wisdom, the astrological politics in Theseus’ Theatre have catastrophic results.23 The planetary deities do not serenely move in their perfectly concentric spheres, but clash in a manner more unedifying than dramatic as they squabble over the promises they have made to their human supporters. The planets behave like big children – or rather, just like the ancient gods as depicted in classical mythology. Hence, it comes as no surprise that within the particular construction of the plot it is ultimately left to the planet/god with the least rational and stable of astrological reputations, Saturn, to prevent complete divine chaos from ensuing. But his intervention is a far cry from embodying a celestial mirror to Theseus’ claims to rational statecraft. On the contrary, it is through the structural means of the fabliau that Saturn saves the other gods’ faces by turning language against itself through reading the princes’ respective promises according to their precise wording rather than the speakers’ intentions.24 Thus, Theseus’ political scheme, too, is doomed to failure as the Fury sent from hell startles Arcite’s horse and effectively kills him. And this failure, I argue, is thrown into high relief if viewed before the backdrop of the fourteenth-century propagandistic uses of planetary paintings. How does this double failure, the planetary and the political, affect our understanding of the visual art so insistently foregrounded in the Knight’s Tale, a visual art simultaneously represented in emphatically Italian colours? The most intensive discussion of Chaucer’s relations with Giotto and trecento art so far, an article published by Michael

155

CIC_rev.indd 155

15/12/2020 10:56:36

New Centur y Chaucer

Hagiioannu in 2001, has focused primarily on the House of Fame and how visual art is imagined there in terms of linear perspective, a perspective that provides a model for forms of individual seeing which create a sense of modernity in Chaucer’s work.25 Hagiioannu invokes Giotto’s art for the way it charts a course towards an illusionistic style of painting that seeks to imitate nature – a style that is working its way towards linear perspective even if it does not yet have a full mathematical grasp of that concept; or, to put it differently, a manner of visual representation that possesses a sense of the aesthetic principles involved in linear perspective even though it has not yet fully worked out the optical and geometrical principles involved. However, in Hagiioannu’s perceptive article, the idea of linear perspective and the particular style of vision it foregrounds are firmly rooted in a teleological account of Renaissance art history that sees in Giotto’s work a revolutionary moment of origin triggering a development towards an ever more ‘realistic’ (i.e. nature-like), illusionistic and scientific manner of painting. And within this overarching teleological narrative, Hagiioannu associates Chaucer’s poetic appreciation and appropriation of linear perspective with an individualising experience, since linear perspective structures and constructs visual experience according to a mathematically identifiable situatedness of the gaze, a situatedness that is both objective and subjective at the same time. The situatedness in question is objective since it can clearly be pinpointed and tracked to a precise point in physical space, but it is also subjective because in all its supposed mathematical objectivity it derives its unique specificity from that singular point of view from which a given individual happens to train his or her gaze on an object in the distance. Many medievalists may feel slightly uncomfortable with this all too obvious and straightforward link between a mathematically grounded sense of objectivity, on the one hand, and an individual subjecthood as expressed in a style of vision, on the other. After all, this line of argument fits only too well into a Burckhardtian view of Renaissance culture that is predicated on a crucial obsolescence of all things medieval. Indeed, in Hagiioannu’s reading of the House of Fame, the link between linear perspective and individual subjectivity often becomes quite metaphorical,

156

CIC_rev.indd 156

15/12/2020 10:56:37

Chaucer and Italian Culture

thus invoking all the more those ideological implications which have so often served the purpose of buttressing Western modernity’s selfcongratulatory grands récits. But regardless of the ideological subtexts that Hagiioannu’s interpretation buys into, his contribution is of fundamental importance for drawing attention to a crucial aspect of Chaucer’s Italian experience, namely his obvious fascination with Italian visual art, especially with painting, and to the fact that Chaucer seems to understand that there is a powerful and politically relevant sense of the ‘modern’ underpinning these Italian artworks. Moreover, in a manner almost embarrassing to the self-consciously anti-teleological medievalist of the early twenty-first century, Chaucer’s description of Theseus’ Theatre does, quite insistently, link a sense of mathematical objectivity with a simultaneous insistence on the individuality of visual perspective – and in the Knight’s Tale, I would argue, that link proves to be at least as conspicuous as in the House of Fame, where Hagiioannu has spotted it. After all, one of the things that Chaucer is most concerned about in his description of Theseus’ Theatre is the visual possibilities its specific geometrical shape offers to each and every member of its audience: That swich a noble theatre as it was I dar wel seyen in this world there nas. The circuit a myle was aboute, Walled of stoon, and dyched al withoute. Round was the shap, in manere of compas, Ful of degrees, the heighte of sixty pas, That whan a man was set on o degree, He letted not his felawe for to see. (Knight’s Tale, ll. 1885–92)

In other words, in the Knight’s Tale, there is a strong impression of the visual as calibrated in what present-day readers would tend to identify as a close-to-stereotypical Renaissance sense. One might actually say that in the Knight’s Tale the mathematical principles of linear perspective are looming on the horizon. Hence, Chaucer appears to be very

157

CIC_rev.indd 157

15/12/2020 10:56:37

New Centur y Chaucer

much aware of the conceptual changes taking place in trecento painting. This notion of linear perspective as conveyed through the Theatre’s architecture is worthy of note, inter alia, because it provides a setting, one might even say a frame, for the paintings in the temples – temples, we remember, deliberately built into this theatrical architecture rather than being located somewhere else entirely, as they are in Boccaccio. And it is in the relations between the Theatre’s overarching visual framing and the particular representations in its temples, I argue, that we encounter a remarkable hiatus. The frame’s insistence on something like a proto-form of linear perspective, its evident fascination with a mathematically based and individualised, as well as seemingly objective, notion of controllable vision, is by no means matched by the aesthetic presentation of the actual paintings in the temples themselves. Or, to put it differently, however much the Theatre, with its perfect geometrical design and its close-to-abstract aesthetics, appears to be embodying the principles on which linear perspective actually rests – or, historically speaking, on which it will eventually come to rest – the paintings and works of art in the temples themselves quite provocatively refuse to follow suit: their jumbled description betrays no sense of perspective at all. The verbal depiction of art in the temples displays no interest whatsoever in conveying a scientific aesthetic. As V. A. Kolve has noted, the images described in the temples are ‘experienced as modally indeterminate, spatially unfixed, and devoid of any clear internal structure’.26 At first glance, what appears to matter in the temples is the conventional and time-honoured effects of an ekphrastic rhetoric.27 If they betray any interest in aesthetic qualities, then the descriptions of the statues and murals in the temples focus on an evocation of lifelikeness through the means of poetic language. And, time and again, the lifelikeness of the imagery is overwhelmed by the allegorical nature of the paintings’ subjects, the effect of which is less visual than moral, emotional or psychological, as for instance in the temple of Venus: First in the temple of Venus maystow se Wroght on the wal, ful pitous to beholde,

158

CIC_rev.indd 158

15/12/2020 10:56:37

Chaucer and Italian Culture

The broken slepes, and the sikes colde, The sacred teeris, and the waymentynge, The firy strokes of the desirynge That loves servantz in this lyf enduren; The othes that hir covenantz assuren; Plesaunce and Hope, Desir, Foolhardynesse, Beautee and Youthe, Bauderie, Richesse, Charmes and Force, Lesynges, Flaterye, Dispense, Bisynesse, and Jalousye, That wered of yelewe gooldes a gerland, And a cokkow sittynge on hir hand; Festes, instrumentz, caroles, daunces, Lust and array, and alle the circumstaunces Of love, which that I rekned and rekne shal, By ordre weren peynted on the wal, And mo than I kan make of mencioun. (Knight’s Tale, ll. 1918–35)

However much the narrator may introduce his ekphrasis with the formula ‘maystow se’, the end result of this descriptive passage shows little interest in the actual visuality of the experience. In those fleeting moments when we do indeed feel that one of the descriptions may, actually, be seeking to convey a visual impression, as in Jealousy’s garland of yellow gold and the cuckoo sitting on her hand, these glimpses are immediately supplanted by passages devoid of any particular visuality or pictoriality. While the rhetorical framing invites readers to conjure up images in their minds’ eyes, the descriptions themselves refrain from providing any hints as to the particular visual nature a given image may actually possess. In and of itself, this is nothing to be marvelled at. As Margaret Bridges has pointed out in her seminal article on medieval ekphrasis, ekphrastic passages in medieval literature – here to be understood as fictional representations of visual art – are not necessarily marked by their particularly visual or pictorial quality but can often be reduced to a mere enumeration of content, which comes very close to what Chaucer is doing here.28 In fact, as Bridges stresses, quite

159

CIC_rev.indd 159

15/12/2020 10:56:37

New Centur y Chaucer

frequently the aesthetic quality of descriptions that do not claim to be referring to works of visual art may actually be just as visual or pictorial in nature, or even more so, as the rhetorical set-pieces concerned with fictional statues, paintings or tapestries which we have come to label ‘ekphrastic’ since the work of Murray Krieger and James W. Heffernan.29 Hence, later, when Saturn himself describes his own astrological qualities, his words seem to be echoing the ekphrastic descriptions of the paintings in the temples of his fellow deities, even though the narrative setting of the description is an entirely different one: ‘Myn is the drenchyng in the see so wan’ (Knight’s Tale, l. 2455). There are, however, moments when Chaucer’s ekphrastic descriptions of the temple paintings do appear to be intent on making specifically visual impressions, however brief and fleeting they might be. Thus, it is said about the Temple of Venus: The statue of Venus, glorious for to se, Was naked, fletynge in the large see, And fro the navele doun al covered was, With wawes grene, and brighte as any glas. A citole in hir right hand hadde she, And on hir heed, ful semely for to se, A rose garland, fressh and wel smellynge; Above hir heed hir dowves flikerynge. Biforn hir stood hir sone Cupido; Upon his shuldres wynges had he two And blynd he was, as it is often seene; A bowe he bar and arwes brighte and kene. (Knight’s Tale, ll. 1955–66)

Here, too, we encounter typically ekphrastic elements such as the reference to the sweet smell of flowers that cannot truly be smelt because, in their fictional world, they exist only as a two-dimensional visual representation. And here, too, we are confronted with descriptions in which visual detail, listed for its allegorical relevance rather than its aesthetic impact, is enumerated rather than described. But there

160

CIC_rev.indd 160

15/12/2020 10:56:37

Chaucer and Italian Culture

are two brief lines that seem to be breaking out of that (non-)visual, or, perhaps more precisely, non-pictorial rhythm. These are the lines describing the body of Venus. Represented through a painted statue, the goddess is covered from the navel downwards with green waves, translucent and yet coyly hiding what they are simultaneously drawing attention to. Here, the visual qualities of the description actually matter, and hence we are told that the green waves, the ‘wawes grene’, are shiny and reflect the light, that they are ‘brighte as any glas’. Colour and light combine to create the impression of a glittering, semi-transparent surface that gives us a sense of movement conveyed as the product of an aesthetic illusion. This moment of heightened pictoriality may be brief, but it is all the more significant for that. What makes this moment so intriguing in the context of my argument is not merely its sense of pictoriality but also the fact that its aesthetic principles appear to be diametrically opposed to those of the Theatre’s construction. The geometrical clarity, the mathematically grounded visual experience offered by the Theatre, is juxtaposed with an aesthetic of visual ambiguity, of intriguing vagueness. What we are permitted to see here is interesting not for what we actually see, but for the way in which a paradoxical sense of simultaneously seeing and not seeing is engendered. Besides, we are treated to a truly visual experience inasmuch as we are made to envisage not merely the surface of something, but the impression that this surface makes on the senses: skin, liquid, colour and light all combine to provide an effect of shimmering indeterminacy. The notion of a shiny skin as a marker of a heightened visual experience resurfaces in the Knight’s Tale more than once: first, when the narrator displays his ekphrastic cunning through an abbreviated occupatio that forces readers to imagine Emily dousing her naked body with water even as they are told that the description of such a scene might be considered indecorous.30 And later again, we encounter a similar visual effect when we are told of the wrestlers’ naked oiled bodies at Arcite’s funeral games.31 Admittedly, the absence of pictorial qualities that I have associated with Chaucer’s temple ekphrases applies most of all to the temple of Venus and, to a lesser extent, to that of Diana, whereas the temple of

161

CIC_rev.indd 161

15/12/2020 10:56:37

New Centur y Chaucer

Mars proffers a distinctly richer range of pictorial experience; though, when all is said and done, here, too, allegory seems primarily to have the effect of quenching visual desire. But, in the temple of Mars, we do get a few moments of relative pictorial intensity such as this one: The sleere of hymself yet saugh I ther – His herte-blood hath bathed all his heer – The nayl ydryven in the shode anyght; The colde deeth, wyth mouth gapyng upright. (Knight’s Tale, ll. 2005–8)

Yet the most hauntingly visual moment conveyed in the Temple of Mars is not concerned with what we see, but with what actually prevents us from seeing, or rather about the limitations of our sight: Ther stood the temple of Mars armypotente, Wroght al of burned steel, of which the entree Was long and streit, and gastly for to see. And thereout came a rage and swich a veze That it made all the gate for to rese. The northren lyght in at the dores shoon, For wyndowe on the wal ne was ther noon, Thurgh which men myghten any light discerne. (Knight’s Tale, ll. 1982–9)

Here, our most acutely visual impression derives from the building’s lack of illumination. Because the temple has no windows, a northern – and therefore weak – light falls in only at the door. In consequence, the pictorial world we are led to imagine is one of darkness and shadows, of dimly lit contours and the potentially dramatic lighting effects of individual beams of light from the door cutting through the darkness and strikingly illuminating only very small and clearly circumscribed areas: a Caravaggesque chiaroscuro, as it were. Without wishing to invoke clichés of the avant-la-lettre type, one does feel that Chaucer’s negotiation of Italian visual art and its

162

CIC_rev.indd 162

15/12/2020 10:56:37

Chaucer and Italian Culture

particular politics resembles something like a premonition of the standard narrative arc of Italian art history, a development from the fifteenth-century celebration of the newly discovered laws of linear perspective through the cult of vagueness and indeterminacy of contours later to be encountered in aesthetic phenomena such as Leonardo’s sfumato to, finally, the striking contrast of lighting and darkness as embodied by the strong chiaroscuro of mannerist and early baroque painting. In imagining visual art, Chaucer clearly displays an uncanny awareness of different aesthetic styles and their potential for political signification. While the mathematically grounded perspectives of Theseus’ Theatre with its claims to order and rationality appear to be giving expression to a visual politics of control, the frescoes in the temples – and especially the statue of Venus with its combination of painting and sculpture – open up scope for an aesthetic of deliberate vagueness, a sense of indeterminacy that defies the strict visual organisation providing the framing of the temple images within the Theatre’s larger architectural structure. If, as the fourteenth century progressed, planetary paintings were becoming subject to a complete change of their political colours; and if, as the Chiesa degli Emeritani in Padua amply demonstrates, the problem of a painting’s political meaning was actually fought over in iconographic programmes and counter-programmes, then Chaucer’s fascination with visual vagueness, as displayed in the Knight’s Tale especially, bears all the traces of an aesthetic answer to the problem of an iconography’s vulnerability to political appropriation and ideological recoding. Each in its own way, the temples of Mars and Venus offer alternative forms of pictorial experience even as they display ideologically charged planetary iconographies within an architectural space that links the astronomical/astrological with a sense of vision remarkably close to the sense of perspective the century’s new style of painting was promoting. Chaucer’s handling of his fictional artworks suggests – if only in a handful of small but arguably significant instances – that aesthetic form may, in fact, be capable, in certain circumstances, of undermining supposedly straightforward iconographical claims to political meaning-making.

163

CIC_rev.indd 163

15/12/2020 10:56:37

New Centur y Chaucer

In so doing, Chaucer would, indeed, be picking up on certain nascent developments in contemporary Italian discourses on visual art, where the quality of vaghezza was being increasingly identified with a sense of the aesthetic that claimed for itself a more particular and a more elevated role than the merely didactic or the decorative. And though it is probably no more than a coincidence, I cannot resist mentioning in this context that the Florentine poet and scholar Franco Sacchetti (1330–1400) used the term ‘vague’ – a term beginning to acquire a very particular aesthetic connotation in the early Renaissance, as the art historian Klaus Krüger has shown – with special respect to the colour green: ‘verde, che è il piu vago colore che sia’ (‘green, that is the vaguest colour there is’).32 As early as the fourteenth century, the notion of vaghezza was beginning to be associated with an aesthetic elusiveness of form and colour that was considered to be attractive in itself.33 Hence, as they invoke erotic and aesthetic fascination, Venus’ ‘wawes grene’ prove to be very tempting, indeed – even though the contextual link I have hinted at here may, in fact, be just too beautiful to be true.34 But whether Chaucer knew Sacchetti or not, in his depiction of that shiny vagueness embodied in Venus’ statue, the English poet seems to be deliberately pointing the way in the direction of an aesthetic of semantic instability – an aesthetic considerably less prone to political appropriation than the planetary iconography that statue ostensibly seems to belong to.

Notes 1. For the importance of the frescoes in the Rocca di Angera and the ensuing fashion of planetary painting see Peter Blume, Regenten des Himmels: Astrologische Bilder in Mittelalter und Renaissance (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2000), pp. 64–9. Blume provides an excellent analysis of the links between painting and astronomy/astrology in trecento Italy and especially in Padua and Florence. In this article, I rely heavily on his work. 2. Blume, Regenten des Himmels, pp. 19–25. 3. In the Decameron, Boccaccio praises Giotto specifically for renewing Italian art: ‘Hence, by virtue of the fact that he brought back to light an art which had been buried for centuries beneath the blunders of those who, in their paintings, aimed to bring visual delight to the ignorant rather than intellectual satisfaction to the wise, his work may justly be regarded as a shining

164

CIC_rev.indd 164

15/12/2020 10:56:37

Chaucer and Italian Culture

monument to the glory of Florence.’ Giovanni Boccaccio, The Decameron, trans. G. H. McWilliam, second edn (London: Penguin, 1995), VI.5, p. 455. The original wording is ‘avendo … quella arte ritornata in luce, che molti secoli sotto gli error d’alcuni che più a dilettar gli occhi degl’ignoranti che a compiacere allo ’ntelletto de’ savi dipignendo era stata sepulta’. Giovanni Boccaccio, Il Decameron, ed. Vittore Branca (Florence: Felice Le Monnier, 1952), VI.5, p. 150. 4. In so doing I am aware that I may find myself provoking opposition. After all, the easy equation of Chaucer’s Italian experience with all that is interesting and special and new about Chaucer has long been debunked as a rather simplistic version of Whig history. So, even before I start, I must add the caveat that I have no desire whatever to paint a picture of Chaucer’s undergoing some kind of transformative Italian experience, rendering him irreversibly modern and making him turn his back on the Middle Ages once and for all. On the contrary, I shall be following in a very general fashion a lead given by David Wallace some twenty years ago, which insists on the importance of Chaucer’s Italian experience while also acknowledging the degree to which Chaucer retained a critical distance from what he saw on his various trips to Italy – as expressed, amongst other things, through his critique of the Petrarchan academy in the Clerk’s Tale. See David Wallace, Chaucerian Polity: Absolutist Lineages and Associational Forms in England and Italy (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), pp. 261–98. Far from simply swallowing hook, line and sinker all that he encountered in early Renaissance Italy, Chaucer developed a keen sense not only of contemporary Italy’s particular claims to modernity but also of the drawbacks and delusions that were part and parcel of that cult of modernity. And Chaucer seems to have been especially attentive to those drawbacks and delusions, whenever they related to the realm of politics. 5. While this article argues strongly in favour of Chaucer’s developing an acute awareness of Italian art, both in terms of the contexts of that art and also of that art’s sense of its possessing a particular aesthetic status of its own, previous criticism sometimes tended to posit the opposite, namely that Chaucer considered (Italian) visual art as a mere craft and had no notion of encountering anything special. John Larner, for instance, suggested in 1983: ‘Chaucer … though he might admire the strength of a castle or feel reverence before a painting of a Madonna, would not, like the tourist of today, look in Italy for “Art”, since that was something which had not yet been invented.’ But only a few lines later, Larner continues: ‘It was still only in limited circles, and still only occasionally, that a few great individuals – Giotto, Simone Martini – were hailed as intellectual creators whose work rose above the other “mechanical arts” and could be considered as adding to the glory of their cities.’ See John Larner, ‘Chaucer’s Italy’, in Piero Boitani (ed.), Chaucer and the Italian Trecento (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), pp. 7–32 (p. 15). It is precisely this budding cult of the artist, I contend here,

165

CIC_rev.indd 165

15/12/2020 10:56:37

New Centur y Chaucer

that Chaucer was seeking to come to terms with in his responses to Italian visual art and architecture. 6. Larry D. Benson (gen. ed.), The Riverside Chaucer, third edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). All subsequent quotations from Chaucer are taken from this edition. References to the fragments and line numbers will follow in brackets. 7. For an insightful interpretation of Chaucer’s explorations of the relations between the semiotic and the social in his allusions to the production of visual art see Robert Epstein, ‘“With many a florin he the hewes boghte”: Ekphrasis and Symbolic Violence in the Knight’s Tale’, Philological Quarterly, 85 (2006), 49–68. 8. Blume, Regenten des Himmels, pp. 70–85. 9. Margaret Plant, ‘Patronage in the Circle of the Carrara Family: Padua, 1337–1405’, in Francis William Kent, Patricia Simons and J. C. Eade (eds), Patronage, Art, and Society in Renaissance Italy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), pp. 177–99. There were two setbacks to the Carrarese ascendancy: from 1328 to 1338 the Veronese Scaligeri took control in Padua and from 1388 to 1390 the Visconti ruled the city, but in each case the da Carrara family succeeded in returning to power. 10. Shortly after the work was completed, Pietro d’Abano actually wrote a commentary on Aristotle in which he praised Giotto for being capable of portraying human faces in such a manner that it was always possible to recognise the person represented. 11. Blume, Regenten des Himmels, pp. 70–104. 12. Blume, Regenten des Himmels, pp. 88–92. 13. Blume, Regenten des Himmels, pp. 95–102. 14. Blume, Regenten des Himmels, pp. 103–4. 15. John M. Najemy, A History of Florence: 1200–1575 (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006), pp. 133–7. 16. Wallace, Chaucerian Polity, p. 10. 17. For the intricacies of Chaucer’s responses to Italian culture and classical history and literature, and the particular modernity of these responses see Robert R. Edwards, Chaucer and Boccaccio: Antiquity and Modernity (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave, 2002), pp. 1–16. 18. Blume, Regenten des Himmels, pp. 95–102. 19. It is likely that Chaucer would have been aware of Giotto himself, since allusions to Giotto are scattered across Italian literature. Even Boccaccio’s early work, which is of especial importance to Chaucer’s poetic career, contains references to Giotto. As David Wallace reminds us, in Boccaccio’s dream vision Amorosa visione, which is assumed to have influenced Chaucer’s House of Fame, the dreamer enters a great hall ‘whose rich and fabulous architecture excites a comparison with the work of Giotto’; David Wallace, Chaucer and the Early Writings of Boccaccio, Chaucer Studies, 12 (Woodbridge: D. S. Brewer, 1985), p. 18.

166

CIC_rev.indd 166

15/12/2020 10:56:37

Chaucer and Italian Culture

20. Scott Lightsey, Manmade Marvels in Medieval Culture and Literature (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), pp. 67–8. For the details of Chaucer’s second Italian trip see Derek Pearsall, The Life of Geoffrey Chaucer: A Critical Biography (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), pp. 107–9. 21. Silvio A. Bedini and Francis R. Maddison, Mechanical Universe: The Astrarium of Giovanni de’ Dondi, Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, n.s. 56/5 (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1966), p. 10. 22. Marijane Osborn, Time and the Astrolabe in The Canterbury Tales (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2002), pp. 123–50. 23. For the tension between the Theatre’s geometrical order and the unruly visual spectacle it provides see V. A. Kolve, Chaucer and the Imagery of Narrative: The First Five Canterbury Tales (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1984), p. 122. For the general sense of failure that dominates the Knight’s Tale’s politics see Lee Patterson’s classic interpretation in Chaucer and the Subject of History (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press; London: Routledge, 1991), pp. 165–230. 24. Dieter Mehl, Geoffrey Chaucer: An Introduction to His Narrative Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), was one of the first scholars to spot the fabliau-like aspects in the Knight’s Tale (p. 160). An excellent analysis of the Knight’s Tale’s fabliau-like structures can be found in Scott Vaszily, ‘Fabliau Plotting Against Romance in Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale’, Style, 31 (1997), 523–42. 25. Michael Hagiioannu, ‘Giotto’s Bardi Chapel Frescoes and Chaucer’s House of Fame: Influence, Evidence, and Interpretations’, The Chaucer Review, 36/1 (2001), 28–47. For an earlier discussion of Italian art and linear perspective for Chaucer’s poetry see Linda Tarte Holley, Chaucer’s Measuring Eye (Houston: Rice University Press, 1990), pp. 31–9. 26. Kolve, Chaucer and the Imagery of Narrative, p. 122. 27. Carolyn P. Collette, Species, Phantasms, and Images: Vision and Medieval Psychology in The Canterbury Tales (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001), p. 49. 28. Margaret Bridges, ‘The Picture in the Text: Ecphrasis as Self-reflexivity in Chaucer’s Parliament of Fowles, Book of the Duchess and House of Fame’, Word and Image, 5 (1989), 151–8 (p. 152). 29. For Heffernan’s definition of ekphrasis see James A. W. Heffernan, Museum of Words: The Poetics of Ekphrasis from Homer to Ashbery (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), p. 3. 30. For a reading of the politics of vision in this scene see Andrew James Johnston, Performing the Middle Ages from Beowulf to Othello (Turnhout: Brepols, 2008), pp. 94–116. 31. For the specifically erotic politics of this scene see Andrew James Johnston, ‘Wrestling with Ganymede: Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale and the Homoerotics of Epic History’, Germanisch-Romanische Monatsschrift, 50 (2000), 21–43.

167

CIC_rev.indd 167

15/12/2020 10:56:37

New Centur y Chaucer

32. Franco Sacchetti, Il Trecentonovelle, Novella 48, ed. E. Faccioli (Turin: Einaudi, 1970), p. 128 (my translation). One could, theoretically, also translate the line as ‘green, that is the most attractive colour there is’, but this translation would destroy the ambiguity inherent in the term vago itself, since the attractiveness implied in vago derives from the very elusiveness that is at issue here. 33. Klaus Krüger, Grazia: Religiöse Erfahrung und ästhetische Evidenz, Figura 5 (Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 2016), pp. 63–4. 34. It would have been even more beautiful if the fourteenth-century Italian adjective vago had been related to a contemporary Italian noun denoting ‘wave [of the sea]’, but this is not the case. Italian Vago is derived from Latin vagus, ‘unstable, indeterminate’, and there is no evidence that a transferred meaning of ‘wave’ as a noun was associated with Italian vago (http://www. treccani.it/vocabolario/vago1/). The French word, vague, ‘wave’, is Germanic in origin (https://www.littre.org/definition/vague).

168

CIC_rev.indd 168

15/12/2020 10:56:37

6

THE PROPHETIC EAGLE IN ITALY, ENGLAND AND WALES: DANTE, CHAUCER AND INSULAR POLITICAL PROPHECY Victoria Flood

T

his chapter considers Chaucer’s House of Fame in relation to political prophetic interests at work in Dante’s Commedia and a roughly contemporary insular tradition of politicised apocalypticism drawing on similar currents in pan-European circulation. A number of critics have argued persuasively that, in his House of Fame, Chaucer offered a pastiche of contemporary apocalyptic and visionary motifs. This has generally been understood as a jibe at the pretensions of visionary literature (including Dante’s Commedia) to a privileged form of knowledge – as Helen Cooper has put it, a sense that ‘this side of death, judgement is human, provisional, uncertain, and quite possibly wrong’.1 In this respect, the House of Fame represents one of a number of medieval texts that cultivate an association between apocalypticism, authorship and authority – however unstable this configuration is for Chaucer.2 Despite this critical interest, Chaucer’s apocalypticism has yet to be located by scholars in the broader context of what was a significant engagement with and contemporary circulation of prophetic literature. Revelatory material was by no means necessarily politically

CIC_rev.indd 169

15/12/2020 10:56:37

New Centur y Chaucer

neutral during this period, and the later Middle Ages saw a flourishing of apocalyptic and imperially minded political prophecy in the medieval West, drawn on by politically engaged authors and compilers from southern Italy to Wales.3 This chapter follows a westward geo-political trajectory, taking in Italy, England and Wales, with two aims in mind: the contextualisation of what I understand to be Chaucer’s rejection of a dominant continental source tradition in pan-European transmission; and Chaucer’s insular context, in evidence in the interaction between English and Welsh prophecy, without which, as I have argued elsewhere, we cannot understand the long historical development of prophecy in medieval Britain.4 This study is therefore concerned with the porous boundaries between medieval linguistic and cultural contexts. It is conducted not with specific source analysis in mind (although on occasion source relationships are suggested), but rather with an emphasis on the broad diffusion of a common prophetic motif – the figure of the eagle, whose revelatory and imperialist potential is both invoked and denied by Chaucer – across different political and social milieux in late medieval Europe. This mode of analysis takes its cue from the recent interest in the ‘itinerary’ approach to European literatures, championed by David Wallace – the study of a theme in pan-European circulation, viewed from the vantage point of three very specific, although inter-related, geo-political contexts.5

Dante’s Joachism and Chaucer’s Eagle Dante’s engagements with political prophecy have been understood as inspired by the prophetic exegeses of Joachim of Fiore (c.1135–1202), a Calabrian abbot and founder of the monastery of San Giovani, and the prophecies produced in imitation of him.6 A prophetic vogue beginning in southern Italy during the early thirteenth century, political Joachite texts circulated fairly rapidly across Europe. Joachite prophecy takes its impetus from a tripartite understanding of history, found in Joachim’s genuine prophetic writings, which proposed three chronological epochs, the Age of the Father (articulated through the Old

170

CIC_rev.indd 170

15/12/2020 10:56:37

Chaucer and Italian Culture

Testament), the Age of the Son (articulated through the New Testament) and the anticipated Age of the Holy Spirit. This utopian third age, contemporary with the arrival of Antichrist, would see the renewal of apostolic purity and the flourishing of a new class of spiritual men. A pronounced feature of Joachim’s works, and early imitations, was the suspicion of, and even overt hostility towards, imperial power, and it might be understood as a prophetic genre keenly alert to the abuses of kings and emperors. However, relatively early in its history, Joachim’s third epoch came to be associated with a tradition of political prophecy (of the sibylline type that circulated in the ancient and late antique worlds) concerning the Last World, or Last Roman, Emperor. The figure of the Emperor appears as a reformer who ushers in a golden age, offering a brief respite from the turmoil of the reign of Antichrist which follows (although, on occasion, the two came to be positioned as contemporaries). The motif owes its medieval European circulation to the Prophecy of Pseudo-Methodius, composed in the eastern empire at the end of the seventh century.7 A king of the Greeks or Romans who builds a world empire, converts Muslims and Jews, and conquers the Holy Land, the Emperor lays down his crown at Golgotha before the arrival of Antichrist, who is finally defeated by Christ or St Michael. Associated with the dawn of a golden age within history, the Last World Emperor was deployed in a political Joachite framework as a herald of the third historical epoch, or ‘status’, promised by Joachim’s prophecies. Although Joachim’s writings (and subsequent Joachite prophecy based on them) were understood as at best heterodox and at worst heretical, Dante places Joachim in Paradise in the third book of his Commedia.8 In Joachite prophecy, Dante found an interest which was at once political and spiritual. Marjorie Reeves has argued that Dante’s engagement with the imperial theme diverges from the blunt millenarianism of the sibylline trope outside its Joachite contexts. For Dante, the prophesied Emperor presaged a renewal that was as spiritual as it was material, an understanding in which he may very well have been influenced by the Spiritual Franciscans, whom he certainly seems to have understood as heralds of the Third Status (in line with the Joachite interests of the order itself).9 There is no denying, however,

171

CIC_rev.indd 171

15/12/2020 10:56:37

New Centur y Chaucer

that there is a strongly worldly, and imperial, bias to Dante’s prophetic engagements. The most significant text for our understanding of Dante’s imperial prophecies is found in his account of the Veltro (the hound) in the first canto of the Inferno, who defeats the wolf of avarice which has infected the Italian peninsula. Virgil (for medieval thinkers, the prophet both of the Roman Empire and of Christ) issues a political prophecy: e ha natura sì malvagia e ria,   che mai non empie la bramosa voglia,   e dopo ’l pasto ha più fame che pria. Molti son li animali a cui s’ammoglia,   e più saranno ancora, infin che ’l Veltro   verrà, che la farà morir con doglia. Questi non ciberà terra nè peltro,   ma sapïenza, amore e virtute,   e sua nazion sarà tra Feltro e Feltro. Di quella umile Italia fia salute   per cui morì la vergine Cammilla,   Eurialo e Turno e Niso di ferute. Questi la caccerà per ogni villa,   fin che l’avrà rimessa nello ’nferno,   là onde invidia prima dipartilla. (Inf. 1.97–111) She [the wolf of avarice] has a nature so vicious and malignant that her greedy appetite is never satisfied and after food she is hungrier than before. Many are the creatures with which she mates and there will yet be more, until the hound comes that shall bring her to miserable death. He shall not feed on land or lucre but on wisdom and love and valour, and his country shall be between Feltro and Feltro; he shall be salvation to that low-lying Italy for which the Virgin Camilla and Euryalus and Turnus and Nisus died of their wounds; he shall hunt her through every city till he has sent her back to Hell whence envy first set her loose.10

172

CIC_rev.indd 172

15/12/2020 10:56:37

Chaucer and Italian Culture

The hound has been taken to refer to Can Grande della Scala, ruler of Verona from 1308 to 1329. ‘Can Grande’ literally means ‘great dog’, and Verona is situated between Feltro and Montefeltro, the ‘Feltro e Feltro’ of the prophecy.11 The extent to which we might align the reforming Veltro with the sibylline Last World Emperor has been questioned by some scholars, but certainly it was accepted as such in commentaries on the Commedia produced after Dante’s death.12 The expectation of renewal under the Veltro is of a type with interests expressed by Dante elsewhere, in relation to the reforming powers of Henry of Luxemburg, although this hope of renewal certainly remained a feature of Dante’s writing after Henry’s death in 1313, one year after he received the imperial crown in Rome. Dante also appears to have been aware of Joachite prophecies of an Angelic Pope who enacts ecclesiastical reform – material which Nick Havely suggests may have reached him through a Franciscan connection.13 More broadly, as is typical of European political prophecy from this period, the sequence is concerned with territory and the claims, and responsibilities, of a particular subject population and their rulers: a particular imagining of Virgil’s ‘umile Italia’ (‘humble Italy’), applied by Dante as an allusion to a state of moral depravity as much as a geographical location. The reference to figures of the Trojan past (Camilla, Euryalus, Turnus and Nissus) potentially gestures to the descent of the Italian Veltro from legendary, heroic stock. This is a specific application of Virgil’s Roman foundation legend, the Aeneid, which was applied to various European dynasties from the ninth century to the very end of the Middle Ages.14 Troy is a feature of political prophecy across medieval Europe, noted further, in its English context, below. The close relationship between the second and third books of the House of Fame and the Inferno is relatively widely observed.15 Chaucer, however, offers no Veltro. This may seem a tenuous line of enquiry – an investigation into an absence. Yet, in an apocalyptic text of this period (as critics have understood the poem to be), it seems to me to be a distinctive one, not least given the interest of Chaucer’s Italian source model in political prophecy. This finds a nodal point in the figure of the eagle. The ascent of Chaucer’s poet-narrator with the loquacious eagle is depicted as a process of revelation:

173

CIC_rev.indd 173

15/12/2020 10:56:37

New Centur y Chaucer

This egle, of which I yow have told, That shon with fethres as of gold, Which that so hye gan to sore, I gan beholde more and more …

(ll. 529–32)

The eagle appears on a number of occasions in the Commedia in similarly revelatory contexts. We might think first of the heaven of Jupiter in Paradiso 19 and 20, where the narrator encounters ‘la bella image’ of the eagle, a congregation of blessed souls speaking with a single voice of the Eternal Justice which governs the created world.16 The eagle traces the full scope of universal history, from the creation to the Crucifixion to the Day of Judgement. In regard to the latter, the eagle strikes a political prophetic chord (from line 112 to the end of Canto 19), forecasting misery for the unrighteous in Persia, Prague, France, England, Scotland, Spain, Bohemia, Portugal, Norway, Venice, Hungary, Navarre, Nicosia and Famagosta – a direct indictment of their rulers. This material contains allusions to near-contemporary political events, such as the invasion of Bohemia in 1304, the death of Philip of France in 1314, and the Scottish Wars of Independence.17 This disarray is juxtaposed with the eagle itself, a corporate image not just of the blessed souls of Paradise, but of the Holy Roman Empire. For Dante, as we find in Italian and German political Joachite prophecy, and later English prophecy (some of which drew on Joachite currents), the eagle was consistently read in relation to the Holy Roman Emperor or the Empire. In Canto 20, the eagle names a series of just rulers, none of whom are contemporary (from the Old Testament David to the twelfth-century King William the Good of Naples), yet the entire discussion appears to be built on the strong identification of earthly justice with a political structure in which an emperor rules all nations.18 Such imperial imaginings were closely associated with prophecies of the Last World Emperor type, and certainly (as Reeves has argued), we find a similar anticipation of a coming golden age in these cantos. The sequence is eschatological, imperial and very possibly Joachite. Reeves has detected a direct debt in this figure (the eagle emerges from the letters ‘M’ and ‘I’) to one of Joachim’s tree figurae (and we might note that,

174

CIC_rev.indd 174

15/12/2020 10:56:37

Chaucer and Italian Culture

for Dante, the souls themselves are ‘perpetual flowers of eternal bliss’: ‘O perpetui fiori / dell’etterna letizia’, Par. 19.22–3). Joachim’s figura rests on the same letters, and when turned upside down reveals two eagles (the heads are the root of the tree, and the wings the branches). This functions as a concealed numerical message pointing to the Third Status. For Dante, this was the eagle of St John, symbol of the Apocalypse, held in conjunction with a reformulated sibylline, and imperial, meaning.19 In a similar vein, in Purgatorio 33.37–9, Dante alludes to the shedding of the feathers of the imperial eagle. In the lines which follow (40–5), Beatrice prophesies the coming of an heir to the Roman eagle who will destroy the corrupt powers of church and state.20 This is known as the DXV-prophecy, the ‘Cinquecento dieci e cinque’, a numerical cipher of the type found in sibylline prophecy. Its precise meaning remains uncertain, but it is generally regarded as a counterpart to the prophecy of the Veltro.21 It has been understood as relating directly to Dante’s interests in Henry of Luxemburg, whose coronation Dante hailed in his letters in political prophetic terms: ‘Behold, now is the accepted time, when signs are rising of consolation and of peace; for a new day brightens, showing dawn, which already thins the shades of long calamity.’22 We might read the eagle in Purgatorio 9.19–33 in a similar way. In a brief dream within a dream, the narrator is picked up by an eagle and carried to the gates of Purgatory. The eagle is interpreted by Dante in relation to the Roman god Jupiter’s abduction of Ganymede, although here we most certainly see a synthesis between classical pagan and Christian allusions. It carries the dreamer to an angel who, in the fashion of an angel of the Apocalypse, unlocks the door to a great mystery: in this case, purgatory. The episode is situated at an intersection between the spiritual and the imperial. It has been suggested by one editor and translator of the poem that Ganymede held particular appeal for Dante as a prince of the ‘Trojan, Imperial race’: ‘His dream is a flash of prophetic vision of the Empire of God’s intention, of an ordered life for the world.’23 As is well noted, this material finds a direct re-working, more properly a pastiche, in the House of Fame, where the dreamer ascends with the eagle:

175

CIC_rev.indd 175

15/12/2020 10:56:37

New Centur y Chaucer

This egle, of which I yow have told, That shon with fethres as of gold, Which that so hye gan to sore, I gan beholde more and more To se the beaute and the wonder But never was ther dynt of thonder.

(ll. 529–34)

The reference to Jupiter, the god of thunder, is found in Dante, but Chaucer’s eagle is not Jupiter and, indeed, the dreamer later states overtly that he is not Ganymede (l. 589). He contends, equally, that he is not Enoch or Elijah either – which is to say, he is not a prophet, nor one who should be privy to the secrets of the beginning and end of creation. This is a sure and certain departure from Dante’s eschatology, a deliberate closing off of potential apocalyptic signifiers. As Helen Cooper notes, in the multiple eyes of Lady Fame, compared to the beasts of Apocalypse 4.6, ‘as John writ in th’Apocalips’ (ll. 1381–5), we find an imperfect apocalypse that ‘is not apocalyptic, nor even revelatory’.24 To this, we might add Kathryn Kerby-Fulton’s observation that the dreamer’s anxiety about the dangers of ‘fantom and illusion’ (l. 493), voiced immediately prior to his encounter with the eagle, offers a satirical take on the discernment of spirits, a contemporary issue associated with the interpretation of prophecy.25 Chaucer’s poem flirts with the revelatory but consistently denies its realisation. No Last World Emperor appears.

Imperial Prophecy in Late Medieval England We might safely assume that Chaucer possessed the cultural context, and codes, to recognise Dante’s prophetic strategies, if not indeed his precise referents. As is well noted, the production, and contestation, of political prophecy is a particular feature of English political culture of the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries, not least in association with the deposition of Richard II and the historiographical and prophetic counter-narratives of Lancastrian partisans and Ricardian loyalists.26 Of course, the composition of the House of Fame (generally

176

CIC_rev.indd 176

15/12/2020 10:56:37

Chaucer and Italian Culture

located in the early 1380s, although this might be pushed as late as 1384),27 significantly pre-dates the Lancastrian revolution, but the prophetic interests of 1399 have a long history, and imperial political prophecy was a relatively deeply entrenched presence in mainstream English political literary culture. Joachite prophecy circulated alongside, and was combined with, a dominant English tradition of political prophecy in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries, derived largely from Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Prophetiae Merlini, integrated as Book VII of his Historia Regum Britanniae (c.1138).28 There are a number of significant English manuscripts and library catalogues containing Joachite political prophecy. Chief among these is Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, MS 404, compiled at the Benedictine abbey of Bury St Edmunds in the late fourteenth century by the abbey’s librarian Henry of Kirkstede.29 Notable in this compilation are a number of prophecies ascribed pseudonymously to Joachim, including the arrival of Antichrist and the Joachite pictorial sequence ‘Vaticinia Pontificum’ (‘Prophecy of the Popes’), as well as sibylline texts of the Last World Emperor type.30 Roughly contemporary evidence also survives from among the Augustinians at York in the library of John Erghome, a fourteenth-century canon of Bridlington associated with the powerful Bohun family. Erghome is an important figure in the history of English prophecy, and his personal library, bequeathed to the house at York, boasts a wealth of Joachite political prophetic texts.31 Combining sibylline apocalypticism with visions of British restoration derived from earlier and continuous Welsh models, Geoffrey’s Prophetiae construct a trajectory of far-reaching, even quasi-crusading, imperial conquest by insular rulers. We might note, for example, Geoffrey’s prophecy of a futurist hero in the fashion of Arthur, a descendant of the Breton hero Conanus, whose trajectory across Europe carries him to Muslim Spain, ‘in ulteriorem Hispaniam’ (VII. 118).32 The broader field of Galfridian allusion lent itself relatively easily to Joachite materials, and the two even appear to have been understood as interchangeable. For example, in the version of the Historia contained in the fourteenth-century English collection of prophetic and historical materials, Cambridge, St John’s College, MS G. 16, the Italian

177

CIC_rev.indd 177

15/12/2020 10:56:37

New Centur y Chaucer

Joachite prophecy ‘Gallorum levitas’ is incorporated after Historia VI as a prophecy of Merlin (fols 43r–44r).33 The prophecy originally concerns the conflict of the Hohenstaufen emperors with the papacy, but in a Galfridian context it reads as a trajectory of European conquest of a type with those of the Prophetiae, a congruence which extends also to its use of animal ciphers. It begins with the inconsistency (‘levitas’) of the Gauls, who, associated with the figure of the defeated ‘gallus’ (the cock), are overcome. Following this, the world is united in adoration of the ‘aquile vitricia signa’ (‘the victorious sign of the eagle’).34 In its anti-French interests, the political utility of the prophecy in late medieval England would have been obvious. ‘Gallorum levitas’ appears in another Joachite Galfridian prophecy in circulation in the age of Chaucer, a composite prophetic sequence termed by J. R. S. Phillips the ‘Verses of Gildas concerning the Prophecy of the Eagle and the Hermit’.35 A work of the reign of Edward II, the sequence combines a vision of an English king’s British and Irish conquests with victories in Europe (‘Gallorum levitas’), and the recapture of Jerusalem. Michael Bennett has suggested that material of this type was associated with Richard II during the final years of his reign, and may even have been known to the king and influenced his ill-timed attempt to conquer Ireland in 1399, during which Henry IV seized the throne.36 Another imperial prophecy in enduring circulation throughout the fourteenth century appears to have found a particular association with Richard: the Holy Oil of St Thomas. At the core of the prophecy is the legend of an eagle-shaped ampoule containing holy oil, given to Thomas of Canterbury, while in exile in France, by the Virgin Mary, who also provided the saint with a prophecy that an English king anointed with the oil was to conquer the lost French territories of Normandy and Aquitaine, as well as the Holy Land. The earliest version of the prophecy (termed by T. A. Sandquist, the Common Version) survives in at least twenty-three manuscripts down to the seventeenth century.37 A legend first attested in the reign of Edward II, the earliest witness of the prophecy is from the beginning of the reign of his son, Edward III, and most probably circulated in the context of Edward III’s claim to the French throne.38 The prophecy’s

178

CIC_rev.indd 178

15/12/2020 10:56:37

Chaucer and Italian Culture

insular circulation was continuous, and there are at least two midfifteenth-century English-language translations, alongside three Welsh recensions (one of which is discussed further below).39 Towards the end of his reign, Richard II is understood to have re-discovered the ampoule in the Tower of London, and unsuccessfully requested that the Archbishop of Canterbury hold a second coronation for him, so that he might be anointed from the ampoule. In the event, the oil was used in Henry IV’s coronation instead.40 Although this account survives only in a hostile witness, the pro-Lancastrian chronicle of Thomas Walsingham, the association of Richard with the oil sits plausibly with prophetic expectations associated with the king elsewhere. For example, the pro-Ricardian Dieulacres Chronicle records a number of prophecies attendant on Richard’s nativity.41 These include prophecies of the ‘taurus’ and ‘gallus de bruto’, Joachite ciphers originally associated with the imperial careers of Edward III and the Black Prince in the influential Prophecies of John of Bridlington (c.1362–4), another notable combining of Galfridian and Joachite currents.42 As in Walsingham’s account, the legend of the holy oil appears to have held particular utility in early Lancastrian propaganda, and we find an allusion to it in the work of Chaucer’s contemporary, John Gower.43 In ‘H. aquile pullus’, a short panegyric written to Henry IV, Gower draws the revelatory eagle into conjunction with the imperial: H. aquile pullus, quo nunquam gracior ullus, Hostes confregit, que tirannica colla subegit. H. aquile cepit oleum, quo regna recepit; Sic veteri iuncta stipiti nova stirps redit uncta. H. the eagle’s chick, than whom no one is ever more graceful, Has broken his enemies, and subjugated tyrannical necks. H. the eagle has captured the oil, by which he has received the rule of the kingdom; Thus the new stock returns, anointed and joined to the old stem.44

179

CIC_rev.indd 179

15/12/2020 10:56:37

New Centur y Chaucer

Alongside the legend of the holy oil, the prophecy draws on the imperial eagle, as it appears in a well-known Latin text of the early thirteenth century, the Prophecies of Merlin Silvester, which features the eagle’s chick who wrests Britain from the rule of an inept white king.45 The prophecy was originally written after the successful challenge of Henry II to Stephen, and rests on an allusion to the earlier Henry’s imperial mother, the Empress Matilda. By the late fourteenth century, the text appears in manuscripts produced across England and Wales, attributed to the eagle of Shaftsbury (a figure which first appears in the writings of Geoffrey of Monmouth), another prophetic eagle after the fashion of the eagle of the Apocalypse. In his account of the deposition, the chronicler Adam of Usk suggests a relatively pervasive association of Henry with the eagle’s chick, as a figure from Merlinian prophecy: ‘According to the prophecy of Merlin, this duke Henry is the eaglet, for he was the son of John.’ An ex post facto rationalisation of this prophetic identification, Adam alludes to John of Gaunt, who shares his name with the evangelist associated with the eagle emblem.46 Versions of this interpretative matrix appear to have been relatively diffuse, and Henry emerges as the eagle himself (rather than his chick) in political poetry of this period, produced beyond that of Gower and the immediate purview of the Lancastrian court. In Richard the Redeless, we read of the appearance of an eagle from the east (a reference to Henry’s landing at Ravenspur in 1399), who amends the evils of Richard’s misrule, and nourishes his chicks, who fight by the side of the rightful heir to the kingdom: How the Egle in the est entrid his owen, And cried and clepid after his owen kynde briddis, That weren anoyed in his nest and norished full ille, And well ny yworewid with a wronge leder? But the nedy nestlingis, whan they the note herde, Of the hende Egle, the heyer of hem all, Thei busked fro the busches and breris that hem noyed, And burnisched her beekis and bent to-him-wardis, And folowid him fersly to fighte for the wrongis

(III. 69–77)47

180

CIC_rev.indd 180

15/12/2020 10:56:37

Chaucer and Italian Culture

In this passage, the commons of England become the eagle’s chick. This configuration is much of a type with the uses of bird imagery in English political prophecy from this period more broadly. For example, the opening allusion of the fifteenth-century Percy-ite anti-Lancastrian prophecy, Cock in the North, addresses Henry Hotspur as the cock (another Joachite symbol, via Bridlington), and identifies the Percy family’s northern forces as his chicks: ‘When the cocke in the North hath bilde his nest / And busketh his bridds and beddnys hem to fle.’48 We might understand this prophecy as a localised co-option of a mode of royal, imperial address, the terms of which were broadly recognisable as such. The eagle, or the eagle’s chick, finds no mention in the single example within Chaucer’s later (post-1399) writings that we might term a Henrician panegyric, albeit, a tongue in cheek one. I refer to Chaucer’s address to Henry IV in the envoy which concludes Complaint to his Purse: O conquerour of Brutes Albyon, Which that by lyne and free eleccion Been verray kyng, this song to yow I sende, And ye, that mowen alle oure harmes amende, Have mynde upon my supplicacion.

(22–6)

This is a reference to the British foundation legend: the conquest of the island, then called Albion, by the Trojans under Brutus, as reimagined by Geoffrey of Monmouth in Book I of the Historia. This originary moment is associated by Chaucer with Henry’s accession, in a combining which might be understood as a representation of the triple Lancastrian claim: Henry accedes through right of conquest, blood, and common assent. In one respect this corresponds with Gower’s panegyric, and Richard the Redeless, but in Chaucer this material, expressed so succinctly, and so bluntly, may tend towards pastiche: if one predicate for rule is in place, why state the others? Chaucer may well be pointing to the overdetermination of the Lancastrian propaganda machine. The allusion does, however, utilise a wider prophetic and historical strategy common

181

CIC_rev.indd 181

15/12/2020 10:56:37

New Centur y Chaucer

to this period. Chaucer’s uses of the Troy legend in relation to the imperial representations of the kings of England is of a type with the uses of the Roman foundation legend by Dante, in his prophecy of the Veltro, although in Chaucer’s work the theme is notably undeveloped. There is a possible allusion to Geoffrey of Monmouth, in respect of his Trojan material, in the House of Fame, where among the historians of Troy Chaucer names the ‘Englyssh Gaufride’ (l. 1470). Although the long assumed identification of ‘Gaufride’ as Geoffrey of Monmouth has been queried by Helen Cooper, who has suggested, given that Geoffrey might not be understood to be obviously English, that this might be a coded reference to Chaucer’s own claims as a historian of Troy, by virtue of Troilus and Criseyde,49 Simon Meecham-Jones has convincingly argued that we might see the Anglicising of Geoffrey of Monmouth as symptomatic of the English co-option of British insular history in this period.50 Certainly, Galfridian history and prophecy were firmly aligned with the interests, and dynastic (I have suggested, imperial) identities of late medieval English kings. Yet for Chaucer this interest appears to have been marginal at best.

The Holy Oil in Fifteenth-century Wales There is another sphere in the insular world, closely contemporary with Chaucer, where both the prophetic eagle and British imperium carried a particular resonance. Welsh political prophetic engagements with the imperial eagle offer a striking point of comparison to Italian and English uses of the trope. The earliest Welsh-language (heavily adaptive) translation of the Holy Oil, Darogan yr Olew Bendigaid (The Prophecy of the Holy Oil) appears in Aberystwyth, National Library of Wales, Peniarth MS 50, also known as Y Cwtta Cyfarwydd o Forganwg (The Short Guide of Morganwg), compiled c.1445–56 in Glamorgan, possibly at Neath Abbey.51 A collection of English, Welsh and Latin prophecies, Peniarth 50 represents a significant combining of multilingual literary-political influences in fifteenth-century Wales. The text must be situated in the longer historical context of the circulation of English crusading prophecies in Wales and the March, which in their

182

CIC_rev.indd 182

15/12/2020 10:56:37

Chaucer and Italian Culture

origins probably owe something to interests in English activities in France during the early years of the Hundred Years Wars. One of the earliest witnesses of the Common Version of the Holy Oil, London, British Library, Royal MS 12. C. xii, compiled in Hereford c.1320–40, integrates the text alongside a number of prophecies engaged with English conquests in France, including Lilium regnans (later translated into English as The Lily, the Lion and the Son of Man), which similarly features a crusading king of England, and during the fifteenth century was translated into Welsh as Proffwydoliaeth y Fflwrdelis.52 Alongside additions to, and omissions from, the Latin text, Darogan yr Olew Bendigaid is contextualised in relation to a number of Arthurian allusions, from French, Latin and Welsh sources. To its construction of its imperial hero, we must add the wider influence of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Arthur, who by this period can be understood as a fully naturalised element of Welsh historical-literary culture as much as of English – copies of the Brut y Brenhinedd (the Welsh translations of Geoffrey’s Historia) survive in large numbers from medieval Wales, second only to the Welsh Laws.53 In a sequence of reminiscences associated with Nascien, cousin of Peredur, and an account of Arthur’s devotion to the Virgin Mary, the holy oil is said to have come to Britain through the travels of Josephus, the bishop of Sarras and the son of Joseph of Arimathea. It was used by the Archbishop Dubricius to anoint Arthur, who under the impetus of the oil, strengthened the church, defeated the giants who plagued Britain, and subdued the Saxons: Ac o nerth duw ay ras yntheu a arllwyssawdd yr ynys or kewri ar gormessoedd a oedd yn yr ynys honn ac a sathrawdd dan y draet y paganyeit saeson … Ac ef atnewyddawdd y temlau ac ychwanegawdd cret y cristynogyon. And from God’s strength and his grace, he purged the island of the giants and the plagues that were in this island and he trod under his feet the Saxon pagans … and he restored the temples and extended the Christian faith.54

183

CIC_rev.indd 183

15/12/2020 10:56:37

New Centur y Chaucer

The giants, which appear in association with gormesoedd (plagues), read in relation to hostile occupation, or at least, occupation antithetical to British rule, as they are in Geoffrey of Monmouth’s British foundation legend of Historia I, where the giants are defeated by Brutus and the Trojans. The term gormes appears in the Welsh triads, and related prose tales, as a synonym for illegitimate conquest, understood as afflicting the Britons in waves (the Picts, the Saxons, and possibly the Romans).55 To the giants, the prophecy adds the Saxons, characterised as a pagan invasion, as we find in both Geoffrey’s Historia and the earliest account of Arthur’s battles in the ninth-century Historia Brittonum, which characterise the conflicts as a war of religion. After the time of Arthur’s holy conquests, the Welsh addition to the prophecy records that the oil was lost until its rediscovery by Thomas Becket in Sens in the late twelfth century. A translation of the Latin prophecy follows, with one particularly important difference. It refers to the conquests not of a king of England, but rather the king of ‘this island’, that is, Britain, a king identified as an eagle; while all references to the French territories are omitted: Eisoes brenhin or ynys a vydd yr hwnn gyntaf a vrddir or olew hwnn ac ef a ennill drachefyn yr hwnn a gollawdd y rieni … y adeilya llawer o eglwysseu ny tir bendigeit ac ef a yrr y paganyeit ar fo o vabilon. Even so, a king of the island, who is foremost, will be honoured with this oil and he will win back that which his ancestors lost … he will build many churches in the holy land and he will pursue the pagans in flight to Babylon.

The terms used here correspond closely to those applied to Arthur. This is a vision of a British (Welsh) high king, who will defeat both the Saxons (the English) and the Saracens, two categories which are here conflated, in line with the text’s reminiscence of the Arthurian past. Furthermore, the lost territories are not the French lands ceded from

184

CIC_rev.indd 184

15/12/2020 10:56:37

Chaucer and Italian Culture

the English crown, but the loss of legendary insular wholeness that constitutes Britain in Welsh historical and prophetic writings, associated here not least with the age of Arthur. This activity is appended by the re-conquest of the Holy Land: the pagans are pursued to Babylon (which here probably means Cairo). This is much in the fashion we would expect of the imperial eagle of sibylline prophecy, which is combined with Welsh legendary content – an association which was, at least in part, very likely facilitated by Geoffrey’s own earlier combining of British prophecy with the imperial. The rationale behind the Welsh translation and adaptation of the Latin text is given in a prefatory essay, which precedes this section of the manuscript. In an assertion which might equally speak to the activities of the compiler-translator across the manuscript as a whole, the author-compiler, who identifies himself as Dafydd, introduces the text as a translation of prophetic material ‘o ladin, franghec a saesnec’ (‘from Latin, French and English’) into Welsh. This is an undertaking Dafydd connects to his desire to better understand the history of the Welsh, and their future. He laments the conditions of Wales following Edward I’s conquest of north Wales in 1284, later exacerbated by the harsh penal laws which followed the suppression of the revolt of Owain Glyn Dw ˆ r against Henry IV, in the early part of the fifteenth century. Ceridwen Lloyd-Morgan has suggested that the immediate conditions of the post-revolt years may well have been in mind at the point of original translation and adaptation.56 This would place its production roughly contemporary with Chaucer and Gower, and might be understood as a response to shared prophetic stimuli, subject to different political treatments on either side of the Welsh border. Notably, Darogan yr Olew Bendigaid contains passages which are fairly faithful to the Latin, which cause a number of jarring slippages between the Britishness (that is, the Welshness) of the prophesied deliverer in the translator’s modified framework, and the Englishness of the source. What is more, in its conclusion, the influence of early Lancastrian propaganda is felt: it records the final delivery of the oil to King Henry of England.

185

CIC_rev.indd 185

15/12/2020 10:56:37

New Centur y Chaucer

Conclusion The influence of imperial prophecy can be felt from Italy, to England, to Wales. In political prophecy and panegyric of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries its presence is pervasive. We find it everywhere – everywhere, that is, except in Chaucer. I am not convinced that we can explain Chaucer’s reluctance to engage in the shared, and contested, imperial fantasies of Christian Europe as anything more than a matter of taste, evinced by his use of a particular mode of pastiche which evaded not only fully revelatory, but also directly political, content. Political prophecies rest on declarations of certainty, a particular vision of the political future, and the actions of political figures. It is precisely this type of certainty which, in the House of Fame, Chaucer regarded with considerable suspicion. However, as we see in the example of Darogan yr Olew Bendigaid, when read in comparison to Gower’s Lancastrian panegyric, or the earlier associations of the oil with Richard II, this seemingly most confident discourse was actually as protean, and as shifting, as anything we find in the House of Fame – a site of slippage between English and Welsh, and one king and another. Yet the use of prophecy is predicated nonetheless on a certain level of political conviction (exercised cynically or not), and prophecy and apocalypticism are never truly serious subjects for Chaucer. In fact, the House of Fame might be read as a testament to an extreme diffidence about the future: it is a poem that ends in ellipsis, with the appearance of a man of ‘grete auctorite’ who remains forever silent.

Notes 1. James Simpson, ‘Dante’s “astripetam aquilam” and the Theme of Poetic Discretion in the House of Fame’, Essays and Studies, 39 (1986), 1–18; Lisa J. Kiser, ‘Eschatological Politics in Chaucer’s House of Fame’, Modern Language Quarterly, 49/2 (1988), 99–119; Helen Cooper, ‘The Four Last Things in Dante and Chaucer: Ugolino in the House of Rumour’, New Medieval Literatures, 3 (1999), 39–66 (p. 54). The presence of apocalyptic signifiers are also noted by Richard K. Emmerson, ‘Introduction: The Apocalypse in Medieval Culture’, in Richard K. Emmerson and Bernard McGinn (eds), The Apocalypse in the Middle Ages (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992), pp. 293–332 (pp. 294–5).

186

CIC_rev.indd 186

15/12/2020 10:56:37

Chaucer and Italian Culture

2. For further comment on this trope, in relation to the authorship of the New Testament Apocalypse, see Emmerson, ‘Introduction’, p. 293. 3. For full-length discussions of medieval English political prophecy, see Victoria Flood, Prophecy, Politics and Place in England: From Geoffrey of Monmouth to Thomas of Erceldoune (D. S. Brewer: Cambridge, 2016); Lesley A. Coote, Prophecy and Public Affairs in Later Medieval England (York: York Medieval Press and Boydell and Brewer, 2000); Rupert Taylor, The Political Prophecy in England (New York: Columbia University Press, 1911). For the most recent book-length account of the Welsh tradition, see Aled Llion Jones, Darogan: Prophecy, Lament and Absent Heroes in Medieval Welsh Literature (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2013). 4. Flood, Prophecy, Politics and Place. 5. David Wallace (ed.), Europe: A Literary History, 1348–1418, 2 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016). 6. The most important resource on Joachim of Fiore and his reception history remains Marjorie Reeves, The Influence of Prophecy in the Later Middle Ages: A Study in Joachimism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969, 2000; repr. Notre Dame IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1993, 2011). See also Reeves, ‘The Development of Apocalyptic Thought: Medieval Attitudes’, in C. A. Patrides and Joseph Wittreich (eds), The Apocalypse in English Renaissance Thought and Literature (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984), pp. 40–72; Reeves, ‘Joachimist Influences on the Idea of a Last World Emperor’, in Delno C. West (ed.), Joachim of Fiore in Christian Thought: Essays on the Influence of the Calabrian Prophet, 2 vols (New York: Burt Franklin, 1975), I, pp. 511–58. 7. Reeves, Influence of Prophecy, pp. 306–19; Reeves, ‘Joachimist Influences on the Idea of a Last World Emperor’, pp. 511–58; P. J. Alexander, ‘The Diffusion of Byzantine Apocalypses in the Medieval West and the Beginnings of Joachimism’, in Ann Williams (ed.), Prophecy and Millenarianism: Essays in Honour of Marjorie Reeves (Harlow: Longman, 1980), pp. 57–75. 8. H. Grundmann, ‘Dante und Joachim von Fiore zu Paradiso X–XII’, in West (ed.), Joachim of Fiore in Christian Thought, II, pp. 329–75. 9. Reeves, ‘Dante and the Prophetic View of History’, in Cecil Grayson (ed.), The World of Dante: Essays on Dante and his Times (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980), pp. 44–60 (p. 53). 10. Quotation and translation from John Sinclair (ed. and trans.), Dante, The Divine Comedy: 1. Inferno (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), pp. 26–9. 11. Sinclair, Inferno, pp. 31–2. 12. Reeves, ‘Joachim of Fiore, Dante, and the Prophecy of a Last World Emperor’, in J. Chrysostomides (ed.), Kathegetria: Essays Presented to Joan Hussey for Her 80th Birthday (Camberley, UK: Porphyrogenitus, 1988), pp. 385– 94; Reeves, ‘Dante and the Prophetic View of History’, p. 52. For later interpretations of the prophecy, see Reeves, ‘Dante and the Prophetic View

187

CIC_rev.indd 187

15/12/2020 10:56:37

New Centur y Chaucer

of History’, p. 57; Reeves, ‘Joachim of Fiore, Dante, and the Prophecy of a Last World Emperor’, p. 388. 13. Nick Havely, Dante and the Franciscans: Poverty and the Papacy in the Commedia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 97. 14. For a brief overview of the uses of Troy in French and English historiography, see Francis Ingledew, ‘The Book of Troy and the Genealogical Construction of History: The Case of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia regum Britanniae’, Speculum, 69 (1994), 665–704 (pp. 683–6). Its use in Wales and Ireland has been discussed by Helen Fulton, ‘History and Historia: Uses of the Troy Story in Medieval Ireland and Wales’, in Ralph O’Connor (ed.), Classical Literature and Learning in Medieval Irish Narrative (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2014), pp. 40–57; Helen Fulton, ‘Translating Europe in Medieval Wales’, in Aidan Conti, Orietta da Rold and Philip Shaw (eds), Writing Europe, 500–1450: Texts and Contexts (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2015), pp. 159–74. 15. Cf. Cooper, ‘Four Last Things’, p. 56. 16. Text and translation from John Sinclair (ed. and trans.), Dante: The Divine Comedy: 3. Paradiso (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981). 17. Sinclair, Paradiso, pp. 280, 283–4. 18. Sinclair, Paradiso, pp. 296–8. 19. Reeves, ‘Dante and the Prophetic View of History’, p. 59. 20. John Sinclair (ed. and trans.), Dante: The Divine Comedy: 2. Purgatorio (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971). 21. For a brief discussion, see Reeves, ‘Joachim of Fiore, Dante, and the Prophecy of a Last World Emperor’, p. 388. 22. Quoted in Sinclair, Purgatorio, p. 444. 23. Sinclair, Purgatorio, p. 127. 24. Cooper, ‘Four Last Things’, p. 57. The correspondence is also discussed by Emmerson (‘Introduction’, pp. 294–5), although the poem is here regarded as properly revelatory. 25. Kathryn Kerby-Fulton, Books under Suspicion: Censorship and Tolerance of Revelatory Writing in Late Medieval England (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2006), p. 220. 26. Paul Strohm, England’s Empty Throne: Usurpation and the Language of Legitimation (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), pp. 1–31; Helen Fulton, ‘Arthurian Prophecy and the Deposition of Richard II’, Arthurian Literature, 22, ed. Keith Busby and Roger Dalrymple (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2005), pp. 64–83. 27. Cooper, ‘Four Last Things’, p. 64. 28. For an account of the circulation of Joachite prophecy in England, see Reeves and M. W. Bloomfield, ‘The Penetration of Joachism into Northern Europe’, Speculum, 29 (1954), 772–93; Kathryn Kerby-Fulton, ‘English Joachimism and its Codicological Context: A List of Joachite Manuscripts of English Origin or Provenance before 1600’, in Julia Eva Wannenmacher (ed.), Joachim of

188

CIC_rev.indd 188

15/12/2020 10:56:37

Chaucer and Italian Culture

Fiore and the Influence of Inspiration: Essays in Memory of Marjorie E. Reeves (1905–2003) (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2013), pp. 183–230; Victoria Flood, ‘Political Joachism and the English Franciscans: The Rumour of Richard II’s Return’, in Michele Campopiano and Helen Fulton (eds), Anglo-Italian Cultural Relations in the Later Middle Ages (York: York Medieval Press, 2018), pp. 128–49. 29. M. R. James, A Descriptive Catalogue of the Manuscripts in the Library of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, 2 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1911), II, pp. 269–77. 30. R. E. Lerner, Powers of Prophecy: The Cedar of Lebanon Vision from the Mongol Onslaught to the Dawn of the Enlightenment (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1983), pp. 93–101; Reeves, Influence of Prophecy, pp. 93–4; Kerby-Fulton, Books under Suspicion, p. 68. 31. Reeves, Influence of Prophecy, pp. 255–6; Kerby-Fulton, Books under Suspicion, pp. 107–8. Erghome was an enthusiastic reader, if not indeed the author, of one of the most famous English prophecies of the later Middle Ages, the Prophecies of John of Bridlington (c.1362–4). See note 42 below. 32. Geoffrey of Monmouth, The History of the Kings of Britain, ed. Michael D. Reeve, trans. Neil Wright (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2007). 33. M. R. James, A Descriptive Catalogue of the Manuscripts in the Library of St John’s College, Cambridge, 2 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1911), II, pp. 269–77. 34. For discussion of the prophecy’s early English context, see Coote, Prophecy and Public Affairs, p. 75. Transcription and quotations from Coote. 35. J. R. S. Phillips, ‘Edward II and the Prophets’, in W. M. Ormrod (ed.), England in the Fourteenth Century: Proceedings of the 1985 Harlaxton Symposium (Woodbridge: Boydell, 1986), pp. 189–201 (pp. 194–5). 36. Michael J. Bennett, ‘Richard II and the Wider Realm’, in Anthony Goodman and James L. Gillespie (eds), Richard II: The Art of Kingship (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999), pp. 187–204 (pp. 202–3). For further discussion of Richard II’s associations with prophecy, see Flood, Prophecy, Politics and Place, pp. 145–9. 37. T. A. Sandquist, ‘The Holy Oil of St Thomas of Canterbury’, in T. A. Sandquist and Michael R. Powicke (eds), Essays in Medieval History Presented to Bertie Wilkinson (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1969), pp. 330–44. Supplementary English manuscripts of the Latin have since been noted by Coote, Prophecy and Public Affairs, pp. 239–80. 38. This appears to be the context of the incomplete early version found in a sequence of Latin prophecies in London, British Library, Royal MS 12. C. xii, fols 13r–16v. 39. The Middle English versions appear in Oxford, Bodleian Library Hatton MS 56; Cambridge, University Library MS Kk. I. v. For discussion of the Welsh translations, see Ceridwen Lloyd-Morgan, ‘Darogan yr Olew Bendigaid: Chwedl o’r Bymthegfed Ganrif’, Llên Cymru, 14 (1981–2), 64–85.

189

CIC_rev.indd 189

15/12/2020 10:56:37

New Centur y Chaucer

40. Michael J. Bennett, Richard II and the Revolution of 1399 (Stroud: Sutton, 1999), pp. 140–1; Walter Ullmann, ‘Thomas Becket’s Miraculous Oil’, Journal of Theological Studies, n.s. 8 (1957), 129–33 (pp. 129–30); J. W. McKenna, ‘The Coronation Oil of the Yorkist Kings’, English Historical Review, 82 (1967), 102–4 (pp. 102–3). 41. London, Gray’s Inn Library MS 9, fol. 142v. 42. Thomas Wright (ed.), Political Poems and Songs relating to English History, Composed during the Period from the Accession of Edward III to that of Richard III, 2 vols (London: Longman, Green, Longman, and Roberts, 1859– 1861), I, pp. 123–215; M. J. Curley, ‘The Prophecy of John of Bridlington: An Edition’ (unpublished PhD thesis, University of Chicago, 1973); Sister H. M. Peck, ‘The Prophecy of St John of Bridlington’ (unpublished PhD thesis, University of Chicago, 1930); P. Meyvaert, ‘John Erghome and the Vaticinium Roberti Bridlington’, Speculum, 61 (1966), 656–64; M. J. Curley, ‘The Cloak of Anonymity and the Prophecy of John of Bridlington’, Modern Philology, 77 (1980), 361–9; A. G. Rigg, ‘John of Bridlington’s Prophecy: A New Look’, Speculum, 63 (1988), 596–613; Taylor, Political Prophecy, pp. 51–8; Coote, Prophecy and Public Affairs, pp. 118–19, 121–8. 43. For a brief discussion of Gower’s engagement with the motif, see Coote, Prophecy and Public Affairs, p. 167. 44. Text and translation (modified) from John Gower, The Minor Latin Works, ed. and trans. R. F. Yeager (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 2005), pp. 46–7. 45. The prophecy is printed in John Jay Parry (ed.), Brut y Brenhinedd: Cotton Cleopatra Version (Cambridge, MA: Mediaeval Academy of America, 1937), pp. 225–6. See also Anne F. Sutton and Livia Visser-Fuchs, ‘Richard III’s Books: VIII: Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia Regum Britanniae with The Prophecy of the Eagle and Commentary’, The Ricardian, 8/105 (June 1989), 217–24; 8/107 (December 1989), 290–304; and 8/108 (March 1990), 351–62; Victoria Flood, ‘Prophecy as History: A New Study of the Prophecies of Merlin Silvester’, Neophilologus, 102.4 (2018), 543–59. 46. Strohm, England’s Empty Throne, pp. 12–13. 47. ‘Richard the Redeless’, in James M. Dean (ed.), Richard the Redeless and Mum and the Soothsegger (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 2000). 48. My transcription from London, British Library, Cotton Roll, II. 23. For contextualisation, see further, Flood, Prophecy, Politics and Place, pp. 161–2. 49. Cooper, ‘Four Last Things’, pp. 58–9. 50. Simon Meecham-Jones, ‘“Englyssh Gaufride” and British Chaucer: Chaucerian Allusions to the Condition of Wales in the House of Fame’, The Chaucer Review, 44 (2009), 1–24 (pp. 15–22). 51. Daniel Huws, Medieval Welsh Manuscripts (Aberystwyth: National Library of Wales; Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2000), p. 61. On the prophecies in MS Peniarth 50, and the possibility that the manuscript may have been commissioned by Rhys ap Siancyn of Aberpergwm, in the Neath valley, see

190

CIC_rev.indd 190

15/12/2020 10:56:37

Chaucer and Italian Culture

Helen Fulton, ‘The Geography of Welsh Literary Production in Late Medieval Glamorgan’, Journal of Medieval History, 41/3 (2015), 325–40. 52. Victoria Flood, ‘Early Tudor Translation of English Prophecy in Wales’, in Aisling Byrne and Victoria Flood (eds), Crossing Borders in the Insular Middle Ages (Turnhout: Brepols, 2019), pp. 65–88. 53. Brynley F. Roberts, ‘Geoffrey of Monmouth, Historia Regum Britanniae and Brut y Brenhinedd’, in Rachel Bromwich, A. O. H. Jarman and Brynley F. Roberts (eds), The Arthur of the Welsh: The Arthurian Legend in Medieval Welsh Literature (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2008), pp. 97–116. 54. R. Wallis Evans, ‘Darogan yr Olew Bendigaid a Hystoria yr Olew Bendigaid’, Llên Cymru, 14 (1981–2), 6–91 (my translation). 55. Rachel Bromwich (ed. and trans.), Trioedd Ynys Prydein: The Triads of the Island of Britain (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2014), pp. 84–7. 56. Ceridwen Lloyd-Morgan, ‘Prophecy and Welsh Nationhood in the Fifteenth Century’, Transactions of the Honourable Society of Cymmrodorion (1986), 9–26 (p. 17).

191

CIC_rev.indd 191

15/12/2020 10:56:37

Thi spagei nt ent i onal l yl ef tbl ank

7

‘TROPHEE’ AND TRIUMPH IN THE MONK’S TALE Leah Schwebel

A

fter recounting a list of Hercules’ triumphs in his portrait of the hero in the Monk’s Tale, the Monk directs us to an enigmatic Latin authority, ‘Trophee’, for the details of how Hercules set pillars at each end of the earth: At bothe the worldes endes, seith Trophee, In stide of boundes he a pileer sette.1

But who or what is this ‘Trophee’, to whom the Monk credits this information? The perplexing marginal note that accompanies this attribution, ‘Ille vates Chaldeorum Tropheus’ (‘Tropheus was a Chaldean Priest’), present in many manuscripts – including the Ellesmere and Hengwrt – provides little clarification. As Frederick Tupper and Robert Pratt have suggested, this phrase is probably a combination of two, once separate, glosses, vates Chaldeorum, glossing the portrait of Daniel, and Tropheus, glossing the portrait of Hercules, that were erroneously conflated.2 Also of little help is John Lydgate’s subsequent identification of ‘a book which callid is Trophe’ as the ‘Lumbard’ authority behind Troilus and Criseyde.3 Not only is Boccaccio, and not ‘Trophee’, Chaucer’s source for the Troilus, but Chaucer identifies an altogether

CIC_rev.indd 193

15/12/2020 10:56:37

New Centur y Chaucer

separate, and equally fictitious, Latinate auctor to whom he claims absolute fidelity in his creation of this work, one ‘Lollius’.4 While certainly not a question that preoccupies readers today, the identity of Chaucer’s ‘Trophee’ provoked a degree of critical debate in the last century, with scholars including Walter William Skeat, George Livingstone Hamilton, George Lyman Kittredge, Oliver Farrar Emerson, Tupper, Pratt, and Vincent DiMarco weighing in on this matter.5 On the one hand, Skeat, Hamilton, Emerson and Tupper suggested that the name ‘Trophee’ referred to Guido delle Colonne, who, in the Historia destructionis Troiae, describes Hercules setting up pillars at the edges of the world.6 For these critics, it seems possible that Chaucer replaced Colonne (‘columns’) with Trophea, which means pillar (among other things) in Latin.7 Kittredge, on the other hand, claimed that Chaucer believed ‘Trophee’ to have been an authority on the figure of Hercules. He suggested that Chaucer perhaps misremembered, or inherited an already confused understanding of, the word trophaea found in the Latin Epistola Alexandri ad Aristotelem, where the word is used to refer to the pillars supposedly erected by Hercules and Dionysus to mark the farthest boundary of the eastern lands they had conquered: Ast et ad Herculis Liberique Trophaea me deduxit in orientis ultimis oris; aurea utraque deorum constituerat simulacra. And, moreover, he [Porus] brought me [Alexander] to the Trophies [i.e. monuments] of Hercules and Bacchus at the farthest boundaries of the east; he had erected golden images of each of the gods.8

This incident alludes to the myth that Hercules (Greek Herakles) and Dionysus together led a war in ‘farthest India’ and thus ‘planted their standards in the dawning world’. Pliny the Elder refers to Macedonia as an empire (led by Alexander) which ‘roamed in the tracks of Father Liber [Dionysus] and of Hercules and conquered India’.9 Memorials to commemorate expeditions, military or exploratory, were regularly erected by Greek and Roman leaders, and the ‘pillars’ or monuments

194

CIC_rev.indd 194

15/12/2020 10:56:37

Chaucer and Italian Culture

attributed to Hercules (and Dionysus), planted at the most easterly point of their campaign, represented this tradition.10 Kittredge speculates that Chaucer would have been unfamiliar with the term tropaeum, and that in his confusion – his own or that of intermediaries – he could have overestimated its import, making it the personified source for his information rather than just a pillar.11 Kittredge’s theory was later refuted by Pratt, who noted that ‘if the word tropea comes to stand for a person, it cannot indicate the monuments’ to which Chaucer also refers in the line ‘At bothe the worldes endes, seith Trophee, he a pileer sette’, and thus ‘we are left without an Oriental structure to match the Occidental Pillars.’12 More recently, however, DiMarco revived, and in his words ‘refined’, Kittredge’s argument by locating another passage in the Epistola Alexandri that allows for the word trophaeum to be ‘misconstrued while still explicitly pointing to the oriental pillar or pillars’.13 Reading this passage, DiMarco suggests, Chaucer would have had ‘no trouble divining the right sense of the common word pilas, but, like others before and after him’ could have still been ‘thrown by trophea’.14 No doubt with the aid of DiMarco’s ‘refinement’, Kittredge’s explanation of Chaucer’s Latin authority as a misreading or misunderstanding of trophea is generally accepted by scholars, and has, at least to my knowledge, remained unchallenged for over fifty years. Yet it is my hope to provide a new explanation of Chaucer’s ‘Trophee’ that does not take as its premise the poet’s erroneous translation or memory of a Latin passage, an approach strikingly similar to Kittredge’s theory on ‘Lollius’, which likewise hinges on an assumption that Chaucer misconstrued a Latin phrase.15 I suspect that Chaucer’s intertextual poetics are more complicated than his Latin is bad, and that, far from being a mistake, his choice of ‘Trophee’ as a witness to the fame of Hercules has a significance that extends beyond the Monk’s Tale to Chaucer’s larger exploration of fame and fortune across his writings. That is, I suggest that Chaucer evokes in his reference to ‘Trophee’ a sense of the word tropaeum, related but not restricted to pillar, that signifies its function as a monument or memorial to victory.16 Used in this way, tropaeum has a very specific

195

CIC_rev.indd 195

15/12/2020 10:56:37

New Centur y Chaucer

application: in the Roman triumph, a military procession in ancient Rome in which a laurelled general would ascend to the Capitol on a chariot led by his captives, the tropaea are the spoils acquired by the victor, or the monuments erected in his honour.17 In other words, the tropaea are not simply the trophies of war but the more permanent markers of a transient victory.18 But why should Chaucer include a reference to ‘Trophee’ (or tropaeum in the gloss) in his portrait of Hercules, who died, horribly, at the hands of his wife? It so happens that the figure of Hercules is intimately tied to the ritual of the Roman triumph.19 Tracing the hero’s ‘historical and material associations’ with this procession, Matthew P. Loar suggests that Hercules’ name became a ‘metonym for Rome’s Republican triumphal past’.20 Annalisa Marzano notes that ‘although the triumph was a ceremony linked above all with Iuppiter Optimus Maximus, Hercules was connected to the triumph from the early times of Rome’.21 Hercules’ role in the triumph is not only ancient, but also extensive. First, he was an integral part of the procession: victors would pass through the Forum Boarium, in which a bronze statue of Hercules – the triumphalis – was erected. Pliny the Elder explains that on the occasion of a triumph, this statue was arrayed in triumphal clothes.22 On the way to the capitol, the triumphing victor would stop before the triumphalis and dedicate a portion of his spoils to the hero, a long-standing tradition in ancient Rome.23 In the second and first centuries BC, moreover, Hercules began to figure on triumphal coinage.24 There also appeared a number of temples, dedicated to Hercules, which were stationed along the triumphal route, some of which hosted feasts following the procession.25 By honouring Hercules as part of their triumphs, victors appealed to the hero as a fellow conqueror, a man who triumphed over so many others, even if he was eventually brought low by his wife. According to some traditions, moreover, the Hercules celebrated along the triumphal route – the recipient of a portion of the triumphal booty – was not simply a prodigious hero but actually an immortal god, his death at the hands of Deianira the stimulus of his deification. Marzano traces the progression of Hercules from a figure associated with trade to a deity ‘predominantly connected to the military sphere

196

CIC_rev.indd 196

15/12/2020 10:56:37

Chaucer and Italian Culture

and victory’, a figure deeply linked to martial conquest and sometimes conflated with Mars himself.26 This Hercules was ‘celebrated for his physical strength, which allowed him to overcome difficult tasks and to ultimately become a god’.27 The association of Hercules with invincibility and martial triumph has its origins in the Hellenistic period. In mid-Republican Rome, ‘the epithets of Invictus and Victor were introduced … when the figure of Hercules primarily connected to traders was substituted with a god more directly connected to the sphere of war and victory in a “Hellenistic” way.’28 Hercules, then, was essential to the ceremony of the Roman triumph, his statue a highlight of the procession where victors would lay down a portion of their spoils, a feast given in his honour, and his name closely bound up with ideas of fame, victory and even immortality. Chaucer’s invocation of ‘Trophee’ – the spoils, or monuments, of the Roman triumph – in his portrait of Hercules – a figure closely connected to the Roman triumph – is, then, at least thematically appropriate, even if doing so appears antithetical to the thrust of the Monk’s main narrative lesson: that to fall is the human condition, and that obscurity is our ultimate and equal lot. There remains, therefore, the question of why Chaucer should choose to affiliate the Monk’s Tale, a work supposedly recording the falls of famous individuals, with the Roman triumph, a spectacle designed to celebrate and honour man’s ascent to victory. In answer, I suggest that in many ways the Monk’s Tale functions as a poetic triumph, a written record of a triumphal procession, and so itself a kind of tropaeum or monument to fleeting victory. Although it has largely faded from our cultural lexicon and memory, the poetic triumph was an immensely popular genre from antiquity to the Renaissance, embraced by writers and poets including Livy, Virgil, Ovid, and Propertius, and later revived by Dante, Boccaccio, and Petrarch. Showcasing a vast range of rulers and heroes from history and myth, meanwhile singling out individual figures for commemoration, the triumph form ‘attracted imitators’, as Aldo S. Bernardo notes, because it allowed a dazzling display of knowledge of the past while celebrating some cause or person in an epic key. It served

197

CIC_rev.indd 197

15/12/2020 10:56:37

New Centur y Chaucer

as pretext for parading the greatest figures of mythology, antiquity, scripture, and even contemporary times in a series of tableaux usually reflecting a moral structure within an allegorical context.29

In Zygmunt G. Baran´ski’s words, the triumph exemplified, and celebrated, Roman power: the procession ‘stood as a topos for Roman authority and greatness’.30 Accordingly, poets reconstructed the triumphal procession because it was a ‘most convenient way to represent concisely and in a poetically telling manner the enduring fame of all that was best and most typically Roman’.31 Besides using the triumph to commemorate Roman antiquity, by adopting this procession to verse, poets would immortalise not only their triumphal subject but also themselves by association. Petrarch, for example, states in the Bucolicum Carmen in reference to the triumph of Scipio that he will celebrate with the Africa a man worthy of Orpheus.32 It is the subject, Scipio, who must be found worthy of the poet, in this case, and not the other way around. Indeed, for authors such as Dante and Petrarch, the very process of writing triumphal poetry is tantamount to receiving a Roman triumph. Dante begins the Paradiso by staking a claim to the laurel, an act he associates with the ancient procession. Addressing Apollo, he explains that after finishing his poem, he will crown his brow with the triumphal laurel:   Vedra’mi al piè del tuo diletto legno venire, e coronarmi de le foglie che la materia e tu mi farai degno.   Sì rade volte, padre, se ne coglie per trïunfare o cesare o poeta – colpa e vergogna de l’umane voglie –   che parturir letizia in su la lieta delfica deïtà dovria la fronda peneia, quando alcun di sé asseta. You will see me come to the foot of your beloved tree, and crown myself with the leaves of which the

198

CIC_rev.indd 198

15/12/2020 10:56:37

Chaucer and Italian Culture

subject and you will make me worthy. So seldom, father, are gathered for the triumph of emperor or poet – such is the guilt and shame of human desires – that the Peneian leaf should give birth to gladness in the happy Delphic deity, when it makes any one thirst for it.33

Dante compares his self-laureation, which he claims will take place at the close of his work, to the triumph of a Roman victor – poets and warriors are ‘so seldom’ granted the laurel, and so he will go to Apollo’s tree and claim this honour for himself. For Petrarch, the fusion of poetic and military triumph is fully realised in Book 9 of the Africa, in which Petrarch himself, the poet Ennius and Petrarch’s poetic subject, Scipio Africanus, are all celebrated with triumphal laurels. Petrarch’s own ‘triumph’ is foretold in Ennius’ dream, in which Ennius is visited by Homer. Predicting Petrarch’s laureation, which he suggests will occur upon the poet’s completion of the Africa, Homer describes this event as a Roman triumph:            … Seroque triumpho Hic tandem ascendet Capitolia vestra, nec ipsum Mundus iners studiisque aliis tunc ebria turba Terrebit quin insigni florentia lauro Tempora descendens referat comitante Senatu. (Africa 9.237–41) At last in tardy triumph he will climb … the Capitol. Nor shall a heedless world nor an illiterate herd, inebriate with baser passions, turn aside [terrebit, in the sense of ‘deter’ or ‘frighten away’] his steps when he descends, flanked by the company of Senators, and from the rite returns with brow girt by the glorious laurel wreath.34

Having celebrated the triumph of Scipio, Petrarch will receive eternal glory for immortalising the deeds of his subject.

199

CIC_rev.indd 199

15/12/2020 10:56:37

New Centur y Chaucer

Although frequently denigrated for its repetitive insistence on our inevitable and collective downfall, the Monk’s Tale operates, like Book 9 of Petrarch’s Africa, as a celebration of mutual military and poetic glory.35 Despite the Monk’s insistence that he tells only ‘tragedies’, a genre he defines in the singular, following Boethius, as ‘a certeyn storie, / … Of hym that stood in greet prosperitee, / And is yfallen out of heigh degree’ (VII.1973–6), the poem in fact consists of many stories of men and one woman (Zenobia) achieving notable fame and victory.36 Using the De casibus virorum illustrium (redaction A, composed between the mid 1350s and 1360s; redaction B, 1373) as his primary source – a poem detailing Fortune’s sway over our lives, an idea Boccaccio seems to have developed in his earlier poetic triumph in Italian, the Amorosa visione (1342–3) – Chaucer follows Boccaccio’s example of featuring only men and women who have achieved earthly glory or notoriety.37 For his part, Boccaccio provides a logical explanation for this decision: he will select the most famous subjects from among the mighty so that when contemporary princes see these individuals brought low by the judgement of the omnipotent God, or, as they are used to calling him, Fortune (‘Deus Omnipotens – ut eorum loquar more – Fortuna’), they will recognise God’s power, the slipperiness of Fortune, and their own weakness.38 In Henry Ansgar Kelly’s words, the De casibus narratives ‘provide object lessons to the wicked … by show[ing] the judgments of God to high-ranking knaves and fools’.39 Boccaccio thus makes clear that his choice of stories of famous individuals brought low by Fortune is rooted in practical application: he appeals to princes to be humble, lest they, too, fall. Although he consistently laments the wide-reaching arm of Lady Fortune, Chaucer includes no such proviso to explain the purpose of his narrative. And while the Monk, too, selects subjects who have achieved fame, he does not claim to do so for the sake of edifying his contemporaries. Yet, in the absence of a clear didactic ambition, his portraits of famous individuals are just that: stories of men and women who have reaped acclaim, or at least recognition, for memorable deeds. Despite the Monk’s protests to the contrary, moreover, he in fact spends the majority of certain ‘tragedies’ regaling his listeners with lengthy

200

CIC_rev.indd 200

15/12/2020 10:56:37

Chaucer and Italian Culture

catalogues of his subjects’ worldly accomplishments and material goods. When these catalogues of worldly conquests and riches are committed to the page, I suggest, they become poetic triumphs: written records of transient victories, immortalised by the poet, and immortalising him too in the process. Early on in the Monk’s Tale, for example, we are treated to a dazzling résumé of Samson’s physical achievements. He slew a lion with his bare hands, tied together 300 fox tails, and then subdued 1,000 men with nothing but the jawbone of a donkey:   This noble almyghty champioun, Withouten wepen save his handes tweye, He slow and al torente the leoun … … Thre hundred foxes took Sampson for ire, And alle hir tayles he togydre bond, And sette the foxes tayles alle on fire, For he on every tayl had knyt a brond; And they brende all the cornes in that lond, And alle hire olyveres, and vynes eke. A thousand men he slow eek with his hond, And hadde no wepen but an asses cheke. (VII.2023–5; VII.2031–8)

In his portrait of Hercules, the Monk similarly catalogues for posterity the hero’s many triumphs, accumulating his labours like trophies in a battle, as though they are themselves relics of the deceased champion.40 We are told, He slow and rafte the skyn of the leoun; He of Centauros leyde the boost adoun; He Arpies slow, the crueel bryddes felle; He golden apples rafte of the dragoun; He drow out Cerberus, the hound of helle; He slow the crueel tyrant Busirus And made his hors to frete hym, flessh and boon; He slow the firy serpent venymus;

201

CIC_rev.indd 201

15/12/2020 10:56:37

New Centur y Chaucer

Of Acheloys two hornes he brak oon; And he slow Cacus in a cave of stoon; He slow the geant Antheus the stronge; He slow the grisly boor, and that anon; And bar the hevene on his nekke longe. (VII.2098–2110)

In his narrative of Nebuchadnezzar, the Monk catalogues what he suggests is the King’s indescribable glory, splendour, and riches: The myghty trone, the precious tresor, The glorious ceptre, and roial magestee That hadde the kyng Nabugodonosor With tonge unneth may discryved bee. He twyes wan Jerusalem the citee; The vessel of the temple he with hym ladde. At Babiloigne was his sovereyn see, In which his glorie and his delit he hadde. (VII.2143–50)

To provide one final example, the first two-thirds of the portrait of Zenobia – which Chaucer derives primarily from Boccaccio’s De mulieribus claris (1361–75), a work candid in its celebration of fame – catalogue the warrior’s achievements, from youth to adulthood. We are told that even as a child,           to wode she wente, And many a wilde hertes blood she shedde With arwes brode that she to hem sente. She was so swifte that she anon hem hente. (VII.2256–9)

As an adult, ‘she wolde kille / leouns, leopardes, and beres’ (VII.2260– 1) and ‘in hir armes weelde hem at hir wille’ (VII.2262). Beyond emphasising her impressive strength, as a child and later as an adult,

202

CIC_rev.indd 202

15/12/2020 10:56:37

Chaucer and Italian Culture

the Monk draws his reader’s attention to Zenobia’s indescribably beautiful attire: Hir riche array ne myghte nat be told, As wel in vessel as in hire clothyng. She was al clad in perree and in gold. (VII.2303–5)

A list of her martial accomplishments follows, as does the Monk’s description of a Roman triumph, although not Zenobia’s own.41 If the Monk is attempting to prove that worldly goods are fleeting, vis-àvis a Boethian model of consolation, then he contradicts himself by documenting, and thereby preserving, Zenobia’s strengths, wealth and martial feats in great detail. In many portraits, such as those of Hercules, Holofernes and Alexander, the Monk reveals his triumphal ambition by highlighting the enduring fame of his subjects. He opens his narrative of Hercules by issuing a command: ‘Of Hercules,’ he proclaims, ‘syngen his werkes laude and heigh renoun; / For in his tyme of strengthe he was the flour’ (VII.2095–7). Calling the hero ‘the sovereyn conquerour’ (VII.2095), the Monk comments that Hercules was famous throughout the world, his strength and reputation unmatched: Was never wight, sith that this world bigan, That slow so manye monstres as dide he. Thurghout this wyde world his name ran, What for his strengthe and for his heigh bountee. (VII.2111–14)

Like that of Hercules, the portrait of Holofernes features praise of the captain’s expansive campaign and lasting glory. The Monk insists, Was nevere capitayn under a kyng That regnes mo putte in subjeccioun,

203

CIC_rev.indd 203

15/12/2020 10:56:37

New Centur y Chaucer

Ne strenger was in feeld of alle thyng, As in his tyme, ne gretter of renoun … … Than Oloferne. (VII.2551–4; VII.2556)

When he comes to Alexander, the Monk presumes our familiarity with his tale before he even begins, reminding us of his subject’s worldwide reputation (nor should it surprise us that it is the names and arms of Alexander, as well as those of Hercules, that adorn the shoulders of Lady Fama in the House of Fame, III.1413): The storie of Alisaundre is so commune That every wight that hath discrecioun, Hath herd somwhat or al of his fortune. (VII.2631–3)

The Monk then suggests that fame itself brought Alexander further acclaim: ‘This wyde world, as in conclusioun, / He wan by strengthe, or for his hye renoun’ (VII.2634–5). Should we seek far and wide, we will never find his equal: ‘Comparisoun myghte nevere yet been maked / Bitwixe hym and another conquerour’ (VII.2639–40). As it turns out, his reign extends as far as his reputation, for ‘as fer as man may ryde or go, / The world was his’ (VII.2651–2). Even if he were to write or speak of his excellence for ‘evermo’ (VII.2653), the Monk concludes, it might not suffice. Like Scheherazade, Hercules appears to outrun death by having his story told and retold. It is only in the final sections of these portraits that the Monk looks forward to his subjects’ downfalls. Of the forty lines that make up Alexander’s portrait, for example, only the final twelve treat his fateful end, and even these re-emphasise his greatness, lamenting his death at the hands of false Fortune. Hercules’ portrait is similarly imbalanced, with twenty-four lines celebrating the hero’s significance and only the final eight focusing on Fortune’s cruelty and his death.42 ‘Thus starf this worthy, myghty Hercules’, the Monk laments, ‘Lo, who may truste on Fortune any throwe?’

204

CIC_rev.indd 204

15/12/2020 10:56:37

Chaucer and Italian Culture

For hym that folweth al this world of prees Er he be war is ofte yleyd ful lowe. Ful wys is he that kan hymselven knowe! Beth war, for whan that Fortune list to glose, Thanne wayteth she her man to overthrowe. (VII.2135–41)

This last claim, warning even those who are at the top of Fortune’s wheel to anticipate a reversal in their luck, does not negate the Monk’s earlier celebration of Hercules’ lasting fame. On the contrary, the Monk’s repeated emphasis on the sheer scope and duration of Hercules’ renown – it stretches, like the pillars erected in his name, from one end of the earth to the next, unequalled since the world began – undermines his conclusion that Fortune’s ‘overthrowe’ of man is decisive, and that worldly things do not last. If we are to learn one thing from this portrait, it is that the fame of Hercules survives in spite of his death. So long as his name and deeds are remembered, moreover, he possesses a kind of (literary) immortality. The Monk’s Tale functions in this regard as a memorial to lasting reputation, with Chaucer serving as the creator of this memorial.43 Thus contradicted by the immortalising function of his own work, the Monk bears up the fame of his subjects at the same time as he decries the transience of worldly goods. By retelling stories that ‘comth unto my remembraunce’ (VII.1989) – that are, in other words, woven into our collective, cultural memory – he demonstrates that the vicissitudes of fortune are only temporary, whereas fame can last forever, an ambition that is, at its core, triumphal. Mary Beard reminds us of the potential of art – in this case both monuments and poetry – to memorialise triumph, to flout, in other words, the very transience of victory: Public spectacles are usually ephemeral events. At the end of the day, when the participants have gone home … the show lives on only in memory. It is, of course, in the interests of the sponsors to ensure the memory lasts, to give the fleeting spectacle a more permanent form, to spread the experience beyond the lucky few

205

CIC_rev.indd 205

15/12/2020 10:56:37

New Centur y Chaucer

who were present on the day itself … In the case of Pompey’s triumphs, the written accounts of the events that were offered by ancient historians, antiquarians, and poets are crucial in the whole process of its memorialization … But art and architecture also played an important part in fixing the occasions in public consciousness and memory.44

This idea of the poet as generator and preserver of worldly fame is an ancient one. Whereas the glory of the conqueror could and often did die with him, the poet has the ability to preserve fame, and even to deliver it to worthy individuals. What is more, so long as he continues to be read, he can circumvent death himself.45 In Elegies 3.1 (c.23 BC), after describing the triumph of his poetic muse, Propertius reminds his reader that it is the poet who propagates fame in the first place. Comparing himself to Homer, he asks who would have heard of Troy, were it not for the author of the Iliad. Juxtaposing the collapse of an empire with the rise of Homer’s poetic career, Propertius recognises that our knowledge of Troy is contingent on the poet who sang of it. But whereas Troy was reduced to ashes, Homer has found his reputation grow with time, his fame only escalating in death.46 Propertius concludes that Rome will likewise praise him long after his demise, his glory and name immortalised by his poetry.47 Tracing the glory of men back to the writing of poets, John of Salisbury, in the prologue to his Policraticus (1156–9), offers a similar explanation of the poet’s role in immortalising human achievements: Quis enim Alexandros sciret aut Cesares, quis Stoicos aut Peripateticos miraretur, nisi eos insignirent monimenta scriptorum? Quis apostolorum et prophetarum amplexanda imitaretur uestigia, nisi eos posteritati diuinae litterae consecrassent? Arcus triumphales tunc proficiunt illustribus uiris ad gloriam, cum ex quibus causis et quorum sint, inpressa docet inscriptio. Liberatorem patriae, fundatorem quietis, tunc demum inspector agnoscit, cum titulus triumphatorem, quem nostra Britannia genuit, indicat

206

CIC_rev.indd 206

15/12/2020 10:56:37

Chaucer and Italian Culture

Constantinum. Nullus enim umquam constanti gloria claruit, nisi ex suo uel scripto alieno. Eadem est asini et cuiusuis imperatoris post modicum tempus gloria, nisi quatenus memoria alterutrius scriptorum beneficio prorogatur.48 Who would know of Alexander or Caesar, or would respect the Stoics or the Peripatetics, unless they had been distinguished by the memorials of writers? Whoever would have followed the footsteps of the cherished apostles and prophets, unless they had been consecrated for posterity in the Holy Scriptures? Triumphal arches advance the glory of illustrious men whenever inscriptions explain for what cause and for whom they have been erected. It is only because of the inscription on a triumphal arch that the onlooker recognises that Constantine (who was of British stock) is proclaimed liberator of his country and founder of peace. No one would ever be illuminated by perpetual glory unless he himself or someone else had written. The reputation of the fool and the emperor is the same after a moderate period of time except where the memory of either is prolonged by the beneficence of writers.

The deeds of great men would die with their bodies were it not for the writings of poets and scribes. In this regard, death – the inevitability of death – is not entirely ‘tragic’, as the Monk and his critics would have it. Rather, death for the famous is an apotheosis of sorts, since it leads (or at least can lead) to immortality through and in the poetic memory. Whereas L. O. Aranye Fradenburg suggests that the Monk’s moral is ultimately ‘catastrophic’, forecasting death and unhappiness without ‘remedie’ – He emphasizes that it is the business of tragedy to ‘bewail’. He raises the stakes of tragedy, catastrophizes it further; tragedy is not just about an ‘overturning’ or an unhappy end, but about falling to an end utterly without resources … It is about fallenness as complete dispossession and helplessness, the absolute

207

CIC_rev.indd 207

15/12/2020 10:56:37

New Centur y Chaucer

absence of ‘remedie’ for unfortunate men of high estate who end ‘wrecchedly’, like the ‘wrecched ympes’ (1956) born to Harry Bailey’s shrimp-men.49

– in fact, the remedy to the tragedies of the Monk’s Tale is provided within the work itself, by that fickle ‘suster’ of Fortune, Fame.50 Still, there is another side to the poet’s function as a memorialiser of stories: his ability not only to dispense fame but also to deny it, a faculty Chaucer explores in both the Monk’s Tale and the House of Fame.51 In the latter work, the narrator Geffrey travels to Fame’s house, which is built on a mountain of ice. On its slope, the names of famous men and women have been written, some of which have faded beyond recognition, ‘so unfamous woxe hir fame’ (III.1146). Other names are so clear they appear to have only just been written. Fame, Chaucer would seem to suggest, is utterly unpredictable, its duration and nature dictated by forces unknown to us. Indeed, Chaucer’s meeting with Lady Fama appears to confirm this perspective. Witnessing her dispense glory, slander and obscurity with a paradoxically wilful arbitrariness, Geffrey refuses to give his name when asked for it. Instead, he claims, he wants only anonymity: ‘Sufficeth me, as I were ded, / That no wight have my name in honde’ (III.1876–7). This phrasing recalls Chaucer’s experience upon first entering Fame’s abode, where he learns that the glory of men is literally held in the hands of poets. Statius holds up the fame of Thebes and Achilles on his shoulders; Homer, Dares, Dictys, Lollius and ‘Englyssh Gaufride’ bear up the fame of Troy; Virgil carries aloft the glory of Aeneas; and Lucan holds in his arms the fame of Caesar and Pompey (III.1461–1502). For all his emphasis on the fickleness of Lady Fame, Chaucer ultimately reveals that her power is an extension of the poet’s, since he – not she – decides who is named or left out of his work, who is praised and who is condemned. Like Propertius and John of Salisbury before him, Chaucer reminds us exactly how individuals become famous in the first place: they are written about, and thereby immortalised, by poets.52 There remains, of course, an element of chaos in the production of glory – works can be lost, names can be forgotten – but while

208

CIC_rev.indd 208

15/12/2020 10:56:37

Chaucer and Italian Culture

not everyone can achieve (or for that matter hold on to) fame, the poet can use his work as an archive, staving off obscurity by memorialising his subjects. Conversely, he can also withhold fame from others, increasing the likelihood that their names will be forgotten, like those ‘molte[d] away’ on the mountain of ice. We can thus connect Chaucer’s retelling of ‘commune’, well-known, stories in the Monk’s Tale to his description of famous poets bearing up the glory of their subjects in the House of Fame. If, in the House of Fame, it is Homer, Virgil, Ovid, Statius and others who elevate the fame of ancient heroes and cities, then in the Monk’s Tale Chaucer does this heavy lifting himself, sustaining the reputations of the likes of Samson, Hercules and Alexander even as the Monk decries worldly glory as ephemeral. We can further consider Chaucer’s refusal to identify Boccaccio throughout his poetry through the lens of the poets’ prerogative to both uphold (or hold up) and withhold fame. In the Monk’s Tale, Chaucer himself plays the role of Lady Fame, blowing the horn of reputation and disseminating good fame, bad fame and, in Boccaccio’s case, no fame throughout his exempla. Chaucer’s ‘Trophee’ – literally, a monument of triumph – is, in this regard, a perfect synecdoche for the tale as a whole, which provides a ‘more permanent form’ to narratives of fleeting fortune, as well as a pointed reminder that fame is the domain of the poet. It is the Monk, not necessarily Chaucer himself, who seemingly mistakes Trophee for an authority, but the mistake (if it is one) actually proves his point about the authority of memorials, architectural or poetic, to confer lasting fame on individuals. Whether or not Chaucer was thinking of the monument to Hercules described in the Epistola Alexandri, the ‘Trophee’ who ‘speaks’ is a memorial on which the deeds of the great are written and on which their fame is preserved. What the Trophee ‘says’ is what is written on it as a testament to the fame of Hercules, who set up his own ‘pillars’ to mark his victorious campaigns. While the glory of their worldly achievements has the potential to make heroes immortal, we would do well to remember that this immortalisation can only occur when their deeds are preserved in writing – by tropaea, perhaps, or by their textual ‘suster’, poetry.

209

CIC_rev.indd 209

15/12/2020 10:56:37

New Centur y Chaucer

Notes 1. VII.2117–18. All citations from Chaucer’s poetry are taken from Larry D. Benson (gen. ed.), The Riverside Chaucer, third edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), using the relevant book and line numbers. 2. Frederick Tupper, ‘Chaucer and Trophee’, Modern Language Notes, 31 (1916), 142–6; Robert A. Pratt, ‘Chaucer and the Pillars of Hercules’, in Lillian B. Lawler, Dorothy M. Robathan and William C. Korfmacher (eds), Studies in Honor of B. L. Ullman (St Louis: Classical Bulletin, 1960), pp. 118–25 (pp. 122– 3). See also the notes to Chaucer’s lines in the Riverside Chaucer, p. 931. 3. John Lydgate, Fall of Princes, ed. Henry Bergen, 4 vols, Early English Text Society (London: Oxford University Press, 1923–7), I, Book 1, ll. 283–7. 4. Chaucer names ‘Lollius’ as his source for the Troilus on two occasions: I.3995 and V.1653. 5. Studies on Chaucer’s ‘Trophee’ (apart from Tupper’s and Pratt’s, cited above) include Walter William Skeat (ed.), Complete Works of Geoffrey Chaucer: Boethius and Troilus (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1894), pp. liv–lvi; George Livingstone Hamilton, The Indebtedness of Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde to Guido delle Colonne’s Historia Trojana (New York: Columbia University Press, 1903), esp. pp. 150–4; George Lyman Kittredge, ‘The Pillars of Hercules and Chaucer’s “Trophee”’, in F. Boas (ed.), The Putman Anniversary Volume (Cedar Rapids: Torch; New York: Stechert, 1909), pp. 545–66; Oliver Farrar Emerson, ‘Seith Trophee’, Modern Language Notes, 31 (1916), 142–6; and Vincent DiMarco, ‘Another Look at Chaucer’s “Trophee”’, Names: A Journal of Onomastics, 34 (1986), 275–83. 6. Skeat posits this theory in his introduction to Troilus and Criseyde (Complete Works of Geoffrey Chaucer: Boethius and Troilus, pp. liv–lvi). See also Hamilton, The Indebtedness of Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde, esp. pp. 55–7 and 150–4; Tupper, ‘Chaucer and Trophee’, pp. 11–14; and Emerson, ‘Seith Trophee’, pp. 142–6. 7. As Pratt points out (‘Chaucer and the Pillars of Hercules’, p. 121), Chaucer refers to the author of the Historia elsewhere, yet never cites this figure as ‘Trophea’. Instead, Chaucer refers to him as ‘Guido’ in the Legend of Good Women, and as ‘Guydo de Columpnis’ in the House of Fame. 8. Cited by Kittredge, ‘The Pillars of Hercules’, p. 558, with translation adapted from DiMarco, ‘Another Look’, p. 281 n. 3. Vincent de Beauvais rather closely paraphrases this passage from the Epistola Alexandri in his Speculum historiale, also cited by Kittredge: ‘Pervenit autem ad Herculis Liberique trophea, in ultimis finibus orientis posita, ubi uterque deus auri solidum habebat symulacrum’ (‘Then he reached the monuments of Hercules and Bacchus, placed at the farthest limits of the east, where each god had a solid image of gold’) (Kittredge, ‘The Pillars of Hercules’, pp. 558–9). Kittredge argues that Chaucer’s notion of ‘Trophee’ as a person came from a series

210

CIC_rev.indd 210

15/12/2020 10:56:37

Chaucer and Italian Culture

of confusions and ‘blunders’ deriving from the Epistola Alexandri, a very popular work that had already been translated into Old English (c.1000) and French (thirteenth century) and was translated into Middle English sometime in the fifteenth century (DiMarco, ‘Another Look’, p. 276). For the Old English version, see Andy Orchard, Pride and Prodigies: Studies in the Monsters of the Beowulf-Manuscript (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1995), pp. 116–39 and appendices containing the Latin and Old English texts of the Epistola. For the Middle English version, see Vincent DiMarco and Leslie Perelman (eds), The Middle English Letter of Alexander to Aristotle (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1978). On the Epistola as a source for vernacular romances of Alexander, especially the insular Anglo-Norman Roman de toute chevalerie, see Venetia Bridges, Medieval Narratives of Alexander the Great (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2019), pp. 35, 151–70. The Epistola has been translated into modern English by L. Gunderson, Alexander’s Letter to Aristotle about India (Meisenheim am Glan: A. Hain, 1980), pp. 140–56. 9. These quotations are from Seneca the Younger’s Oedipus, ll. 113–16, and Pliny’s Natural History 4.39 respectively. See Seneca, Tragedies, vol. II: Oedipus, Agamemnon, Thyestes, ed. and trans. John G. Fitch, Loeb Classical Library, 78 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), pp. 26–7; Pliny, Natural History, vol. II: Books 3–7, trans. H. Rackham, Loeb Classical Library, 352 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1942), pp. 146–7. 10. Emma Stafford, Herakles (New York: Routledge, 2012), has suggested that the actual ‘pillars’ may have been monuments dedicated to Hercules, like those seen by Herodotus (pp. 192–3). Certainly the references cited above from the Epistola and the Speculum historiale are slightly ambiguous, signifying either memorials dedicated to Hercules or monuments supposedly erected by him to mark the furthest point of his expedition, or possibly both. The term tropaea was regularly used to signify dedications to gods following military victories: see for example Pliny, Natural History 6.152, ‘Numenium ab Antiocho rege Mesenae praepositum ibi vicisse eodem die classe aestuque reverso iterum equitatu contra Persas dimicantem et gemina tropaea eodem in loco Iovi ac Neptuno statuisse’ (‘the governor of Mesene appointed by King Antiochus, Numenius, here won a battle against the Persians with his fleet and after the tide had gone out a second battle with his cavalry, and set up a couple of trophies, to Jupiter and to Neptune, on the same spot’) (Pliny, Natural History, vol. II: Books 3–7, trans. Rackham, pp. 452–3). 11. Kittredge seems reluctant to believe that Chaucer himself misunderstood or garbled his Latin source, but refers to ‘a series of corruptions, mistranslations, and mnemonic lapses’ (‘The Pillars of Hercules’, p. 560). Both Kittredge and DiMarco (‘Another Look’) point to the difficulties that vernacular translators had with the word tropaea. But we need to remember that it is the Monk, and not necessarily Chaucer, who takes ‘Trophee’ to be an authority. 12. Pratt, ‘Chaucer and the Pillars of Hercules’, p. 119. 13. DiMarco, ‘Another Look’, pp. 275, 277.

211

CIC_rev.indd 211

15/12/2020 10:56:37

New Centur y Chaucer

14. DiMarco, ‘Another Look’, p. 278. 15. In his seminal study on Chaucer’s invented author, ‘Chaucer’s Lollius’, Harvard Studies in Classical Philology, 28 (1917), 47–132, Kittredge claims that ‘Lollius’ owes his existence to Chaucer’s misunderstanding of a vocative in Horace’s epistles. According to this theory (first posited by R. G. Latham and Bernhard ten Brink), Chaucer found in Epistles 2.1 an address to ‘Lollius Maximus’, and, assuming this figure to be an ancient authority on the Trojan War, he named him as his source. By naming a Latin as opposed to a vernacular authority, Kittredge maintains, Chaucer gave his poem an ‘air of truth and authenticity’ (p. 49). 16. See the Oxford English Dictionary entry for both tropaeum and (our modern English derivative) trophy. See also the definition of tropaeum in Charlton T. Lewis and Charles Short’s Latin Dictionary, and in the Dictionary of Medieval Latin from British Sources. In his 1539 translation of Erasmus’ Prouerbes, Richard Taverner writes that ‘in olde tyme’, victors ‘were wonte to erecte and set vp some great stone, pyller or other thyng for a sygne of victorie, which marke they called Trophæum’. Certain critics, including Kittredge, Emerson and DiMarco, refer to this sense and origin of Chaucer’s ‘Trophee’, yet ultimately argue that Chaucer uses the word to mean something else. Emerson (‘Seith Trophee’, pp. 143–4), for example, suggests that Chaucer uses the term as a pseudonym for Guido delle Colonne for the sake of his rhyme scheme: ‘In his Hercules story Chaucer was completing an eight-line stanza, and wished a fourth rime with long close e. Guido, column, pillar were equally impossible, even if he had not the latter (piler) already in mind for his next line. Rather than recast his stanza, or perhaps by a happy thought rendered unhappy only by our obtuseness, he hit upon Trophee for Guido and his stanza was complete’ (pp. 144–5). Kittredge and DiMarco both define tropaeum before arguing that Chaucer uses ‘Trophee’ to refer to a person. According to Kittredge (‘The Pillars of Hercules’, p. 557), ‘as a mere word, “Trophee” is clear enough. It is of course the French trophée, Latin tropaeum (tropheum)’, so it is Chaucer’s use of Trophee as a name that ‘causes all the difficulty’. DiMarco (‘Another Look’, p. 276) likewise provides the definition of ‘tropaeum (postclassical trophaeum, medieval tropheum; cf. OF trophee)’ as ‘a memorial of victory’, yet concludes, like Kittredge, that Chaucer mistranslates this word, using ‘Trophee’ as a name (the term ‘proved, perhaps because of its various meanings, notoriously difficult for translators’). 17. Stephen Harrison (ed.), Horace: Odes, Book II (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), p. 127 n. 20, locates a passage in Virgil, Georgics 3.32 (‘duo … diuerso ex hoste tropaea’) in which tropaeum is used metaphorically, ‘to mean simply “victory” rather than “victory trophy”’, and suggests that this sense of tropaeum has been used since Cicero. 18. For the history of the Roman triumph see especially H. S. Versnel, Triumphus: An Inquiry into the Origin, Development and Meaning of the

212

CIC_rev.indd 212

15/12/2020 10:56:37

Chaucer and Italian Culture

Roman Triumph (Leiden: Brill, 1970) and Mary Beard, The Roman Triumph (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007). For the history and use of tropaea in Roman triumphs, see Gilbert Charles Picard, Les trophées romains: contribution à l’histoire de la religion et de l’art triomphal de Rome (Paris: de Boccard, 1957). 19. For Hercules’ significant role in the Roman triumph, see, for example, Annalisa Marzano, ‘Hercules and the Triumphal Feast for the Roman People’, in B. Antela-Bernárdez and T. Ñaco del Hoyo (eds), Transforming Historical Landscapes in the Ancient Empires (Oxford: British Archaeological Reports, 2009), pp. 83–97, and Matthew P. Loar, ‘Hercules, Mummius, and the Roman Triumph in Aeneid 8’, Classical Philology, 112 (2017), 45–62. 20. Loar, ‘Hercules, Mummius, and the Roman Triumph in Aeneid 8’, p. 47. 21. Marzano, ‘Hercules and the Triumphal Feast’, p. 95. 22. Pliny, Natural History, vol. IX: Books 33–35, trans. H. Rackham, Loeb Classical Library, 394 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1952), 33.16: ‘Fuisse autem statuariam artem familiarem Italiae quoque et vetustam, indicant Hercules ab Euandro sacratus, ut produnt, in foro boario, qui triumphalis vocatur atque per triumphos vestitur habitu triumphali …’ (‘That the art of statuary was familiar to Italy also and of long standing there is indicated by the statue of Hercules in the Cattle Market said to have been dedicated by Evander, which is called “Hercules Triumphant”, and on the occasion of triumphal processions is arrayed in triumphal vestments …’) (pp. 152–3). 23. See Marzano, ‘Hercules and the Triumphal Feast’, pp. 83–4 and 89. 24. Loar, ‘Hercules, Mummius, and the Roman Triumph in Aeneid 8’, p. 47. 25. Loar, ‘Hercules, Mummius, and the Roman Triumph in Aeneid 8’, p. 47. For the temples dedicated to Hercules, see Maggie Popkin, The Architecture of the Roman Triumph: Monuments, Memory, and Identity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016). For the feasts given in Hercules’ honour, see Marzano, ‘Hercules and the Triumphal Feast’, p. 89. 26. Marzano, ‘Hercules and the Triumphal Feast’, p. 89. She adds that it seems ‘very likely that there were various stages in the development of the triumphal celebrations at the Ara Maxima. Hercules at the Ara, in earlier times the recipient of one-tenth of one’s profit in thanksgiving, started also to receive the offerings of victorious generals, once the connection of the god to the sphere of war became stronger.’ 27. Marzano, ‘Hercules and the Triumphal Feast’, p. 86. 28. Marzano, ‘Hercules and the Triumphal Feast’, p. 88. 29. Aldo S. Bernardo, ‘Triumphal Poetry: Dante, Petrarch and Boccaccio’, in Konrad Eisenbichler and Amilcare Iannucci (eds), Petrarch’s Triumphs: Allegory and Spectacle (Toronto: Dovehouse Editions, 1990), pp. 33–45 (p. 33). 30. Zygmunt G. Baran´ski, ‘A Provisional Definition of Petrarch’s Triumph’, in Eisenbichler and Iannucci (eds), Petrarch’s Triumphs, pp. 63–83 (p. 67).

213

CIC_rev.indd 213

15/12/2020 10:56:37

New Centur y Chaucer

31. Baran´ski, ‘A Provisional Definition of Petrarch’s Triumph’, p. 67. 32. Petrarch, Bucolicum Carmen, trans. and ann. Thomas G. Bergin (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974), 1.22–3. 33. Robert M. Durling (ed. and trans.), The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri, vol. 3: Paradiso (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 1.25–33. 34. The Latin text of Petrarch’s Africa comes from Nicola Festa’s edition of the Africa (Florence: G. C. Sansoni, 1926), 9.237–8 and 240. The translation is by Thomas G. Bergin and Alice S. Wilson, Petrarch’s Africa (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977). All citations and translations will be taken from this edition and noted in the text. As James Simpson points out with regard to this work, ‘state power and poetic enterprise’ are bound together in the ‘single motif of the triumphal laurel that crowns both imperial victor and poet.’ Simpson, ‘Subjects of Triumph and Literary History: Dido and Petrarch in Petrarch’s Africa and Trionfi’, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, 35 (2005), 490–508 (p. 499). 35. Robert K. Root, for example, in The Poetry of Chaucer: A Guide to its Study and Appreciation (Boston and New York: Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1906), protested against the ‘unspeakable monotony’ of the portraits (pp. 207–8). R. M. Lumiansky, Of Sondry Folk: The Dramatic Principle in the Canterbury Tales (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1955), similarly labelled the Monk’s Tale a series of ‘tedious and repetitive tragedies’ (p. 103). 36. That Chaucer takes his definition of tragedy from Boethius’ Consolation of Philosophy has long been recognised. For the Boethian elements of Chaucer’s Monk’s Tale, see especially Bernard L. Jefferson, Chaucer and the Consolation of Philosophy of Boethius (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1917) and Douglas Lepley, ‘The Monk’s Boethian Tale’, The Chaucer Review, 12 (1977–8), 162–70. 37. It is in the Amorosa visione, a poem written in Italian, in terza rima, consisting of five triumphal processions, that Boccaccio appears to develop his structural plan for the De casibus. Todd Boli (review of the Amorosa visione, ed. Robert Hollander, Speculum, 63 (1988), 625–7) calls the triumph of Fortune an ‘embryonic version’ of the De casibus (p. 625). The final procession of the Amorosa visione – the Triumph of Fortune – details the fall of mighty men and women at the hands of an arbitrary Lady Fortune. As Boccaccio’s guide in this work insists, however, no sooner does Fortune give gifts than she takes them away. See Robert Hollander, Timothy Hampton and Margherita Frankel (ed. and trans.), Amorosa visione: Bilingual Edition (Hanover, NH and London: University Press of New England, 1986), 34.10–12. 38. ‘Sed ex claris quosdam clariores excerpsisse sat erit, ut, dum segnes fluxosque principes et Dei iudicio quassatos in solum reges viderint, Dei potentiam, fragilitatem suam, et Fortune lubricum noscant, et letis modum ponere discant, et aliorum periculo sue possint utilitati consulere’ (‘But it will be enough to have selected only the most illustrious from among the

214

CIC_rev.indd 214

15/12/2020 10:56:38

Chaucer and Italian Culture

famous, so that when they [contemporary rulers] see princes sluggish and frail, as well as kings crushed onto the ground by the judgement of God, they might know the power of God, their own fragility, and the instability of Fortune, and they might learn to put a limit to their own joys, and from the dangers of others they might be able to look out for their own good’). The text is taken from Pier Giorgio Ricci and Vittorio Zaccaria (eds), De casibus virorum illustrium, in Tutte le opere di Giovanni Boccaccio, vol. IX (Milan: Mondadori, 1964), Book 1, Proemio, §8 (my translation). 39. Henry Ansgar Kelly, Chaucerian Tragedy (Woodbridge: D. S. Brewer, 1997), p. 26. 40. The idea of the Monk’s ‘accumulation’ of the labours of Hercules is Kara Gaston’s (‘Literary Catalogues and Verse Units’, unpublished conference paper, International Congress of the New Chaucer Society, University of Reykjavik, 16–20 July 2014). See also Jahan Ramazani, ‘Chaucer’s Monk: The Poetics of Abbreviation, Aggression, and Tragedy’, The Chaucer Review, 27 (1993), 260–76, for his idea of the Monk as a ‘collector’, for whom ‘stories … are objects to be gathered’ (p. 261). 41. The Monk in fact includes two Roman triumphs in his tale – first Aurelian’s, in his portrait of Zenobia (VII.2361–6), and then Caesar’s, in the De Julio (VII.2695–6). In recording the triumph of Caesar, Chaucer contradicts Lucan, whom he names as one of his sources for this portrait. At the beginning of the Pharsalia, Lucan insists that in a civil war there are no triumphs. 42. Richard Neuse, ‘They Had Their World in Their Time: The Monk’s “Little Narratives”’, Studies in the Age of Chaucer, 22 (2000), 415–23, notes the anti-feminist thrust behind certain portraits: ‘Having … repressed Dianira’s agency in Hercules’ death – we are given no hint of her motives or feelings; in other words, she doesn’t really count – the Monk is suddenly confronted by a woman truly dangerous to mankind’, namely Fortune. Neuse continues, ‘Though like Sampson and Hercules he is “a manly man”, there are signs that [the Monk] is quite aware of the “gender issue” in his narration of history’ (pp. 419–20). 43. L. O. Aranye Fradenberg, Sacrifice Your Love (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), pp. 113–54, points to the memorialising aspect of the Monk’s Tale but she suggests that the Monk is more focused on preserving the strictures of his genre, tragedy, than anything else: ‘We are to appreciate that our understanding of tragedy depends on techniques of storage and transmission; without such techniques, the Monk could not “declare” to us the features of the genre … The Monk’s Tale memorializes knowledge of and writing about tragedy just as much as it memorializes the falls of unfortunate men’ (p. 131). 44. Beard, Roman Triumph, p. 18. 45. As Ovid insists at the conclusion to the Amores, for example, he will endure so long as he continues to be read: ‘vivam, parsque mei multa superstes erit’ (‘I’ll live, and the better part of me will survive’). Ovid, Heroides and

215

CIC_rev.indd 215

15/12/2020 10:56:38

New Centur y Chaucer

Amores, trans. Grant Showerman, Loeb Classical Library, 41 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1914), Amores 1.15.42 (pp. 378–9). Ovid ends the Metamorphoses with a similar sentiment: ‘Iamque opus exegi, quod nec Iovis ira nec ignis / nec poterit ferrum nec edax abolere vetustas. / cum volet, illa dies, quae nil nisi corporis huius / ius habet, incerti spatium mihi finiat aevi: / parte tamen meliore mei super alta perennis / astra ferar, nomenque erit indelebile nostrum, / quaque patet domitis Romana potentia terris, / ore legar populi, perque omnia saecula fama, / siquid habent veri vatum praesagia, vivam’ (‘And now my work is done, which neither the wrath of Jove, nor fire, nor sword, nor the gnawing tooth of time shall ever be able to undo. When it will, let that day come which has no power save over this mortal frame, and end the span of my uncertain years. Still in my better part I shall be borne immortal far beyond the lofty stars and I shall have an undying name. Wherever Rome’s power extends over the conquered world, I shall have mention on men’s lips, and, if the prophecies of bards have any truth, through all the ages shall I live in fame’). Ovid, Metamorphoses: Books 1–8, trans. Frank Justus Miller, Loeb Classical Library, 42 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1916), 15.871–9 (pp. 426–7). 46. ‘Nec non ille tui casus memorator Homerus / posteritate suum crescere sensit opus; / meque inter seros laudabit Roma nepotes’ (‘Homer also, the chronicler of your fate, has found his reputation grow with the passage of time. I, too, will be praised by late generations of Rome’). Propertius: Elegies, ed. and trans. G. P. Goold, Loeb Classical Library, 18 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), 3.1.33–5 (pp. 222–3). 47. ‘Illum post cineres auguror ipse diem. / ne mea contempto lapis indicet ossa sepulcro’ (‘Not neglected shall be the grave where the tombstone marks my bones’), Elegies, ed. and trans. Goold, 3.1.36–7 (pp. 222–3). 48. The Latin text is taken from Ioannis Saresberiensis episcopi Carnotensis Policratici sive de nugis curialium et vestigiis philosophorum libri VIII, ed. Clement C. J. Webb, 2 vols (Oxford: Oxford Clarendon Press, 1909), I, Prologue, 385b (pp. 12–13). The translation is by Cary J. Nederman, John of Salisbury: Policraticus (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), p. 3. 49. Fradenburg, Sacrifice Your Love, p. 138. 50. Chaucer refers to fortune as fame’s ‘suster’ in the House of Fame III.1547. 51. For Chaucer’s exploration of fame, see especially Piero Boitani, Chaucer and the Imaginary World of Fame, Chaucer Studies, 10 (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 1984). See also Nick Havely’s more recent, ‘“I wolde … han hadde a fame”: Dante, Fame and Infamy in Chaucer’s House of Fame’, in Isabel Davis and Catherine Nall (eds), Chaucer and Fame: Reputation and Reception (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2015), pp. 43–56. 52. Compare C. S. Lewis, Poetry and Prose in the Sixteenth Century (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1954), who suggests that ‘poets are, for Chaucer, not the people who receive fame but the people who give it’ (p. 27).

216

CIC_rev.indd 216

15/12/2020 10:56:38

8

FROM IMITATION TO INVENTION: CHAUCER’S JOURNEY FROM THE HOUSE OF FAME TO THE NUN’S PRIEST’S TALE Teresa A. Kennedy

S

cholars generally agree that Chaucer’s attitude to poetic authority and his own status as an author within a literary tradition rest on the tension between imitation and commentary.1 In other words, how does Chaucer craft his position as ‘compiler’ or reader and interpreter of the varied literary traditions he encounters in classical, French or Italian sources, and translate them into his own ‘authoritative’ vernacular project?2 In order to reduce this enormous question to manageable proportions, this essay will focus on Chaucer’s use of the topos of dreaming in The House of Fame (1379?) and in the Nun’s Priest’s Tale (1396–1400?) to trace the arc of his growing appreciation for how competing models of discourse shape his own assertions about the importance of vernacular culture in these two distinct narratives that share a focus on both the art of writing and the art of reading.3 Ultimately, both texts share a preoccupation with the problem of finding a reader capable of engaging with the complex claims of vernacular literature to assert auctoritas and to teach a reader how to ‘taketh the fruyt, and lat the chaf be stille’.4

CIC_rev.indd 217

15/12/2020 10:56:38

New Centur y Chaucer

The House of Fame has long been recognised as a work that exemplifies Chaucer’s understanding of the problematic nature of authorial power and its relationship to the utility of vernacular literature, especially with respect to its didactic and ethical importance for its potential audience. Simultaneously, the dream vision functions as a formal mimetic model for active hermeneutic reading that demands Chaucer – in his role as dreamer – interpret the complex panoply of source material that constitutes what can be broadly construed as a literary tradition. Embedded in this confrontation lies a representational challenge: how to illustrate this negotiation of conflicting voices that can operate only fantastically – that is, in the world of the poet’s imagination. The work is composed in three parts, each with a proem. The first book shares the narrator’s experience of reading, and by extension commenting on, Virgil’s Aeneid, and the second narrates a bizarre encounter with an eagle obliquely connected to Dante’s Divine Comedy. The third unfinished book describes a chaotic vision that ostensibly comments on the mutability of poetic fame and breaks off abruptly as Geffrey the dreamer encounters a man of great authority who is never identified. Chaucer’s choice of the dream vision for the genre of this work makes perfect sense in this rhetorical context. The nature of the experience and the interpretation of dreaming reflect the narrator’s experience of reading: the setting for The House of Fame is the ‘mental world of books’.5 The structural chaos that informs the narrative represents the intellectual and broader social chaos derived from the attempt to interpret the competing authorities that clamour for a voice. Significantly, in this early work, Chaucer appears to understand the fundamental connections among reading, commentary and invention that construct the notion of poetic authority; at the same time, he exhibits ‘an extraordinary abnegation of authorial responsibility’.6 Chaucer adopts a rhetorical pose of intellectual paralysis, apparently denying any authorial responsibility for the content – for the re-inscription of the authority of his sources in his text, despite its first-person narrative perspective. The sources for The House of Fame have been widely explored, and various scholars emphasise Chaucer’s mediation among classical,

218

CIC_rev.indd 218

15/12/2020 10:56:38

Chaucer and Italian Culture

biblical, vernacular Italian, French and English works. The scholarship devoted to identifying the catalogue of sources contained in The House of Fame could fill a small library, and focus on the poet’s use of classical sources including Macrobius, Virgil and Ovid; French sources such the Romance of the Rose, Alan of Lille, Machaut and Froissart; and Italian sources, including Dante, Petrarch and Boccaccio. Chaucer also draws on a wide variety of theologians and authorities on the natural sciences, from St Augustine and Boethius to Vincent of Beauvais. A consensus has emerged that the poem should be read primarily as a sceptical response to Dante’s claims for the theological authority of vernacular culture.7 At the same time, while scholarly appreciation of Dante’s influence on Chaucer’s development of his poetic imagination remains unquestioned, exploring the intertextual relationships that inform his response to the larger Italian stil nuovist literary tradition has gained traction more recently.8 Certainly, the naïve narrator in The House of Fame appears completely overwhelmed by the sheer volume of competing authorities, as he attempts to create a heuristic to incorporate essentially grossly divergent views of vernacular culture that are frequently deployed through parallel images and allusions, while simultaneously refusing to take a position of his own. Profoundly intertextual in its structure, The House of Fame has its narrator Geffrey wandering through the imaginary landscape sharing what he sees with his reader. Each proem functions in microcosm to exemplify the fraught attitude towards authority outlined above, beginning with what the reader will eventually realise is a rhetorical question:   … what causeth swevenes Eyther on morwes or on evenes; And why th’effect folweth of somme, And of somme hit shal never come; Why that is an avisioun And this a revelacioun, Why this a drem, why that a sweven, And noght to every man lyche° even;

the same

219

CIC_rev.indd 219

15/12/2020 10:56:38

New Centur y Chaucer

Why this a fantome, why these oracles, I not° …  (3–12)

know not

The dreamer defers any answer to the meaning and interpretation of dreams, especially their claims to any moral truth or authority, to Macrobius or other ‘… grete clerkys, / That trete of this and other werkes; / For I of noon opinion / Nyl as now make mensyon’ (53–6). The ‘cruel lyf unsoften / Which these ilke lovers leden / That hopen over-muche or dreden’ (36–8) echoes Macrobius’ assessment of Dido, and anticipates the theme of Book I. At the same time, Chaucer incongruously invokes both Morpheus and the River Lethe (70–6), drawn from Metamorphoses 11, while urging his readers to pay attention to his trip to the Temple of Venus.9 In the ironic narrative that follows, Chaucer ‘consistently restricts his theme to the nature and destiny of human narratives’, not authoritative truth claims.10 Thus allusion to and intertextual appropriation of other literary texts – that is, the manipulation of sources through metonymy – becomes the dominant trope of The House of Fame and shapes its satiric exposition of the instability of language to portray truth. Although the ability to recognise the plurality of the sources empowers a reader to assert authority over the hermeneutic effect of the text, this is precisely what Chaucer’s narrator remains apparently incapable of doing. In this way, intertextuality becomes the defining trope to build not authority, but parody. The proem to Book II provides another example of the complex intertextuality deployed in The House of Fame, marked by the appearance of the Eagle as a guide for the confused Geffrey. As Book I draws to a close and the narrator leaves the mysterious Temple of Glass, he finds himself in a field of sand, and, frightened by the desolation, despairs: ‘“O Crist!” thought I, “that are in blysse, / Fro fantome and illusion / Me save”’ (492–4). As Karla Taylor has suggested, the narrator is overwhelmed by the idea that the Virgilian images in the temple have no connection to external reality or truth. At this moment of intellectual crisis, an eagle swoops down to rescue the dreamer. The description of the Eagle begins at the end of Book I and is then interrupted by the Proem to Book II, in which Chaucer invokes the muses to assist him

220

CIC_rev.indd 220

15/12/2020 10:56:38

Chaucer and Italian Culture

with the retelling of his dream: ‘O Cipris … me to endite and ryme / Helpeth, that on Parnaso duelle, / Be Elicon, the clere welle’ (518–21). This invocation echoes Boccaccio’s in the Teseida: ‘O sorelle castalie, che nel monte / Elicona contente dimorate, / Dintorno al sacro gorgoneo fonte’ (‘Castalian sisters, happily living on Mount Helicon around the sacred Gorgonean well’).11 Chaucer also invokes the power of his own memory, emphasising the self-reflexivity and metafictional narrative strategy: ‘O Thought, that wro al that I mette, / And in the tresory hyt shette / Of my brayn, now shal men se / Yf any vertu in the be. / To tellen al my drem aryght’ (523–7). The eagle itself:   … of which I have yow told, That shon with fethres as of gold, Which that so hye gan to sore, I gan beholde more and more, To se the beaute and the wonder; But never was ther dynt of thonder, Ne that thyng that men calle fouder,°

a thunderbolt

That smot somtyme a tour to powder, And in his swifte comynge brende,°

burned

That so swithe gan descende As this foul, when hyt beheld That I a-roume° was in the feld;

in the open

And with hys grymme pawes stronge, Withyn hys sharpe nayles longe, Me, fleynge, in a swap he hente, And with hys sours ayen up wente°…  (529–44) soared again

At first glance, Chaucer’s use of the eagle appears to draw from multiple moments in the Divine Comedy. The allusion to Dante’s own dream of an Eagle from Purgatorio  9.19–33 invoked here is well known. Moreover, as Taylor notes, Chaucer complicates the allusion by drawing from the appearance of the Imperial Eagle in Purgatorio 32.112 and Paradiso 6.1, which represents ‘a deliciously witty demonstration of the nature of Chaucer’s debt to Dante’.12 The poetic strategy Chaucer

221

CIC_rev.indd 221

15/12/2020 10:56:38

New Centur y Chaucer

deploys in sharing his version of Dante’s vision is remarkable for its humour. The strategy of incongruous juxtaposition that Chaucer no doubt learned from Ovid and his imitators defines the epitome of a bad reader, one who is incapable of understanding not only the larger meaning of a text like the Divine Comedy, but its style as well. Geffrey’s reaction to his flight with the Eagle in Book II illustrates this rhetorical strategy that shapes the parody throughout The House of Fame as the splendid descends into the absurdly quotidian. Dante’s epic similes, such as the lordly eagle who urges Dante to put forth his strength in Purgatorio 9, are replaced by a parody that relies on difference.13 The Eagle awakens Geffrey in a voice that reminds him of another voice that ‘I koude nevene’ (562), and ‘with that vois, soth for to seyn / My mynde cam to me ageyn’ (564–5). As Geffrey regains consciousness, exhortation to courage dissolves into burlesque: ‘And thoo gan he me to disporte, / And with wordes to comforte, / And sayde twyes, “Seynte Marye, / Thou art noyous for to carye! / And nothyng nedeth it, pardee …” (571–5). No intimation of divine vision informs Geffrey’s response: the Eagle is not his lordly guide but a friend (582). Like Dante in Canto I of Inferno, Geffrey wonders why he has been chosen for this journey to the stars, but instead of placing himself with Aeneas and Saul, he asks: ‘O God!,’ thoughte I, ‘that madest kynde, Shal I noon other weyes dye? Wher Joves wol me stellyfye, Or what thing may this sygnifye? I neyther am Ennok, ne Elye, Ne Romulus, ne Ganymede, That was ybore up, as men rede, To hevene with daun Jupiter, And mad the goddys botiller.’° (584–92)

butler

The inapposite nature of the comparison calls into question the very nature of the commentary on the Commedia that The House of Fame

222

CIC_rev.indd 222

15/12/2020 10:56:38

Chaucer and Italian Culture

narrates by presenting a fascinating example of a key concern for the development of a viable vernacular culture: the problematic consequences of misreading multiple sources. Not only did Geffrey not seem to understand that none of the figures he cites dies, but neither does he seem to grasp that the distinctive experience of Saul and Aeneas is not apotheosis but descent and return, and to group Ganymede with Romulus pushes the boundaries of the satiric absurd. As is also well known, a second key manipulation of Chaucer’s encounter with Dantean poetics is contained in the imagery of visible speech that, as Taylor has argued, functions not as an assertion of certainty for Dante’s vision of poetic imagination but as evidence for its fallibility in Chaucer’s idea of vernacular culture.14 Chaucer questions precisely Dante’s claims for the nature of the ‘tidings’ that form the basis for human versions of truth. In Chaucer’s view multiple competing versions of ‘historical’ events both ‘fals and soth copouned / Togeder fle for oo tydinge’ (‘false and true compounded together fly as one’, 2108–9). Dante on the other hand, in his role as theologus poeta, suggests a very different status for himself: ‘dependent on a virtually unprecedented infusion of grace … [he] insinuate[s] that he and he alone impersonates, or ever could, this new figuration of poetic author.’15 It is Chaucer’s rejection of this kind of claim to authority that forms the foundation of his Dantean critique and perhaps forces the abrupt closure to The House of Fame. It is important to note that Chaucer’s response to Dante is framed in the nature of his poetics. The imagery of visible speech coalesces with the genre of the dream vision and with the use of ekphrasis, both techniques borrowed from the Comedy by Boccaccio as well. The experience of dreaming and that of exploring a literary tradition merge in the unmediated act of reading; the psychological and bas-relief representations shape the imaginary production of visible speech. By refusing to mediate, Chaucer manipulates the text in order to elide any hermeneutic authority within the work. The mimetic function of the ekphrasis that dominates the stories of Dido and Aeneas in the first book of The House of Fame anticipates the incomprehension of the chaotic spoken ‘tidings’ of Books II and III, as visual collage becomes recast into cacophony.

223

CIC_rev.indd 223

15/12/2020 10:56:38

New Centur y Chaucer

Geffrey’s advice to his readers in Book I is consistently metatextual, referring them to its source materials for the competing versions of the classical story and to amplify his theme of faithlessness, that men may often read about in books (387). The authority to speak of love, he notes, remains outside his experience – ‘What shulde I speke more queynte, / Or peyne me my words peynte / To speke of love? Hyt wol not be; / I kan not of that faculte’ (245–8) – and therefore beyond his capacity to authenticate. Although Geffrey claims ‘non other auctour allege I’ but Virgil (314), much of Dido’s complaint is original to Chaucer, while other sources and exempla permeate the visual scenery, including Ovid, Claudian and Macrobius, as well as Old Testament digressions. Yet even the accumulated weight of other stories in the library of Geffrey’s mind fails to provide an answer to the central question: ‘O, have ye men such godlyhede / In speche, and never a del of trouthe?’ (330–1). If knowledge of (absolute) truth is unachievable, the proper utilitas of such stories must remain grounded in the contingent sphere. The specific use of ekphrasis as a representational technique is, of course, partially inspired by the walls of Mount Purgatory that were made ‘di marmo candido e addorno / d’intagli sì, che non pur Policleto, / ma la natura lì avrebbe scorno’ (‘of pure white marble, and adorned with such carvings that not only Polycletus but Nature herself would be put to shame’, Purg. 10.31–3). But Chaucer’s shift in emphasis from the divine to the historical in The House of Fame has its most proximate source in the work of Boccaccio, especially the Amorosa visione (c.1342–3) and the De casibus virorum illustrium (c.1360–73).16 The Amorosa visione echoes Dantean poetic devices, including ekphrasis as a key representational strategy; moreover, as Vittore Branca has pointed out, the Amorosa visione is the most Dantean of Boccaccio’s works in both form and content.17 In this work Boccaccio engages the genre of the dream vision, the terza rima verse form, the narratives of Dido and Aeneas, and the technique of ekphrasis. He also includes a mysterious female heavenly guide whose hermeneutic significance is unclear, lacking any of the specificity of characterisation that informs Beatrice’s presence in Dante’s texts; rather, she is remarkable for her inefficacy.18 Most importantly to Chaucer’s work, the Amorosa visione

224

CIC_rev.indd 224

15/12/2020 10:56:38

Chaucer and Italian Culture

shifts the emphasis from the spiritual to the worldly by, for example, juxtaposing the models of Dante with that of Ovid, and provides a paradigm to construct a creative space with which to engage a site of differentiation from Dante’s theological construct of vernacular culture to one that emphasises fortune and history. Chaucer’s use of the De casibus to support this paradigm is well known.19 Constructed as a pseudo-biographical dream vision, De casibus offers as its theme the ‘antagonistic relationship between fame and fortune’.20 Explicitly focused on the ethical and political sphere, Boccaccio describes various encounters with famous and infamous political figures, punctuated with conversations with Fortune herself, Petrarch, and finally Dante. In his encounter with Fortune, Boccaccio explicitly articulates the limitations of his goals for vernacular culture and distances himself from the allegorical weight of Dante’s eagle: ‘Agnosco quidem non esse pennas volucres michi, quarum adiutus suffragio celos penetrare queam, ibidem Dei lustraturus archana et demum mortablibus visa relaturus’ (‘I know that I do not have the feathers of a bird by the aid of which I could penetrate the Heavens to see the secrets of God. Then I could reveal these sights to mortal man’).21 However, Chaucer’s sympathy for Boccaccio’s position as a poet has its limits when the focus turns to the political agenda espoused by the Italian humanist. Chaucer’s resistance to merging his poetic endeavours with politics dominates his approaches to both Italian humanism and the rapidly expanding vernacular culture in England.22 One of the most puzzling aspects of The House of Fame remains the abrupt way the text breaks off: ‘Atte laste y saugh a man, / Which that y [nevene] nat ne kan; / But he semed for to be / A man of gret auctorite’ (2155–8). Although, to be sure, the identity of this mysterious figure has never been established, it is interesting to consider the possibility of an associative link between Chaucer’s ‘man of great authority’ and the characterisation and context of Boccaccio’s portrait of Dante who appears in the De casibus among a huge crowd of overthrown princes: ‘[E]t venientem cernam clarissimum virum et amplissimis laudibus extollendum Dantem Alighierii, poetam insignem’ (‘I saw coming that most famous of men, one worthy of the

225

CIC_rev.indd 225

15/12/2020 10:56:38

New Centur y Chaucer

highest praise, the famous poet Dante Alighieri’, 9.23.6). After establishing a filial relationship between them, Dante reveals his role among the crowd: to ensure that Boccaccio relates the history of the former tyrant of Florence, Walter of Brienne. Boccaccio’s history of the rise and fall of Walter, and his scathing indictment of the citizens of Florence for their loss of republican principles, refer to a political debate that cannot resonate with Chaucer. Rather, his silence is emblematic of his consistent refusal to risk misinterpretation by his readers on the one hand, and his anxiety about the instability of language to convey truth or knowledge on the other. Chaucer distils the noise and chaos of the multitude of voices in Book III of The House of Fame into the Canterbury Tales, as he gains control over his own sense of agency as an author. In other words, he moves from representing himself as a compiler of sources – or translator – to rhetorical innovator. And, as many scholars have noted, this process often involves reworking themes from earlier works into the Canterbury Tales. Chaucer’s anxieties about language and vernacular culture are particularly prominent, for example, in Fragment VII.23 The unity of the fragment can be construed broadly as a kind of defence of poetry that addresses not only the limits of vernacular language to express truth, but also the problem of the ability of the audience to comprehend, culminating in the Nun’s Priest’s advice to ‘take the fruit and let the chaff be still’. Chaucer’s interest in classical and vernacular humanism is clearly accessible to modern readers, but his contemporary audience’s ability to understand and appreciate its larger metaliterary context is by no means certain.24 Given his notorious reluctance to claim the role of author directly, part of Chaucer’s goals for this fragment can be understood as pedagogical: using parody as a way to showcase the importance of an audience that is well informed across a wide variety of topics by representing its opposite. Much like The House of Fame, at the heart of Fragment VII is the question of reading comprehension; each narrator, Shipman, Prioress, Chaucer the pilgrim, Monk, and Nun’s Priest, presents the problem of interpretation in different ways. Taken together, the tales of the Fragment address the nature, quality and diversity of both its audience and its narrators.

226

CIC_rev.indd 226

15/12/2020 10:56:38

Chaucer and Italian Culture

The ugly character of the ‘Shipman’s Tale’ and its narrator has provoked a number of interpretations. The Shipman, presented in the ‘General Prologue’ as a thief, a fraud and a murderer to account for his presence on the pilgrimage, is central to the pluralism of the reading public the Canterbury pilgrims encapsulate.25 Critical readings of the tale itself generally focus on the theme of commercialism and the public’s equivocal attitude to the expanding role of merchants in a postplague urban society. As Helen Fulton points out, the ‘tale constructs the ambivalence of late fourteenth-century society towards a group of men who were essential to urban government and economy, yet whose corporate ideology was not necessarily geared to the common good of the urban community’.26 This ambivalence, moreover, extends to the content of the tale and the characterisation of the merchant of St Denis. As Taylor suggests, focusing on the rhetorical strategy of the Shipman’s puns opens a window onto not only the pluralism of the social world Chaucer explores, but also its linguistic diversity and the instability of semantic fields as a bar to comprehension: ‘Is the merchant also excluded from understanding the tricky punning of his friend and wife? The open question of the tale is whether he ever recognizes that he has been duped.’27 In its larger context, the semantic equivalence connecting sex to money presents an ugly reality that undermines the humour of fabliaux and their aesthetic function. The ‘Shipman’s Tale’, then, opens the fragment most concerned with language by representing a world where aesthetics – and by extension poetry – are not recognised. The topic of the limited capacity to comprehend similarly appears in the ‘Prioress’s Tale’, represented by the recitations of the little ‘clergeon’ on the one hand, and the naïve narrator herself. As Lee Patterson notes, at the centre of the ‘Prioress’s Tale’ is Chaucer’s representation of the Prioress’s aspirations to innocence revealed in language: ‘given the ideal form of speech implied by the clergeon’s perfect (because uncomprehending) rehearsal of the Alma redemptoris, the Prioress’s breathless sequence of exclamations is unintentionally parodic.’28 There is little argument that the characterisation of the Prioress focuses on the tension between the exegetical meaning of the clergeon who, like the Holy Innocents, speaks a message from God that he cannot understand,

227

CIC_rev.indd 227

15/12/2020 10:56:38

New Centur y Chaucer

and that of the childish and sentimental narration the Prioress provides.29 Is her childish anti-semitic tale, as Patterson asks, an imitation of authentic liturgical acts, or is not all ritual by definition an act of mimicry of older, unsanctioned behaviors? … [T]hese questions are not foreign to Chaucer, whose explorations of written culture as an echo chamber in The House of Fame and Troilus and Criseyde are well known.30

It is important to add here that the Prioress’s use of sources that she does not understand, especially the ironic context of her biblical allusions, sums up Chaucer’s anxieties about the legitimacy of vernacular culture to make claims about truth.31 Layered within the Prioress’s false or inauthentic claims to authority, in other words, rests a warning about the dangers of asserting the kind of authority Dante claims as theologus-poeta. At the centre of Fragment VII are the tales of Chaucer the pilgrim, the tales of ‘Sir Thopas’ and of ‘Melibee.’ In both these tales Chaucer satirically explores his understanding of his own potential role as an author, juxtaposing his role as a courtly poet in the burlesque of ‘Sir Thopas’ with that of the uneasy verbosity of Prudence’s language of counsel in ‘Melibee’. In his role as pilgrim, he offers two negative versions of authorial subjectivity, one playful and one serious, neither of which is an authentic representation of Chaucer’s vernacular ambitions. Few scholars would disagree with Patterson’s assertion that both these tales ‘seek to define, and to defend, the authorial identity that Chaucer … has come to assume, an identity that is inevitably in opposition to that of courtly “maker” but that can now lay no claim to the august title “poete”’.32 Through the parodic modelling of his native tradition that inspires such a negative reaction from Harry Bailly, Chaucer reminds his audience of the radically new approach to poetry that the rest of his narratives in the Canterbury Tales achieve. Moreover, while the childish fantasy of the tale offers a rhetorical response to the childish and sentimental Prioress, it also suggests through its chaotic structure and inept style that the courtly values the genre embraces

228

CIC_rev.indd 228

15/12/2020 10:56:38

Chaucer and Italian Culture

are effectively played out. ‘Implicit in Thopas’s adolescent sexuality is the latent violence that subverts Theseus’ chivalric order … [and] is described in terms that evoke the frenzied coupling of the Reeve’s tale.’33 The host’s revulsion at the tale, however – ‘Myne eres aken of thy drasty speche’(VII.923) – is not an objection to its content, but to its poetic style, to its ‘rym dogerel’ (925). The satiric effect once again focuses the reader’s attention on the problems of comprehension. The ‘Tale of Melibee’ provides two different kinds of insight into Chaucer’s larger anxieties about authority. The first concerns the problem of the lack of a vocabulary capable of articulating civic discourse, and the second concerns the futility of counsel as an effective means to guide government policy. Both of these are rhetorical issues that focus on the nature of eloquence – the precise correspondence of thought to word. As Taylor argues, even as Chaucer makes pedagogical use of the doublet as a means to gloss terms internally from multilingual sources, the copious sea of Prudence’s language falls on deaf ears.34 Melibee’s preliminary response to Prudence’s pleas for mercy is the judgement of exile (VII.835). As David Aers has argued, Melibee’s final capitulation to Prudence’s renewed arguments to grant mercy embraces a rationale motivated by all the wrong reasons, because her arguments ‘appeal to the material and cultural self-interests of secular power’.35 Harry Bailly underscores the dangers of failed interpretation, transferring the ethical force of the tale’s critique of ungovernable rage from himself to his wife, who ‘knows nothing of patience’.36 Chaucer, then, is acutely aware of the limits of his audience not only with respect to his poetic texts, but also in terms of his role as a civil servant, working in a political environment where taking authorial responsibility could have far graver consequences. In the ‘Monk’s Tale’, Chaucer returns to his scepticism about the wisdom of linking the political with his brand of vernacular poetry, a position framed by a second encounter with Boccaccio’s De casibus, focusing on the role of Fortune in the inevitable fall of men.37 The series of disconnected narratives that informs the structure of the tale is, as Richard Neuse suggests, ‘like a battleground between contending forces, the scene where tradition in the full sense of that word is no

229

CIC_rev.indd 229

15/12/2020 10:56:38

New Centur y Chaucer

sooner set down than it is questioned or disrupted’.38 The Monk’s version of Fortune as a figure that suppresses the role of virtue in the fall of princes seems to represent the wilful misappropriation of the relationship between textual authority and political power. Simultaneously, the Monk’s narratives reprise the chaos that undermines literary tradition in The House of Fame. Chaucer achieves this through simply rewriting source texts, as in the treatment of Ugolino, or by manipulating the inconsistencies among variations in competing sources which the Monk uses, as in the treatment of Croesus, in order to eliminate the presence of providence or free will in the world.39 Up to this point, the tales of Fragment VII have in one sense been built on exempla that highlight the question asked in The House of Fame: how are texts produced for the audience they are intended to benefit? The answer to this question must focus on the process of cultural transference through translation, but the tales of Fragment VII also address Chaucer’s earlier concerns about the stability of textual authority and the problem of reading comprehension that are central to interpretation, or, in other words, the problem of not only inventing but also defining a reading community. Scholars agree that a key function of authorial invention is the transfer of external literary systems into new communities in a way that provides new readers access to their content. At the same time, the translation must necessarily create sufficient difference to mark the originality of its author.40 The Nun’s Priest’s Tale creates a heuristic to frame and partially resolve these themes in an exuberant allegory that celebrates the gratuitous pleasure readers can take in Chaucer’s vernacular craftsmanship. Chaucer ends his fragment on language with a narrator who understands the challenges posed by the diversity of his audience. Harry Bailly’s demand to ‘Telle us swich thing as may oure hertes glade’ (NPP 2811) is a demand for a reply to the Monk’s grim view of Fortune, but it is also an opportunity for the priest to provide an ethical context for the other tales in the fragment and for the responsibilities readers and authors share in this evolving literary system. The choice of a beast fable for the Priest’s tale is, of course, designed to appeal to all members of the audience while facilitating the

230

CIC_rev.indd 230

15/12/2020 10:56:38

Chaucer and Italian Culture

narrator’s own didactic rhetorical goals. The genre by definition is both comic and ‘overtly false’.41 The allegory’s typological strategy creates the narrative context for the priest – given the pressure to teach and to entertain his role demands – to quit the Monk and also to address the challenges of attempting to teach those who wilfully refuse to learn. In this sense, the Priest aligns his role with that of Prudence’s didactic agenda in ‘Melibee’ and Phania’s efforts to warn Croesus of his doom in the ‘Monk’s Tale’; the narcissistic Prioress is one target of critique. The ‘povre widow’ in his tale appears then to be an inversion of the description of the Prioress’s sophomoric sentimentality in the ‘General Prologue’. Madame Eglentyne ‘leet no morsel from hir lippes falle, / Ne wette hir fyngres in hir sauce depe’ (I.128–9); further, her small dog ‘she fedde / With rosted flesh, or milk and wastel-breed (I.146–7). Conversely, the widow had no sauce at all, and she, not her dog, ate milk and brown bread (VII.2835; 2844). Yet the Prioress’s role as a reader hidebound by parochial and reductive thinking represents only one example of a larger typology further exemplified by Geffrey’s naïve misinterpretations in The House of Fame, the intractable stubbornness of Melibee and the unconvincing arguments of Chauntecleer. Within the closed idealised space of the beast fable, Chaucer returns to a familiar inventive strategy: the use of the dream vision in order to showcase how conflicting authorities and interpretations contribute to the chaos of Chauntecleer’s debate with Pertelote on the interpretation of dreams. The significance of dreams, as Geffrey in The House of Fame reminds the reader, stems from diverse causes that can never be absolutely known even should the dream come true. Geffrey does not know ‘Why that is an avision / And why this a revelacion’ (HF 8–9). Nor can he distinguish between dreams caused by ‘dysordynaunce / Of naturel acustumaunce’ (HF 27–8) or from excesses of study, devotion, or anxiety about love (HF 30–7). Is Chauntecleer’s dream of the fox eschatological or scatological? On the face of it, Chauntecleer’s claims to a Delphic revelation of a fatal threat are ridiculous. Pertelote’s reaction, framed as it is in digestive issues, is the more likely explanation. Yet as the fox nearly succeeds in his capture, it appears that even a stopped clock is right twice a day. Perhaps the moral of this aspect of

231

CIC_rev.indd 231

15/12/2020 10:56:38

New Centur y Chaucer

the story actually points to the Priest’s own experience of attempting to give advice to the Prioress or others like her, as one who wishes to claim a metaphysical authority that cannot be proved, only asserted. Chauntecleer is no Dante. The Nun’s Priest’s Tale returns us to the question of poetic language and its capacity for external referentiality in the fallen world, the question that so troubled Geffrey at the end of Book I of The House of Fame.42 Chauntecleer’s metaphorical figuration contrasts the ‘colors of nature to the colors of rhetoric’.43 More specifically, the return to the parody of Dante’s Eagle in The House of Fame also informs Chaucer’s exploration of the relationship between language and truth, and approaches the effect of mise-en-abyme. More than simply the parallel burnished golden feathers shared by rooster (NPT 2864), eagle (Purg. 9.19–33), and the jocular Eagle in The House of Fame, additional associations with Dante’s eagles lurk in the subtext of the Nun’s Priest’s Tale. Peter Travis, for example, quite rightly associates the appearance of the Imperial Eagle of Paradiso 18 with what he calls the ‘noise of history’; the Eagle’s speech ‘ascends the ladder of locution, from subphonemic rumble to … a complex syntactical proposition’.44 In the Imperial Eagle’s discourse on justice and predestination, his audible speech works in contrast to the ‘visible speech’ which frames the mountain of Purgatory, and which Chaucer adapts in The House of Fame. As Travis argues, the onomatopoeia in the fox chase of the Nun’s Priest’s Tale reverses this ladder so that it leads from the articulation of divine justice to the natural language of the barnyard.45 Yet it is important to remember that the Imperial Eagle’s words articulate a central issue for Chaucer: Just as there is no concrete reality which may be distinguished in its own right as irreducible, not even the lives of men who serve as the signifiers of God’s Providence, so there is no ultimate reality signified beyond the text itself … The eagle, as unlike an eagle as can be imagined, stands as a figure for the poem itself, a nonrepresentation that is its own reality.’46

Chauntecleer comically represents the same tautology.

232

CIC_rev.indd 232

15/12/2020 10:56:38

Chaucer and Italian Culture

Like Geffrey’s in The House of Fame, Chauntecleer’s catalogue of stories demonstrating the oracular power of dreams is a representation of the mental world of books. Chaucer’s goal for this catalogue is to reinstate the concepts of free will and providence against the harsh determinism with which the Monk defines Fortune in the historical world, even as the Nun’s Priest disclaims any certainty about the debate: ‘Wheither that Goddes worthy forwityng / Streyneth me nedely for to doon a thing – / “Nedely” clepe I symple necessitee – / Or elles, if free choys be graunted me / … I wol nat han to do of swich mateere’ (VII.3243–51). Since Chauntecleer does reverse the doom he has anticipated and does escape from the fox, the power of providence and free will is demonstrated even as the power of interpretation is debunked. The theme of misinterpretation, whether from confusion and ignorance or through malice, repeats itself in the manipulation of the story of Croesus, as it is recounted first by Geffrey in The House of Fame, then by the Monk as he closes his tale, and again by Chauntecleer. As Eric Jager points out, the Monk selectively edits the legend of Croesus in his source, Jean de Meun’s Roman de la Rose … In the Roman and other medieval versions of the legend, including the one invoked in Chaucer’s The House of Fame, Croesus is a victim not of Fortune, but rather of his own interpretive error.’47

Of course, in most versions of the legend Croesus escapes death. Chaucer selectively relies on the Roman’s version, including Phania’s interpretation of her father’s dream, but omits the debate on the dangers of literal interpretation in both The House of Fame and the ‘Monk’s Tale’.48 In the Nun’s Priest’s Tale, the dream and its interpretation are reduced to one sentence: ‘Lo Cresus, which that was of Lyde kyng, / Mette he nat that he sat upon a tree, / Which signified he sholde anhanged bee?’ (VII.3138–40). The larger debate on dream interpretation is allegorised into Pertelote taking on the role of Phania, and Chauntecleer that of Croesus, a reification that ultimately reveals the error of both.

233

CIC_rev.indd 233

15/12/2020 10:56:38

New Centur y Chaucer

One important question that needs to be asked is what truth, or absent truth, does this complex allegory seek to represent? One answer might be that in the Nun’s Priest’s Tale Chaucer creates a representational strategy that allows him to authenticate Dante’s vision of paradise in a way he could not in The House of Fame. In creating the barnyard and its anthropomorphic characters inside the ‘noise of history’ Chaucer rescales the divine perspective of Dante’s vision of Paradise, or Troilus’ Boethian downward gaze, into one that does not strain the limits of human knowledge or imagination. In the microcosm of the barnyard he creates a City of Man, and, in the context of the satire, allows readers to imagine, if not to know, something more about truth, history, literary tradition, fortune, the workings of providence, and ultimately transcendence than they did before. Chaucer creates an analogy suggesting that to members of the celestial audience, human knowledge of the transcendent is about as reliable as Chaunticleer’s. In other words, human beings are like chickens in the theatre of eternity. Chaucer provides a parodic resolution to the question of the power of language to assert truth by illustrating its limitations to aspire to certainty.

Notes 1. See for example, Robert R. Edwards, Invention and Authorship in Medieval England (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2017), pp. 105–46; Alastair J. Minnis, Medieval Theory of Authorship: Scholastic Literary Attitudes in the Later Middle Ages, second edn (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010), pp. 233–6; Helen Cooper, ‘Chaucerian Poetics’, in Robert G. Benson and Susan J. Ridyard (eds), New Readings of Chaucer’s Poetry (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2003), pp. 31–50 (pp. 31–3); A. C. Spearing, Medieval to Renaissance in English Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985; repr. 1990), pp. 15–58; Vincent Gillespie, ‘Authorship’, in Marion Turner (ed.), A Handbook of Middle English Studies (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013), pp. 137–54. For a discussion of medieval inventio as the practice of discovering meaning from ‘an inherited tradition of written authority’, see Rita Copeland, Rhetoric, Hermeneutics, and Translation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 151–78 (p. 160). 2. See Edwards, Invention and Authorship, pp. 105–8; Copeland, Rhetoric, Hermeneutics, and Translation, pp. 90–3. For The House of Fame, see

234

CIC_rev.indd 234

15/12/2020 10:56:38

Chaucer and Italian Culture

Winthrop Wetherbee, Chaucer and the Poets: An Essay on ‘Troilus and Criseyde’ (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984), p. 22 n. 3. 3. For The House of Fame as metafiction and as an ars poetica see Robert M. Jordan, Chaucer’s Poetics and the Modern Reader (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1987), pp. 24–5; Donald R. Howard, ‘Flying Through Space: Chaucer and Milton’, in Joseph Anthony Wittreich (ed.), Milton and the Line of Vision (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1975), pp. 3–23 (p. 5); Robert O. Payne, The Key of Remembrance: A Study of Chaucer’s Poetics (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1963), pp. 129–37. For the Nun’s Priest’s Tale, see Peter W. Travis, Disseminal Chaucer: Rereading the ‘Nun’s Priest’s Tale’ (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2010), pp. 51–117. 4. Geoffrey Chaucer, The Nun’s Priest’s Tale, in Larry D. Benson (gen. ed.), The Riverside Chaucer, 3rd edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), pp. 252– 61 (with notes on pp. 935–41); all further references to Chaucer’s works will be to this edition. 5. Karla Taylor, Chaucer Reads ‘The Divine Comedy’ (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1989), p. 20; Sheila Delany, Chaucer’s House of Fame: The Poetics of Skeptical Fideism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972), sees the narrator’s dreaming as a metaphor for invention; that is, ‘for the poetic conception embodied in the work’ (p. 44). 6. Gillespie, ‘Authorship’, p. 152; Edwards, Invention and Authority, pp. 92–3; for a hermeneutics that focuses on the act of reading, rather than on authorial intention, see Jonathan Culler, ‘Prolegomena to a Theory of Reading’, in Susan Rubin Suleiman and Inge Crosman (eds), The Reader in the Text: Essays on Audience and Interpretation (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), pp. 46–66. 7. For Chaucer’s scepticism about literary tradition see Minnis, Medieval Theory of Authorship, pp. 190–210; Delany, Chaucer’s House of Fame, pp. 1–12. For Chaucer’s response to Dante see for example B. G. Koonce, Chaucer and the Tradition of Fame: Symbolism in The House of Fame (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966), chapters 3–5; J. A. W. Bennett, Chaucer’s Book of Fame: An Exposition of The House of Fame (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968), pp. 49–53, 137–74; Edwards, Invention and Authority, pp. xxiii–xxv, 194; Taylor, Chaucer Reads ‘The Divine Comedy’, pp. 1–25; John M. Fyler, Language and the Declining World in Chaucer, Dante, and Jean de Meun, Cambridge Studies in Medieval Literature, 63 (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 139–41; Wetherbee, Chaucer and the Poets, p. 17; Piero Boitani, ‘What Dante Meant to Chaucer’, in Piero Boitani (ed.), Chaucer and the Italian Trecento (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983), pp. 115–39; William A. Quinn, ‘Chaucer’s Recital Presence in the House of Fame and the Embodiment of Authority’, The Chaucer Review, 43/2 (2008), 171–96; Glenn A. Steinberg, ‘Chaucer in the

235

CIC_rev.indd 235

15/12/2020 10:56:38

New Centur y Chaucer

Field of Cultural Production: Humanism, Dante, and the House of Fame’, The Chaucer Review, 35/2 (2000), 182–203. 8. See for example David Wallace, Chaucer and the Early Writings of Boccaccio, Chaucer Studies, 12 (Woodbridge: D. S. Brewer, 1985) as well as his Chaucerian Polity: Absolutist Lineages and Associational Forms in England and Italy (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997); Robert R. Edwards, Chaucer and Boccaccio: Antiquity and Modernity (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave, 2002); Warren Ginsberg, Chaucer’s Italian Tradition (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002); William T. Rossiter, Chaucer and Petrarch, Chaucer Studies, 41 (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2010); and Kathryn McKinley, Chaucer’s ‘House of Fame’ and Its Boccaccian Intertexts: Image, Vision, and the Vernacular (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 2016). 9. Ovid, Metamorphoses, trans. Stanley Lombardo (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2010), ll. 690–700. 10. Lisa J. Kiser, ‘Eschatological Poetics in Chaucer’s House of Fame’, Modern Language Quarterly, 49/2 (1988), 99–119 (p. 101). 11. Giovanni Boccaccio, Teseida delle Nozze di Emilia, ed. Alberto Limentani, in Tutte le opere di Giovanni Boccaccio, vol. II, ed. Vittore Branca (Milan: Mondadori, 1964) I, 1. 12. Taylor, Chaucer Reads the Divine Comedy, p. 36. For the relationship between Chaucer’s and Dante’s competing versions of visible speech see also Paul G. Ruggiers, ‘Words into Images in Chaucer’s House of Fame’, Modern Language Notes, 69 (1954) 34–7; Bennett, Chaucer’s Book of Fame, p. 98. 13. Dante, The Divine Comedy: Purgatorio, ed. and trans. Charles S. Singleton (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973), Purg. 9, describes his dream in the high style, opening the vision with an epic simile, and occurring at the hour when ‘la mente nostra … a le sue vision quasi è divina’ (‘when our mind in its visions is almost divine’, 16–18); he sees the eagle poised to swoop, and ‘mi parea là dove fuoro / abbandonati i suoi da Ganimede, / quando fu ratto al sommo consistoro’ (‘and I seemed to be in the place where Ganymede abandoned his own company and was caught up to the supreme consistory’, 22–4). Then, the eagle ‘terribil come folgor discendesse, / e me rapisse suso infino al foco. / Ivi parea che ella e io ardesse; / e sì lo ’ncendio imaginato cosse, / che convenne che ’l sonno si rompesse’ (‘descended terrible as a thunderbolt, and snatched me upwards as far as the fire: there it seemed that it and I burned; and the imagined fire so scorched me that perforce my sleep was broken’, 29–33). Dante closes this description with another epic simile that invokes Achilles. The eagle then speaks: ‘Non aver tema,’ disse il mio segnore; / ‘fatti sicur, ché noi semo a buon punto; / non stringer, ma rallarga ogne vigore’ (‘Have no fear,’ said my lord, ‘take confidence, for all is well with us; do not hold back, but put forth all your strength’, 46–8). 14. Taylor, Chaucer Reads ‘The Divine Comedy’, 30–8.

236

CIC_rev.indd 236

15/12/2020 10:56:38

Chaucer and Italian Culture

15. Albert Russell Ascoli, Dante and the Making of a Modern Author (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), p. 384 (my italics). 16. McKinley, Chaucer’s ‘House of Fame’. See also Bennett, Chaucer’s Book of Fame, p. 135; Koonce, Chaucer and the Tradition of Fame, p. 138; Martin Eisner, Boccaccio and the Invention of Italian Literature: Dante, Petrarch, Cavalcanti, and the Authority of the Vernacular (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), p. 4; Vittore Branca, ‘The Myth of the Hero in Boccaccio’, in Norman T. Burns and Christopher J. Reagan (eds), Concepts of the Hero in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1975), pp. 268–93 (p. 268); Piero Boitani, Chaucer and the Imaginary World of Fame, Chaucer Studies, 10 (Cambridge: Boydell and Brewer, 1984), pp. 125–30. 17. Vittore Branca, ‘Introduction’, in Giovanni Boccaccio, Amorosa visione: Bilingual Edition, ed. and trans. Robert Hollander, Timothy Hampton and Margherita Frankel (Hanover, NH and London: University Press of New England, 1986), pp. ix–xxviii (pp. ix–xii). 18. McKinley, Chaucer’s ‘House of Fame’, p. 10. Many scholars have been frustrated by the ambiguous nature of the guide in the poem. See Branca, ‘Introduction’, who notes that her characterisation is remarkable for its ‘lifeless and conventionalized’ nature, and suggests that such interpretative efforts are fruitless (p. xxi). 19. Chaucer’s knowledge of the De casibus and its role as the source of the Monk’s Tale has been extensively demonstrated. See Benson (gen. ed.), Riverside Chaucer, p. 932; Boitani, Chaucer and the Italian Trecento, p. 152; David Wallace, Chaucerian Polity, pp. 306–11; Ginsberg, Chaucer’s Italian Tradition, pp. 190–239. For The House of Fame and the De casibus see McKinley, Chaucer’s ‘House of Fame’, pp. 114–18. 20. Jason M. Houston, Building a Monument to Dante: Boccaccio as Dantista (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2010), p. 65. 21. Giovanni Boccaccio, De casibus virorum illustrium, ed. Pier Giorgio Ricci and Vittorio Zaccaria, in Tutte le opere di Giovanni Boccaccio, vol. IX (Milan: Mondadori, 1964), VI.10; all further references will be to this edition; Boccaccio, The Fates of Illustrious Men, trans. and abrdg. Louis Brewer Hall (New York: F. Ungar, 1965), p. 138. For an extensive discussion of the treatment of the Eagle in The House of Fame in relation to De casibus see McKinley, Chaucer’s ‘House of Fame’, pp. 115–39. 22. Warren Ginsberg in Chaucer and the Italian Tradition argues that Fragment VII of the Canterbury Tales takes on ‘the force of political critique’ but, compared to Boccaccio’s political agenda, remains ‘extremely reluctant to explore the possibilities of a confederation between politics and fiction’ (p. 239). For Chaucer’s reticence with respect to political debate see Lee Patterson, ‘“No Man His Reson Herde”: Peasant Consciousness, Chaucer’s Miller, and the Structure of the Canterbury Tales’, in Lee Patterson (ed.), Literary Practice and Social Change in Britain, 1380–1530 (Berkeley:

237

CIC_rev.indd 237

15/12/2020 10:56:38

New Centur y Chaucer

University of California Press, 1990), pp. 113–55 (pp. 146–50); Sheila Delany, The Naked Text: Chaucer’s Legend of Good Women (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994); Paul Strohm, Social Chaucer (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1989); Lynn Arner, Chaucer, Gower and the Vernacular Rising: Poetry and the Problem of the Populace after 1381 (University Park PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2013), p. 2. 23. Travis, Disseminal Chaucer, p. 324; Karla Taylor, ‘Social Aesthetics and the Emergence of Civic Discourse from the “Shipman’s Tale” to “Melibee”’, The Chaucer Review, 39/3 (2005), 298–322 (p. 299); Helen Cooper, The Structure of the Canterbury Tales (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1984), pp. 160–3. 24. For a summary of the complex factors that contribute to defining Chaucer’s contemporary consumers of learned literature, see Arner, Chaucer, Gower and the Vernacular Rising, pp. 17–44; Strohm, Social Chaucer, pp. 1–23. 25. ‘General Prologue’, I.388–410; Jill Mann, Chaucer and Medieval Estates Satire: The Literature of Social Classes and the ‘General Prologue’ to the Canterbury Tales (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973), notes the notorious reputations of shipmen (pp. 170–1). See also John M. Ganim, Chaucerian Theatricality (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), who suggests that characters like ‘the Cook and the Shipman hardly form part of what we might regard as a participatory literary public. Instead, they represent “subcultures”, groups within medieval society that might be assumed to have their own popular forms’ (p. 129); Helen Fulton, ‘Mercantile Ideology in Chaucer’s Shipman’s Tale’, The Chaucer Review, 36/4 (2002), 311–28, who emphasises that the Canterbury Tales ‘are located at that site of struggle between the various interest-groups in urban society’ (p. 316). For a general overview of the Shipman, see Wendy R. Childs, ‘The Shipman’, in Stephen H. Rigby and Alastair J. Minnis (eds), Historians on Chaucer: The ‘General Prologue’ to the Canterbury Tales (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), pp. 277–97. 26. Fulton, ‘Mercantile Ideology’, p. 315. 27. Taylor, ‘Social Aesthetics and the Emergence of Civic Discourse’, p. 309. 28. Lee Patterson, ‘“The Living Witnesses of Our Redemption”: Martyrdom and Imitation in Chaucer’s Prioress’s Tale’, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, 31/3 (2001), 507–60 (p. 516). 29. Patterson, ‘Living Witnesses’, p. 515. See also Robert Adams, ‘Chaucer’s “New Rachel” and the Theological Roots of Medieval Anti-Semitism’, Bulletin of the John Rylands Library, 77 (1995), 9–18; Alfred David, The Strumpet Muse: Art and Morals in Chaucer’s Poetry (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1977), pp. 208–11. 30. Patterson, ‘Living Witnesses’, p. 521. 31. See Adams, ‘Chaucer’s “New Rachel”’, pp. 10–13. 32. Lee Patterson, ‘“What Man Artow?” Authorial Self-Definition in “The Tale of Sir Thopas” and “The Tale of Melibee”’, Studies in the Age of Chaucer, 11

238

CIC_rev.indd 238

15/12/2020 10:56:38

Chaucer and Italian Culture

(1989), 117–75 (p. 123); for the dual roles of Chaucer’s authorial identity in this context see Richard Firth Green, Poets and Princepleasers: Literature and the English Court in the Late Middle Ages (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1980), pp. 142–4. 33. Winthrop Wetherbee, Chaucer: The Canterbury Tales (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 95. 34. Taylor, ‘Social Aesthetics’, pp. 310–11; for the ‘uselessness of Prudence’s discourse’ see Patterson, ‘“What Man Artow?”’, p. 157. 35. David Aers, ‘Chaucer’s Tale of Melibee’, in David Aers (ed.), Medieval Literature and Historical Inquiry: Essays in Honor of Derek Pearsall (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2000), pp. 69–83 (pp. 78–9). 36. Canterbury Tales VII.1891–6; Patterson, ‘“What Man Artow?”’, pp. 155–7, fully develops this point. 37. Scholarly interest in the ‘Monk’s Tale’ has increased significantly over the past fifteen years, especially with respect to its links with Boccaccio and its philosophical arguments. See Winthrop Wetherbee, ‘The Context of the Monk’s Tale’, in Michio Kawai (ed.), Language and Style in English Literature: Essays in Honour of Michio Masui (Hiroshima: English Research Association of Hiroshima, 1990), pp. 159–77; Renate Haas, ‘Chaucer’s “Monk’s Tale”, An Ingenious Criticism of Early Humanist Conceptions of Tragedy’, Humanistica Lovaniensia, 36 (1987), 44–70; Ginsberg, Chaucer’s Italian Tradition, pp. 213–39; Larry Scanlon, Narrative, Authority, and Power: The Medieval Exemplum and Chaucerian Tradition (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 215–30; Richard Neuse, ‘The Monk’s De casibus: The Case Reopened’, in Leonard Michael Koff and Brenda Deen Schildgen (eds), The Decameron and the Canterbury Tales: New Essays on an Old Question (Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2000), pp. 247–77. 38. Neuse, ‘Monk’s De Casibus’, p. 259; Scanlon, Narrative, Authority, and Power, pp. 216–25. 39. For Chaucer’s treatment of Ugolino see Richard Neuse, Chaucer’s Dante: Allegory and Epic Theater in The Canterbury Tales (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), pp. 140–51; Daniel J. Pinti, ‘The Comedy of the Monk’s Tale: Chaucer’s Hugelyn and Early Commentary on Dante’s Ugolino’, Comparative Literature Studies, 37/3 (2000), 277–97; Piero Boitani, ‘The Monk’s Tale: Dante and Boccaccio’, Medium Aevum, 45 (1976), 50–69. For Chaucer’s treatment of the Croesus legend see Eric Jager, ‘Croesus and Chauntecleer: The Royal Road of Dreams’, Modern Language Quarterly, 49/1 (1988), 3–18; Jameson S. Workman, Chaucer and the Death of the Political Animal (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), pp. 120–45. 40. For a full discussion, see Edwards, Invention and Authorship, pp. v–xxv; Minnis, Medieval Theory of Authorship, pp. 160–205; Copeland, Rhetoric, Hermeneutics, pp. 70–95; Ginsberg, Chaucer’s Italian Tradition, pp. 1–10. 41. Scanlon, Narrative, Authority, and Power, p. 229. For a trenchant summary of critical approaches to the tale, see Derek Pearsall (ed.), A Variorum Edition

239

CIC_rev.indd 239

15/12/2020 10:56:38

New Centur y Chaucer

of the Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, vol. II: The Canterbury Tales. Part Nine: The Nun’s Priest Tale (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1984), pp. 30–81; Travis, Disseminal Chaucer, pp. 1–28. 42. For extensive discussion of this theme in the context of the conflict between the world of art and the world of history, see Workman, Chaucer and the Death of the Political Animal, pp. 83–96. 43. Travis, Disseminal Chaucer, p. 172. 44. Travis, Disseminal Chaucer, pp. 210–38. 45. Travis, Disseminal Chaucer, pp. 238–52. 46. John Frecero, ‘Introduction’, in John Ciardi (trans.), Dante Alighieri: The Paradiso (New York: Penguin, 1972), p. xv. 47. Jager, ‘Croesus and Chauntecleer’, p. 3. 48. Jager, ‘Croesus and Chauntecleer’, pp. 5–6; Workman, Chaucer and the Death of the Political Animal, p. 127.

240

CIC_rev.indd 240

15/12/2020 10:56:38

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Primary Sources Alexander’s Letter to Aristotle about India, trans. L. Gunderson (Meisenheim am Glan: A. Hain, 1980). Alighieri, Dante, Convivio, ed. Piero Cudini, seventh edn (Milan: Garzanti, 2008). ——— Il Convivio (The Banquet), trans. Richard Lansing (New York: Garland, 1990). ——— The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri, vol. 1: Inferno, ed. and trans. Robert M. Durling (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997). ——— The Divine Comedy: 1. Inferno, ed. and trans. John D. Sinclair (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975). ——— The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri, vol. 2: Purgatorio, ed. and trans. Robert M. Durling (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). ——— The Divine Comedy: 2. Purgatorio, ed. and trans. John Sinclair (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971). ——— The Divine Comedy: Purgatorio, ed. and trans. Charles S. Singleton (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973). ——— The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri, vol. 3: Paradiso, ed. and trans. Robert M. Durling (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). ——— The Divine Comedy: 3: Paradiso, ed. and trans. John Sinclair (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981). ——— The Paradiso, trans. John Ciardi (New York: Penguin, 1972). ——— Vita nova, ed. Guglielmo Gorni, in Opere, vol. 1, second edn (Milan: Mondadori, 2015), pp. 745–1063. ——— Vita nova, trans. Andrew Frisardi (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2012). ——— Vita Nuova, ed. Manuela Colombo (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1993).

CIC_rev.indd 241

15/12/2020 10:56:38

New Centur y Chaucer

Aquinas, St Thomas, Commentaries on Aristotle’s ‘On Sense and What Is Sensed’ and ‘On Memory and Recollection’, trans. Kevin White and Edward M. Macierowski (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2005). ——— Commentary on Aristotle’s De anima, trans. Kenelm Foster, OP and Silvester Humphries, OP (New Haven CT: Yale University Press, 1951; repr. Notre Dame IN: Dumb Ox Books, 1994). ——— Sentencia libri de anima, Leonine edition, vol. 45, part 1 (Rome: Commissio Leonina; Paris: Vrin, 1984). ——— Sentencia libri de sensu et sensato, ed. René-Antoine Gauthier, OP, Leonine edition, vol. 45, part 2 (Rome: Commissio Leonina; Paris: Vrin, 1985). ——— Summa theologiae (Rome: Editiones Paulinae, 1962). ——— Summa theologica, trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province, 5 vols (New York: Benziger Brothers, 1948). Augustine, St, De Trinitate libri quindecim (Patrologia Latina, 42), http:// www.augustinus.it/latino/trinita/index2.htm. ——— The Trinity, trans. Stephen McKenna (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1963). Bachelard, Gaston, La poétique de l’espace (Paris: Presses Universitaires, 1957). ——— The Poetics of Space, trans. Maria Jolas (New York: Penguin, 2014). Bede, Ecclesiastical History of the English People, ed. and trans. Bertram Colgrave and R. A. B. Mynors, Oxford Medieval Texts (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969). Boccaccio, Giovanni, Amorosa visione: Bilingual Edition, ed. and trans. Robert Hollander, Timothy Hampton and Margherita Frankel (Hanover, NH and London: University Press of New England, 1986). ——— De casibus virorum illustrium, ed. Pier Giorgio Ricci and Vittorio Zaccaria, in Tutte le opere di Giovanni Boccaccio, vol. IX (Milan: Mondadori, 1964). ——— Decameron, ed. Vittore Branca, in Tutte le opere di Giovanni Boccaccio, vol. IV (Milan: Mondadori, 1976). ——— Decameron, ed. Vittore Branca, 2 vols (Milan: Mondadori, 1989). ——— Il Decameron, ed. Vittore Branca (Florence: Felice Le Monnier, 1952). ——— The Decameron, trans. G. H. McWilliam, 2nd edn (London: Penguin, 1995).

242

CIC_rev.indd 242

15/12/2020 10:56:38

Chaucer and Italian Culture

——— The Decameron, trans. Guido Waldman with introduction and notes by Jonathan Usher, The World’s Classics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993). ——— Esposizioni sopra la Comedia di Dante, ed. Giorgio Padoan, in Tutte le opere di Giovanni Boccaccio, vol. VI (Milan: Mondadori, 1965). ——— Filostrato, ed. Vittore Branca, in Tutte le o,pere di Giovanni Boccaccio, vol. II (Milan: Mondadori, 1964). ——— Teseida delle Nozze di Emilia, ed. Alberto Limentani, in Tutte le opere di Giovanni Boccaccio, vol. II, ed. Vittore Branca (Milan: Mondadori, 1964), pp. 229–664. ——— The Fates of Illustrious Men, trans. and abrdg. Louis Brewer Hall (New York: F. Ungar, 1965). Brut y Brenhinedd: Cotton Cleopatra Version, ed. John Jay Parry (Cambridge, MA: Mediaeval Academy of America, 1937). The Brut or the Chronicles of England, ed. F. W. Brie, 2 vols (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner, and Company, 1906–8). Calcidius, On Plato’s Timaeus, ed. and trans. John Magee, Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library, 41 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016). Chaucer, Geoffrey, Complete Works of Geoffrey Chaucer: Boethius and Troilus, ed. Walter William Skeat (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1894). ——— The Riverside Chaucer, gen. ed. Larry D. Benson, third edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). ——— A Variorum Edition of the Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, vol. II: The Canterbury Tales. Part Nine: The Nun’s Priest Tale, ed. Derek Pearsall (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1984). ——— The House of Fame, ed. Nick Havely, second edn (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies; Durham: Institute of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, Durham University, 2013). ——— Troilus and Criseyde, ed. Stephen A. Barney, in Benson (gen. ed.), The Riverside Chaucer, pp. 471–585. Geoffrey of Monmouth, The History of the Kings of Britain, ed. Michael D. Reeve, trans. Neil Wright (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2007). Gower, John, Confessio Amantis, vol. III, ed. Russell A. Peck (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, Western Michigan University, 2004). ——— The Minor Latin Works, ed. and trans. R. F. Yeager (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 2005). Heidegger, Martin, ‘Building, Dwelling, Thinking’, in David Farrell Krell (ed.), Basic Writings: From ‘Being and Time’ (1927) to ‘The Task of Thinking’ (1964), second edn (London: Routledge, 1993), pp. 347–63.

243

CIC_rev.indd 243

15/12/2020 10:56:38

New Centur y Chaucer

Henryson, Robert, The Poems of Robert Henryson, ed. Denton Fox (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981). Heraclides Criticus, ‘Herakleides Kritikos (369A), Description of Greece’, ed. and trans. Jeremy McInerney, in Ian Worthington (ed.), Brill’s New Jacoby, 2nd edn, online database, F.1. (https:// referenceworks-brillonline-com.bris.idm.oclc.org/entries/ brill-s-new-jacoby-2/herakleides-kritikos-369a-a369A?s.num=3). Horace, Odes, Book II, ed. Stephen Harrison (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017). Isidore of Seville, Isidori Hispalensis Episcopi, Etymologiarum sive Originum Libri XX, ed. W. M. Lindsay, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1911). ——— The Etymologies of Isidore of Seville, trans. Stephen A. Barney, W. J. Lewis, J. A. Beach and Oliver Berghof (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). John of Salisbury, Ioannis Saresberiensis episcopi Carnotensis Policratici sive de nugis curialium et vestigiis philosophorum libri VIII, ed. Clement C. J. Webb, 2 vols (Oxford: Oxford Clarendon Press, 1909). ——— Policraticus, trans. Cary J. Nederman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). Joyce, James, Ulysses: The Corrected Text, ed. Hans Walter Gabler et al. (London: Penguin, 1986). Le Livre de Griseldis, ed. and trans. Amy W. Goodwin, in Correale and Hamel (eds), Sources and Analogues of The Canterbury Tales, I, 140–67. Lydgate, John, Fall of Princes, ed. Henry Bergen, 4 vols, Early English Text Society (London: Oxford University Press, 1923–7). ——— Lydgate’s Troy Book, ed. Henry Bergen, 4 vols, Early English Text Society (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner & Co. and Oxford University Press, 1906–35). Mela, Pomponius, Chorographie, ed. A. Silberman (Paris: Société d’Édition Les Belles Lettres, 1988). ——— Pomponius Mela’s Description of the World, trans. F. E. Romer (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1998). Ovid (Publius Ovidius Naso), Heroides and Amores, trans. Grant Showerman, Loeb Classical Library, 41 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1914). ——— Metamorphoses: Books 1–8, trans. Frank Justus Miller, Loeb Classical Library, 42 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1916).

244

CIC_rev.indd 244

15/12/2020 10:56:38

Chaucer and Italian Culture

——— Metamorphoses, trans. Stanley Lombardo, (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2010). Petrarch, Africa, ed. Nicola Festa (Florence: G. C. Sansoni, 1926). ——— Africa, trans. Thomas G. Bergin and Alice S. Wilson (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977). ——— Bucolicum Carmen, trans. and ann. Thomas G. Bergin (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974). ——— ‘Historia Griseldis: Petrarch’s Epistolae Seniles XVII.3’, ed. and trans. Thomas J. Farrell, in Correale and Hamel (eds), Sources and Analogues of The Canterbury Tales, I, 108–29. ——— Letters of Old Age (Rerum senilium libri), ed. Aldo S. Bernardo, Saul Levin and Reta A. Bernardo, 2 vols (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992). ——— Rerum familiarum libri I–VIII, trans. Aldo S. Bernardo (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1975). Pliny the Elder, Natural History, vol. II: Books 3–7, trans. H. Rackham, Loeb Classical Library, 352 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1942). ——— Natural History, vol. IX: Books 33–35, trans. H. Rackham, Loeb Classical Library, 394 (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1952). Political Poems and Songs relating to English History, Composed during the Period from the Accession of Edward III to that of Richard III, ed. Thomas Wright, 2 vols (London: Longman, Green, Longman and Roberts, 1859–61). Propertius, Elegies, ed. and trans. G. P. Goold, Loeb Classical Library, 18 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990). ‘The Prophecy of John of Bridlington: An Edition’, ed. M. J. Curley (unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University of Chicago, 1973). Richard the Redeless and Mum and the Soothsegger, ed. James M. Dean (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 2000). Sacchetti, Franco, Il Trecentonovelle, ed. E. Faccioli (Turin: Einaudi, 1970). Seneca the Younger, Tragedies, vol. II: Oedipus, Agamemnon, Thyestes, ed. and trans. John G. Fitch, Loeb Classical Library, 78 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004). Walsingham, Thomas, The St Albans Chronicle: The Chronica Maiora of Thomas Walsingham, vol. 2: 1394–1422, ed. John Taylor and Wendy R. Childs, trans. Leslie Watkiss, Oxford Medieval Texts (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011).

245

CIC_rev.indd 245

15/12/2020 10:56:38

New Centur y Chaucer

Secondary Sources Adams, Robert, ‘Chaucer’s “New Rachel” and the Theological Roots of Medieval Anti-Semitism’, Bulletin of the John Rylands Library, 77 (1995), 9–18. Aers, David, ‘Chaucer’s Tale of Melibee’, in David Aers (ed.), Medieval Literature and Historical Inquiry: Essays in Honor of Derek Pearsall (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2000), pp. 69–83. Akbari, Suzanne Conklin, Seeing Through the Veil: Optical Theory and Medieval Allegory (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004). Alexander, P. J., ‘The Diffusion of Byzantine Apocalypses in the Medieval West and the Beginnings of Joachimism’, in Ann Williams (ed.), Prophecy and Millenarianism: Essays in Honour of Marjorie Reeves (Harlow: Longman, 1980), pp. 57–75. Armstrong, Guyda, Rhiannon Daniels, and Stephen J. Miller (eds), The Cambridge Companion to Boccaccio (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015). Arner, Lynn, Chaucer, Gower and the Vernacular Rising: Poetry and the Problem of the Populace after 1381 (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2013). Ascoli, Albert Russell, Dante and the Making of a Modern Author (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008). Azzolini, Monica and Isabella Lazzarini (eds), Italian Renaissance Diplomacy: A Sourcebook, Durham Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Translations, 6 (Durham: Institute of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, Durham University; Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 2017). Bailey, Elizabeth, ‘Raising the Mind to God: The Sensual Journey of Giovanni Morelli (1371–1444)’, Speculum, 84 (2009), 984–1008. Baran´ski, Zygmunt G., ‘A Provisional Definition of Petrarch’s Triumph’, in Eisenbichler and Iannucci (eds), Petrarch’s Triumphs: Allegory and Spectacle, pp. 63–83. Barney, Stephen A., ‘Troilus and Criseyde’ (explanatory notes), in Larry D. Benson (ed.), The Riverside Chaucer, third edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), pp. 1020–58. Barolini, Teodolinda, Dante’s Poets: Textuality and Truth in the ‘Comedy’ (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984). Batty, Roger, ‘Mela’s Phoenician Geography’, Journal of Roman Studies, 90 (2000), 70–94.

246

CIC_rev.indd 246

15/12/2020 10:56:38

Chaucer and Italian Culture

Beard, Mary, The Roman Triumph (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007). Bedini, Silvio A. and Francis R. Maddison, Mechanical Universe: The Astrarium of Giovanni de’ Dondi, Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, n.s. 56/5 (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1966). Beidler, Peter G., ‘Just Say Yes, Chaucer Knew the Decameron: Or, Bringing the Shipman’s Tale Out of Limbo’, in Leonard Michael Koff and Brenda Deen Schildgen (eds), The ‘Decameron’ and the ‘Canterbury Tales’: New Essays on an Old Question (London: Associated University Presses, 2000), pp. 25–46. Bennett, J. A. W., Chaucer’s Book of Fame: An Exposition of The House of Fame (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968). Bennett, Michael J., Richard II and the Revolution of 1399 (Stroud: Sutton, 1999). ———‘Richard II and the Wider Realm’, in Anthony Goodman and James L. Gillespie (eds), Richard II: The Art of Kingship (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999), pp. 187–204. Bennett, Tony and Patrick Joyce (eds), Material Powers: Cultural Studies, History and the Material Turn (New York and London: Routledge, 2010). Bernardo, Aldo S., ‘Triumphal Poetry: Dante, Petrarch and Boccaccio’, in Eisenbichler and Iannucci (eds), Petrarch’s Triumphs: Allegory and Spectacle, pp. 33–45. Blume, Peter, Regenten des Himmels: Astrologische Bilder in Mittelalter und Renaissance (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2000). Boitani, Piero, Chaucer and Boccaccio, Medium Aevum Monographs, n.s. 8 (Oxford: Society for the Study of Mediaeval Languages and Literatures, 1977). ——— Chaucer and the Imaginary World of Fame, Chaucer Studies, 10 (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 1984). ——— (ed.), Chaucer and the Italian Trecento (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983). ——— ‘The Monk’s Tale: Dante and Boccaccio’, Medium Aevum, 45 (1976), 50–69. ——— ‘What Dante Meant to Chaucer’, in Boitani (ed.), Chaucer and the Italian Trecento, pp. 115–39. Boli, Todd, Review of the Amorosa visione, ed. Robert Hollander, Speculum, 63 (1988), 625–7.

247

CIC_rev.indd 247

15/12/2020 10:56:38

New Centur y Chaucer

Boyde, Patrick, Dante, Philomythes and Philosopher: Man in the Cosmos (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981). ——— Perception and Passion in Dante’s Comedy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). Bradley, Helen, ‘“Saluti da Londra”: Italian Merchants in the City of London in the Late Fourteenth and Early Fifteenth Centuries’, in Helen Fulton and Michele Campopiano (eds), Anglo-Italian Cultural Relations in the Later Middle Ages (York: York Medieval Press and Boydell and Brewer, 2018), pp. 103–27. Branca, Vittore, ‘The Myth of the Hero in Boccaccio’, in Norman T. Burns and Christopher J. Reagan (eds), Concepts of the Hero in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1975), pp. 268–93. Brantley, Jessica, Reading in the Wilderness: Private Devotion and Public Performance in Late Medieval England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007). Bridges, Margaret, ‘The Picture in the Text: Ecphrasis as Self-reflexivity in Chaucer’s Parliament of Fowles, Book of the Duchess and House of Fame’, Word and Image, 5 (1989), 151–8. ——— ‘Writing, Translating and Imagining Italy in the Polychronicon’, in Fulton and Campopiano (eds), Anglo-Italian Cultural Relations in the Later Middle Ages, pp. 8–39. Bridges, Venetia, Medieval Narratives of Alexander the Great (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2019). Briggs, Charles F., ‘The Clerk’, in Rigby (ed.), Historians on Chaucer, pp. 187–205. Brodersen, Kai, ‘Mapping Pliny’s World: The Achievement of Solinus’, Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies, 54/1 (2011), 63–88. Brown, Peter, Chaucer and the Making of Optical Space (Bern: Peter Lang, 2007). Bryan, Jennifer, Looking Inward: Devotional Reading and the Private Self in Late Medieval England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008). Bullón-Fernández, María, ‘Poverty, Property, and the Self in the Late Middle Ages: The Case of Chaucer’s Griselda’, Mediaevalia, 35 (2014), 193–226. Burri, Renate, ‘The Rediscovery of Ptolemy’s Geography (End of the Thirteenth to End of the Fifteenth Century)’, Imago Mundi, 61/1 (2009), 124–7. Candido, Igor (ed.), Petrarch and Boccaccio: The Unity of Knowledge in the Pre-modern World (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2018).

248

CIC_rev.indd 248

15/12/2020 10:56:38

Chaucer and Italian Culture

Carruthers, Mary, The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008). Casey, Edward S., Getting Back into Place: Toward a Renewed Understanding of the Place-World (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993). ——— ‘Heidegger In and Out of Place’, in Heidegger: A Centenary Appraisal (Pittsburgh: Silverman Phenomenology Center, 1990), pp. 62–98. Celenza, Christopher, ‘Petrarch and the History of Philosophy’, in Candido (ed.), Petrarch and Boccaccio, pp. 78–90. Chaplais, Pierre, English Diplomatic Practice in the Middle Ages (London and New York: Hambledon and London, 2003). Cherniss, Michael D., ‘Chaucer’s Anelida and Arcite: Some Conjectures’, The Chaucer Review, 5 (1970), 9–21. Childs, Wendy R., ‘The Shipman’, in Rigby (ed.), Historians on Chaucer, pp. 277–97. Clarke, Kenneth P., Chaucer and Italian Textuality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). ——— ‘Chaucer and Italy: Contexts and/of Sources’, Literature Compass, 8/8 (2011), 526–33. ——— ‘On Copying and Not Copying Griselda: Petrarch and Boccaccio’, in Piero Boitani and Emilia Di Rocco (eds), Boccaccio and the European Literary Tradition (Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 2014), pp. 57–71. Collette, Carolyn P., Species, Phantasms, and Images: Vision and Medieval Psychology in The Canterbury Tales (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001). Connors, Catherine, ‘Imperial Space and Time: The Literature of Leisure’, in Oliver Taplin (ed.), Literature in the Greek and Roman Worlds (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 492–518. Contini, Gianfranco, Varianti e altra linguistica (Turin: Einaudi, 1970). Coole, Diana and Samantha Frost (eds), New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010). Cooper, Helen, ‘After Chaucer’, Studies in the Age of Chaucer, 25 (2003), 3–24. ——— ‘Chaucerian Poetics’, in Robert G. Benson and Susan J. Ridyard (eds), New Readings of Chaucer’s Poetry (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2003), pp. 31–50. ——— ‘The Four Last Things in Dante and Chaucer: Ugolino in the House of Rumour’, New Medieval Literatures, 3 (1999), 39–66.

249

CIC_rev.indd 249

15/12/2020 10:56:38

New Centur y Chaucer

——— The Structure of the Canterbury Tales (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1984). Coote, Lesley A., Prophecy and Public Affairs in Later Medieval England (York: York Medieval Press and Boydell and Brewer, 2000). Copeland, Rita, Rhetoric, Hermeneutics, and Translation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). Correale, Robert M. and Mary Hamel (eds), Sources and Analogues of the Canterbury Tales, 2 vols (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2003). Criva˘t,, Anca, ‘Isidore of Seville – Reader of Solinus’, Bucharest Working Papers in Linguistics, 15/1 (2013), 113–32. Crow, Martin and Clair C. Olson (eds), Chaucer Life-Records (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1966). Culler, Jonathan, ‘Prolegomena to a Theory of Reading’, in Susan Rubin Suleiman and Inge Crosman (eds), The Reader in the Text: Essays on Audience and Interpretation (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), pp. 46–66. Curley, M. J., ‘The Cloak of Anonymity and the Prophecy of John of Bridlington’, Modern Philology, 77 (1980), 361–9. David, Alfred, ‘Recycling Anelida and Arcite: Chaucer as a Source for Chaucer’, Studies in the Age of Chaucer, Proceedings, 1 (1984), 105–15. ——— The Strumpet Muse: Art and Morals in Chaucer’s Poetry (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1977). Davis, Isabel and Catherine Nall (eds), Chaucer and Fame: Reputation and Reception (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2015). Delany, Sheila, Chaucer’s House of Fame: The Poetics of Skeptical Fideism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972). ——— The Naked Text: Chaucer’s Legend of Good Women (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994). Dempster, Germaine, ‘Chaucer’s Manuscript of Petrarch’s Version of the Griselda Story’, Modern Philology, 41 (1943), 6–16. Denery II, Dallas G., Seeing and Being Seen in the Later Medieval World: Optics, Theology, and Religious Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). de Vivo, Filippo, Information and Communication in Venice: Rethinking Early Modern Politics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). DiMarco, Vincent, ‘Another Look at Chaucer’s “Trophee”’, Names: A Journal of Onomastics, 34 (1986), 275–83. ——— ‘The Squire’s Tale’, in Correale and Hamel (eds), Sources and Analogues of the Canterbury Tales, I, 169–209.

250

CIC_rev.indd 250

15/12/2020 10:56:38

Chaucer and Italian Culture

——— and Leslie Perelman (eds), The Middle English Letter of Alexander to Aristotle (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1978). Dover, Paul, ‘Reading “Pliny’s Ape” in the Renaissance: The Polyhistor of Caius Julius Solinus in the First Century of Print’, in Jason König and Greg Woolf (eds), Encyclopaedism from Antiquity to the Renaissance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), pp. 414–43. Durling, Robert M., ‘Boccaccio on Interpretation: Guido’s Escape (Decameron VI. 9)’, in Aldo S. Bernardo and Anthony L. Pellegrini (eds), Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio: Studies in the Italian Trecento in Honor of Charles S. Singleton (Binghamton NY: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1983), pp. 273–304. ——— ‘Epicureans’, in Richard Lansing (ed.), The Dante Encyclopedia (New York: Garland Publishing, 2000), pp. 346–7. Dyer, Christopher, Making a Living in the Middle Ages: The People of Britain 850–1520 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002). Edmondson, George, The Neighboring Text: Chaucer, Boccaccio, Henryson (Notre Dame IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2011). Edwards, A. S. G., ‘The Unity and Authenticity of “Anelida and Arcite”: The Evidence of the Manuscripts’, Studies in Bibliography, 41 (1988), 177–88. Edwards, Robert R., Chaucer and Boccaccio: Antiquity and Modernity (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave, 2002). ——— Invention and Authorship in Medieval England (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2017). Eisenbichler, Konrad and Amilcare Iannucci (eds), Petrarch’s Triumphs: Allegory and Spectacle (Toronto: Dovehouse Editions, 1990). Eisner, Martin, Boccaccio and the Invention of Italian Literature: Dante, Petrarch, Cavalcanti, and the Authority of the Vernacular (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013). Emerson, Oliver Farrar, ‘Seith Trophee’, Modern Language Notes, 31 (1916), 142–6. Emmerson, Richard K. and Bernard McGinn (eds), The Apocalypse in the Middle Ages (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992). Epstein, Robert, ‘“With many a florin he the hewes boghte”: Ekphrasis and Symbolic Violence in the Knight’s Tale’, Philological Quarterly, 85 (2006), 49–68. Farrell, Thomas J., ‘The Griselda Story in Italy’, in Correale and Hamel (eds), Sources and Analogues, I, 103–6. Favier, Dale A., ‘Anelida and Arcite: Anti-Feminist Allegory, Pro-Feminist Complaint’, The Chaucer Review, 26 (1991), 83–94.

251

CIC_rev.indd 251

15/12/2020 10:56:38

New Centur y Chaucer

Flood, Victoria, ‘Early Tudor Translation of English Prophecy in Wales’, in Aisling Byrne and Victoria Flood (eds), Crossing Borders in the Insular Middle Ages (Turnhout: Brepols, 2019), pp. 65–88. ——— Prophecy, Politics and Place in England: From Geoffrey of Monmouth to Thomas of Erceldoune (D. S. Brewer: Cambridge, 2016). Fradenberg, L. O. Aranye, Sacrifice Your Love (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002). Frigo, Daniela (ed.), Politics and Diplomacy in Early Modern Italy: The Structure and Practice of Diplomatic History, 1450–1800, trans. Adrian Belton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). ——— ‘Prudence and Experience: Ambassadors and Political Culture in Early Modern Italy’, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, 38/1 (2008), 15–34. Frow, John, ‘Matter and Materialism: A Brief Pre-History of the Present’, in Bennett and Joyce (eds), Material Powers, pp. 66–90. Fulton, Helen, ‘Arthurian Prophecy and the Deposition of Richard II’, ed. Keith Busby and Roger Dalrymple, Arthurian Literature, 22 (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2005), 64–83. ——— ‘History and Historia: Uses of the Troy Story in Medieval Ireland and Wales’, in Ralph O’Connor (ed.), Classical Literature and Learning in Medieval Irish Narrative (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2014), pp. 40–57. ——— ‘Mercantile Ideology in Chaucer’s Shipman’s Tale’, The Chaucer Review, 36/4 (2002), 311–28. ——— ‘The Geography of Welsh Literary Production in Late Medieval Glamorgan’, Journal of Medieval History, 41/3 (2015), 325–40. ——— ‘The Performance of Social Class: Domestic Violence in the Griselda Story’, AUMLA: Journal of the Australasian Universities Language and Literature Association, 106 (2006), 25–42. ——— ‘Translating Europe in Medieval Wales’, in Aidan Conti, Orietta da Rold and Philip Shaw (eds), Writing Europe, 500–1450: Texts and Contexts (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2015), pp. 159–74. ——— ‘Urban History in Medieval and Early Modern Britain: The Influence of Classical and Italian Models’, in Fulton and Campopiano (eds), Anglo-Italian Cultural Relations in the Later Middle Ages, pp. 150–78. ——— Welsh Prophecy and English Politics in the Later Middle Ages (Aberystwyth: University of Wales Centre for Advanced Welsh and Celtic Studies, 2008). ——— and Michele Campopiano (eds), Anglo-Italian Cultural Relations in the Later Middle Ages (York: York Medieval Press for Boydell and Brewer, 2018).

252

CIC_rev.indd 252

15/12/2020 10:56:38

Chaucer and Italian Culture

Fyler, John M., Language and the Declining World in Chaucer, Dante, and Jean de Meun, Cambridge Studies in Medieval Literature, 63 (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007). Galloway, Andrew, ‘Chaucer’s Legend of Lucrece and the Critique of Ideology in Fourteenth-Century England’, ELH, 60/4 (1993), 813–32. ——— and R. F. Yeager (eds), Through a Classical Eye: Transcultural and Transhistorical Visions in Medieval English, Italian, and Latin Literature in Honour of Winthrop Wetherbee (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009). Ganim, John M., Chaucerian Theatricality (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990). Gaston, Kara, ‘“Save oure tonges difference”: Translation, Literary Histories, and Troilus and Criseyde’, The Chaucer Review, 48/3 (2014), 258–83. Gillespie, Vincent, ‘Authorship’, in Marion Turner (ed.), A Handbook of Middle English Studies (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013), pp. 137–54. Gilson, Simon A., Medieval Optics and Theories of Light in the Works of Dante (Lewiston ME: Mellen, 2000). Ginsberg, Warren, ‘“And Speketh so Pleyn”: The Clerk’s Tale and its Teller’, Criticism, 20 (1978), 307–23. ——— Chaucer’s Italian Tradition (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002). ——— ‘From Simile to Prologue: Geography as Link in Dante, Petrarch, Chaucer’, in Galloway and Yeager (eds), Through a Classical Eye, pp. 145–64. ——— ‘Petrarch, Chaucer and the Making of the Clerk’, in James J. Paxson, Lawrence M. Clopper and Sylvia Tomasch (eds), The Performance of Middle English Culture: Essays on Chaucer and the Drama in Honor of Martin Stevens (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1998), pp. 125–41. Goldie, Matthew Boyd, Scribes of Space: Place in Middle English Literature and Late Medieval Science (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2019). Gormley, C. et al., ‘The Medieval Circulation of the De Chorographia of Pomponius Mela’, Medieval Studies, 46 (1984), 266–320. Green, Richard Firth, Poets and Princepleasers: Literature and the English Court in the Late Middle Ages (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1980). Gross, Karen Elizabeth, ‘Chaucer’s Silent Italy’, Studies in Philology, 109/1 (2012), 19–44.

253

CIC_rev.indd 253

15/12/2020 10:56:38

New Centur y Chaucer

Grundmann, H., ‘Dante und Joachim von Fiore zu Paradiso X–XII’, in West (ed.), Joachim of Fiore in Christian Thought, II, 329–75. Guenée, Bernard, Histoire et culture historique dans l’Occident médiéval (Paris: Aubier Montaigne, 1980). Haas, Renate, ‘Chaucer’s “Monk’s Tale”: An Ingenious Criticism of Early Humanist Conceptions of Tragedy’, Humanistica Lovaniensia, 36 (1987), 44–70. Hagiioannu, Michael, ‘Giotto’s Bardi Chapel Frescoes and Chaucer’s House of Fame: Influence, Evidence, and Interpretations’, The Chaucer Review, 36/1 (2001), 28–47. Hamilton, George Livingstone, The Indebtedness of Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde to Guido delle Colonne’s Historia Trojana (New York: Columbia University Press, 1903). Hampton, Timothy, Fictions of Embassy: Literature and Diplomacy in Early Modern Europe (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2009). Hanly, Michael, ‘Courtiers and Poets: An International Network of Literary Exchange in Late Fourteenth-Century Italy, France and England’, Viator, 28 (1997), 305–32. Harkins, Jessica, ‘Chaucer’s Clerk’s Tale and Boccaccio’s Decameron X.10’, The Chaucer Review, 47/3 (2013), 247–73. Harvey, David, Spaces of Capital: Towards a Critical Geography (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2001). Havely, Nick, Chaucer’s Boccaccio: Sources for ‘Troilus’ and the ‘Knight’s’ and ‘Franklin’s Tales’: Translations from the ‘Filostrato’, ‘Teseida’ and ‘Filocolo’ (Woodbridge: D. S. Brewer, 1992). ——— Dante (Oxford: Blackwell, 2007). ——— Dante and the Franciscans: Poverty and the Papacy in the Commedia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). ——— ‘“I wolde … han hadde a fame”: Dante, Fame and Infamy in Chaucer’s House of Fame’, in Davis and Nall (eds), Chaucer and Fame, pp. 43–56. ——— ‘The Italian Background’, in Steve Ellis (ed.), Chaucer: An Oxford Guide (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), pp. 313–31. ——— ‘The Self-Consuming City: Florence as Body Politic in Dante’s Commedia, Deutsches Dante Jahrbuch, 61 (1986), 99–113. Heffernan, James A. W., Museum of Words: The Poetics of Ekphrasis from Homer to Ashbery (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993). Helgerson, Richard, Forms of Nationhood: The Elizabethan Writing of England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992).

254

CIC_rev.indd 254

15/12/2020 10:56:38

Chaucer and Italian Culture

Helterman, Jeffrey, ‘Masks of Love in Troilus and Criseyde’, Comparative Literature, 26/1 (1974), 14–31. Holley, Linda Tarte, Chaucer’s Measuring Eye (Houston: Rice University Press, 1990). Houston, Jason M., Building a Monument to Dante: Boccaccio as Dantista (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2010). Howard, Donald R., ‘Flying Through Space: Chaucer and Milton’, in Joseph Anthony Wittreich (ed.), Milton and the Line of Vision (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1975), pp. 3–23. Huws, Daniel, Medieval Welsh Manuscripts (Aberystwyth: National Library of Wales; Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2000). Ingledew, Frances, ‘The Book of Troy and the Genealogical Construction of History: The Case of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia regum Britanniae’, Speculum, 69 (1994), 665–704. Jager, Eric, ‘Croesus and Chauntecleer: The Royal Road of Dreams’, Modern Language Quarterly, 49/1 (1988), 3–18. James, M. R., A Descriptive Catalogue of the Manuscripts in the Library of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, 2 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1911). ——— A Descriptive Catalogue of the Manuscripts in the Library of St John’s College, Cambridge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1913). Jefferson, Bernard L., Chaucer and the Consolation of Philosophy of Boethius (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1917). Johnson, Anthony W., ‘Shakespeare, Architecture, and the Chorographic Imagination’, Shakespeare, 13/2 (2017), 114–35. Johnston, Andrew James, Performing the Middle Ages from Beowulf to Othello (Turnhout: Brepols, 2008). ——— ‘Wrestling with Ganymede: Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale and the Homoerotics of Epic History’, Germanisch-Romanische Monatsschrift, 50 (2000), 21–43. Jones, Aled Llion, Darogan: Prophecy, Lament and Absent Heroes in Medieval Welsh Literature (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2013). Jordan, Robert M., Chaucer’s Poetics and the Modern Reader (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1987). Kadish, Emilie P., ‘The Proem of Petrarch’s Griselda’, Mediaevalia, 2 (1976), 189–206. Karnes, Michelle, Imagination, Meditation and Cognition in the Middle Ages (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011).

255

CIC_rev.indd 255

15/12/2020 10:56:38

New Centur y Chaucer

Kelly, Henry Ansgar, Chaucerian Tragedy (Woodbridge: D. S. Brewer, 1997). Kerby-Fulton, Kathryn, Books under Suspicion: Censorship and Tolerance of Revelatory Writing in Late Medieval England (Notre Dame IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2006). ——— ‘English Joachimism and its Codicological Context: A List of Joachite Manuscripts of English Origin or Provenance before 1600’, in Julia Eva Wannenmacher (ed.), Joachim of Fiore and the Influence of Inspiration: Essays in Memory of Marjorie E. Reeves (1905–2003) (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013), pp. 183–230. Kirkpatrick, Robin, ‘The Wake of the Commedia: Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales and Boccaccio’s Decameron’, in Boitani (ed.), Chaucer and the Italian Trecento, pp. 201–30. Kiser, Lisa J., ‘Eschatological Politics in Chaucer’s House of Fame’, Modern Language Quarterly, 49/2 (1988), 99–119. Kittredge, George Lyman, ‘Chaucer’s Lollius’, Harvard Studies in Classical Philology, 28 (1917), 47–132. ——— ‘The Pillars of Hercules and Chaucer’s “Trophee”’, in F. Boas (ed.), The Putman Anniversary Volume (Cedar Rapids: Torch; New York: Stechert, 1909), pp. 545–66. Klein, Bernard, Maps and the Writing of Space in Early Modern England (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001). Knuuttila, Simo, ‘Aristotle’s Theory of Perception and Medieval Aristotelianism’, in Knuuttila and Kärkkäinen (eds), Theories of Perception in Medieval and Early Modern Philosophy, pp. 1–22. ——— and Pekka Kärkkäinen (eds), Theories of Perception in Medieval and Early Modern Philosophy, Studies in the History of Philosophy of Mind, 6 (Heidelberg: Springer, 1998). Kolve, V. A., Chaucer and the Imagery of Narrative: The First Five Canterbury Tales (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1984). Koonce, B. G., Chaucer and the Tradition of Fame: Symbolism in The House of Fame (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966). Krüger, Klaus, Grazia: Religiöse Erfahrung und ästhetische Evidenz, Figura, 5 (Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 2016). Kuhl, E. P., ‘Why was Chaucer Sent to Milan in 1378?’, Modern Language Notes, 62/1 (1947), 42–4. Larner, John, ‘Chaucer’s Italy’, in Boitani (ed.), Chaucer and the Italian Trecento, pp. 7–32. Lawton, David, Voice in Later Medieval English Literature: Public Interiorities (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017).

256

CIC_rev.indd 256

15/12/2020 10:56:38

Chaucer and Italian Culture

Lazzarini, Isabella, Communication and Conflict: Italian Diplomacy in the Early Renaissance, 1350–1520 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015). ——— ‘The Preparatory Work: From Choice to Instructions’, in Azzolini and Lazzarini (eds), Italian Renaissance Diplomacy: A Sourcebook, pp. 11–36. Lee, Alexander, ‘Petrarch and the Venetian–Genoese War of 1350– 1355’, in Jason Powell and William T. Rossiter (eds), Authority and Diplomacy from Dante to Shakespeare (Farnham and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2013; repr. London: Routledge, 2016), pp. 39–56. Lefebvre, Henri, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991). Lepley, Douglas, ‘The Monk’s Boethian Tale’, The Chaucer Review, 12 (1977–8), 162–70. Lerner, R. E., Powers of Prophecy: The Cedar of Lebanon Vision from the Mongol Onslaught to the Dawn of the Enlightenment (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1983). Lewis, C. S., Poetry and Prose in the Sixteenth Century (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1954). Lightsey, Scott, Manmade Marvels in Medieval Culture and Literature (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). Lindberg, David C., Theories of Vision from Al-Kindi to Kepler (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976). Lloyd-Morgan, Ceridwen, ‘Darogan yr Olew Bendigaid: Chwedl o’r Bymthegfed Ganrif’, Llên Cymru, 14 (1981–2), 64–85. ——— ‘Prophecy and Welsh Nationhood in the Fifteenth Century’, Transactions of the Honourable Society of Cymmrodorion (1986), 9–26. Loar, Matthew P., ‘Hercules, Mummius, and the Roman Triumph in Aeneid 8’, Classical Philology, 112 (2017), 45–62. Lowes, John Livingston, ‘Chaucer and Dante’s Convivio’, Modern Philology, 13/1 (1915), 19–33. Lumiansky, R. M., Of Sondry Folk: The Dramatic Principle in the Canterbury Tales (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1955). Lynch, Kathryn L., ‘Dating Chaucer’, The Chaucer Review, 42 (2007), pp. 1–22. Mann, Jill, Chaucer and Medieval Estates Satire: The Literature of Social Classes and the ‘General Prologue’ to the Canterbury Tales (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973). ——— ‘In Defense of Francesca: Human and Divine Love in Dante and Chaucer’, Strumenti Critici, 28/1 (2013), 3–26.

257

CIC_rev.indd 257

15/12/2020 10:56:38

New Centur y Chaucer

Marchitello, Howard, ‘Political Maps: The Production of Cartography and Chorography in Early Modern England’, in Margaret J. M. Ezell and Katherine O’Brien O’Keeffe (eds), Cultural Artifacts and the Production of Meaning: The Page, the Image, and the Body (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994), pp. 13–40. Marzano, Annalisa, ‘Hercules and the Triumphal Feast for the Roman People’, in B. Antela-Bernárdez and T. Ñaco del Hoyo (eds), Transforming Historical Landscapes in the Ancient Empires (Oxford: British Archeological Reports, 2009), pp. 83–97. Matheson, Lister M., ‘Chaucer’s Ancestry: Historical and Philological Re-Assessments’, The Chaucer Review, 25 (1991), 171–89. Mattingly, Garrett, Renaissance Diplomacy (Baltimore and London: Penguin, 1964). Maxson, Brian J., ‘Diplomatic Oratory’, in Azzolini and Lazzarini (eds), Italian Renaissance Diplomacy: A Sourcebook, pp. 27–41. Mazzeo, J. A., ‘Dante and Epicurus’, Comparative Literature, 10 (1958), 106–20. McInerney, Jeremy, ‘Callimachus and the Poetics of the Diaspora’, in Greta Hawes (ed.), Myths on the Map: The Storied Landscapes of Ancient Greece (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), pp. 122–40. McKenna, J. W., ‘The Coronation Oil of the Yorkist Kings’, English Historical Review, 82 (1967), 102–4. McKinley, Kathryn, Chaucer’s ‘House of Fame’ and its Boccaccian Intertexts: Image, Vision, and the Vernacular (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 2016). Meecham-Jones, Simon, ‘“Englyssh Gaufride” and British Chaucer: Chaucerian Allusions to the Condition of Wales in the House of Fame’, The Chaucer Review, 44 (2009), 1–24 (pp. 15–22). Mehl, Dieter, Geoffrey Chaucer: An Introduction to His Narrative Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986). Meyvaert, P., ‘John Erghome and the Vaticinium Roberti Bridlington’, Speculum, 61 (1966), 656–64. Middleton, Anne, ‘The Clerk and His Tale: Some Literary Contexts’, Studies in the Age of Chaucer, 2 (1980), 121–50. Miles, Margaret, Image as Insight: Visual Understanding in Western Christianity and Secular Culture (Eugene OR: Wipf and Stock, 1985). Minnis, Alastair, ‘“Dante in Inglissh”: What Il Convivio Really Did for Chaucer’, Essays in Criticism, 55/2 (2005), 97–116.

258

CIC_rev.indd 258

15/12/2020 10:56:38

Chaucer and Italian Culture

——— Medieval Theory of Authorship: Scholastic Literary Attitudes in the Later Middle Ages, second edn (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010). Muscatine, Charles, Chaucer and the French Tradition (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1965). Najemy, John M., A History of Florence: 1200–1575 (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006). Neuse, Richard, Chaucer’s Dante: Allegory and Epic Theater in The Canterbury Tales (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991). ——— ‘The Monk’s De Casibus: The Case Reopened’, in Leonard Michael Koff and Brenda Deen Schildgen (eds), The Decameron and the Canterbury Tales: New Essays on an Old Question (Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2000), pp. 247–77. ——— ‘They Had Their World in Their Time: The Monk’s “Little Narratives”’, Studies in the Age of Chaucer, 22 (2000), 415–23. Newhauser, Richard (gen. ed.), The Chaucer Encyclopedia, 4 vols (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2020). Norton-Smith, J., ‘Chaucer’s Anelida and Arcite’, in P. L. Heyworth (ed.), Medieval Studies for J. A. W. Bennett: Aetatis Suae LXX (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981), pp. 81–99. Orchard, Andy, Pride and Prodigies: Studies in the Monsters of the Beowulf-Manuscript (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1995). Osborn, Marijane, Time and the Astrolabe in The Canterbury Tales (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2002). Otter, Chris, ‘Locating Matter: The Place of Materiality in Urban History’, in Bennett and Joyce (eds), Material Powers, pp. 91–137. Patterson, Lee, Chaucer and the Subject of History (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press; London: Routledge, 1991). ——— ‘“No Man His Reson Herde”: Peasant Consciousness, Chaucer’s Miller, and the Structure of the Canterbury Tales’, in Lee Patterson (ed.), Literary Practice and Social Change in Britain, 1380–1530 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), pp. 113–55. ——— ‘“The Living Witnesses of Our Redemption”: Martyrdom and Imitation in Chaucer’s Prioress’s Tale’, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, 31/3 (2001), 507–60. ——— ‘“What Man Artow?” Authorial Self-Definition in “The Tale of Sir Thopas” and “The Tale of Melibee”’, Studies in the Age of Chaucer, 11 (1989), 117–75.

259

CIC_rev.indd 259

15/12/2020 10:56:38

New Centur y Chaucer

Payne, Robert O., The Key of Remembrance: A Study of Chaucer’s Poetics (New Haven CT: Yale University Press, 1963). Pearsall, Derek, John Lydgate (1371–1449): A Bio-bibliography (Victoria, Canada: University of Victoria Press, 1997). ——— The Life of Geoffrey Chaucer: A Critical Biography (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992). Peck, Sister H. M., ‘The Prophecy of St John of Bridlington’ (unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University of Chicago, 1930). Phillips, J. R. S., ‘Edward II and the Prophets’, in W. M. Ormrod (ed.), England in the Fourteenth Century: Proceedings of the 1985 Harlaxton Symposium (Woodbridge: Boydell, 1986), pp. 189–201. Picard, Gilbert Charles, Les trophées romains: contribution à l’histoire de la religion et de l’art triomphal de Rome (Paris: de Boccard, 1957). Pinti, Daniel J., ‘The Comedy of the Monk’s Tale: Chaucer’s Hugelyn and Early Commentary on Dante’s Ugolino’, Comparative Literature Studies, 37/3 (2000), 277–97. Plant, Margaret, ‘Patronage in the Circle of the Carrara Family: Padua, 1337–1405’, in Francis William Kent, Patricia Simons and J. C. Eade (eds), Patronage, Art, and Society in Renaissance Italy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), pp. 177–99. Popkin, Maggie, The Architecture of the Roman Triumph: Monuments, Memory, and Identity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016). Pratt, Robert A., ‘Chaucer and the Pillars of Hercules’, in Lillian B. Lawler, Dorothy M. Robathan and William C. Korfmacher (eds), Studies in Honor of Ullman (St Louis: Classical Bulletin, 1960), pp. 118–25. Queller, Donald E., The Office of Ambassador in the Middle Ages (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1967). Quinn, William A., ‘Chaucer’s Recital Presence in the House of Fame and the Embodiment of Authority’, The Chaucer Review, 43/2 (2008), 171–96. Ramazani, Jahan, ‘Chaucer’s Monk: The Poetics of Abbreviation, Aggression, and Tragedy’, The Chaucer Review, 27 (1993), 260–76. Redstone, Vincent B. and Lillian J. Redstone, ‘The Heyrons of London: A Study in the Social Origins of Geoffrey Chaucer’, Speculum, 12 (1937), 182–95. Reeves, Marjorie, ‘Dante and the Prophetic View of History’, in Cecil Grayson (ed.), The World of Dante: Essays on Dante and his Times (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980), pp. 44–60. ——— ‘Joachim of Fiore, Dante, and the Prophecy of a Last World Emperor’, in J. Chrysostomides (ed.), Kathegetria: Essays

260

CIC_rev.indd 260

15/12/2020 10:56:38

Chaucer and Italian Culture

Presented to Joan Hussey for Her 80th Birthday (Camberley, Surrey: Porphyrogenitus, 1988), pp. 385–94. ——— ‘Joachimist Influences on the Idea of a Last World Emperor’, in West (ed.), Joachim of Fiore in Christian Thought, I, 511–58. ——— ‘The Development of Apocalyptic Thought: Medieval Attitudes’, in C. A. Patrides and Joseph Wittreich (eds), The Apocalypse in English Renaissance Thought and Literature (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984), pp. 40–72. ——— The Influence of Prophecy in the Later Middle Ages: A Study in Joachimism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969, 2000; repr. Notre Dame IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1993, 2011). ——— and M. W. Bloomfield, ‘The Penetration of Joachism into Northern Europe’, Speculum, 29 (1954), 772–93. Reinhard, Kenneth, ‘Kant with Sade, Lacan with Levinas’, Modern Language Notes, 110/4 (1995), 785–808. Rigby, Stephen H. (ed. with the assistance of Alastair J. Minnis), Historians on Chaucer: The ‘General Prologue’ to the Canterbury Tales (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). Rigg, A. G., ‘John of Bridlington’s Prophecy: A New Look’, Speculum, 63 (1988), 596–613. Roberts, Brynley F., ‘Geoffrey of Monmouth, Historia Regum Britanniae and Brut y Brenhinedd’, in Rachel Bromwich, A. O. H. Jarman and Brynley F. Roberts (eds), The Arthur of the Welsh: The Arthurian Legend in Medieval Welsh Literature (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2008), pp. 97–116. Robinson, James, Joyce’s Dante: Exile, Memory, and Community (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016). Root, Robert K., The Poetry of Chaucer: A Guide to Its Study and Appreciation (Boston and New York: Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1906). Rosenberg, C. M., The Este Monuments and Urban Development in Renaissance Ferrara (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). Rossiter, William T., Chaucer and Petrarch, Chaucer Studies, 41 (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2010). ——— ‘Chaucer Joins the Schiera: The House of Fame, Italy and the Determination of Posterity’, in Davis and Nall (eds), Chaucer and Fame, pp. 21–42. Ruggiers, Paul G., ‘Words into Images in Chaucer’s House of Fame’, Modern Language Notes, 69 (1954), 34–7.

261

CIC_rev.indd 261

15/12/2020 10:56:38

New Centur y Chaucer

Sandquist, T. A., ‘The Holy Oil of St Thomas of Canterbury’, in T. A. Sandquist and Michael R. Powicke (eds), Essays in Medieval History Presented to Bertie Wilkinson (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1969), pp. 330–44. Sassen, Saskia, Territory, Authority, Rights: From Medieval to Global Assemblages (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006). Scanlon, Larry, Narrative, Authority, and Power: The Medieval Exemplum and Chaucerian Tradition (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007). ——— ‘What’s the Pope Got to Do with It? Forgery, Didacticism, and Desire in the Clerk’s Tale’, New Medieval Literatures, 6 (2003), 129–66. Schless, Howard, Chaucer and Dante: A Revaluation (Norman, OK: Pilgrim Books, 1984). Schmitt, Jean-Claude, Ghosts in the Middle Ages: The Living and the Dead in Medieval Society, trans. Teresa Lavender Fagan (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998). Segre, Arturo (ed.), ‘I dispacci di Cristoforo da Piacenza, procuratore mantovano alla corte pontificia (1371–1383)’, Archivio storico italiano, 43 (1909), 27–95. Shippey, Tom, J. R. R. Tolkien: Author of the Century (London: HarperCollins, 2000). Shoaf, R. A., Dante, Chaucer and the Currency of the Word: Money, Images, and Reference in Late Medieval Poetry (Norman OK: Pilgrim Books, 1983). Simpson, James, ‘Dante’s “astripetam aquilam” and the Theme of Poetic Discretion in the House of Fame’, Essays and Studies, 39 (1986), 1–18. ——— Reform and Cultural Revolution. Oxford English Literary History, vol. 2: 1350–1547 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002). ——— ‘Subjects of Triumph and Literary History: Dido and Petrarch in Petrarch’s Africa and Trionfi’, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, 35 (2005), 490–508. Sloane, Barney, The Black Death in London (Stroud: The History Press, 2011). Smallwood, T. M., ‘The Prophecy of the Six Kings’, Speculum, 60 (1985), 571–92. Smyth, Gerry and Jo Croft, ‘Introduction: Culture and Domestic Space’, in Gerry Smyth and Jo Croft (eds), Our House: The Representation of Domestic Space in Modern Culture (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2006), pp. 14–15.

262

CIC_rev.indd 262

15/12/2020 10:56:38

Chaucer and Italian Culture

Sowerby, Tracey A., ‘Early Modern Diplomatic History’, History Compass, 14/9 (2016), 441–56. Spearing, A. C., Medieval to Renaissance in English Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985; repr. 1990). Stafford, Emma, Herakles (New York: Routledge, 2012). Stanbury, Sarah, ‘The Lover’s Gaze in Troilus and Criseyde’, in R. A. Shoaf (ed.), Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde: ‘Subgit to alle Poesye’: Essays in Criticism (Binghamton NY: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1992), pp. 224–38. ——— The Visual Object of Desire in Late Medieval England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008). Steinberg, Glenn A., ‘Chaucer in the Field of Cultural Production: Humanism, Dante, and the House of Fame’, The Chaucer Review, 35/2 (2000), 182–203. Storm, Melvin, ‘Troilus and Dante: The Infernal Center’, Yearbook of English Studies, 22 (1992), 154–61. Strohm, Paul, Social Chaucer (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989). Sturges, Robert S., ‘Desire and Devotion, Vision and Touch in the Vita nuova’, in Manuele Gragnolati, Tristan Kay, Elena Lombardi and Francesca Southerden (eds), Desire in Dante and the Middle Ages (Oxford: Legenda, 2012), pp. 101–13. ——— ‘The State of Exception and Sovereign Masculinity in Troilus and Criseyde’, in Tison Pugh and Marcia Smith Marzec (eds), Men and Masculinity in Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2008), pp. 28–42. ——— ‘Visual Pleasure and La Vita nuova: Lacan, Mulvey, and Dante’, in Corine Schleif and Richard Newhauser (eds), Pleasure and Danger in Perception: The Five Senses in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, special issue of The Senses and Society, 5/1 (2010), 93–105. Summit, Jennifer, Lost Property: The Woman Writer and English Literary History, 1380–1589 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000). Sutton, Anne F. and Livia Visser-Fuchs, ‘Richard III’s Books: VIII: Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia Regum Britanniae with The Prophecy of the Eagle and Commentary’, The Ricardian, 8/105 (June 1989), 217– 24; 8/107 (December 1989), 290–304; and 8/108 (March 1990), 351–62. Tarantino, Elisabetta, ‘The Dante Anecdote in Gower’s Confessio Amantis, Book VII’, The Chaucer Review, 39 (2005), 420–35. Taylor, Jerome, ‘Fraunceys Petrak and the Logyk of Chaucer’s Clerk’, in Aldo Scaglione (ed.), Francis Petrarch, Six Centuries Later: A

263

CIC_rev.indd 263

15/12/2020 10:56:38

New Centur y Chaucer

Symposium, North Carolina Studies in the Romance Languages and Literatures: Symposia, 3 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina; Chicago: Newberry Library, 1975), pp. 364–83. Taylor, John, The Universal Chronicle of Ranulf Higden (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1966). Taylor, Karla, ‘A Text and Its Afterlife: Dante and Chaucer’, Comparative Literature, 35/1 (1983), 1–20. ——— Chaucer Reads ‘The Divine Comedy˙ (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1989). ——— ‘Social Aesthetics and the Emergence of Civic Discourse from the “Shipman’s Tale” to “Melibee”’, The Chaucer Review, 39/3 (2005), 298–322. Taylor, Rupert, The Political Prophecy in England (New York: Columbia University Press, 1911). Travis, Peter W., Disseminal Chaucer: Rereading the ‘Nun’s Priest’s Tale’ (Notre Dame IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2010). Tupper, Frederick, ‘Chaucer and Trophee’, Modern Language Notes, 31 (1916), 142–6. Turner, Marion, Chaucer: A European Life (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019). Twomey, Michael, ‘Encyclopaedias’, in Nigel J. Morgan and Rodney M. Thomson (eds), The Book in Britain, vol. II: 1100–1400 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), pp. 244–9. Ullmann, Walter, ‘Thomas Becket’s Miraculous Oil’, Journal of Theological Studies, n.s. 8 (1957), 129–33. Vallone, Aldo, ‘Commedia: 1. Introduction’, in Richard Lansing (ed.), The Dante Encyclopedia (New York: Garland Publishing, 2000), pp. 181–4. van Paassen, Christiaan, The Classical Tradition of Geography (Groningen: J. B. Wolters, 1957). Vaszily, Scott, ‘Fabliau Plotting Against Romance in Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale’, Style, 31 (1997), 523–42. Versnel, H. S., Triumphus: An Inquiry into the Origin, Development and Meaning of the Roman Triumph (Leiden: Brill, 1970). Wallace, David, Chaucer and the Early Writings of Boccaccio, Chaucer Studies, 12 (Woodbridge: D. S. Brewer, 1985). ——— Chaucerian Polity: Absolutist Lineages and Associational Forms in England and Italy (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997). ——— ‘Chaucer’s Italian Inheritance’, in Piero Boitani and Jill Mann (eds), The Cambridge Companion to Chaucer, second edn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 36–57.

264

CIC_rev.indd 264

15/12/2020 10:56:38

Chaucer and Italian Culture

——— (ed.), Europe: A Literary History, 1348–1418, 2 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016). ——— Geoffrey Chaucer: A New Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017). ——— ‘Griselde before Chaucer: Love between Men, Women and Farewell Art’, in Galloway and Yeager (eds), Through a Classical Eye, pp. 206–20. ——— Premodern Places: Calais to Surinam, Chaucer to Aphra Behn (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006). Wallis, R., ‘Darogan yr Olew Bendigaid a Hystoria yr Olew Bendigaid’, Llên Cymru, 14 (1981–2), 6–91. Watkins, John, ‘Toward a New Diplomatic History of Medieval and Early Modern Europe’, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, 38/1 (2008), 1–14. West, Delno C. (ed.), Joachim of Fiore in Christian Thought: Essays on the Influence of the Calabrian Prophet, 2 vols (New York: Burt Franklin, 1975). Wetherbee, Winthrop, Chaucer and the Poets: An Essay on ‘Troilus and Criseyde’ (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984). ——— ‘Chaucer and the Tragic Vision of Life’, Poetica, 55 (2001), 29–53. ——— Chaucer: The Canterbury Tales (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). ——— ‘The Context of the Monk’s Tale’, in Michio Kawai (ed.), Language and Style in English Literature: Essays in Honour of Michio Masui (Hiroshima: English Research Association of Hiroshima, 1990), pp. 159–77. Wheeler, Bonnie, ‘Dante, Chaucer, and the Ending of “Troilus and Criseyde”’, Philological Quarterly, 61/2 (1982), 105–23. Wimsatt, James I., ‘Anelida and Arcite: A Narrative of Complaint and Comfort’, The Chaucer Review, 5 (1970), 1–8. Windeatt, Barry, ‘Chaucer and the Filostrato’, in Boitani (ed.), Chaucer and the Italian Trecento, pp. 163–83. ——— ‘Plea and Petition in Chaucer’, in Gerald Morgan (ed.), Chaucer in Context: A Golden Age of English Poetry (Bern: Peter Lang, 2012), pp. 189–216. Witt, Ronald, ‘Petrarch, Creator of the Christian Humanist’, in Candido (ed.), Petrarch and Boccaccio, pp. 65–77. Wolfe, Jessica, Humanism, Machinery, and Renaissance Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).

265

CIC_rev.indd 265

15/12/2020 10:56:38

New Centur y Chaucer

Woolgar, C. M., The Senses in Late Medieval England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006). Workman, Jameson S., Chaucer and the Death of the Political Animal (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015). Zak, Gur, Petrarch’s Humanism and the Care of the Self (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010).

266

CIC_rev.indd 266

15/12/2020 10:56:38

INDEX

A absence 49–58, 61, 65–74, 77–8, 80–2 Aeneas 208, 222–4 aesthetics 9–10, 146–64 Africa 94, 111 agriculture 98, 100, 111 Albertanus 33 Alfonso X 146 allegory 10, 13, 107, 158, 160, 162, 198, 230–1, 234 allusion 59, 78, 139, 152, 173–83, 194, 219–21 ambassadors 6, 18–9, 22–3, 27–38; see also diplomacy; embassy angels 76–7, 81–2, 173, 175 Antenor 34 Antichrist 171, 177 apocalypse 11, 169–80 Apollo 69, 70, 77, 198–9 Aquinas, St Thomas 9, 125–6, 129–30, 133 architecture 9–10, 98, 149–58, 163, 206, 209; see also buildings Argos, Argive women 74 Aristotle 9, 108–9, 124–6, 129–31 Arthur, King 11, 177, 183–5 Asia 94, 101 astrology 9, 10, 145–55, 160, 163–4 Athens 68, 74, 93, 152; see also Greece auctoritas 29, 31, 71–3, 217; see also authorship; authority

CIC_rev.indd 267

audience 6, 19, 111–12, 218, 226–30, 234; see also reader Augustine, St of Hippo 9, 19, 107, 136–40, 150–3, 177, 219 De Trinitate 132, 133, 136 authority 12–13, 169, 193–5, 198, 209, 217–20, 223–5, 228–30, 232 of the author 5, 71 political 21, 27, 78 royal 109–11 territorial 113 textual 13 authorship 13, 65, 67, 70–1, 169, 193–5, 198–9, 206, 208, 217–18, 228–30

B Babylon 23, 184–5 Bacchus 194 battles 69, 95, 145, 184, 201, 229; see also war Beatrice 9, 56–7, 72, 122–3, 133–4, 137–9, 175, 224; see also Dante Alighieri: Paradiso Bede 91, 100–3 Boccaccio, Giovanni 2–7, 19, 21, 29–30, 34–6, 49–52, 58–72, 158, 193, 202, 209, 223–6 Amorosa visione 200, 224 Decameron 3, 5, 7, 20, 23, 57, 58–68, 71, 73, 102, 146

15/12/2020 10:56:39

New Centur y Chaucer

Chaucer, Geoffrey (life) as poet–diplomat 4, 18, 23, 20–1, 23–7, 34, 38 as esquire 4, 26–7 as translator 12, 24, 30–2, 195, 226 death of family 45–7, 49 experience in Italy 4, 6, 17–18, 38, 148, 153–4, 157 humanism 30–1, 33–4, 153 Chaucer, Geoffrey (works) Anelida and Arcite 5, 7–8, 67–75, 77–82 Canterbury Tales 5, 13, 66, 102, 226–8 Clerk’s Tale 3, 5, 6, 8, 23, 28, 32–6, 91, 102–14 Fragment VI 13, 226, 228, 230 House of Fame 5, 11–13, 108, 156–7, 169, 173, 175–6, 182, 186, 204, 208–9, 217–34 Knight’s Tale 5, 9, 10, 67, 74, 145–9, 152, 155, 157, 159–63 Monk’s Tale 11, 12, 147, 193–209, 229–31, 233 Nun’s Priest’s Tale 12, 13, 217, 226, 230, 232–4 Tale of Melibee 32–3, 228, 229, 231 Wife of Bath’s Tale 123 Parliament of Fowls 5 Romaunt of the Rose 49 Troilus and Criseyde 3, 5, 6, 9, 34, 121–3, 134–41, 182, 193, 228 Chauntecleer 231–4 chorography 8, 91–2, 94–5, 97, 100–14 Christianity 98, 106–9, 113–14, 123, 130, 137, 171–2, 175, 183 Christ, Jesus 98, 151, 171 Christendom 18, 21–2, 98, 113–14, 186

Boccaccio, Giovanni (continued) De casibus virorum illustrium 12 Esposizioni sopra la Comedia di Dante 52, 58, 61–3, 65 Filostrato 3, 5, 34, 36, 67, 122 Teseida 3, 5, 7, 10, 67–74, 82, 147, 221 body 51–2, 63, 127–8, 131, 137, 161 Boethius 200, 203, 219, 234 Boitani, Piero 2, 17, 124 borders 93, 97, 113, 185; see also boundaries borrowing 2, 5, 7–9, 13, 107, 223 boundaries 8, 93, 100, 107, 194; see also borders Britain 8, 11, 91, 94–6, 100–1, 111–14, 170, 177, 180–5, 206–7 Brunelleschi, Brunetto 58–61, 63–4 buildings 9, 22, 48, 98, 147–50, 155; see also architecture Burckhardt, Jacob Christopher 22, 28, 156 burial 46–7, 74–6, 164; see also funeral; graveyard

C Caesar, Julius 207–8 Calchas 34–7; see also Chaucer, Geoffrey (works): Clerk’s Tale Canterbury, archbishop of 179 capitalism see commerce Carraresi family 148, 154 Cavalcanti, Cavalcante di 7, 52–7, 60–3, 76; see also Dante Alighieri; Inferno Cavalcanti, Guido 7, 50–65, 73, 76; see also Dante Alighieri: Inferno ceremony 11, 19, 196–7 chaos 10, 155, 208, 218, 223, 226, 228, 230–1 characterisation 80, 224–7

268

CIC_rev.indd 268

15/12/2020 10:56:39

Chaucer and Italian Culture

death 7, 45–52, 55–6, 65, 139–40, 151, 172, 174, 196, 204–7, 233 Delphic 199, 231 desire 9, 134, 137, 139 dialogue 2, 7, 58, 66 didacticism 164, 200, 217–18, 231 Dido 220, 223, 224 diplomacy 4, 6, 17–38, 154; see also ambassadors; embassy discourse 51, 54, 62–4, 76, 92, 146, 186, 217, 232 Chaucerian 8 chorographic 103, 110, 112–13 civic 229 geographic 93, 98, 100 of authority 70–1, 73 of triumph 12 of painting 146, 153 of power 113 dreams 12–13, 81, 175, 199, 217–18, 220–1, 223–5, 231, 233

Church 113, 175 God 9, 56, 62–3, 78–80, 98, 107, 126, 133–8, 222, 225, 227 Cicero, Marcus Tullius 29–30 ciphers 175, 178–9 city-states 3–4, 108, 145–6, 153 classical reception 8, 12, 29–30, 33, 91–8, 100, 103, 106, 113, 124–9, 131, 133, 136–40, 152–5, 195–206, 217–19, 224, 226 coast 94–6, 101, 104 colonisation 92 colour 129–31, 155, 161, 163–4 commemoration 38, 145, 194, 197–8 commentary 52, 125–6, 129, 217–18, 222 commerce 2, 6, 8, 103, 109, 111–14, 227; see also towns; urban coronation 175, 179 Corynne 72, 74 court 4, 24, 26, 32, 35, 154, 180 Creation 98, 174, 176 criticism 7, 13, 17, 114 Croesus, king of Lydia 230–3 crown 171, 198; see also monarchy; royalty

E eagle 10–11, 13, 108, 169–70, 173–85, 218, 220–5, 232 Early Modern 21–2, 29, 34, 37–8, 95, 100–1, 103 Earth 7, 51, 62, 94, 98, 193, 205 ecclesiastical 100, 173 economy 8, 47, 93, 103, 108, 111–13, 227 Edward III, King 11, 26, 178–9 Egypt 101 ekphrasis 10, 75, 149, 158–61, 223–4 embassy 18, 21–3, 33, 38; see also ambassadors; diplomacy emotion 46–9, 75–6, 80–2, 158 empire 10–1, 92–8, 113, 171, 174, 194, 206 empiricism 4, 7–8, 48, 92–3 England 2, 3, 10–11, 25–7, 45–7, 100–3, 137, 152, 170, 174, 176–86, 225; see also London

D damnation 52, 56, 61; see also hell Dante Alighieri 2–13, 17, 19, 49–67, 72, 121–37, 152, 169–76, 182, 197–9, 218–19, 221–6, 228, 232 Convivio 9, 121, 123–8, 131–2 Inferno 7, 11, 50–62, 65, 68, 71, 76, 82, 172, 173, 222 Paradiso 70, 78, 171, 174, 198, 221, 232 Purgatorio 7, 50, 56–7, 61, 72–82, 175, 221–2 Vita nova 9, 54, 57, 61, 121–6, 133–4, 137, 139

269

CIC_rev.indd 269

15/12/2020 10:56:39

New Centur y Chaucer

chorography 91, 100–1; see also chorography classical 8; see also classical reception dream vision 218, 223–4; see also dreams poetic triumph 10–11, 197; see also triumph prophetic 171; see also prophecy Geoffrey of Monmouth 91, 101, 177, 180–4 geography 6, 8, 59, 91–5, 97–8, 100–1, 103, 106–8, 111, 113 geometry 10, 156–8, 161 Ghibelline 51, 55, 145 ghost 7, 46, 50–3, 57, 72, 76, 82 Giotto di Bondone 10, 146, 148–50, 153, 155–6 glory 134, 199–200, 202–3, 206–9 gods 68, 155, 175–6, 196–7; see also Christianity: God government 10, 25, 33, 148, 150, 153, 227, 229 Gower, John 17, 102, 180–1, 185–6 grace 31–2, 68–9, 134, 183, 223 graveyard 21, 58– 60, 62, 64; see also burial; funeral Greece 34–7, 91–5, 97–101, 103, 171, 194; see also Athens Gregory XI, Pope 23 Griselda 3, 5, 8, 23, 27–32, 102–3, 107–13; see also Chaucer, Geoffrey (works): Clerk’s Tale

epic 68, 74, 197, 222 Epicureanism 51–3, 56–7, 61–3, 65, 76 epistemology 78–80, 92 Epistola Alexandri ad Aristotelem 194–5, 209 eschatology 46, 56, 62, 174, 176, 231 ethnography 91, 93–5 etymology 37, 99–100 Europe 4, 6, 11, 18, 22, 28, 34, 93–4, 101, 111, 170–1, 173, 177–8, 186 exegesis 61, 72, 75, 170, 227 exile 4, 23, 51, 55–6, 62, 178, 229 extramission 124, 126–7, 129, 132–3, 135–7, 139 eye 55, 75, 124–36, 154, 159, 176

F fabliau 5, 155, 227 fabula 30, 107 fame 12, 195, 197–8, 200–9, 225 fifteenth century 17, 22, 25, 27, 148, 163, 176–7, 181–3, 185–6 fire 51, 125–8, 201 fortune 12, 195, 200, 204–5, 208–9, 225, 229–30, 233–4 fourteenth century 6, 7, 18, 22, 23, 25, 30, 32, 36, 37, 95, 102, 103, 114, 124, 127, 146, 148, 149, 153, 155, 163, 164, 168, 176–8, 180, 186, 227, fox 38, 201, 231–3 France 1, 4–5, 26–8, 178, 183–5 fresco 10, 145–51, 153, 163 funeral 46, 76, 161; see also burial; graveyard

H haunting 6, 45, 49–50, 62–82 heaven 126, 174, 225 Heidegger, Martin 48 hell 50, 65, 80, 155, 172; see also damnation Henry II, King 180 Henry IV, King 11, 178–9, 181 Henry VI, King 38 Henry of Luxemburg 173, 175

G gaze 9, 112, 134–40, 156, 234 gender 71–2, 78, 112, 135 genre 8, 32, 103, 113, 200, 228, 231

270

CIC_rev.indd 270

15/12/2020 10:56:39

Chaucer and Italian Culture

irony 62, 65–6, 70–2, 76–82, 220, 228 Isidore of Seville 94, 97–9, 101–2, 106, 133 Italy 1–14, 17–19, 28, 95–113, 137, 146, 152–4, 172–3, 186; see also Rome Chiesa degli Emeritani 150–1, 163 chorography 91, 98, 100; see also chorography Florence 19, 27, 55–60, 62, 105, 146, 148, 151–2, 226 Genoa 20, 26–8 humanism 19, 33–4, 225; see also humanism language 4–6, 29, 102, 219 literary tradition 1–3, 5, 7, 11, 13, 29, 49–50, 56, 67, 123, 152–3, 172–4, 217, 219 Lombardy 19, 103, 105, 108, 110, 112, 147, 154 Milan 19, 23, 145, 148, 154 peninsula 21, 91, 96, 98, 111, 172 politics 6, 18–19, 21, 108, 145–7, 153; see also politics trecento 1–2, 6–7, 12, 17, 28, 50, 56, 67, 69, 76, 82, 123, 146, 148, 152, 155, 158 Venice 19–20, 23, 106, 110–11, 146, 150, 174 visual art 147, 149, 157, 162–4; see also visual art

Heraclides Criticus 93–4 Hercules 11, 95, 193–7, 201, 203–5, 209 heresy 7, 8, 50–3, 55–7, 59, 61–3, 65, 76, 79, 81, 171 hermeneutics 7, 12, 218, 220, 223–4 Higden, Ranulph 91, 101–2 Polychronicon 101–2 Holy Roman Empire 11, 146, 174 Homer 199, 206, 208–9 humanity 151–2, 197, 206, 220, 223, 234 humanism 3–4, 19–20, 29–30, 33, 91, 109, 146–7, 153–4, 225–6 humour 13, 11, 222, 227

I iconography 70, 163–4 idealism 11, 19, 22, 111 identification 106, 174, 180, 182, 193 identity 48, 51–3, 61, 72, 77, 146, 149, 182, 194, 225, 228 ideology 3–4, 8, 108, 157, 163, 227 idolatry 9, 137, 138, 139 illusion 156, 161, 176, 220 imagination 46–8, 55–8, 65, 74–6, 80, 126, 134, 152, 163, 173, 218–19, 223, 234 imitation 8, 12, 66, 108, 170–1, 217, 228 immortality 12, 51, 196–9, 201, 205–9 imperialism 3, 8, 11, 13, 92–3, 98, 106–7, 146, 170–83, 185–6, 221, 232 internationalism 5, 8, 22, 28, 103, 112 intertextuality 2–3, 5–7, 11, 13, 58–82, 101–3, 105, 121–39, 195–206, 219–20 intromission 126, 135, 137 invention 12, 65, 105, 217–18, 230–1 invocation 67–72, 77–8, 82, 197, 221

J Joachim of Fiore 11, 170–1, 173–5, 177–9, 181 judgement 56, 123, 169, 174, 200, 229 Jupiter 95, 99, 174–6, 222 jurisdiction 28, 32–3, 92, 111 justice 74, 174, 232 juxtaposition 13, 95, 161, 174, 206, 222, 225, 228

271

CIC_rev.indd 271

15/12/2020 10:56:39

New Centur y Chaucer

K

merchant 5, 18, 112, 113, 227 metatextualism 57, 71–2, 224 military 12, 19, 27, 98, 194, 196, 199, 200 mimesis 218, 223, 228 modernity 153, 156–7 monarchy 4, 11, 18, 25–6, 92–3, 96, 98–9, 106, 114, 146, 171, 173, 176–86; see also crown; royalty monument 98, 194–7, 205, 209 morality 30, 102–3, 105, 109, 111, 158, 173, 198, 207, 220, 231 mortality 9, 47, 51, 56, 57, 62, 65, 225 mountains 75, 95–7, 99–101, 104–7, 110–11, 208–9, 232 mythology 93, 95, 98, 155, 194, 197–8

kings see monarchy; crown knowledge 13, 99, 169, 224, 234

L Lancastrian 176–7, 179–81, 185–6 landscape 8, 13, 92–100, 105–8, 110–13 language 13, 134, 155, 220, 226–30, 232, 234 Latin language 4–5, 11–12, 20, 24, 27, 30, 63, 91–4, 102–3, 105–8, 113, 182–5, 193–5 legend 95, 147, 173, 178–85, 233 linguistics 2, 124, 227; see also language Lollius, Marcus 5, 11, 72, 194–5, 208 London 2, 5, 45–6, 100, 102, 112–13, 179; see also England love 9, 57, 68, 73, 79–81, 121–4, 129, 134–9, 159, 172, 224, 231 Lydgate, John 17, 38–9, 66, 193

N narrative 66, 72–4, 79–82, 91, 109, 112, 202–3, 221, 224, 228–31 expectation 74 frame 62, 67, 107, 112 historical 17, 163 lesson 197, 200 setting 80, 160 teleological 156 narrator 79, 108, 136, 149, 159, 161, 174–5, 208, 218–20, 226–28, 230–1 nation 21, 92, 95, 174 nuncio 24, 25, 27, 28, 34–5

M maps 8, 92–4, 97–8, 100, 104–5, 108, 112–13 materialism 7–8, 48–9, 57, 67, 76, 92, 109, 111, 113 mathematics 156–8, 161, 163 Mattingly, Garrett 21–2, 30, 33–4 meaning 1, 3, 12–13, 92, 147–8, 153, 163, 220, 222; see also semantics; semiotics mediation 21, 30, 133, 218, 223 Mediterranean 93, 94, 111 Mela, Pomponius 94–8, 101–6, 110–11 memorialisation 12, 38, 46, 69, 76, 194–5, 205–9 memory 46–7, 70, 75, 134, 195, 197, 205–7, 221

O objectivity 92, 100, 156–7 Oedipus 135 oration 19, 24, 27, 29–38 Ovid 12, 197, 209, 219, 222, 224–5 Metamorphoses 220

272

CIC_rev.indd 272

15/12/2020 10:56:39

Chaucer and Italian Culture

P

politics 3–4, 6–11, 13, 19, 24, 112, 145–50, 152–5, 157, 163–5, 225–6, 229–30 political prophecy 169–82, 185–6; see also prophecy territorial 92–3, 100, 108–9; see also territory visual 163–5 power 29, 32, 34, 70, 113, 151, 233, 234 authorial 208, 218, 221; see also authority; authorship divine 98, 127, 200; see also Christianity political 19, 23, 25–6, 100, 114, 146, 171, 198, 229–30; see also politics preface 8, 103, 107–10, 113, 218–20; see also prologue pride 51, 61, 75–82, 153 procession 12, 196–8 procurator 18, 26–8, 33–5 proem see preface prologue 206, 227, 231; see also preface propaganda 147–8, 153–5, 179, 181, 185 prophecy 10–11, 169–86 Provan, Sir James de 26–7 providence 230, 232–4 public sphere 9–10, 12, 19, 27, 30, 48, 98, 146, 153, 205–6, 227 purgatory 72, 79, 175, 224, 232; see also Dante Alighieri: Purgatorio

paganism 9, 80, 137–8, 140, 175, 183–5 painting 9–10, 145–50, 153, 155–58, 160, 163; see also visual art pan–European 148, 169–70; see also Europe; internationalism; transnational papacy 4, 23–4, 28, 33, 113, 173, 177–8 parliament 5, 35 parody 9, 13, 138, 220, 222, 226–8, 232–4 passion 57, 61, 137, 151, 199 pastiche 169, 175, 181, 186 pathos 36, 77 patronage 93, 153 peace 11, 19–21, 175, 207 peasant 23–4, 108, 112 pedagogical 226, 229 perception 51, 53, 55, 62, 66, 123, 125, 128–30, 136, 156 performance 18–19, 36–7, 46 periodisation 21–2, 28–9, 37 Petrarch, Francesco 2–6, 8, 12, 17, 19–20, 23–5, 29–32, 37, 102–3, 105–11, 113–14, 151–2, 197–200, 219, 225 Canzoniere 3, 5 Seniles 23, 27, 29–30, 32 phallic 133, 135–6, 139 philosophy 5, 7, 22, 60–1, 108–9, 124–6, 129, 151–3 pictoriality 10, 150, 153, 159–63, 177 pilgrim 50, 53, 56, 72, 76, 82, 226–8 pillars 193–5, 205, 209 plague 7, 45–7, 49 planets 9–10, 94, 145–51, 153–5, 163–4 Plato 9, 124–9, 131, 133 Pliny 94, 98, 101–2, 105, 194, 196 poetry 2, 4, 80, 107, 109, 122, 180, 198, 205–6, 209, 226–9

Q quotation 58, 75, 80, 151

R rationality 7, 57, 146, 150, 153, 155, 163

273

CIC_rev.indd 273

15/12/2020 10:56:39

New Centur y Chaucer

scripture 198, 207; see also Christianity Scythia 94, 101 sea 37, 95–7, 99, 105–7, 229 semantics 12, 26, 164, 227 semiotics 18, 98 senses 8–9, 121–38, 161; see also touch; vision Sibyl 171–7, 185 sight see vision sin see pride; heresy Solinus, Gaius Julius 97–8, 101, 105 soul 51–2, 56, 75, 79, 107, 128, 130, 133–4, 136–8, 174–5 Spain 101, 174, 177 spatial 7, 48, 67, 94, 97, 100, 158 spectacle 197, 205 spectral 53, 58, 60, 69, 72, 74, 78; see also ghost spirituality 9, 48, 65, 82, 123–4, 132–3, 136–9, 171, 175, 225; see also Christianity stars 10, 94, 107, 222 state 21–2, 25, 30, 33–4, 93, 108, 113, 175–6, 198 Statius 72, 208, 209 Thebaid 72 statues 10, 158, 160–1, 163–4, 196, 197 Strabo 93–4, 103 style 13, 28, 66–8, 103, 106, 156, 163, 222, 228–9 subjectivity 139, 156, 228 sublime 111, 137 symbolism 10–12, 107, 111–12, 151, 175, 181 syntax 63, 73, 80, 232

reader 103, 138, 217, 220, 222, 226, 229–31 reading 12, 53, 64, 122, 217–18, 223, 226–7, 230 reality 13, 100, 113, 132, 137, 156, 220, 227, 232 regional 91–4, 103, 105, 109–10 religion 9, 11, 93, 99, 113, 151–2, 184; see also Christianity republicanism 3, 10, 19, 146, 153, 196, 226 re-mediation 1, 5, 11, 13 remembrance 46, 74–7, 81, 205 Renaissance 6, 8, 21–2, 28, 33, 37, 91, 113, 146, 156–7, 164, 197 representation literary 6, 9, 24–5, 32, 37–8, 55–7, 92, 132, 147, 151, 156–60, 181–2, 218, 223–4, 227–8, 233–4 political 19–22, 28–30, 33, 37, 146, 153 reputation 203–7, 209 revolution 156, 177, 185 rhetoric 8, 19, 26, 30, 36–7, 78, 81, 91–2, 103–9, 158–60, 218–19, 222, 226–32 Richard II, King 11, 27, 176–9, 186 Richard the Redeless 180–1 ritual 6, 12, 18, 46–7, 196, 228 river 93, 95–7, 99–101, 104, 106–7, 11–11, 220 Rome 12, 23, 24, 95, 97, 152, 173, 196, 197, 206; see also Italy royalty 18, 26–7, 101, 109, 113–14, 181; see also crown; monarchy

S satire 176, 220, 223, 228–9, 234 Saturn 99, 155, 160 Saxons 11, 183–4 science 92, 94, 146, 149–50, 153–8, 219

T temples 10, 68, 82, 98, 122, 136, 138, 147–8, 153, 158, 160–3, 183, 196, 202, 220

274

CIC_rev.indd 274

15/12/2020 10:56:39

Chaucer and Italian Culture

U

territory 8, 11, 28, 92–3, 97–100, 103, 108, 111, 113, 173, 178, 184 theatres 10, 147–9, 154–5, 157–8, 161, 163; see also architecture Thebes 73–4, 80, 93, 208 theology 78, 80, 151, 219, 225 Theseus 10, 68, 72–4, 82, 147–9, 154–5, 157, 163, 229; see also Chaucer, Geoffrey (works): Knight’s Tale thirteenth century 5, 25, 27, 33–4, 127, 146, 170, 180 thunder 176, 221 tombs 51, 59–60, 75–6; see also graveyard topography 8, 91–113 touch 8–9, 121, 123–4, 129–35, 137–9; see also senses towns 92–5, 97, 98, 100, 103, 105–7, 110–14; see also commerce; urban tragedy 9, 200, 207–8 transcendence 57, 234 translation 3, 5, 24, 29–32, 182, 184–5, 195, 217, 230 transnational 6, 18, 28; see also international; pan-European trecento see Italy triumph 11–12, 193, 196–201, 203, 205–7, 209 Troy, Trojan 35–6, 38, 77, 122, 173, 175, 182, 206, 208 tropaeum, trophaeum 11, 195, 196, 197, 209, 211, 212, 213 Trophee 11–12, 193–7, 209; see also Chaucer, Geoffrey (works): Monk’s Tale truth 13, 92, 105, 107, 109, 220, 223–4, 226, 228, 232, 234 Tudor 8, 100–1 twelfth century 11, 146, 174, 184 tyranny 4, 20, 29, 73, 112, 145, 152, 179, 201, 226

Uberti, Farinata degli 51, 55, 76; see also Dante Alighieri: Inferno urban 4, 6, 8–10, 25, 93, 98, 103, 108–14, 227; see also commerce; towns Urban V, Pope 23

V Venus 10, 158, 160–1, 163–4, 220 violence 133, 137, 229 Virgil 12, 50, 76, 106, 172–3, 197, 208–9, 218–20, 224 Aeneid 173, 218 virtue 19–20, 29–30, 109, 111, 122, 230 Visconti of Milan 4, 19–20, 27, 29–30, 108, 145, 147–8, 154 Bernabò 4, 19, 27, 147, 154 vision 8–9, 121–40, 158–9, 162–3; see also senses visual art 137, 145–50, 154–64, 205–6 voice 12–13, 22, 29, 33–4, 51, 77, 81, 102, 111, 136, 174, 176, 218, 222, 226

W Wales 10–11, 101, 169–70, 177, 179–80, 182–6 Wallace, David 3, 4, 7, 17, 33, 48, 67, 108, 152, 170 Walter 8, 28, 103, 106, 107, 110–11; see also Chaucer, Geoffrey (works): Clerk’s Tale war 4, 11–12, 19, 27, 73, 96, 174, 183–4, 194–7; see also battles women 9, 12, 74, 111, 147

Z Zenobia, Septimia 200, 202 zodiac 10, 149, 151

275

CIC_rev.indd 275

15/12/2020 10:56:39

Thi spagei nt ent i onal l yl ef tbl ank

Thi spagei nt ent i onal l yl ef tbl ank

Thi spagei nt ent i onal l yl ef tbl ank

‘The eight essays in this

intrigued by the nature and consequences

volume reinvigorate the study

of Chaucer’s exposure to Italian culture

of Chaucer’s reception and representation of Italian culture

during his professional visits to Italy in the

by reconceptualising the ways

1370s. In this volume, leading scholars take

in which we might approach

a new and more holistic view of Chaucer’s

his work. Chaucer’s relation to

engagement with Italian cultural practice,

Petrarch gains depth and nuance … and his acquaintance with

moving beyond the traditional ‘sources and

developments in Italian painting

analogues’ approach to reveal the varied

casts new light on both his

strands of Italian literature, art, politics and

political engagements and his

intellectual life that permeate Chaucer’s work.

interaction with Boccaccio’s works … Chaucer and Italian

Each chapter examines from different angles

Culture is a book anyone

links between Chaucerian texts and Italian

interested in cross-cultural

intellectual models, including poetics, chorography, visual art, classicism, diplomacy and prophecy. Echoes of Petrarch, Dante and

translation will want to read.’ Professor Warren Ginsberg, University of Oregon

Boccaccio reverberate throughout the book,

‘Addressing important topics

across a rich and diverse landscape of Italian

such as diplomacy, topography,

cultural legacies. Together, the chapters cover a wide range of theory and reference,

vision, painting and language, Chaucer and Italian Culture also offers unusual and illuminating

while sharing a united understanding of the

approaches to subjects such

rich impact of Italian culture on Chaucer’s

as the poetics of haunting,

narrative art.

prophecy and civic ritual. With essays by established scholars new generation of medievalists, the collection is a timely addition

HELEN FULTON is Chair and

to research on Chaucer’s

Professor of Medieval Literature

European identity.’ Emeritus Professor Nick Havely, University of York

Cover design: Olwen Fowler Cover images: Shutterstock

www.uwp.co.uk

Edited by H E L E N F U LTO N

alongside contributions from a

at the University of Bristol.

Chaucer and Italian Culture

Chaucerian scholarship has long been

Gwasg Prifysgol Cymru University of Wales Press

Chaucer-Italian.indd 1

16/12/2020 12:01