Mobility and Identity in Chaucer's "Canterbury Tales" 1843845520, 9781843845522

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SARAH BRECKENRIDGE WRIGHT is an assistant professor of English at Duquesne University. Design: Toni Michelle Cover: Miniature depicting a man who personifies idleness riding a donkey across a bridge, surrounded by boats and bodies in motion. From an early fifteenth-century Book of Hours made in Paris. © The British Library Board, Yates Thompson MS 3, fol. 162r.



Sarah Breckenridge Wright

he Canterbury Tales is a collection of stories told by pilgrims en route to Canterbury; but how does their movement shape the world around them, and how are they shaped by their world? This volume seeks to answer these questions by exploring expressions of mobility in Chaucer’s frame narrative and tales. Combining the theoretical and historical methods of literary analysis with the interpretive tools of cultural geography and ecocriticism, it argues that movement is the medium through which identity is performed in The Canterbury Tales. This unique interdisciplinary approach shows how physical and ideological mobilities shape and are shaped by geographical, ecological, sociopolitical, and gendered identities. As human and more-than-human bodies cross borders and dissolve boundaries, they contribute to a fluid, permeable, and hybrid world that challenges traditional perceptions of boundedness, security, and fixity. By examining this kinesis alongside contexts including medieval bridge building, economics, and biology, this book reveals a rich exchange between word and world. In the end, The Canterbury Tales emerges as an amalgam of lived experience and the poetic imagination that both chronicles and constructs a world in the process of becoming.

Mobility and Identity in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales

Chaucer Studies

Mobility and Identity

Sarah Breckenridge Wright

CHAUCER STUDIES XLVI MOBILITY AND IDENTITY IN CHAUCER’S CANTERBURY TALES

CHAUCER STUDIES ISSN 0261-9822

Founding Editor Professor Derek S. Brewer Editorial Board Professor Helen Cooper Dr Isabel Davis Dr Robert Meyer-Lee Dr William T. Rossiter

Since its foundation, the series Chaucer Studies has played a highly significant role in the development and promotion of research on Chaucer and his many cultural contexts. It is an ideal forum for the publication of work by both younger and established scholars, comprising innovative monographs and essay collections together with indispensable reference books. Chaucer scholarship just would not be the same without it. Professor Alastair Minnis Douglas Tracy Smith Professor of English, Yale University

The publisher welcomes new proposals for the series; monographs are particularly encouraged but volumes of essays will be included when appropriate. All submissions will receive rapid, informed attention. They should go in the first instance to Caroline Palmer, Editorial Director, at the following address: Boydell & Brewer, PO Box 9, Woodbridge, Suffolk, IP12 3DF, UK Previously published volumes in this series are listed at the back of this book

MOBILITY AND IDENTITY IN CHAUCER’S CANTERBURY TALES

SARAH BRECKENRIDGE WRIGHT

D. S. BREWER

© Sarah Breckenridge Wright 2020 All rights reserved. Except as permitted under current legislation no part of this work may be photocopied, stored in a retrieval system, published, performed in public, adapted, broadcast, transmitted, recorded or reproduced in any form or by any means, without the prior permission of the copyright owner

The right of Sarah Breckenridge Wright to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

First published 2020 D. S. Brewer, Cambridge

ISBN 978 1 84384 552 2

D. S. Brewer is an imprint of Boydell & Brewer Ltd PO Box 9, Woodbridge, Suffolk IP12 3DF, UK and of Boydell & Brewer Inc. 668 Mt Hope Avenue, Rochester, NY 14620–2731, USA website: www.boydellandbrewer.com

The publisher has no responsibility for the continued existence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

This publication is printed on acid-free paper

For Mike

Contents List of illustrations

viii

Introduction: Moving Across, In, and As the World 1 Economic Mobilities in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales 2 Building Bridges to Canterbury 3 Rocking the Cradle and Quiting the Knight 4 “Translating” Female Bodies and (En)Gendering Mobility Conclusion: Mobilizing Medieval and Modern Identities

1 21 59 89 131 183

Acknowledgments 187 Bibliography 189 Index 205

Illustrations Maps 1 Map of the Canterbury Pilgrimage

49

Figures 1 2 3

View of Rochester Bridge with the Castle &c., c. 1775. Rochester Bridge Trust 1911.4.1. Reproduced by permission of the Rochester Bridge Trust. 67 An Exact Plan and Elevation, Rochester Bridge over the Medway, copied by John James Robson, c. 1912. Rochester Bridge Trust 1912.1.1. Reproduced by permission of the Rochester Bridge Trust. 69 View of London Bridge, 1632, by Claude de Jongh (1600–1663). Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Fund B2005.4. 79

The author and publishers are grateful to the institutions listed for permission to reproduce the materials in which they hold copyright.

Introduction: Moving Across, In, and As the World In his Confessions, Augustine condemns “concupiscentia oculorum” (“the lust of the eyes”) as being the product of a “vana et curiosa cupiditas” (“vain and curious desire”) that distracts human beings from meditating on God and directs them to terrestrial rather than heavenly destinations. Yet in one of the most poetic passages of Book 10, he writes, “et eunt homines mirari alta montium et ingentes fluctus maris et latissimos lapsus fluminum et oceani ambitum et gyros siderum” (“people are moved to wonder by mountain peaks, by vast waves of the sea, by broad waterfalls on rivers, by the all-embracing extent of the ocean, by the revolutions of the stars”) (10.8.15).1 A passage on the memory’s capacity to produce infinite space – Augustine sees these sites “in memoria… spatiis tam ingentibus quasi foris viderem” (“inwardly in my memory… with the same vast spaces between, as if I saw them abroad”) – takes a sharp detour as he contemplates how human beings move through and are moved by the world around them. People were and are still inspired to traverse the globe in search of its highest peaks and widest canyons, and upon arrival they are stirred by the earth’s beauty, power, and grandeur. Even those most dedicated to a “life of the mind” (e.g., Augustine) find themselves drawn toward what lies beyond their books’ bindings. This suggests the impact of mobility on the human experience, underscored still further in the Confessions by the fact that venturing outside will reveal a world that is itself remarkably kinetic. The image Augustine offers is not a static artistic rendering of the natural world – a “landscape” in its original sense from the Dutch landschap – but a place in motion, where water flows and falls, the ocean embraces, and stars revolve. Despite his best efforts to turn his eyes toward God, Augustine is seduced by celestial, terrestrial, and embodied movements, both sensed and thereafter seen in memoria. Leading up to the fourteenth century, observations like these became increasingly common as pilgrimage, commerce, warfare, and disease encouraged bodies to move through space. St Bridget of Sweden recalls how Christ “bad hir ordeinde hir to Jerusalem to visit the sepulcre and othir holi places” 1

Augustine, Confessions, trans. Henry Chadwick (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 187.

2  Mobility and Identity in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales

(7.6), and Margery Kempe’s autobiography describes how she “toke hir leve at hir husband and of the holy ankyr, which had teld hir beforn the process of hir goyng and mech dysese that sche schuld sufferyn be the wey” (1387–9).2 Both narratives unfold into meditations on movement through space and time as the female mystics witness Christ’s passion at the Mount of Calvary and Mary’s labor in Bethlehem.3 Meanwhile, Sir John Mandeville’s pilgrimage to Jerusalem catapults beyond the Holy Land to consider an Ethiopian race that “han but oon foot, and they goo so faste that hit is mervayl” (1501–2), and “schippis without nayles other bondes of yrun for rocis of adamaundis that beth in the see that wolde drawe schippis to hem” (1562–3).4 Here secular travel and curiositas dismantle holy pilgrimage as Mandeville’s return trip to Jerusalem succumbs to a forward momentum that nearly leads to his circumnavigation of the globe, and (as in the Confessions) the world is shown to be mobile: marvelous races hop exceedingly fast across a turgid landscape and carefully crafted ships work to resist the pull of magnetic rocks. In fictional narratives of the Middle Ages, too, we see an increased attention to movement. Channel crossings in the alliterative Morte Arthure, Christmastime questing in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and maritime battles with disguised Saracen ships in Richard Coer de Lyon all draw a reader’s attention to the waters and wildernesses experienced en route to a destination. In these spaces between, the body and world alike are hyperkinetic; corporeal and elemental substances flow and intermingle to carry bodies across space in search of adventure, miracles, and marvels. In the alliterative Morte Arthure, for example, the poet writes, When all was shipped that sholde, they shunt no lenger, Bot unteld them tite, as the tide runnes; Coggez and crayers then crosses their mastes, At the commandment of the king uncovered at ones; Wightly on the wale they wie up their ankers, By wit of the watermen of the wale ythes. … Lokes to the lode-stern when the light failes, 2

3

4

The Liber Celestis of St Bridget of Sweden: The Middle English Version in British Library MS Claudius B.I, together with a Life of the Saint from the Same Manuscript, ed. Roger Ellis, EETS O.S. 291 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987); The Book of Margery Kempe, ed. Lynn Staley (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 1996). Bridget’s account of Christ’s Nativity is particularly striking in its attention to the bodily movements inherent to the birthing process. She writes, “And than saw I in hir wombe a thinge stire; and sodanli sho bare hir son. … And it was so sodan, that beringe of the child, that I might noght persaive the passinge furthe of the childe. Also I sawe the secondine, that is the rim that the child was born in ther, liand all white” (7.22). Despite the “passinge” of Christ being obscured from Bridget’s sight, birth is described as a process, which begins with the “stirring” (movement) of the womb and ends with the infant latching onto its mother’s breast. These images resonate with the discussion of Griselda in Chapter 4. The Book of John Mandeville, eds. Tamarah Kohanski and C. David Benson (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 2007).



Introduction  3 Castes courses by craft when the cloud rises With the needle and the stone on the night tides. … And all the steren of the streme steken at ones. (736–54)5

In this account, stasis is discouraged as Arthur’s ships set sail to the rhythm of the tide, and his men witness a world in motion as they turn to the revolving stars and the spinning needle of a compass to navigate the channel’s depths. “Watermen” and the “steren of the streme,” who we will see more of in Chapter 2, are also introduced here – those who belong to the sea rather than the land, identified by their being “steren”: stern (MED stern(e, adj.) but also practiced at steering vessels (MED steren, v.1). In autobiography, romance, and crusading narratives alike, movement had captured the medieval imagination. Chaucer is not exempt from this theme. In his long poems, we see eagles carry dislocated dreamers high above the earth, the avian kingdom travel to an annual parliament in Venus’s garden, and a perpetuum mobile of twigs spinning atop a melting ice mountain.6 In The Canterbury Tales, arguably the most explicit treatment of movement in Chaucer’s oeuvre, pilgrims travel toward Canterbury Cathedral, “the holy bisful martir [Thomas Becket] for to seke” (1.17). As in Mandeville’s Travels, though, the pilgrims’ destination slowly recedes into the background as a world that resonates with mobility usurps the narrative. We learn in the General Prologue that the pilgrims are bodies on the move even when they are not pilgrimaging: the Wife of Bath is an avid traveller – “She coude muchel of wandringe by the weye” (1.467) – and the Monk, who should be confined to his cloister, is “lykned til a fish that is waterlees” on account of his riding and hunting (1.180).7 We even see an echo of the alliterative Morte Arthure’s watermen in Chaucer’s description of the Shipman: of his craft to rekene wel his tides, His stremes and his daungers him besides, His herberwe, and his moone, his lodemenage, Ther nas noon swich from Hulle to Cartage. (1.396–404)

Meanwhile, the tales themselves take us from London to Russia, and readers are invited to explore worlds enlivened by royal castaways, dancing fairies, and death himself. Around every bend, the frame narrative and pilgrims’ tales record and meditate on mobile categories in fourteenth-century England, showing movement to be central to an understanding of the late-medieval world and literary representations of it. 5

6 7

Alliterative Morte Arthur in King Arthur’s Death: The Middle English Stanzaic Morte Arthur and Alliterative Morte Arthure, ed. Larry D. Benson, rev. Edward E. Foster (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 1994). See The House of Fame and Parliament of Fowles. Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales, in The Riverside Chaucer, ed. Larry D. Benson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988). All quotations from Chaucer’s works are taken from this edition, cited by fragment/book and line number.

4  Mobility and Identity in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales

The current book investigates the strategies and techniques by which movement is represented The Canterbury Tales, focusing on moments in which the portrayal of movement does poetic, social, and ecological work. In so doing, I build on scholarship that considers ritual movement (e.g., pilgrimage) to show that human and nonhuman mobilities alike provide a framework by which to consider ecologies, economies, class, and gender in the fourteenth century. I begin by examining the material world of the frame narrative to show that Chaucer celebrates environmental and economic movement, foregrounding the kinesis associated with rivers, bridges, and commercial networks. I then narrow the scope of inquiry to consider how a single fragment (Fragment One) and then a single tale (the Clerk’s Tale) deploy mobility to challenge social stratification and gendered space. Together, these considerations show that in The Canterbury Tales movement becomes the medium through which identity is performed and the domain in which imagination forges new possibilities for understanding identity. In the following sections of this introduction, I examine how cultural geography and ecocriticism offer two critical frames through which to consider the work of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. First, the study of physical movement and its contemporary cultural geographical contexts reveals the various ways in which mobility comes to bear on this study. It is physical and ideological, forced and volitional, and inheres in animate and inanimate substances. Bodies that are microcosms of a mobile world move across space, navigating and producing ideological networks that are themselves on the move. These metaphorical “fluidities” then lead us to consider literal fluidity, specifically the liquid landscape, to reveal how human mobility works within and alongside more inclusive ecologies.

Moving ACROSS and IN the World Chaucer’s works are surprisingly kinetic. In contrast to texts like John Gower’s Confessio Amantis, which records Amans’s stationary confession to Venus’s priest Genius – “The selve prest which as sche wolde / Was redy there and sette him doun / To hiere my confessioun” (1.200–3) – Chaucer’s poems unfold across space, literalizing the move beyond one’s books by transforming the act of reading into dreamscapes that carry his dreamers to barren fields and blossoming meadows, and locating his pilgrims on the road such that they tell their tales shoulder to shoulder rather than face to face.8 These representations of movement are both physical and philosophical, calling on scientific and theoretical discourse to represent and reflect on movement in the Middle Ages.

8

John Gower, Confessio Amantis, ed. Russel A. Peck, trans. Andrew Galloway (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 2006); emphasis mine.



Introduction  5

Medieval Physics: Aristotle and Ockham Chaucer’s scientific understanding of movement depended largely on Aristotelian doctrine and commentaries on Aristotle, including most significantly the writing of Englishman William of Ockham. As Paul Vincent Spade observes, “histories have long recognized that the three most important figures in the philosophy of the High Middle Ages were Thomas Aquinas, John Duns Scotus, and William of Ockham,” and William Courtenay notes that Ockham was particularly influential from the mid- to late-fourteenth century in intellectual centers including Oxford, making it likely that Chaucer was exposed to the circulation of his ideas if not his manuscripts.9 Specifically, Ockham’s Brevis summa libri physicorum, Expositio in libros physicorum aristotelis, and Quodlibeta septum are relevant insofar as they position movement at the center of human experience. As the following discussion will show, Ockham’s commentaries present movement as the potential for and expression of change in mobile bodies, which themselves exact change in the world; and in a more radical way than Aristotle, Ockham embraces movement’s complexities, acknowledging its capacity to manifest physically and ideologically, as force and volition, with the potential for plurality and perpetuity. Ockham begins by insisting that movement is critical to humankind’s understanding of existence. Following Aristotle, Ockham writes, “if we are ignorant of what a motion is, we are of necessity ignorant of what nature is.”10 This is in part rooted in Ockham’s supposition that motion inheres in (natural) bodies. In two separate definitions of movement, he suggests that it manifests as the “act of being in potency insofar as it is in potency” (an Aristotelian conceit) and “the act of a moveable being” (an Ockhamian clarification).11 In both cases, movement is not itself a substance, but the act of a body in motion that has and will continue to have the potential to move. This body then anticipates both perpetual motion insofar as the body’s capacity to move is manifest in the past, present, and future, and continuous transformation insofar as it exhibits different qualities, or Aristotelian “accidents,” as it moves along a continuum 9

10

11

Paul Vincent Spade, “Introduction,” in The Cambridge Companion to Ockham (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 1. For a discussion of Ockham’s influence, see William J. Courtenay, “The Academic and Intellectual Worlds of Ockham,” in The Cambridge Companion to Ockham (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). Although Chaucer was not a scholar (as Derek Pearsall contends in The Life of Geoffrey Chaucer: A Critical Biography), his work suggests some scholarly expertise. See Kathryn L. Lynch, Chaucer’s Philosophical Visions (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2000); Helen Ruth Andretta, Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde: A Poet’s Response to Ockhamism (New York: Peter Lang, 1997); A. J. Minnis, Chaucer and Pagan Antiquity (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1982). William of Ockham, Opera philosophica, vol. 6 (St Bonaventure, NY: The Franciscan Institute, 1980), 6; William of Ockham, Ockham on Aristotle’s Physics: A Translation of Ockham’s Brevis Summa Libri Physicorum, trans. Julian A. Davies (St Bonaventure, NY: The Franciscan Institute, 1989), 39. Ockham, Ockham on Aristotle’s Physics, 41–3.

6  Mobility and Identity in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales

(including time, location, situation, action, and passion). Here movement and change are commensurate, and both must manifest in a substance, rather than existing as substance. Significantly, the substance in which movement inheres need not be either material or animate. In considering what causes movement, Ockham argues that an object can move itself, through either its will (proving that movement can be ideological and volitional) or another component part (proving that movement is plural). First, in discussing the movement of will, Ockham acknowledges that movement can be ideological and volitional by allowing for immaterial movement. In response to the objection that a substance cannot alter itself if it has manifest the potential to move and not the act of movement for too long a period of time, he writes, “there is an obvious counterexample in free agents of the sort the will is, because the object can be cognized and present to the will and all the other requisites to the act of willing can endure through a time and yet afterwards the will is able to elicit its act without any outside action, and this because of its freedom.”12 In other words, free will is manifest in the will’s ability to move from potential to action without any triggering cause – one can will differently at two separate times, without the will being moved by a force outside of itself. In reaching this conclusion, Ockham allows for the fact that movement can inhere in immaterial substances. It can therefore be figured ideologically such that economic systems, gender identity, and narrative can move between categories without their movement having to manifest in physical space.13 Moreover, by empowering the will, Ockham’s conclusions demonstrate that movement can be volitional – one can choose to move rather than depending upon external forces including but not limited to a “first mover.” Second, in discussing the movements of a substance’s component parts, Ockham foregrounds the plurality of movement and allows for the self-motion of inanimate objects. Describing air’s movement of a projectile, he writes that “although the projected is moved by an extrinsic thing and violently, nevertheless there are diverse moving things there, which are moved of themselves and not by something extrinsic.”14 What appears to be a simple matter of air moving a projectile becomes air moving itself moving a projectile. Because air is divisible, a single unit of air both acts and is acted upon; the unit preceding it in a sequence moves it, yet that unit is as much air as the unit it moves, thus air moves itself. And while air moves the projectile, the projectile can 12

13 14

William of Ockham, Opera theologica, vol. 9 (St Bonaventure, NY: The Franciscan Institute, 1980), 89. For a helpful discussion of self-motion in Ochkam’s works, see Calvin G. Normore, “Ockham, Self-Motion, and the Will,” in Self-Motion from Aristotle to Newton, eds. Mary Louise Gill and James G. Lennox (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), 291–303. This is not to say they are precluded from doing so. These ideological movements will come to bear on each of the chapters that follow. Ockham, Opera theologica, vol. 5, 626.



Introduction  7

also be divided into component parts that act upon one another to show that the projectile moves itself. As a result, no single force is responsible for the projectile’s movement; it is both extrinsic and intrinsic force. In fact, Ockham even allows for internal impulse, by forwarding the Aristotelian conceit that substances are disposed toward movement. He writes, “simple bodies, and all heavy and light bodies, can move on their own because they have that which is the principle or source of their motion within themselves.”15 Because of their accidents (component parts of a substance), a rock can move itself downward and hot water can cool itself. In tandem with the notion that a substance can be moved by an outside force (as air moves a projectile), this hypothesis suggests a plurality of mobilities/causalities that simultaneously come to bear on moveable substances. Ockham contends, “The universe of causes is caused, not by some one thing but by many, because one caused thing is caused by one first efficient cause and another by another and so on.”16 Here movement is imagined as part of a network, where various movable bodies move and are moved by each other to produce what appears to be a cohesive effect. And because the network’s constituent bodies need not be animate, elemental matter (earth, air, water, fire) can be as potent as human beings in generating movement or change. These hypotheses are adapted in Chaucer’s House of Fame, wherein the eagle explains the movement of sound to the dreamer Geffrey by calling upon his witness of ripples in water: … yf that thow Throwe on water now a stoon, Wel wost thou hyt wol make anoon A litel roundell as a sercle, Paraunter brod as a covercle; And ryght anoon thow shalt see wel That whel wol cause another whel, And that the thridde, and so forth, brother, Every sercle causynge other Wydder than hymselve was; And thus fro roundel to compas, Ech aboute other goynge Causeth of othres sterynge And multiplying ever moo, Til that hyt be so fer ygoo That hyt at bothe brynkes bee. Although thow mowe hyt not ysee Above, hyt gooth yet alway under, Although thou thenke hyt a gret wonder. (2.788–806)

15 16

Ockham, Opera philosophica, vol. 5, 371. Ockham, Opera theologica, vol. 9, 111.

8  Mobility and Identity in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales

In this excerpt from a much longer discourse on movement, both a substance’s capacity to move itself and the plurality of motion is evident. The stone functions as an external force that initiates the water’s movement, but water’s component parts also act on one another such that ripples beget ripples. Movement is internal and external, force and impulse: “the universe of causes is… caused by many [things].” This plurality is then made explicit when the eagle observes that liquid motion is “multiplying ever moo,” one of three moments in the eagle’s discourse that emphasizes multiplication (see also 2.784, 820). Finally, insofar as some of the ripples cannot be sensed – “thow mowe hyt not ysee” – the passage even gestures toward, if not fully realizing, the capacity for movement to inhere in immaterial substances. Here, Chaucer’s exposure to and incorporation of Aristotelian doctrine and the work of his medieval commentators is evident.17 In Chaucer’s oeuvre, then, it should come as no surprise that movement is never as simple as pilgrimage, an object “kyndely enclynyng” (House of Fame, 2.735) or people and events being orchestrated by a “Firste Moevere” (Knight’s Tale, 1.2987). Though these potentialities can be part of a greater network of mobilities acting on or within natural substances, movement is a quality that allows for infinitude and plurality, manifest in both matter and the immaterial. Humankind, a stone, and an idea are equally capable of expressing movement, and that movement can occur geographically and ideologically: through space but also in space insofar as a substance moves between (economic, gendered, linguistic) categories. Movement is therefore figured as multiple, always both/and rather than either/or, inhering in bodies that move within and produce networks capable of exacting change on the world. Modern Mobility Theory: The New Mobility Paradigm The centrality of movement to human understanding proposed by Ockham cum Aristotle also impacts our thinking about place, given that place is consistently subordinated to motion. In Book Four of the Brevis summa, Ockham presents arguments for and against the existence of place. His arguments against the existence of place erase the potential for place to exist at all, leaving movement alone to define the human experience. Even more interestingly, though, when he argues for the existence of place, his proofs remain entirely dependent on motion. He writes: 1. Bodies come one after another into the same place; therefore, place exists 2. Because bodies are moved to their natural places such as upward and downward, [therefore place exists] 3. Because the void exists, [therefore, place exists].18 17

18

On the manifestation of Ockhamian ideas in Chaucer’s House of Fame, see Thomas R. Schneider, “Chaucer’s Physics: Motion in The House of Fame,” in The Passenger: Medieval Texts and Transits, ed. James Smith (Brooklyn, NY: Punctum Books, 2018), 115–29. Ockham, Ockham on Aristotle’s Physics, 55.



Introduction  9

Each of these proofs suggests that place only exists because bodies move: a substance’s displacement over time and its natural impulse to occupy a space suitable to its accidents brings “place” into being. In other words, if place does exist, it doesn’t exist without motion. In many ways, these reckonings are similar to the “new mobilities paradigm” of the twenty-first century, characterized by Mimi Sheller and John Urry as a paradigm that “undermines sedentarist theories present in many studies in geography, anthropology, and sociology [… which treat] as normal stability, meaning, and place, and as abnormal distance, change, and placelessness.”19 This paradigm aims to reprioritize movement, challenging the traditional assumption that place is the foundation of human spatio-temporal understanding. Until very recently, movement was seen as a threat to sedentary living, equated with and valued negatively alongside indecision, perpetuity, and emotion. The geographer Edward Relph argued that roads, railways, and airports were “impositions” that made possible the “spread of placelessness,” and John Brinkerhoff Jackson characterized place as sacred insofar as its “permanent position… gives us our identity,” and “whatever is temporary or short-lived or movable is not to be encouraged.”20 Even Jean Baudrillard’s America, which narrates Baudrillard’s automobile exploration of America’s southwestern deserts, suggests that mobility, combined with heat and the banality of the landscape, produces an “evaporation” or “extermination of meaning.”21 Yet the past decade has seen a turn in geographical thinking that challenges the priority of place and the negative valuation of movement and perpetuity. Contributing to this trend, cultural geographers and social scientists including Tim Cresswell, Peter Adey, and John Urry propose that human understanding ought to start with the line rather than the point – mobility rather than place – and that the association of distance, change, and placelessness with “abnormality” is erroneous.22 Calling upon a wide array of mobile bodies 19 20

21 22

See Mimi Sheller and John Urry, “The New Mobilities Paradigm,” Environment and Planning 38.2 (2006), 207–26 (208). Edward Relph, Place and Placelessness (London: Pion, 1976), 90; John Brinkerhoff Jackson, Discovering the Vernacular Landscape (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1984), 194. These arguments contribute to decades of cultural geographical research that prioritize stability/sedentarism over movement/nomadism, including Carl Sauer, Agricultural Origins and Dispersals (New York: The American Geographical Society, 1952); Paul Vidal de la Blache, Principles of Human Geography (London: Constable, 1965); Yi-Fu Tuan, “Space and Place: Humanistic Perspective,” Progress in Human Geography 6 (1974), 205–13. Jean Baudrillard, America (London: Verso, 1988), 8–9. Tim Cresswell, On the Move: Mobility in the Modern Western World (New York: Routledge, 2006); Peter Adey, Mobility (New York: Routledge, 2010). See also Mobilities, Networks, Geographies, eds. Jonas Larsen, John Urry, and Kay Axhausen (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006); Mobilities: New Perspectives on Transport and Society, eds. Margaret Grieco and John Urry (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2011); Geographies of Mobilities: Practices, Spaces, Subjects, eds. Tim Cresswell and Peter Merriman (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2013).

10  Mobility and Identity in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales

(nomad, flâneur, consumer, tourist) and practices (dance, flight, photography, immigration), these scholars argue that “mobility is ubiquitous,” and that “the movements of people (and things) all over the world and at all scales are… full of meaning.”23 Specifically, they consider movement in the context of geographical, economic, social, and political power structures to show that flux or flow can offer an empowering alternative to fixed forms of order and discipline. This privileging of movement is then rooted in the theoretical considerations of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Michel de Certeau, and Mikhail Bakhtin, who each place mobility at the center of their intellectual endeavors, focusing on geography/geometry, ideology, and the body respectively. Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus (1980) is particularly relevant insofar as it proposes a nomadic metaphysics that figures points as “strictly subordinated to the paths they determine.”24 While sedentarist trajectories move along paths with resting places in mind, nomadic trajectories use these places to define paths, transforming points of destination and departure into mere pauses in between and on the way to going somewhere. The result is a “smooth space” across which bodies are distributed, empowered not by vertical striations of power located in stable, ordered, and geographically bound places, but in horizontal or “open” instantiations of creativity and becoming. The point succumbs to the line, which in turn bleeds into a plane of possibility.25 In the pre-industrial world, this is manifest in the movement of nomadic laborers employed to build cathedrals across Europe, who were empowered by their capacity to “[scatter] construction sites across the land, drawing on an active and passive power,” an assertion that recalls the act and potency of Aristotelian physics. Deleuze and Guattari write, We know about the problems States have always had with journeyman’s associations… the nomadic or itinerant bodies of the type formed by masons, carpenters, smiths etc. Settling, sedentarizing labor-power, regulating the movement of the flow of labor, assigning it channels and conduits, forming corporations in the sense of organisms, and, for the rest, relying on forced manpower recruited on the spot of among indigents—this has always been one of the principal affairs of the State, which undertook to conquer both a band vagabondage and a body nomadism.26

Here, mobile bodies are shown to be threatening insofar as they are nonconformist and subversive, but this “threat” is valued positively as a means by which to express power and exert pressure on traditionally confining structures. The “flow” of labor spreads and multiplies across an open space un-

23 24 25 26

Adey, Mobility, 1; Cresswell, On the Move, 2. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (London: Athlone Press, 1987), 381. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 481. Deleuze and Guattari, Nomadology: The War Machine (New York: Semiotext[e], 1986), 29.



Introduction  11

mediated by order and discipline, resisting conquest as it sustains a perpetual motion that produces (rather than being produced by) space. The works of Michel de Certeau and Mikhail Bakhtin also locate power and discursive potential in mobile bodies. In The Practice of Everyday Life (1980), de Certeau argues that nomads become “poets of their own acts,” circumscribing the categories and classifications of power through their mobility. Using narrative as a metaphor, he observes that the trajectories of bodies in motion “form unforeseeable sentences, partly unreadable paths across a space. Although they are composed with the vocabularies of established languages… and although they remain subordinated to the prescribed syntactical forms… the trajectories trace out the ruses of other interests and desires that are neither determined nor captured by the systems in which they develop.”27 Here bodies in motion authorize themselves even as they are subject to existing hegemonies (not unlike Griselda in the Clerk’s Tale, as Chapter 4 will show). Characterized as “tactics” by de Certeau – i.e., movements practiced by the disempowered to contest the territorialization of the powerful – these compositional practices do not “obey the laws of the place, for they are not defined by or identified by it.”28 Instead, nomads and their narratives produce “unforeseeable… partly unreadable” spaces that defy stability and capture. By remaining in motion, always becoming and never already achieved, they “circulate, come and go, overflow and drift over an imposed terrain like the snowy waves of the sea slipping in among the rocks and defiles of an established order.”29 In a way particularly relevant to the present consideration of Chaucerian narrative, de Certeau empowers bodies as “poets” capable of moving within (if not beyond) existing, static structures. Bakhtin’s theory of the carnivalesque also empowers nonconforming bodies, but rather than figuring movement ideologically, he concentrates on the body’s fluidity and its capacity to perform fluid categories. Specifically, he uses the figure of a grotesque body to demonstrate that the market, fair, and carnival exist in powerful contrast to the order and discipline of the state. Like the narratives of de Certeau’s imaginings, Bakhtin’s grotesque bodies overflow: they sweat, defecate, urinate, and generally leak into the world around them. And in a central tenet of carnival, these bodies are capable of assuming and satirizing roles outside of their experience: a commoner can be crowned a king. Here the mobile body is celebrated not because it has the capacity to move across space, but because it literally and figuratively dissolves, spilling its bounds and seeping across boundaries intended to categorize and classify. As a representation of the carnivalesque, this body is “opposed to all that was ready-made and completed, to all pretense at immutability,” seeking in27 28 29

Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1984), xviii. de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, 29. de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, 34.

12  Mobility and Identity in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales

stead “a dynamic expression; [demanding] ever-changing, playful, undefined forms.”30 For Bakhtin, then, motion, dynamism, and process are valued above stasis, as power is expressed by bodies that practice abundance, superfluity, and multiplicity. In each case, the collision of theory and geography prioritizes the line over the point, nomadism over sedentarism, reasserting in a modern context the Aristotelian conceit that mobility produces space, while demonstrating that movement’s generative capacity poses a powerful threat to structures whose authority depends upon order and stasis. By foregrounding the geographical, ideological, and embodied expressions of movement, in particular, the theories of Deleuze and Guattari, de Certeau, and Bakhtin capture mobility’s contemporary resonances while reminding us of the corresponding medieval paradigms that rendered movement plural, ideological, and volitional (i.e., internal to the body). Incorporated as they are within the new mobilities paradigm, these theories demand that movement be considered as an empirical reality, but also as an embodied experience that produces and is produced by ideological networks (including but not limited to narrative, economics, and sociopolitical structures). The current project works to meet this demand, noting the ways in which mobility inheres in animate and inanimate bodies to produce real (physical) and representational change in the world of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. The frame narrative and tales alike abound with mobile bodies, from the pilgrims traveling toward Canterbury to Perkyn Revelour in the Cook’s Tale. These bodies spread across and produce space, offering new ways of thinking about geography, ideology, and the body that incline toward nomadic rather than sedentarist ways of thinking. Though the degree to which these bodies are empowered by their nomadism varies, their movement always works within and against an array of ideological networks – including economic (Chapters 1 and 2), social (Chapter 3), and gendered (Chapter 4) networks – such that they impact and are impacted by them. Static geographies, social hierarchies, and masculine hegemonies are called into question as Chaucer’s bodies navigate and overflow physical and ideological structures. And as their bodies (at least attempt to) rupture the boundaries of these structures, so too do they rupture themselves: leaking, seeping, and spreading into the world as they spill tears, breastmilk, and semen. The new mobilities paradigm (and its concomitant theories) therefore offers a constructive lens through which to consider The Canterbury Tales. Albeit unintentionally, it hearkens back to Aristotelian natural philosophy – particularly his discourse on movement as articulated by medieval commentators including Ockham – and, by foregrounding ideological contexts and embodied practice, it enriches purely physical ways of thinking about bodies in motion. Applied to the Tales, this framework realizes the 30

Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1984), 11.



Introduction  13

sheer abundance of bodies that move, and the various ways they impact Chaucer’s narrative and comment on his world. Ultimately, it reveals Chaucer’s allegiance to the Ockhamian argument that “there is nothing in the world… that is not moveable.”31

Moving AS the World In each of the above discourses, the deployment of liquid metaphors is striking. As Tim Cresswell observes, the new mobilities paradigm is concerned primarily with the “tension between a spatialized ordering principle seen by many to be central to modernity, and a sense of fluidity and mobility emphasized by others,” and David Harvey writes about the “streams and flows” of capital, information, people, and raw materials that crisscross urban space.32 Associated theoretical considerations of mobile bodies show that they “flow” across smooth space (Deleuze and Guattari), “overflow and drift” like waves (de Certeau), and are marked by fluid connections with the world (Bakhtin). Centuries earlier, Chaucer used the image of rippling water to describe movement in The House of Fame. Combined with the Aristotelian assertion that movement can inhere in inanimate bodies, this suggests that liquid itself – nonhuman, elemental, ecological – ought to be considered alongside human mobilities and ideologies. Contemporary work in sociology and cultural geography anticipates this transition. In discussing the impact of globalization on modern society, John Urry speaks first figuratively and then literally about “global fluids.”33 Defined figuratively as the “heterogenous, uneven and unpredictable mobilities of people, information, objects, money, images and risks, that move chaotically across regions in strikingly faster and unpredictable shapes,” these fluids soon return to their elemental source: Fluids move in particular directions at certain speeds but with no necessary end‐state or purpose. They possess different properties of viscosity and… can be thicker or thinner and hence move in different shapes at different speeds. They move according to certain temporalities. … Most importantly, fluids do not always keep within the scape—they may move outside or escape.34

Here people and goods figured as “liquid” give way to liquid matter, as the physical properties of water rather than metaphor alone come to bear on so31 32 33

34

Ockham, Ockham on Aristotle’s Physics, 60. Cresswell, On the Move, 16; David Harvey, Justice, Nature and the Geography of Difference (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1996), as characterized in Adey, Mobility, 74. John Urry, “Mobile Sociology,” The British Journal of Sociology 67.1 (2010), 347–66 (356). This discussion becomes particularly relevant in light of recent scholarship on the “cosmopolitan” Middle Ages. See, for example, Cosmopolitanism and the Middle Ages, ed. John M. Ganim and Shayne Legassie (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). Urry, “Mobile Sociology,” 356.

14  Mobility and Identity in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales

ciological inquiry. Employing the language of the new mobilities paradigm, Urry shows that the element operates according to lines rather than points – an “end-state” is absent in liquid trajectories – and it is capable of multiplying and moving beyond traditional boundaries. Floods, monsoons, and tidal waves are violent testaments to water’s unboundedness, while meandering rivers slowly cut oxbow lakes into the land, and water seeps into low-lying grasslands to form marshes. In his discussion of “liquid modernity,” Zygmunt Bauman also turns to the elemental. Like Urry, he depends primarily on figurative flows as a means by which to articulate human structures and networks, but he cannot deny the presence of the physical environment. He writes, Liquids, unlike solids, cannot easily hold their shape. Fluids, so to speak, neither fix space nor bind time. While solids have clear spatial dimensions but neutralize the impact, and thus downgrade the significance, of time (effectively resist its flow or render it irrelevant), fluids do not keep to any shape for long and are constantly ready (and prone) to change it; and so for them it is the flow of time that counts, more than the space they happen to occupy: that space, after all, they fill but “for a moment.”35

Bauman’s spatio-temporal musings move from the figurative to the literal as he considers how water manifests in the world. Specifically, because it occupies space only momentarily, he allies water with time, such that its flows are both evidenced by and evidence of time’s passing. The element’s only constant is its potential for and performance of change, as it moves through rather than rests in space. In Urry and Bauman alike, then, liquid metaphor and ontology yield to one another, implicating the human and nonhuman in a consideration of real and representational mobilities. And this give-and-take productively models the connection between “fluid” systems and a world that is (at least in part) literally liquid, while also offering productive insight into how we might figure environmental and elemental movement. These conversations suggest that ecocritical inquiry is an important part of any comprehensive consideration of mobility. The nonhuman moves and impacts our world as much as the human, and a consideration of the nonhuman necessarily incorporates inanimate objects, including the elemental forces or substances that constitute the natural world. A third discourse therefore comes to bear on a consideration of mobility in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales (in addition to medieval physics and contemporary cultural geography) – that is, ecocriticism rooted in object-oriented ontologies including Bruno Latour’s actor-network-theory (ANT) and Jane Bennett’s vibrant materialism, both of which suggest that seemingly inert matter is capable of action. Pushing Ockhamian self-motion to its limits, Bennett argues for the vitality of things, identifying their capacity “to act as quasi agents or forces with trajectories, 35

Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Modernity (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2000), 2.



Introduction  15

propensities, or tendencies of their own.”36 In her estimation, a dead rat, a plastic cap, and a spool of thread are all equally vital players in the world. Latour meanwhile takes a different tack, redefining the “social” to encourage the incorporation of nonhuman and inanimate entities in social systems. Specifically, he defines the social as “a movement, a displacement, a transformation, a translation, an enrollment… an association between entities which are in no way recognizable as being social in the ordinary manner except during the brief moment when they are reshuffled together.”37 Leaving intention out of the equation, he continues, “any thing that [modifies] a state of affairs by making a difference” is an actant.38 Insofar as the actant moves, displaces, transforms, translates, or enrolls, it warrants inclusion within a social framework. In their own ways then, both Bennett and Latour blur the line between human and nonhuman “sociality,” encouraging us to see that our experience and understanding of the world depends as much on active (and potentially agentic) matter as it does on culturally constructed systems and networks. Both ontologies also direct their attention not to the human or nonhuman alone, but to assemblages of animate and inanimate bodies – human, animal, liquid, and stone ecologies “reshuffle” to work on/with each other toward a shared goal. To these ends, Bennett observes that the world is constituted of “heterogeneous assemblages in which agency has no single locus, no mastermind, but is distributed across a swarm of various and variegated vibrant materialities.”39 Here “swarm” deliberately replaces the discourse of cause and effect to foreground the collective and generative sources of change. Recalling a resonant metaphor in Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus, this reorientation forwards a rhizomatic way of seeing that privileges diffuse networks of weeds over deeply rooted oaks: efficacy inheres in a spread of actants rather than a fixed cause.40 By focusing our attention on the distribution of agency across kinetic bodies rather than the singular agent, these theories remind us that human systems cannot be separated from environmental ones; both impact one another such that a single, all-encompassing ecology emerges. As William Howarth writes, “although we cast nature and culture as opposites, in fact they constantly mingle, like water and soil in a flowing stream.”41 We must therefore acknowledge the elemental world as a 36 37 38 39 40 41

Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), viii. Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 64–5. Latour, Reassembling the Social, 71. Bennett, Vibrant Matter, 96. On the rhizome see Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, and Gilles Deleuze, On the Line (Brooklyn, NY: Autonomedia, 1999). William Howarth, “Some Principles of Ecocriticism,” in The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology, eds. Cheryll Glotfelty and Harold Fromm (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1996), 69.

16  Mobility and Identity in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales

component part of systems and networks traditionally ascribed to humankind. A successful economic system may depend as much on a stream as on the commodities being circulated. While these ideas certainly resonate in the sociocultural worlds of Bauman and Bennett, recent ecocriticism also demonstrates the degree to which they inhere in literature. In this context, Bakhtin’s theory of dialogics is particularly relevant, encouraging readers to turn away from the authoritative monologic voice of the narrator and consider instead the elements and characters in the margins.42 In “Discourse in the Novel,” he contends that every utterance partakes of social and historical heteroglossia. Forces he identifies as “centrifugal” and “stratifying” disunify and decentralize language into languages (plural) “of social groups, ‘professional’ and ‘genetic’ languages, languages of generations, and so forth.”43 Every utterance is therefore polyphonic, entering a cluttered field of meaning that incorporates previous and not-yet-spoken utterances, as well as their sociohistorical variants. And while much of Bakhtin’s analysis has to do with human discourse – producing a surprisingly homocentric heteroglossia – the “and so forth” of his claim leaves room for considering how nonhuman languages also come to bear on narrative. As Rebecca M. Douglass notes, Bakhtin’s observations help us “imagine a dialogics that might recover the still more silent voice of the land.”44 And because this dialogic critique applies to all narrative (not just nature writing), analyses of nonhuman voices apply equally to considerations of Barbara Kingsolver and the Pearl Poet, modern and medieval. By this account, the land- and water-scapes of Chaucer’s frame narrative can speak as loudly as Thoreau’s “Jonsonian” owls or the drunken Miller.45 The relevance of ecocriticism to medieval literature has been well established in the past decade.46 In his foundational essay “The Historical Roots 42 43

44 45 46

Michael McDowell, “The Bakhtinian Road to Ecological Insight,” in The Ecocriticism Reader, 371–92. Mikhail Bakhtin, “Discourse in the Novel,” in The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, 3rd edn, ed. Vincent B. Leitch et al. (New York: W. W. Norton, 2018), 1009; emphasis mine. Rebecca M. Douglass, “Ecocriticism and Middle English Literature,” Studies in Medievalism 10 (1998), 136–63 (141); emphasis mine. On Thoreau’s owls, see the chapter entitled “Sounds” in Walden or Life in the Woods. For example: Lynn White Jr, “The Historical Roots of Our Ecological Crisis,” in The Ecocriticism Reader, 3–14; Gillian Rudd, Greenery: Ecocritical Readings of Late Medieval English Literature (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010); Alfred K. Siewers, Strange Beauty: Ecocritical Approaches to Early Medieval Landscape (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009); Karl Steel, How To Make a Human: Animals and Violence in the Middle Ages (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2011); Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, Stone: An Ecology of the Inhuman (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2015). See also Jeffrey Jerome Cohen and Lowell Duckert’s trilogy of edited collections published by the University of Minnesota Press: Prismatic Ecology: Ecotheory beyond Green (2013), Elemental Ecocriticism: Thinking with Earth, Air, Water, and Fire (2015), and Veer Ecology: A Companion for Environmental Thinking (2017).



Introduction  17

of Our Ecological Crisis,” Lynn White Jr suggests that the seventh-century scratch plow fundamentally changed man’s relationship to the earth, observing that “the distribution of land was based no longer on the needs of a family but, rather, on the capacity of a power machine to till the earth. … Formerly man had been part of nature; now he was the exploiter of nature.”47 This observation justifies and makes necessary medieval ecocritique, locating the origin story of our ecological crisis in the Middle Ages, and tacitly encouraging literary critics to look for evidence of this crisis in the period’s literature. In response, medievalists including Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, Gillian Rudd, and Sebastian Sobecki have written on typological landscapes and elemental actants, considering forests, fields, stones, and the sea in medieval literature. Recognizing the significance of water in particular to the medieval imagination, Britt C. L. Rothauser writes, “In discussions of historical cities, such as London, fictitious ones, such as New Troy, and divine urban center[s], such as New Jerusalem, medieval authors from William fitz Stephen to John Lydgate and John Gower highlight the importance of water through their descriptions of the rivers, streams, wells, and fountains that surround and permeate the civic space.”48 In all cases, the nonhuman world is reclaimed, such that the stuff of this earth – objects, elements, animals – is shown to act within complex assemblages that effect change in real and imaginary worlds alike.

Navigating Mobility and Identity in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales The current book positions itself within these frameworks, setting mobility theory alongside ecocriticism to consider Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales as a record of and commentary on fourteenth-century mobility. An abundance of ecocritical work has been done on the Middle Ages, but surprisingly little has focused exclusively on Chaucer’s oeuvre, and that which does tends to prioritize moments in which N/nature is treated literally and explicitly, as in the Physician’s Tale (5.32–6), the Nun’s Priest’s Tale, or The Parliament of Fowles.49 Moreover, these ecocritical considerations relegate mobility to the margins, subordinating or excluding physical, cultural, geographical, and sociological discourse that, as we have seen, can enrich the way one thinks about the natural world. To resist this inclination, Mobility and Identity in Chaucer’s 47

48

49

White, “The Historical Roots of Our Ecological Crisis,” 3. It is also worth noting that this exploitation enabled the commodification of land, in line with the economic concerns discussed in Chapters 1 and 2. Britt C. L. Rothauser, “‘A reuer… brighter þen boþe the sunne and mone’: The Use of Water in the Medieval Consideration of Urban Space,” in Urban Space in the Middle Ages and the Early Modern Ages, ed. Albrecht Classen (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2009), 245–6. See, for example, Lisa J. Kiser, “Chaucer and the Politics of Nature,” in Beyond Nature Writing: Expanding the Boundaries of Ecocriticism, ed. Kathleen R. Wallace and Karla Armbruster (Charlottesville, VA: University Press of Virginia, 2001), 41–56; Sarah Stanbury, “Ecochaucer: Green Ethics and Medieval Nature,” The Chaucer Review 39.1 (2004), 1–16.

18  Mobility and Identity in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales

Canterbury Tales puts mobility at its center, thinking not about how Chaucer represents nature, but about how his representation of nature serves as one component of a much larger conversation regarding mobile bodies and networks in the fourteenth century. Given the prevalence of pilgrimage in the Middle Ages and the abundance of travel narratives generated by this practice, it may seem passé to examine movement in a compilation of stories told en route to Canterbury. But Mobility and Identity looks beyond pilgrimage and travel to reveal how movement is expressed physically and ideologically by human and nonhuman actants, within ecological, economic, political, and social contexts. Doing so reveals that, in The Canterbury Tales, mobility offers a powerful means by which to reimagine physical space and challenge traditional hierarchies and hegemonies. While tales set in urban spaces familiar to Chaucer belie some anxiety regarding hypermobility (the Cook’s Tale and the Canon’s Yeoman’s Tale in particular), Chaucer’s frame narrative demonstrates that prioritizing the line, margin, and rhizome over the point, center, and singularity offers an innovative and more suitable framework around which to organize medieval geographical understanding. The powerful potential that this shift in perspective offers is then realized in Chaucer’s fictions, which demonstrate how mobile practice allows nonconforming bodies to spread, multiply, and produce physical and ideological space within which to perform subversive identities. The organizational structure of this book underscores the increasing power attributed to mobility as Chaucer’s tales take us farther afield from fourteenth-century London. Chapters 1 and 2 consider the real landscapes of fourteenth-century England manifest in the frame narrative and the London tales, while Chapters 3 and 4 consider the imaginary landscapes of the first fragment (the Knight’s Tale, Miller’s Tale, and Reeve’s Tale) and the Clerk’s Tale. This move from the real to the imaginary is echoed by a move from physical to ideological mobility, as a study of southeast England’s geography and architecture gives way to a consideration of physical, social, religious, textual, and ecological movements that each in their own way empower otherwise disenfranchised characters. This structure also demonstrates how mobility manifests within each of the Tales’ concentric frames: the frame narrative of The Canterbury Tales as a whole, the framework of a single fragment, and the framework of a single tale, mediated by Chaucer the author, Chaucer the pilgrim, and the Clerk respectively. Throughout, the disciplinary lenses of cultural geography, sociology, and ecology combine with traditional literary criticism to show that bodies, bodily fluids, and liquid landscapes are central to Chaucer’s mobile imaginings. In Chapter 1, I argue that Chaucer’s frame narrative is a register of fourteenth-century England’s itinerant identity. I begin by examining the discomfort that hypermobility produced in late-medieval London. In the Cook’s Tale and the Canon’s Yeoman’s Tale in particular, the City and its suburbs succumb to unregulated economic and spatial mobility, resulting in a fragmented and



Introduction  19

dissolute placelessness. But, in the frame narrative, Chaucer contains these threatening potentialities by demonstrating how economics can rationalize and regulate placelessness. While an urban (London) perspective sees economic mobilities as threatening, the same movement is capable of organizing and containing pilgrims who are on the road, isolated from customary ordering structures. On Chaucer’s Canterbury pilgrimage, London and Canterbury (church and state) are notably absent: the pilgrims begin in Southwark and never reach their destination. Instead, Chaucer foregrounds Rochester, Sittingbourne, and Harbledown, three locales that flourished as a consequence of pilgrimage toward Canterbury. In so doing, Chaucer rewrites the landscape of the pilgrimage according to economic parameters and transforms the familiar space of southeast England to accommodate the pilgrims’ movement. In Chapter 2, I argue that the built structures used to traverse these newly defined landscapes – London Bridge and Rochester Bridge, in particular – stand as testaments to a fugitive fourteenth century. These unspoken but ever-present structures are distinctly hybrid: both human/nonhuman and mobile/ static. They exemplify both nature and culture insofar as they are man-made entities embedded in rushing waters that never hesitate to make themselves known. Moreover, medieval bridges exemplify both movement and stasis, conveying timeless durability despite combatting erosion in the incessant battle between liquid and stone. Living bridges are particularly poignant examples of this hybridity. Atop a living bridge, one is “there” (i.e., emplaced) precisely because one is between places. This sense of being both in situ and en route is compounded by the mobilities that played out on and across medieval bridges, including pageants, processions, and commercial exchanges. These activities, the networks they generated, and the environments that contained them offer microcosmic representations of an increasingly hybrid English identity: neither hyper- nor hypo-mobile, but kinetic in place. Chapter 3 turns to the tales themselves, arguing that Fragment One both defines and is defined by the politics of mobility. In this fragment, movement is ideologically linked with liberty and political power. In the Knight’s Tale, the Knight maintains a sedentarist metaphysics, celebrating physical and ideological (particularly chivalric) stasis while characterizing movement as “abnormal.” In the opening lines of his tale, Theseus rides as weeping women kneel. This image of a seated male body towering over leaking female bodies safeguards traditional social and sexual hierarchies. Theseus sits atop a horse indicative of his station while the widows kneel, swoon, and cry, their liquid/ mobile bodies rendered mutable and monstrous.50 The Miller’s Tale and the Reeve’s Tale then parody the Knight’s ideology to demonstrate how mobility and mutability can actually empower characters to challenge traditional hierarchies. In these tales, physical movement is compounded by metaphorical “fluidities” as movement transpires in and across bodies, architecture, and 50

See Sarah Miller, Medieval Monstrosity and the Female Body (New York: Routledge, 2010).

20  Mobility and Identity in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales

elements. The result is a collection of hybrid, dispersed, and queer spaces/ bodies that are shown to be generative rather than destructive, existing in stark contrast to the contained, sealed, static fantasies of the Knight’s Tale. Finally, Chapter 4 demonstrates how a close attention to mobility in a single tale reveals the various ways in which movement resonates. Specifically, this chapter argues that Griselda is empowered to move through and across traditional boundaries by virtue of her multiplicity, hybridity, and liquidity. Her movement is physical, as she crosses domestic and courtly thresholds, but also religious, linguistic, and ecological. In rendering Griselda’s movement “voidings” (4.806, 910) and “translations” (4.385), Chaucer allows for a unique form of sovereignty. He sanctifies Griselda by evoking the translation of relics (MED, translaten, v., 1) while also calling to mind a multilingualism that was on the rise as mercantilism saturated the medieval landscape (MED, translaten, v., 6). In evoking plurivocality, poetic translation, and publication, Chaucer also calls to mind his Petrarchan source, and the implications of his own vernacular telling.51 Beyond inspiring voice in her fiction, Griselda provokes authors to translate her story, conveying it across linguistic and geographical boundaries. This attention to poetic movement also explains the Petrarchan proem that the Clerk flippantly deems “a thing impertinent” (4.54): its attention to the liquid landscape (the Po River) sets the stage for a celebration of mutability and movement. Together, these analyses comprise the first full-length study of human and nonhuman mobility in The Canterbury Tales. They demonstrate that on the level of the individual tale and frame narrative alike, the Tales serves as a register of and commentary on real and ideological mobilities in the fourteenth century. Moreover, by using the combined disciplinary lenses of literary criticism, cultural geography, and ecocriticism, each chapter explores how these mobilities resonate in and across the environment, sociopolitics, and the gendered body to challenge ideas of boundedness, security, and fixity. In the end, Mobility and Identity therefore shows that although Canterbury Cathedral is the ostensible destination of Chaucer’s pilgrimage, its conclusion is infinitely deferred by nomadic assemblages, tidal ecologies, and asynchronous spacetimes. The Canterbury Tales is instead the story of a medieval world in motion, defining and defined by what lies across the threshold, in the water, and on the road.

51

See David Wallace, Chaucerian Polity: Absolutist Lineages and Associational Forms in England and Italy (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997).

1 Economic Mobilities in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales In the late fourteenth century, economic forces destabilized national and regional identities defined by geographical fixity. The period is remarkable instead for the importance of movement; tumultuous sociopolitical conditions and new mobilities brought about by the rise of mercantilism challenged the idea that identity could be unambiguously expressed in space. In this chapter, I reprioritize movement by showing that Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales is a register of fourteenth-century England’s itinerant identity. The disorderly potential of mobility is staged in the Cook’s Tale and the Canon’s Yeoman’s Tale. In these fictions, London and its suburbs succumb to unregulated social and spatial mobility, resulting in a fragmented and dissolute placelessness.1 The frame narrative then contains this potentiality, offering economics as a lens through which to understand and regulate such placelessness. In so doing, it renders itinerancy a powerful expression of spatial and social identity, which finds meaning and coherence in networks rather than stable, sealed spaces. The disruptive potential of unregulated social and spatial mobility was felt in the late Middle Ages. As Christian Zacher notes in his monograph Curiosity and Pilgrimage (1976), motion and travel came to exemplify a wandering, errant, and unstable frame of mind for fourteenth-century moralists.2 As opposed to life pilgrimage – a devotional practice that entailed seeking the New Jerusalem without traversing the globe (peregrinatio in stabilitate) – place pilgrimage became an outlet for curiositas, or mental wandering. The threat of curiositas had plagued theologians and philosophers since Augustine. In Book 10 of his Confessions, Augustine admits to having committed concupiscentia oculorum (the lust of the eyes):

1

2

This stands in contrast to early medieval narratives that rooted English identity in place. See, for example: A Place to Believe in: Locating Medieval Landscapes, eds. Clare A. Lees and Gillian R. Overing (University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2006); Scott Smith, Land and Book: Literature and Land Tenure in Anglo-Saxon England (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012). I also explore this phenomenon in “The Soil’s Holy Bodies: The Art of Chorography in William of Malmesbury’s Gesta Pontificum Anglorum,” Studies in Philology 111.4 (2014), 652–79. See Christian Zacher, Curiosity and Pilgrimage: The Literature of Discovery in Fourteenth-­ Century Literature (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976).

22  Mobility and Identity in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales praeter enim concupiscentiam carnis, quae inest in delectatione omnium sensuum et voluptatum, cui servientes depereunt qui longe se faciunt a te, inest animae per eosdem sensus corporis quaedam non se oblectandi in carne, sed experiendi per carnem vana et curiosa cupiditas nomine cognitionis et scientiae palliata. quae quoniam in appetitu noscendi est, oculi autem sunt ad noscendum in sensibus principes, concupiscentia oculorum eloquio divino appellata est. (10.35.54) For besides that concupiscence of the flesh which consisteth in the delight of all senses and pleasures, wherein its slaves, who go far from Thee, waste and perish, the soul hath, through the same senses of the body, a certain vain and curious desire, veiled under the title of knowledge and learning, not of delighting in the flesh, but of making experiments through the flesh. The seat whereof being in the appetite of knowledge, and sight being the sense chiefly used for attaining knowledge, it is in Divine language called the lust of the eyes. (10.35.54)3

As Augustine presents it, this transgression, one of the triad formulated by Saint John in 1 John 2: 15–16, is more threatening than concupiscentia carnis (the lust of the flesh) because it is driven by a delight in experimentation or “curiosity,” erroneously categorized as knowledge and learning. With the flesh as its conduit, concupiscentia oculorum seeks to know, and thereby afflicts both the body and the mind. Moreover, while concupiscentia carnis delights in things pleasurable to the body, concupiscentia oculorum delights in all things, pleasurable or not. The pleasant warmth of an early spring sun is as delightful to the eye as rotting roadkill, because both provide an outlet for mental stimulation and experimentation. The all-inclusive curiosity of the wandering mind is therefore revealed to be the root of man’s corruption, threatening his salvation by inspiring the branches of his eyes, body, and mind to see, feel, and know the sun’s warmth. Bernard of Clairvaux and Aquinas also denounced curiositas, Bernard because it opposed Benedictine stabilitas and Aquinas because it flouted studiositas (scholarly diligence tempered by spiritual vigilance). In the Summa Theologica, Aquinas recognizes that all men naturally desire knowledge, but insists this desire must be checked by moderation in the form of studiositas. If left unchecked, excessive ocular wandering and mental stimulation stokes only a desire to know and a pride in knowing (2.2.166.1). Quoting Bede’s commentary on John, he offers occult learning, sightseeing, and the discovery/dispraise of a neighbor’s faults as examples of unchecked concupiscentia oculorum, each a sensitive turned intellectual pursuit that encourages vice and distracts from what Aquinas deems useful speculation (2.2.166.2).4 3

4

Augustine: Confessions, ed. James J. O’Donnell (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), accessed May 23, 2016, http://faculty.georgetown.edu/jod/conf/frames10.html. Trans. E. B. Pusey, accessed May 23, 2016, http://faculty.georgetown.edu/jod/augustine/Pusey/book10. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae: Latin Text and English Translation, Introductions,



Economic Mobilities in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales  23

Aquinas’s inclusion of sightseeing here is especially noteworthy, as it reminds us that the wandering eye is encased in a body moving through space. Recalling Benedict’s gyrovagi who wander the globe, “propriis voluntatibus et gulae illecebris servientes” (1.11: slaves to their own wills and enticements of gluttony), Aquinas cum Bede’s eye is subject to the enticements of the road, carried by a man’s feet or a horse’s hooves across roads and fields.5 While a life pilgrim can circumvent the flesh as conduit, the sightseer cannot.6 One is always embodied, a physical subject moving in and through space, and, even if not sightseeing, a person will be coerced to see sights. Augustine observes, “canem currentem post leporem iam non specto cum in circo fit; at vero in agro, si casu transeam, avertit me fortassis et ab aliqua magna cogitatione atque ad se convertit illa venation” (10.35.57: “I go not now to the circus to see a dog coursing a hare; but in the field, if passing, that coursing peradventure will distract me even from some weighty thought, and draw me after it”). In this statement, Augustine reifies the improbability of a moving body holding concupiscentia oculorum at bay; though he may be deep in philosophical meditation, he will be distracted by coursing and seek to know. Confessions 10.35 is also noteworthy for its implicit suggestion that one’s lustful eyes can transform the spaces through which one moves. If a person intends to see a dog coursing a hare, the field in which the coursing occurs is rendered circo (circus), but if s/he merely wanders in thought, the very same field is devoid of extravagant signifiers. It is an agro (field), without the fortunetellers, flutists, and flamboyances of the Roman circo. Space is therefore circumscribed and defined by humanity’s intent; concupiscentia oculorum seeps from the seeking body to the spaces one seeks and back again, reminding us that human movements through the world can and do shape it. The transition from space to place, from movement to mobility, depends on bodies in motion engaging with and acting on the environments through which they move. Meaning, in other words, is born from human movement. Despite this potential empowerment, and in part because of it, the theological refrain insisted that pilgrimage, ambling, and rambling excited concupiscentia oculorum and corrupted the mind. Augustine, Bernard, and Aquinas rendered movement contagion: a “disease of curiosity” (morbo cupiditas 10.35.55). But one is left to wonder, did medieval readers and writers unilaterally subscribe to an understanding of movement as corrupting, or did some believe it to be empowering, giving humankind the ability to saturate space and to make place? In his fourteenth-century Canterbury Tales, Chaucer allows for both. In his pilgrims’ fictions he stages the potential for corrupting

5 6

Notes, Appendices, and Glossaries (Cambridge: Blackfriars, 1964). RB 1980: The Rule of St. Benedict in Latin and English with Notes 1.11 (Collegeville, MN: The Liturgical Press, 1981). For a helpful distinction between life and place pilgrimage, see Dee Dyas, Pilgrimage in Medieval English Literature, 700–1500 (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2001).

24  Mobility and Identity in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales

mobilities, while in his frame he contains this potential by foregrounding mobility’s power to redefine a volatile world.

From Walls to Rivers: Mobility in Fourteenth-Century London Chaucer may have felt the destabilizing effects of mobility from his home over London’s Aldgate, the busiest of the city’s seven gates. A resident there from 1374 to 1386, Chaucer very literally lived in a space defined by flux. We tend not to think of gates as homes to anything more than errant pigeons, and indeed in the Middle Ages they were built for defensive purposes, structures meant to be passed through and under if permission was granted. But, in the fourteenth century, London Aldermen decided to lease unused space above the gates, carving space for settlement into structures otherwise symbolic of movement.7 Chaucer became one of these settlers, making a home in an “undeniably spartan” 16 x 14 room.8 Yet this “home” was far from the private, stable space with which we now associate the word. To begin, it was not at all private. His quarters were subject to regular inspection by the chamberlain of the Guildhall, and civic officials had the right to enter for defensive purposes (per the lease: “disponere et ordinare pro eodem tempore prout nobil melius tunc videbitur expedire”).9 Officials, troops, provisions, and supplies would have passed through Chaucer’s “front door,” rendering his home a site of public defense, where bodies and goods were constantly mobilized to accommodate the military needs of the city. Beneath him, too, itinerancy would have been manifest by a constant stream of bodies moving toward and away from London. As Paul Strohm writes in Chaucer’s Tale, There, literally under his feet, passed royal and religious processions, spectacles of public humiliation, expelled convicts and sanctuary seekers, provisioners and trash haulers with iron wheeled carts and vans, drovers, water and wood sellers, traders with Baltic and northern European luxuries, runaway serfs, Essex rebels flowing in on their way to burn Gaunt’s Savoy Palace in 1381, and all the rest of a busy city’s shifting populace.10

While there were also certainly celebratory processions (weddings, pageants, and parades, for example), Strohm’s illustration exemplifies the predominantly troubling mobility marked by London’s gates. As an Aldgate resident, Chaucer bore witness to humiliation, expulsion, and invasion. Paired with the

7 8 9 10

Chaucer’s Aldgate residence anticipates the discussion of living bridges in Chapter 2, a hybrid manifestation of mobility in place, at once dynamic and static. Paul Strohm, Chaucer’s Tale: 1386 and the Road to Canterbury (New York: Penguin, 2014), 54. Strohm, Chaucer’s Tale, 58. Strohm, Chaucer’s Tale, 49.



Economic Mobilities in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales  25

smells emanating from Houndsditch and passing carts of refuse, this milieu would have generated a sense of disquiet, establishing London’s perimeters as sites of political unrest and social deviance, where human waste and hawked wares challenged the notion of London as locus amoenus. Medieval descriptio of London were alert to this impression of instability, with fourteenth- and fifteenth-century texts increasingly emphasizing the city’s porous borders and boundaries. Though early medieval texts certainly recognized the tensions and paradoxes inherent in representing the city as an enclosed and coherent space, they also showed a proclivity for order and codification by invoking the imagery of gardens, cloisters, and fortresses. William fitz Stephen’s twelfth-century Descriptio Londoniae, for example, begins by describing the city’s towers and walls: On the east stands the palatine tower, a fortress both large and strong, the walls and body of which are erected upon deep foundations, and built with a cement tempered with the blood of beasts: On the west are two castles well fortified; and the city wall is both high and thick, with seven double gates, and many towers or turrets on the north side thereof, placed at proper distances.11

Here London’s fortifications are large, strong, high, and thick, with deep foundations that suggest geographical and temporal longevity. The city’s limits are clear and defensible. By the fourteenth century, though, London’s walls were figuratively crumbling, as the city became increasingly multiplicitous, contested, and the product of rhetorical performance and representation.12 Geo­ graphically it was ill-defined, variously spreading to the Square Mile, Westminster, Southwark, and surrounding suburbs. In a late-fourteenth-century poem entitled “The Stores of the Cities,” for example, an anonymous poet describes London as follows: Hec sunt Londonis: pira, pomusque, regia, thronus, Chepp, stupha, Coklana, dolium, leo verbaque vana, Lancea cum scutis—hec sunt staura ciuitatis. These are London’s: pear and apple [scepter and orb], a palace, throne, Cheapside, the Stews, Cock Lane, the ‘Tunne’, the ‘Lion’ and empty words, Lance and shields—these are the stores of the city.13 11 12

13

William fitz Stephen, Description of the City of London, Newly Translated from the Latin Original (London: B. White, 1772), 23–4. For an in-depth discussion of the evolution from twelfth-century urban encomia to fourteenth-century texts aware of their own rhetorical performances and representations, see Catherine A. M. Clarke, Literary Landscapes and the Idea of England, 700–1400 (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2006). Text and translation from A. G. Rigg, “The Stores of the Cities,” Anglia 85 (1967), 127–37. Similar tendencies to blur London’s boundaries can be observed in Adam Usk’s Chronicle, which describes “Parliementum tentum London, apud Westm” (“thereby locating West-

26  Mobility and Identity in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales

Here London includes Westminster (the throne), Southwark (the Stews), Smithfield (the suburb where Cock Lane was located), and a variety of locations within the walled city, including Cheapside, the “Tunne” (a prison in Cornhill), and the “Lion” (either a reference to the lions in the Tower, a second prison, or a public house). As it is formulated in this poem, the city breaks spatial bonds, seeping beyond the Kentish ragstone of its walls into bordering geographical, economic, and administrative spaces. Gower’s Confessio Amantis is also sensitive to this seepage, capturing the metaphorical and literal resonances of London’s gradual liquifaction from a barge on the Thames. Narrating his encounter with King Richard, Gower writes, As it bifel upon a tyde As thing which scholde tho betide,— Under the toun of newe Troye, Which tok of Brut his ferste joye, In Temse whan it was flowende As I be bote cam rowende, So as fortune hir tyme sette, My liege lord par chaunce I mette. (Pr. 35–47)14

Fitz Stephen’s walls and fortifications are absent in this fourteenth-century representation of London. Gower views the city from the south, where it runs into the river rather than stone walls, and the liquid space that mediates his perspective amplifies the passage’s dissolution of imposed or imposing boundaries. Rather than standing securely on the Thames’s southern bank, Gower floats amidst the “flowing” river “upon a tyde,” a qualification that is both spatial and temporal insofar as it locates us in time (MED, tid(e, n. 1–5) but also in a tidal current (MED, tid(e, n. 6–7). His description of London is therefore remarkably mobile. Counter to the Descriptio’s emphasis on timeless foundations, the Confessio implies that a different “tyde” (time) would present differently for Gower and his reader. And the static, ordered geography allowed by fitz Stephen’s bird’s-eye view of the city is flattened (or “smoothed” to recall Deleuze and Guattari’s “smooth space”) as Gower is embedded in the liquid landscape.15 Atop a barge, his gaze would shift laterally as he drifts downriver, and the city’s elevations would transform ever so slightly as he bobs on the Thames’s tides. The city and his ability to describe

14 15

minster within London”), and William fitz Stephen’s Vita Sancti Thomae Cantuariensis Archiepiscopi et Martyris. See The Chronicle of Adam Usk 1377–1421, ed. and trans. Chris Given-Wilson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), 20–1; Materials for the History of Thomas Becket, Rolls Series 67, ed. J. C. Robertson (London: Longman & Co., 1877), 2–13. John Gower, Confessio Amantis, ed. Russell Peck (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 2006). Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (London: Athlone Press, 1987), 481.



Economic Mobilities in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales  27

it from a place of stability are thereby circumscribed by fluidity; the view on offer from the Thames is one in constant flux, and the river’s perpetual motion is a marked contrast to London’s stone walls and ramparts. In Gower’s Confessio we also see a shift from orderly geographical description to rhetorical determinancy. London is rendered “newe Troye” as its classical past overrides the physical realities of the fourteenth-century city, and, in the lines that follow, a high degree of performance and pageantry shifts the reader’s attention away from the city to Ricardian politics and patronage. Noting this privileging of discourse over description with respect to late-­ medieval London, David Wallace writes, There is no idea of a city for all the inhabitants of a space called London to pay allegiance to; there are only conflicts of associational, hierarchical, and anti-associational discourses, acted out within and across the boundaries of a city wall [one might recall Chaucer’s residence at Aldgate] or the fragments of a text.16

In this formulation, conflict and performance replace geographical ontologies, separating the city from the natural/built environment and subjecting it instead to rhetorical and ideological networks that are performed not in stasis, but across and within spatial and textual boundaries. Like the volatile urban identity with which it grapples, discourse defies emplacement through radical mobilization. This boundlessness defined not only late-medieval discursive space, but also the historical bodies that produced and populated this space. Focusing on the movement of bodies as a consequence of the Black Death (1346–53), David Raybin writes of fourteenth-century London, “This city is in constant flux, a place where a man’s death opened a spot for his replacement.”17 The image is that of an ever-rotating door replacing lifeless bodies with virile ones – bodies incapable of motion are moved, replaced by bodies that enact movement on the macro and micro level. Social and spatial movements are enabled and amplified via the plague, exploding the borders that once encapsulated the city of London. Michael Hanrahan, too, notes the itinerancy of London in the late Middle Ages. He obeserves that the city “did not exist in isolation. The rebels’ invasion of the city in 1381 establishes its accessibility and significance to agrarian workers and rural townspeople.”18 And these townspeople 16

17 18

David Wallace, “Chaucer and the Absent City,” in Chaucerian Polity: Absolutist Lineages and Associational Forms in England and Italy (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997), 184. David Raybin, “Chaucer as a London Poet: A Review Essay,” Essays in Medieval Studies 24 (2007), 21–9 (25). Michael Hanrahan, “London,” in A Companion to Chaucer, ed. Peter Brown (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 2000), 266–80 (267). On London’s permeable boundaries, see also Sheila Lindenbaum, “London Texts and Literate Practice,” in Cambridge History of Medieval English Literature, ed. David Wallace (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999),

28  Mobility and Identity in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales

descended on the city in droves. In fact, according to Sylvia Thrupp, by the mid-fourteenth century many guilds – the glovers and painters, in particular – complained about the “influx of foreigns,” including both foreigners (the disenfranchised English-born, disenfranchised because they had not yet sworn loyalty to London’s government) and aliens (those born overseas).19 The majority of these “foreigns” came to the city for economic purposes. Seeking employment in guilds and goods on Cheapside, Cornhill, and Pudding Lane, merchants and entrepreneurial minds flocked to and from London. Henri Lefebvre comments on this emerging mercantile network in his influential study of spatial theory, The Production of Space (1991). He writes, The medieval revolution brought commerce inside the town and lodged it at the centre of a transformed urban space. The marketplace… opened up on every side onto the surrounding territory—the territory the town dominated and exploited—and onto the countryside’s network of roads and lanes.20

In large part owing to the growth of mercantilism, Lefebvre argues, London’s gates were opened wide to its suburbs, and access was readily granted to the roads that led even further into the English countryside.21 The Roman walls that were once imposing barriers were rendered dysfunctional remnants of a long-lost past. While the growth of mercantilism in the Middle Ages is not news, the mobile categories it imposed on preexisting figurations of identity (and the literary representations of this phenomenon) have yet to be fully explored. The move toward a money economy changed the way people thought about labor, goods, and land. As Peter Spufford writes, Just as cultivable land ceased to be regarded as a source of immediately consumable produce and came to be seen as a source of money, so other resources came to be judged in terms of the money they would produce. Forests ceased to be seen merely in terms of hunting for pleasure or food and were valued in money terms.22

19 20 21 22

284–309. Sylvia L. Thrupp, The Merchant Class of Medieval London, 1300–1500 (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1948), 48. Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 265. For more on England’s roads, see Roadworks: Medieval Britain, Medieval Roads, eds. Valerie Allen and Ruth Evans (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2016). Peter Spufford, Money and Its Use in Medieval Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 245. John Scattergood helpfully links this observation to Wynnere and Wastoure (1352), which reads, “Now es it [the ancestral woodland] sett and solde, my sorowe es þe more, / Wastes alle willfully 3oure wyfes to paye. / That are were lordes in londe and ladyes riche, / Now are þay nysottes of þe new gett so nysely attyred / With sle3e slabbande sleves sleght to þe grounde, / Ourlede all umbtourne with ermyn aboute” (402–12). This revaluation of forests as commodity is discussed further in Chapter 2.



Economic Mobilities in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales  29

Both human and nonhuman entities were transformed into intangible value, rendering the trunk of a tree, the fruit of an olive branch, and the sweat of a laboring body significant only insofar as they could be evaluated and exchanged (mobilized) in service of a growing money economy. As Marx would later note, “value is realised only by exchange,” and exchange is made possible through valuation.23 Consequently, self, space, and object are alienated – or dislocated – and while Marxist ideology traditionally uses alienation to refer to the separation of a worker from his objectified labor (the labor becomes alien to the laborer), it is also true that a more general alienation/ dislocation occurs. The space within which an individual works, the body that performs his work, and the tangible manifestation of his work come into being and are mobilized neither organically nor in service of desire, but in service of the intangible economy. That which motivates spatial categorization, self, and object is therefore located not within, but without. In other words, a wagon wheel exists only because it can be identified as such by a market that sees its value as a functioning circular component that can be affixed to a wagon; an ancestral forest becomes wood or pay-to-play recreation or land capable of conversion into rent (in any number of combinations), separated entirely from the borders that once defined it; and an individual becomes a body (the simplest understanding of the Old English bānhūs) caught in the currents of coinage. In a monetized medieval London, even the citizen self became foreign, making the city a loose assemblage of dissolving boundaries, overflowing with alien bodies and goods in motion. Predictably, literary responses to the consequent estrangement were negative.24 In the fourteenth-century Wynnere and Wastoure, the king advises Waster to cater to London’s visitors, essentially advising that he bleed them dry: Teche hym [any botet beryn] to þe taverne till he tayte worþe, Doo hym drynk al ny3te þat he dry be at morow, Sythen ken hym to þe crete to comforth his vaynes, Brynge hum to Bred Strete, bikken thi finger, Schew hym of fatt chepe scholdirs ynew… … and pik hym so clene Þat fynd a peny in his purse and put owte his eghe! When þat es dronken and don, duell þer no lenger, Bot teche hym owt of þe town to trotte aftir more. (477–81, 86–9)

Chronicling a rowdy Friday night, the king suggests Waster get the visitor drunk, provide him a hangover cure, and bring him to the market so that he 23 24

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, “Capital,” in The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, 3rd edn, ed. Vincent B. Leitch, et al. (New York: W. W. Norton, 2018), 675. John Scattergood, “Chaucer’s Complaint to His Purse,” in Chaucer and the City, ed. Ardis Butterfield (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2006), 162–76. Because his treatment of Chaucer’s Complaint is so complete, I will refrain from discussing it here.

30  Mobility and Identity in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales

can buy lamb shoulder (all on his own cash, of course). Then, once all of the visitor’s money has been spent, he should be encouraged to acquire more money, from beyond the city limits, to spend in London at a later date. Interestingly, this passage foregrounds the importance of movement to economic success. Not only should the wealth that sustains London come from outside of the city (inasmuch as an “inside” and “outside” can be designated), the individual carrying that wealth should be constantly on the move. The visitor can “duell þer no longer” when his coin is spent, a demand that subjects him (and more importantly his money) to a perpetuum mobile through London’s gates, and into/out of London’s money-making establishments. Like the dislocating valuation theorized above, this literary exemplar demonstrates the overwriting of subjectivity by monetary value, and the inability to achieve stasis that such a revision implies. The visitor is only significant insofar as he is a source of income for Waster and his city; his identity and rational thought processes (hindered immediately by an abundance of drink and the pounding headache that follows) are entirely absent from this vignette. Langland perhaps most succinctly captures this phenomenon in Piers Plowman, noting “silver is swete” (B. Prologue, 86). The equation is 1:1; sweat is not sweat, it is something else entirely. It is these literary representations of economic mobility that most interest me in the present chapter. Understood at the macro level, such movement challenged preexisting spatial categories while offering radical new ways by which to figure identity. Population centers with already established identities – e.g., the walled City of London, Canterbury as the locus of the Church – were threatened by mobilization as their walls and cloisters transformed into sieves through which mercantile bodies (both human and nonhuman) passed. To wit, an analysis of the Cook’s Tale and the Canon’s Yeoman’s Tale will show that Chaucer’s “London narratives” represent the fourteenth-century city as a fractured space defined by unstable relations and difference. But when London is relegated to the margins (as it is in the frame narrative), representations of movement in The Canterbury Tales instead celebrate the emerging network of moving bodies, coinage, and goods, embracing the potential that a new, mobile geography offered to a nation in flux.

Disrupting Space and Disorderly Places in the London Tales The Cook’s Tale The Cook’s Tale and the Canon’s Yeoman’s Tale both convey a sense of anxiety regarding the new mobilities that confronted fourteenth-century London. Specifically, the tellers represent unstable craft-spaces in London to demonstrate the potentially deleterious effect of economic movement on familiar spatial categories including the shop and the craft space. In the Cook’s Tale, which Wallace calls “Chaucer’s solitary attempt at pure London



Economic Mobilities in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales  31

fiction,”25 the narrative and its representation of “oure citee” (1.4343, 4365) deteriorates to such an extent that it is suspended after only 58 lines.26 After a slow depreciation in geographical place throughout Fragment One (Athens  Oxford  Trumpington), we reach a city that is marked by taverns, whorehouses, and gambling-filled streets.27 The moral disintegration of London in the Cook’s Tale has been discussed at length, so I will not belabor the issue here, but the economic placelessness it represents and the mobilities that are its cause and consequence are significant.28 Specifically, Chaucer’s Cook’s Tale demonstrates the traditional relationship between stasis/order and mobility/disorder by contrasting the relatively static victualler’s craft space to the placelessness of Perkyn Revelour’s more lascivious economic pursuits. The language used to describe the victualler’s craft relies largely on conventional spatial categories and stasis. The master’s foodstuffs are sold in a shop in Cheapside, and his business depends on a traditional master–apprentice model. Moreover, Chaucer writes of Perkyn’s apprenticeship, “This joly prentys with his maister bood, / Til he were ny out of his prentishood” (1.4399–400). The word “bood” here means “to dwell (in a place)” or “tarry” (bōden, v2), implying a sense of stasis associated with the position. Perkyn is expected to remain in place with his master for the duration of his apprenticeship, but expectation and reality do not coincide. Immediately following the assertion of Perkyn’s expected stasis, Chaucer writes, “Al were he snybbed bothe erly and late, / And somtyme lad with revel to Newgate” (1.4401–2). Perkyn is rebuked multiple times daily, presumably for his inability to bōden, which is further reinforced by his movement to and from Newgate prison. Though he probably faced temporary stasis chained to a prison wall, he would soon be on the move again, returning to his master’s shop in Cheapside until the next “revel to Newgate” or “ridyng… in Chepe,” which would inspire him

25 26 27 28

Wallace, “Chaucer and the Absent City,” 156. All quotations taken from The Riverside Chaucer, 3rd edn, ed. Larry D. Benson (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987). Quotations will be cited by fragment and line number. For a discussion of this geographical depreciation, see Helen Cooper, The Canterbury Tales, 2nd edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 118–21. Kathryn L. Lynch, “From Tavern to Pie Shop: The Raw, the Cooked, and the Rotten in Fragment One of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales,” Exemplaria 19 (2007), 117–38; Helen Fulton, “Cheapside in the Age of Chaucer,” in Medieval Cultural Studies: Essays in Honour of Stephen Knight, eds. Ruth Evans, Helen Fulton, and David Matthews (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2006), 138–51; Thomas Carney Forki, “‘Oure Citee’: Illegality and Criminality in Fourteenth-Century London,” Essays in Medieval Studies 24 (2007), 31–41; Craig E. Bertolet, “‘Wel Bet is Roten Appul Out of Hoord’: Chaucer’s Cook, Commerce, and Civic Order,” Studies in Philology 99 (2002), 229–46; Daniel J. Pinti, “Governing the ‘Cook’s Tale’ in Bodley 686,” The Chaucer Review 30 (1996), 379–88; William F. Woods, “Society and Nature in the ‘Cook’s Tale,’” Papers on Language and Literature 32 (1996), 189–205; Paul Strohm, “‘Lad with Revel to Newegate’: Chaucerian Narrative and Historical Meta-Narrative,” in Art and Context in Late Medieval English Narrative: Essays in Honor of Robert Worth Frank, Jr., ed. Robert R. Edwards (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1994), 163–76.

32  Mobility and Identity in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales

to “Out of the shoppe… lepe” (1.4377–8). In all cases, Perkyn’s practice runs contrary to convention; he is a body more prone to dancing, singing, and hopping (1.4370, 4375) than learning to sell food in his master’s (emplaced) shop. Beyond failing to comply with the victualler’s traditional craft space, Perkyn goes so far as to generate his own morally and geographically ambiguous craft spaces, which challenge the association of trades with heavily regulated guilds and shops so embedded into the landscape that streets are named after them (Threadneedle Street, Milk Street, and Bread Street, for example). First, we see him form a gambling ring of sorts: And gadered hym a meynee of his sort To hoppe and synge and maken swich disport; And ther they setten stevene for to meete, To pleyen at the dys in swich a streete. (1.4381–2)

In addition to the micro-movements that define this business venture (hoppen, pleyen), its ambiguous location in “a streete” is significant. No one street in particular is identified (there is no record of a dys strete or gamengate), and as a categorical space the medieval street is a site of multiplicity, robbery, and social/sexual misconduct and malfeasance.29 During the 1380s, mayoral battles between Nicholas Brembre and John of Northampton resulted in uprisings and violent street crimes that remained largely unprosecuted, and multiple cases in the London ward courts imply the deleterious effects of street loitering. A case recorded on April 28, 1382, for instance, states that servants William Swalewe, Henry Clemme, and John Medelond were committed to prison “because they went wandering by night in the ward of Billyngesgate about the eleventh hour of the clock, in a suspicious manner and against the ordinance of the Mayor and Aldermen,” an offence that implies both hooliganism and contempt for the city’s 9 PM curfew.30 After a night in prison, they were mainprised under penalty of £20 “not to make any covin or assembly nor to wander about in a suspicious fashion either by night or at any other time, but to comport themselves well and loyally towards the officers of the city and the rest of

29

30

I will argue below that Chaucer attempts to reimagine “multiplicity” as “re-productivity” in the frame narrative of The Canterbury Tales (“Re-visioning Disruption in Chaucer’s Frame Narrative”) and in tales set outside of London (see Chapters Three and Four). On the reproductive nature of streets, see Sarah Rees Jones, “Chaucer and the Regulation of Nuisance in Post-Plague London,” in Roadworks: Medieval Britain, Medieval Roads, eds. Valerie Allen and Ruth Evans (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2016), 99–126 (99). On highway robbery in the Middle Ages, see Gillian Spraggs, Outlaws and Highwaymen: The Cult of the Robber in England from the Middle Ages to the Nineteenth Century (London: Pimlico, 2001). Calendar of Plea and Memoranda Rolls of the City of London: Volume 3, 1381–1412, ed. A. H. Thomas (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1932), A27 membr.1. On London’s curfew, see Strohm, Chaucer’s Tale, 72.



Economic Mobilities in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales  33

the king’s people.”31 First and foremost, this record renders mobility criminal. The street is not a site of stability or even ritualistic movement; it is a site of “suspicious” wandering, traversed by devious assemblies. Perhaps even more interesting is the assertion that this wandering is problematic whether or not it occurs past curfew; the principal crime here is not a disregard for the St Mary-le-Bow curfew bells, but the body’s presence in and movement through the streets. As the November 5, 1383 case of mercer’s apprentice John Penreth suggests, biding in the streets was particularly inappropriate for apprentices like Perkyn. The records state that Penreth: brought a bill of complaint to the effect that he had been apprenticed to William Paston… who was bound by the terms of the covenant to provide him with food, clothing and instruction, and that now his master had been imprisoned in Calais for debt more than eight weeks and his shop in London had been sealed up, with the result that the petitioner was wasting his time treading the streets (batant les ruwes).32

As in the case of Swalewe, Clemme, and Medelond, this case denigrates mobility as “waste,” and renders the streets waste-lands. Moreover, in its use of the Old French batre it captures the sense of danger that accompanied fourteenth-­century London’s streets. Idiomatically used to imply a roaming of the streets, batre could also imply beating (v.a.1), baiting (v.a.4), and even demolition (v.a.7).33 By locating his craft in such a space, associated more with trouble than trade, and being himself a wandering, “riotous” (1.4408) apprentice, Perkyn challenges legal and civic tradition. Indeed, in promoting street gambling, Perkyn disobeys late-fourteenth-century rules about street conduct in London, which explicitly stated that boys – and particularly apprentices – were not supposed to “waste (or steal) their masters’ goods in order to enjoy the pleasures of the street in gambling, fighting or visiting taverns or prostitutes.”34 Yet in spite of these challenges (and the disapproving tone representative of bourgeois trade in the second half of the Cook’s Tale), Perkyn’s dislocated business ventures serve as a model for economic success.35 There is no implication that divorcing business from the traditional guild model results in his destitution. In fact, Perkyn is so successful at gambling that “he was free / Of his dispense” (1.4387–8). In displacing his commercial pursuits and embracing an economic model that favors mobile networks of services 31 32 33 34 35

PMR, A27, membr.1; emphasis mine. PMR, A27, membr.7. Anglo Norman Dictionary Online edition s.v. “batre, v.,” accessed May 24, 2016, www. anglo-norman.net. Rees Jones, “Chaucer and the Regulation of Nuisance in Post-Plague London,” 101. On the “bourgeois values of trade” and their manifestation in Chaucer’s Cook’s Tale, see C. David Benson, “Literary Contests and London Records in the Canterbury Tales,” in Chaucer and the City, ed. Ardis Butterfield (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2006), 129–44.

34  Mobility and Identity in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales

and streets over static storefronts, Perkyn finds advantage in the relationship between mobility and disorder. The second economic venture in which Perkyn participates – the prostitution of his companion’s wife – furthers this understanding of a successfully dislocated economic system. Chaucer writes, Anon he sente his bed and his array Unto a compeer of his owene sort, That lovede dys, and revel, and disport, And hadde a wyf that heeld for contenance A shoppe, and swyved for hir sustenance. (1.4418–22)

Here we see the second “shoppe” of the Cook’s Tale, but it serves only as a contenaunce, or front, for disreputable business. The potential for a stable economic space is disrupted when we recognize that the shop is only a means by which to misdirect passersby. It appears to subscribe to traditional notions of fixed-use urban space, but quickly transforms into a chimera of stability, shifting in front of consumers from shop to brothel. Reinforcing the link between mobility and disorder, this transformation effects both commercial and geographical fraud. Commercially, Perkyn’s shop pretends to be something it is not, deceiving consumers and thereby committing one of the most commonly prosecuted crimes in late-fourteenth-century London. In the July 6, 1394 case brought against grocer Walter Kyng, for instance, master grocers Edmund Fraunceys and Mark Ernelee accused Kyng of passing off “rape, radish roots and old, rotten cetuall” as “good powdered ginger… in deceit of the people and of the scandal of the whole mistery of grocers.”36 In Kyng’s case, this deceit cost £200, a very steep fine indicative of the city’s ardent desire to eliminate commercial fraud. Geographically, the brothel’s presence in London challenges traditional understandings of the city’s limits, since it was illegal to run a brothel within the walled city from 1285, when Edward I ruled that “no courtesans nor common brothel keepers shall reside within the walls of the City, under pain of imprisonment.”37 As in the fourteenth-century poem “The Stores of the Cities” discussed above, Perkyn’s economic pursuits in the Cook’s Tale therefore disrupt clear delineations between the Square Mile and the Stews. An establishment that ought to be located in Southwark is dislocated within the city walls. In spite of this commercial and geographical fraud, though, and not unlike Perkyn’s gambling ring, the brothel appears to provide Perkyn and his companions with sufficient “sustenance” (1.4422). The “shop” associates dislocation, deceit, and disorder, but in ways that benefit Perkyn and his “compeers.” 36 37

PMR, A33, membr.6. “Rape” likely refers to wild rape, charlock, or field mustard, and “cetuall” (or setwall) to zedoary root. Catharine Arnold, City of Sin: London and Its Vices (London: Simon and Schuster, 2010), footnote 70.



Economic Mobilities in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales  35

The master victualler is clearly opposed to such practice, dismissing Perkyn from his apprenticeship and comparing him to a “roten appul” (1.4406), but readers are left wondering what to make of this ostensibly lucrative system. The argument for associating economic mobility with disorder may be strengthened by the impact of Perkyn’s ventures (and the streets and fraudulent storefronts in which they thrive) on late-fourteenth-century class conflict, which in large part stemmed from emergent social mobilities in the late Middle Ages.38 Depressed populations, together with increasing land availability and consumption following the Black Death, stimulated demographic growth, increased economic productivity, and created new jobs. As Christopher Dyer observes, these phenomena “changed the way of life of everyone, as not just those who migrated into towns but also those who were left behind in the country learned new methods of production and acquired new tastes in consumption.”39 While this change could be seen as empowering, promoting innovation and offering non-aristocratic members of society a say in matters ranging from farming methods to inheritance law, it also resulted in sociopolitical antagonism, popular uprisings (particularly those led by Brembre and Northampton), and violent conflict. Urban spaces became as politically fragmented as they were geographically incoherent, with attempts to regulate trade amplifying a sense of “discursive turbulence” in the fourteenth century.40 As Marion Turner observes, “the permeability of the city walls reflects the nature of the city as a site of conflict.”41 New mobilities invited sociopolitical unrest, and the medieval courts perceived geographical and social mobilities alike to be threatening. The 1388 Statute of Cambridge, for example, held that any person who had been practicing agricultural labor to the age of twelve should continue to do so “without being put to any mystery or handicraft.”42 In an effort to cut down migration into towns, the courts insisted that those working the fields stay in the fields. This sense of turbulence further inheres in Perkyn himself – an alien who successfully pursues illicit trade in spaces that defied regulation. Because Perkyn never finishes his apprenticeship, as we learn when “his maister yaf hym acquitance” (1.4411) rather than the “papir” (1.4404) Perkyn seeks, he

38 39

40 41 42

For example, R. H. Hilton, Class Conflict and the Crisis of Feudalism: Essays in Medieval Social History (London: Verso, 1985). Christopher Dyer, An Age of Transition? Economy and Society in the Later Middle Ages (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 176–7. It is worth noting the significance of migration (mobility) here. Rees Jones, “Chaucer and the Regulation of Nuisance in Post-Plague London,” 114. Marion Turner, “Greater London,” in Chaucer and the City, ed. Ardis Butterfield (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2006), 28. The Statutes of the Realm: Printed by command of his majesty King George the Third, in pursuance of an address of the House of Commons of Great Britain, vol. 2, ed. Alexander Luders (London: Dawsons of Pall Mall, 1810–28). Available at https://catalog.hathitrust.org/ Record/012297566, 12 Ric. 2. C.4–6.

36  Mobility and Identity in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales

cannot become a resident of the City. Beyond the fact that aliens were “regarded… as outsiders,” they were not permitted to rent shops (a legality that would be hard to enforce in Perkyn’s case, given the nature of his “shops”) and the City did everything it could to put them at a disadvantage by “segregat[ing] the foreign shopkeepers.”43 While this may reveal the ingenuity of Perkyn’s turn to the streets and contenaunces – an act of self-segregation that skirts the illegality of renting a traditional storefront – it also suggests the degree to which Perkyn’s entrepreneurship would have offended enfranchised London residents. Moreover, the nature of his trade is problematic because it threatens the more esteemed trades in silk and gold, practiced by what William Dunbar in To the Merchantis of Edinburgh (1500) calls the “merchantis of renoun” (1).44 In this poem, the merchants of renown are criticized for allowing “crudis and milk” and “cokill and wilk, / Pansches, pudinges of Jok and Jame” (23–5) to replace silk and gold at Edinburgh’s “hie croce” and “trone” (22, 24); urban decay is spatially manifest by the cheesemongers’ appropriation of goldsmiths’ space. By representing Perkyn’s appropriation of legitimate shop space for the purpose of prostitution, the Cook’s Tale anticipates this sentiment – late-fourteenth-century London is being overrun by merchants of ill renown. As both a foreign and a dealer in gambling/gamboling, Perkyn is threatening to tradition, his economic pursuits reinforcing the link between mobility/displacement and disorder. Of course, one might begin to see the potential for relocating London’s economic identity within the subversive power of dislocated trade – a radical manifestation of economic mobility – but this power is largely latent in the Cook’s Tale.45 The Canon’s Yeoman’s Tale The Canon’s Yeoman’s Tale is the second London tale told by the second alchemist. While the cook turns animals inside out, transforming inward substance into outward appearance (“substaunce into accident” per the Pardoner’s complaint in 6.538–40), the Canon purports to be able to transform the ground on which Chaucer’s pilgrims ride into gold (8.623–6). And, like the Cook’s Tale before it, the Canon’s Yeoman’s Tale identifies troublesome mobilities in urban craft spaces. The instability of the Canon’s craft lies first and foremost in alchemical practice itself. Though in some ways more socially acceptable than Perkyn’s gambling and prostitution rings, the impact of alchemy on the world was 43 44 45

Thrupp, The Merchant Class of Medieval London, 8. It is worth reminding the reader that “foreign” referred to anyone not holding London citizenship (8). The Poems of William Dunbar, ed. James Kinsley (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), 201–3. This latency is perhaps a consequence of the tale’s abrupt end, which tells us nothing of Perkyn’s life following his eviction from the victualler’s shop and trade. The subversive power of economic mobility is realized instead in the frame narrative of The Canterbury Tales, as I discuss below.



Economic Mobilities in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales  37

remarkably similar. Beyond the addictive nature of alchemy – once one buys into the practice, “They kan nat stynte til no thyng be laft” (8.883) – it threatened received understandings of labor and the market by introducing an alien, displaced laborer to a feudal economy.46 In the Canon’s Yeoman’s Tale, economic systems themselves are on the move, as the Canon’s “elvusshe craft” (8.751) introduces new ways of thinking about capital, labor, and commerce. Someone in the business of transforming base metal into gold was in the business of making money, both in the figurative sense of acquiring wealth and the literal sense of making gold coins. This troubled received understandings of the market in a number of ways. First, it troubled the distinction between artisans and merchants. Traditionally, the former purchased commodities to craft something new (contributing to what Marx would call “productive capital”) and the latter purchased commodities wholesale to be resold as is for a profit (contributing instead to “commercial capital”). Alchemists sought to do both – as artisans they sought to “craft” gold coin out of base metal, and as merchants they sought to transform a commodity into money by literally turning nickel into nobles. In so doing, they replaced labor with science and technology (i.e., smithing with transmutation) and compounded craft and accumulation, making money for the sake of making money.47 Beyond challenging existing class distinctions, this interest in accumulation was troublesome because the (albeit hypothetical) coins made by medieval alchemists threatened to destabilize if not obliterate emerging economic systems.48 Goldsmiths – like those of Dunbar’s poem – were regulated in 46

47

48

This is to say nothing of the ways in which alchemical practice challenged religious and political precepts. On the challenge to religious doctrine, see Joseph Grennan’s scholarship, much of which posits that reading the Canon’s Yeoman’s Tale against the Second Nun’s Tale reveals the former to be a “profane parody” of divine creation (“Saint Cecilia’s ‘Chemical Wedding’: The Unity of the Canterbury Tales, Fragment Eight,” JEGP 65 (1966), 466–81 (466); and the medieval debate outlined by Lee Patterson in note 72 of his chapter “Perpetual Motion: Alchemy and the Technology of the Self,” in Temporal Circumstances: Form and History in the Canterbury Tales (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006). On the mercurial relationship between alchemy and the crown, see Will H. L. Ogrinc, “Western Society and Alchemy, 1200–1500,” Journal of Medieval History 6 (1980), 103–32; Ralph Griffiths, The Reign of Henry VI: The Exercise of Royal Authority, 1422–1461 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1981). These texts will show that medieval attitudes toward alchemy varied greatly, with the only agreement perhaps being that alchemy represented a modernizing impulse in the late-medieval world. In Britton J. Harwood’s account, this displacement of labor is compounded by the fact that the science/technology engaged by alchemists is itself obscured. He writes, “Alchemy conceals the use of productive capital through inversion of the result, the alchemists’ inability to reproduce even their own labor” (Harwood, “Chaucer and the Silence of History: Situating the Canon’s Yeoman’s Tale,” PMLA 102.3 [1987], 338–50 [344]). On class distinctions, it is also worth noting that the Yeoman’s employment challenged the clerical monopoly on learning insofar as alchemy was not exclusively under the purview of the church. See Lee Patterson, “Perpetual Motion: Alchemy and the Technology of the Self,” 173.

38  Mobility and Identity in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales

1238, when gold and silver plate standards were first recorded, and a statute of 1300 entrusted the Goldsmiths’ Company of London with reducing the presence of impure coin on the market and maintaining a standard for gold, silver, and alloys.49 While alchemy was variously allowed or prohibited (forbidden by Henry IV in 1403, encouraged by Henry VI in 1444), there was no system in place by which to regulate the product of alchemists’ transmutations.50 And, if practitioners were lucky enough to transmute metal into gold, the surplus would profoundly impact an otherwise regulated market, as standards and valuations of gold would have to accommodate the introduction of successfully transmuted currency to the market. Beyond introducing new ways of thinking about coin and its valuation, alchemy threatened to refigure the medieval laborer, a threat realized in the alienation and displacement of the Canon’s Yeoman. As Britton Harwood has pointed out, the manner of the Yeoman’s employment makes him “the only wage laborer anywhere in Chaucer – the only person hired to make a commodity.”51 The Yeoman effectively quits his job when the Canon flees for fear of being “discovere[d]” (8.696), and he refers to the wages he will lose when he declares that he will “nevere hereafter… with [the Canon] meete / For peny ne for pound” (8.706–7). As a wage laborer, he is subject to what we now recognize as Marxian alienation/estrangement, wherein the worker’s labor “becomes an object, an external existence… that exists outside him, independently, as something alien to him.”52 This is manifest first and foremost in the Yeoman’s unfamiliarity with alchemical practice. Regarding the many mysteries of his craft, he tells the pilgrims, Though I by ordre hem nat reherce kan, By cause that I am a lewed man, Yet wol I telle hem as they come to mynde, Thogh I ne kan nat sette hem in hir kynde. (8.786–9)

Like the laborer in Marx’s “Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts,” the Yeoman “is related to the product of his labor as to an alien object.”53 The process and product of alchemy are both unknown to the Yeoman, who can 49

50

51 52

53

Marian Campbell, “Gold, Silver, and Precious Stones,” in English Medieval Industries: Craftsmen, Techniques, Products, eds. John Blair and Nigel Ramsay (London: Hambledon and London, 2002). Lawrence M. Principe, The Secrets of Alchemy (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2013); Edgar H. Duncan, “The Literature of Alchemy and Chaucer’s Canon’s Yeoman’s Tale: Framework, Theme, and Characters,” Speculum 43 (1968), 633–56; D. Geoghegan, “A License of Henry VI to Practise Alchemy,” Ambix 6 (1957), 10–17. Harwood, “Chaucer and the Silence of History,” 343. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, “Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844,” in The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, 3rd edn, ed. Vincent B. Leitch, et al. (New York: W. W. Norton, 2018), 657. Marx and Engels, “Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts,” 657.



Economic Mobilities in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales  39

only list the items used in the alchemy lab. Moreoever, in the autobiographical component of his tale he represents himself as a cog in the machine on three separate occasions, a part of the whole responsible for nothing more than blowing on the fire (8.666, 753, 922). He is an objectified, mechanized assembly-line worker, not a craftsman/subject who controls his commodity from beginning to end. As Peggy Knapp observes, “the analysis of the conditions of the Yeoman’s work shows it to be the alienated labor of modernity: partial, out of touch with the product, poorly remunerated, in competition with fellows, and intellectually ungraspable.”54 Unlike the guildsmen of the General Prologue (1.361–77), the Yeoman stands apart from the livery and guildhall of the feudal system. He and his employer are also literally out of place in the context of the Canterbury pilgrimage, having joined the pilgrims not in the Tabard Inn, but on the road through Boughton under Blean. This condition has two effects. First, it marks the Canon and Yeoman as disenfranchised members of the journey who did not agree to the conditions of Harry Bailey’s pilgrimage. They are instead itinerant laborers, a source of much anxiety in the fourteenth century, when declining urban populations following the Black Death led to an influx of immigrants or “interlopers” who “had no investment in the well-being of the community in which they settled.”55 The Canon in particular, who is described as being “heere and there; / He is so variaunt, he abit nowhere” (8.1174–5), models those targeted by new legislation that sought to restrict mobile labor. Because they are out of place and on the move, then, the Canon and Yeoman are “a dark and potentially destructive force that, like a disease, seeks acceptance through its modelling itself in the likeness of the pilgrim body.”56 They pose an immediate threat to the stability of the pilgrim fellowship as a consequence of their mobility. The Canon and Yeoman’s late arrival also presents them as characters who challenge boundedness: their bodies and craft cannot be (dis)stilled. The narrator begins by describing the Canon’s horse, which “So swatte that unnethe myghte it gon,” and the Canon’s forehead, which “dropped as a stillatorie” (8.563, 580). The Canon and his mount are remarkably porous, producing an outpouring of liquid that renders their bodies more mirage than physical substance; already liquidity trumps inert matter. This is then compounded by the Yeoman’s account of their residence. He explains that he and the Canon dwell In the suburbes of a toun… Lurkynge in hernes and in lanes blynde, Whereas thise robbours and thise theves by kynde 54 55 56

Peggy A. Knapp, “The Work of Alchemy,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 30.3 (2000), 575–99 (582). Isabel Davis, Writing Masculinity in the Later Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 118. Davis, Writing Masculinity, 136–7.

40  Mobility and Identity in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales Holden hir pryvee fereful residence, As they that dar nat shewen hir presence; So faren we, if I shal seye the sothe. (8.657–62)

Here, the separation of urban from suburban space is dissolved. Just as the Cook collapses the distance between London and Southwark, the Canon and Yeoman collapse the distance between “suburbs” and the as-yet-unnamed “toun” (though pars secunda of the Yeoman’s tale suggests he is referring to London).57 Turner observes, “there is no sense of division between suburban and urban locations. One can live in one location and work in another, and the term ‘London’ here might cover a much broader area than the walled city.”58 The geographical stability and commercial infrastructure of London is dismantled. The Yeoman’s provocative explanation of his suburb also recalls the streets of Perkyn Revelour’s gambling ring and the nightwalkers that wander or “lurk” thereon. Like the degenerate apprentice, the Canon and Yeoman work in the “hernes and… lanes” alongside robbers and thieves, privately practicing a craft that could be part of a public economic system. Their ghostliness is twice emphasized, in the “blynde” lanes and the fact that “they… dar nat shewen hir presence,” and the criminality associated with their chosen residence is evident in the adjective “fereful.” The Canon and Yeoman’s space is therefore one that defies location, refusing to be mapped because it escapes the naked eye and frightens watchful eyes into turning away. Like the sea monsters on medieval mappaemundi, their residence is a fiction of stasis that actually represents bodies in constant motion, which carry shifting significations of disorder, danger, and the unknowable.59 As the Yeoman continues his autobiography (in prima pars of the tale proper), we find that the stasis of the Canon’s shop is likewise threatened. The Yeoman begins by characterizing their work as an “aventure,” explaining that, like a merchant, “Somtyme [the Canon’s] good is drowned in the see, / And somtyme comth it sauf unto the londe” (8.946–50). In using the word “aventure” the Yeoman (unknowingly, given his tardiness to the Canter57

58 59

The Yeoman speaks of a “Chanoun of religioun / Amonges us” (8.972–3) who “In Loundoun was a preest, an annueleer, / That therinne dwelled hadde many a yeer” (8.1012–13). The “us” of line 973 refers to the teller and the Canon he serves, whose autobiographies are relayed in the prima pars of the Yeoman’s tale. Also Benson, “Literary Contests,” 142–4; Cannon, 91–4; Hanrahan, “London,” 271–3. Turner, “Greater London,” 30. Chet Van Duzer, Sea Monsters on Medieval and Renaissance Maps (London: British Library, 2013). One might also observe here that the Canon’s appearance threatens to turn the Pilgrims’ Way “up-so-doun” (8.625), radically altering the pilgrims’ reality such that it will be no longer recognizable. This threat ultimately proves empty, as the Yeoman asserts that the Canon has yet to successfully transmute anything, but the potential upset is allowed to linger for nearly fifty lines before the Yeoman declares that their work “la[cks] conclusioun” (8.672).



Economic Mobilities in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales  41

bury pilgrimage) recalls the Man of Law’s Tale, wherein “aventure” (2.1151) brought Custance to land and sea, “Somtyme west, and somtyme north and south, / And somtyme est, ful many a wery day” (2.948–9). The practice of alchemy is unknowable, erring in an infinitude of directions that cannot be “shapen” by the will of humankind (2.951). That this multidirectionality cannot be contained is evident when the Canon’s craft space is destroyed. In a description of their alchemical experiments, the Yeoman explains, Thise metals been of so greet violence Oure walles mowe nat make hem resistence, But if they weren wroght of lym and stoon; They percen so, and thurgh the wal they goon. And somme of hem synken into the ground… And somme are scatered al the floor aboute; Somme lepe into the roof. (8.908–12, 14–15)

The ostensibly stable confines of the Canon’s practice are destroyed in this passage, as metals sometimes pierce, sometimes sink and scatter, and sometimes leap. “Lym and stoon” may have withstood the metals’ attack, but even this is hypothetical (and, given the poor hardening properties of lime mortars in the Middle Ages, unlikely). Further, the Yeoman classifies this moment as one of unnatural “violence.” The stuff of alchemy has wrought havoc on the Canon’s craft space, just as alchemy itself heralded economic mobilities that challenged traditional understandings of craft, labor, and exchange. The breaking of the alchemy pot literalizes the threat that emerging economic practices posed to familiar feudal systems, and realizes a transition from stability (lime and stone) to mobility (percen, synkyn, scattered, lepe). This destruction of ordered spaces continues in pars secunda of the Yeoman’s tale. From the beginning, this fiction (or so the Yeoman claims in lines 8.1088–91) is focused on the deterioration of space. The Yeoman begins, Ther is a chanoun… wolde infecte al a toun, Thogh it as greet were as was Nynyvee, Rome, Alisaundre, Troye, and othere three. (8.972–5)

Here a second corrupt canon is figured as a plague on London. Even worse, he has the potential to destroy the world’s greatest cities, including Nineveh, Rome, Alexandria, and Troy. Given the fortitude of Rome in Chaucer’s other Canterbury fictions (e.g., the Man of Law’s Tale, the Second Nun’s Tale, and the Monk’s Tale), the canon’s threat to this space is a particularly powerful indication of his menace – a city that is praised throughout Chaucer’s oeuvre can conceivably be ruined by the canon’s alchemical practice. It is in this fiction, too, that the contenaunces of the Cook’s Tale return to problematize conceptions of stasis. Just as Perkyn’s second “shoppe” misdirects passersby, the canon misdirects a London priest and thereby upsets received understandings of gift-giving and exchange. The Yeoman explains,

42  Mobility and Identity in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales And this chanon, right in the meene while, Al redy was this preest eft to bigile, And for a contenaunce in his hand he bar An holwe stikke. (8.1262–5; emphasis mine)

This deceit runs counter to the gifts given to the priest by his landlady (8.1012–18) and the noble-for-noble exchange staged by the canon in advance of his “dissymulynge” (8.1073).60 Here, the canon allows a hollowed-out stick containing an ounce of silver filings to stand for a poke with which to “[stir] the coles” (8.1278). When the filings are released from the stick (after a wax stopper has melted), mercury appears to have been transformed into pure silver, but the only transmutation that has really occurred is shaved to molten silver. As a consequence of this deceit, the priest offers “body and good” to the canon (8.1289), valuing his self and all he owns equal to one ounce of silver. While this countenaunce has less to do with physical craft space than the Cook’s, both tellers use the term to critique a reimagined economy. The Cook criticizes the retooling of fixed-use market space, while the Yeoman criticizes the market itself. In the Yeoman’s Tale, the chimera is fair exchange; the priest believes he is exchanging all that he has and is for immeasurable wealth, when in fact he has been duped by a system that conflates craft and accumulation, within which value surpasses utility and obscures the inherent properties of things. More (and more, and more) silver is preferable to the mercury out of which it was made, not because it is more useful (in fact, mercury had multiple medicinal uses in the Middle Ages), but because the market deems it valuable. This dissemblance is one of many ways in which the Canon’s Yeoman’s Tale reminds us of the Cook’s Tale. Both Perkyn and the Yeoman/Canon (fictional and otherwise) transform economic landscapes, favoring displacement, alienation, and mobility over stasis and the status quo. Perkyn’s segregation from London’s enfranchised commercial dealings led to his reconstituting the city’s craft space, just as the Canon/Yeoman “myshapp[e]” their workshop (8.944).61 And both tales represent the alienation brought about by emergent economies: Perkyn is a literal alien without “papir” (1.4404), and the Canon’s Yeoman figures his alienation as a consequence of his labor. Both tales also point to an emergent economy, in which entrepreneurship and immaterial networks of value and trade override guild hierarchy and concrete exchange in

60

61

On the noble-for-noble exchange, see lines 1021–51. Also, Robert Epstein, “Dismal Science: Chaucer and Gower on Alchemy and Economy,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 36 (2014), 209–48, wherein Epstein discusses the canon of the Yeoman’s fiction as a confidence man, and proposes that this initial exchange is part of a long con (244–5). One might note the similarity of the word “mishap” (Middle English “mishappen”) to “misshape” in this context. The latter’s first recorded use in the Oxford English Dictionary is in 1450, when John Mandeville writes, “I am but a daie in the yere A woman… And tolde hym… For that sho myschapen wasse” (Oxford English Dictionary Online, s.v. “misshape, v.” accessed June 16, 2017, www.oed.com).



Economic Mobilities in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales  43

fixed-use space. In the end, both tales represent a London that is, like the priest of the Canon’s Yeoman’s Tale, “broghte… to confusioun” (8.1021). Unique to the Yeoman’s tale is its consideration of how alchemy and the networks it anticipated threatened the body and mind. Beyond offering infinite wealth, the philosopher’s stone was believed by some to be a mental curative. The historian Wendy Turner writes, “The ‘medicine’ sought after by the later alchemists, the quintessence, would in theory purify both metal (as in lead to gold) and people, changing the sick into mentally and physically healthy persons.”62 In fact, as early as 1266 Roger Bacon wrote that alchemy could restore its practitioners to a condition unmatched by all save Adam and Eve.63 Ironically, the Yeoman’s alchemical practice leads not to prelapsarian perfection, but to an inescapable debt that affects both his physical and mental health, a consequence that reveals the Tale’s negative valuation of alchemy.64 His once “fressh and reed” color is now “wan and of a leden hewe” (8.727–8, 1097–1100), and he equates the emptying of one’s purse with the “thinning” of one’s wits (8.741). The circulation of coinage in alchemical contexts diseases both body and mind. This dis-ease is manifest in the morass of craft language that infects the Yeoman’s verse. One can imagine the pilgrims’ confusion as he describes Oure urynales and oure descensories, Violes, crosletz, and sublymatories, Cucurbites and alambikes eek, And othere swiche...” (8.792–5)

In a 32-line-long sentence that contains no less than four assertions regarding the unnecessary nature of the information being presented (“Nat nedeth it for to reherce hem alle” [8.796]), the Yeoman supplants traditional narrative with list upon list of materials used in alchemical failures.65 This “multiplicacioun” (8.849) of lists also prefigures the multiple conclusions to the Yeoman’s tale, none of which provide a satisfactory narrative resolution. As Lee Patterson observes, the tale “fails by excess,” with its three endings leading only to the negative knowledge that Derrida called the “logic of the supplement,” where62

63 64

65

Wendy J. Turner, “The Legal Regulation and Licensing of Alchemy in Late Medieval England,” in Law and Magic, ed. Christine A. Corcos (Durham, NC: Carolina Academic Press, 2010), 209–28 (211). William Newman, “Technology and Alchemical Debate in the Late Middle Ages,” Isis 80 (1989), 423–55 (432). The nature of the “borrowing” that the Yeoman references remains unclear; whether he is speaking of money borrowed to fund his “apprenticeship,” or money “borrowed” from the Canon’s customers, we cannot be certain. A list he then returns to in line 852, after a brief invective against those who contemplate alchemy. This abundance of lists reminds us once again that the Yeoman is alienated from his labor; clear alchemical directives are replaced by scientific (and, to the Yeoman’s audience, unknowable) lists.

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in terms are defined by synonyms that are themselves in need of definition.66 Patterson writes, “As the process [of regressive definition] continues, the disclosure of an original meaning becomes the multiplication of meanings; as each signified is revealed to be only another signifier, the act of revelation becomes itself a concealment.”67 One of Plato’s disciples, frustrated by the multiplication of unknowable terms in an embedded, fictional Platonic dialogue in the Canon’s Yeoman’s Tale, denigrates such regression. He exclaims, “Ye, sire, and is it thus? / This is ignotum per ignocius” (8.1456–7). Plato’s specification that “Titanos” is the same substance as “Magnasia” means nothing to the disciple, who realizes that the knowable will be infinitely deferred, resulting in one of the “perpetual motion(s)” to which Patterson’s chapter title refers. Of course, the Yeoman wants to close his tale satisfactorily, avoiding the multiplication that plagues his practice. He concludes definitively with the line, “And there a poynt, for ended is my tale” (8.1480), but this “pointed” conclusion is ultimately forced and impractical. The language of script (where “point” refers to the punctuation mark “period”) does not apply to the Yeoman’s performance.68 He cannot remove his tale from what Patterson calls “the fluid world of speech, with its endless opportunities for continuation, revision, and even rebeginning.”69 Here, disorder permeates even the poetry of an alchemist/yeoman, exhibiting the extent to which fluidity and trans-mutation (a word that in each of its component parts indicates mobility) threatened the stable and status quo. The potential for power and productivity undergirds alchemical practice (again, not unlike Perkyn’s gambling ring), but this power simmers beneath the surface of Chaucer’s London tales.70 As Knapp writes, “distrust and vilification coexisted with hopeful excitement” in the late-medieval world’s perception of alchemy, and Chaucer incorporates both feelings in a voice that “lean[s] first forward and then backward… disclos[ing] an emerging emotional structure while allowing it to both challenge and fuse with more familiar structures.”71 The tale gestures toward Chaucer’s acceptance of dynamic mobilities, but his Yeoman ultimately defers to the familiar, suggesting that alchemy and the economic mobilities it engenders cannot be trusted. The same is true of the Cook’s Tale. Larry Benson concludes that Chaucer, as a poet, finds Perkyn’s “transgressive energy” valuable: 66 67 68 69 70

71

Patterson, “Perpetual Motion,” 163–4. Patterson, “Perpetual Motion,” 164. Middle English Dictionary Online s.v. “pointe, n.(1),” accessed June 16, 2017, http://quod. lib.umich.edu/m/med/. Patterson, “Perpetual Motion,” 164; emphasis mine. One might argue it also simmered beneath the surface historically as well, as certain individuals were given permission to practice alchemy in spite of Henry IV’s ban. In 1444, Henry VI overrode this ban entirely, widely licensing individuals to practice transmutation in an effort to eradicate the crown’s debt. Knapp, “The Work of Alchemy,” 592.



Economic Mobilities in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales  45 It is, after all, that same energy that animates the pilgrim Miller and gives life to the Canterbury Tales. … Far from being simply a degeneration from the stately Knight’s Tale, the Cook’s Tale, like that of the Miller, offers another, distinct kind of discourse to ‘requite’ that ancient romance. In contrast to the order and noble pageantry of Athens, it introduces the demotic energies of life on the streets of London.72

But the tale itself belies a resistance to these demotic energies. Both the Cook’s Tale and the Canon’s Yeoman’s Tale articulate the threat that emerging economic practices and mobilities had on London’s landscapes. Perkyn and the fictional Canon labor within and help to fashion a dislocated landscape, the shifting nature of which necessitated the toppling of foundational (and founded, in the architectural sense of having a foundation) structures that preceded it. As the Cook and Canon’s Yeoman tell it, this has drastic consequences on the moral and geographical stability of English space – economic mobilities inevitability led to the deterioration of familiar spatial orders, and the city emerged as a place “of cultural conflict, jostling rivalries, and incompatible interests… profoundly split and antagonistic.”73 Of course, the categorical judgment of mobility as disorderly is itself far from stable. These tales are fictions, after all, standing in marked contrast to the frame, which is one step closer to Chaucer’s reality (and is Chaucer the pilgrim’s reality). And within the frame, mobility offers an opportunity rather than a threat, realizing the “transgressive energy” to which Benson refers. Mobility, and particularly movement in service of an emergent economy, offered a means by which to rethink geography and society in a period that was by all accounts transitional. Like the marginalization of England on medieval mappaemundi, the incipient mobility of the fourteenth century could be rewritten to indicate productive power rather than unnatural otherness.

Narrating Disruption: Roger of Ware and the Canon’s Yeoman We might begin exploring the subversive power of economic mobility in Chaucer’s frame by looking to the tellers of the Cook’s Tale and the Canon’s Yeoman’s Tale. We learn in the Cook’s Prologue that Roger the Cook is from Ware, despite his being introduced as “The Cook of Londoun” in the prologue’s opening line (1.4325). According to traditional politico-­ geographical definitions, he is a resident of Hertfordshire (one day north of London along the Great North Road), but his introduction complicates the distinction between London proper and adjacent shires/counties. The Cook even thinks of himself as a Londoner despite the geographical distance of

72 73

Benson, “Literary Contests,” 140–1; emphasis mine. On the quiting game, see Chapter 3. Turner, “Greater London,” 25.

46  Mobility and Identity in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales

his residence from the Square Mile, referring to London as “oure citee” (1.4343).74 Like his tale, then, the Cook’s body challenges traditional spatial categories by dissolving city walls in favor of a more malleable definition of London. This dissolution is echoed in the conflict between the Cook and Harry Bailey. Responding to the Cook’s critique of hostellers (“herberwynge by nyghte is perilous” 1.4332), the Host criticizes Roger’s pies and the cleanliness of his shop.75 Despite their living and working in different locales within what Turner calls Greater London (the Host works in Southwark and the Cook likely works in the City of London), a rivalry emerges that collapses any presumptive separation between London and Southwark, reinforcing the Cook and Host’s knowledge of one another and their trades across geographical “boundaries.”76 Yet the challenge to geographical fixity posed by Roger of Ware and his conflict with the Host offers a powerful potential unlike that posed by Perkyn Revelour. Where Perkyn’s story ends in what all parties hope to be unproductive “swyving” (1.4422), Roger’s produces stories. When London’s Roman walls succumb to the fluidity of an emerging mobile economy –represented in Roger’s own multivalent body and his rivalry with the Host – spatial, interpersonal, and discursive potential blossoms. The Cook explains, And therefore, Herry Bailly, by thy feith, Be thou nat wrooth, er we departen heer, Though that my tale be of an hostileer. But natheless I wol nat telle it yit; But er we parte, ywis, thou shalt be quit. (1.4358–62)

His rivalry with Harry Bailey therefore produces both the tale he intends to tell presently (the story of Perkyn Revelour) and a second tale of a hosteller that will “quit” the Host. What is discursive turbulence in the Cook’s Tale is rendered instead as discursive potential/productivity in the Cook’s Prologue, suggesting that economic mobility can beget innovation. In fact, Roger’s exclamation “God forbede that we stynte heere” (1.4339) insists on the momentum created by economic mobilities and the consequent dissolution of traditional spatial categories. Neither the storytelling contest nor the pilgrimage itself can broach stasis when a game is afoot. 74

75

76

Even if the Cook worked in London (we are made privy to his shop ownership in 1.4352), he would be considered foreign like Perkyn, and his first-person-plural claim to the city would be contentious. Interestingly, the Host’s critique of the Cook echoes William Dunbar’s critique of second-rate traders in Edinburgh insofar as they both critique the sale of a “Jakke of Dovere” (a kind of pie), suggesting that such a critique may have been conventional. The Host exclaims, “many a paste hastow laten blood, / And many a Jakke of Dovere hastow sold / That hath been twies hoot and twies coold” (1.4346–8), and Dunbar refers to the “pudingis of Jok and Jame” in line 25 of To the Merchantis of Edinburgh (quoted above, 18). Turner, “Greater London,” 29–30.



Economic Mobilities in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales  47

Roger of Ware also problematizes the relationship between displacement and disorder by providing a biological necessity to bodies on the move; the orderly functioning of the pilgrims’ bodies and their successful completion of the pilgrimage depends on their consumption of edible food. Despite mirroring the practices of his tale’s protagonist (and thereby seemingly reinforcing the mobility/disorder nexus), the Cook is arguably the most important member of the Canterbury pilgrimage when it comes to maintaining biological, dietary, and cultural (insofar as food preparation is concerned) order. As Christopher M. Woolgar notes, many pilgrims purchased uncooked food on their route and depended on cooks they traveled with to prepare the food in household or establishment kitchens.77 An arguably disorderly body capable of dislocating traditional spatial categories, then, actually fuels the entire Canterbury expedition. Of course, we cannot ignore the fact that Roger of Ware is literally diseased, evidenced by the mormal (ulcer) on his shin described in the General Prologue (1.386).78 Though this physical malady differs from the “disease of curiosity” central to the ostensible mobility/disorder relationship in the minds of Augustine, Bernard, and Aquinas, it nonetheless suggests that the Cook is an aberration, a dissolute storyteller telling a tale about a dissolute apprentice. It is here we see that London’s taletellers are not fully capable of escaping disease, even if their bodies offer a glimpse at the productive potential of mobile categories (the movements/displacements associated with fourteenth-century economics, in particular). The Cook occupies a middle ground – a mobile body at once gangrenous (disorderly) and capable of bringing different manifestations of order to bear on a collective, insofar as he perpetuates the storytelling game and feeds his fellow pilgrims. His existing between London and Hertfordshire threatens traditional spatial categories, but it is this very liminality (along with the movement he practices as a member of the pilgrimage) that gives his body meaning and begets his unique contribution to the contest. The Canon’s Yeoman, too, offers a redemptive take on economic mobilities, as he abandons the perpetuum mobile of the alchemy lab for the Canterbury pilgrimage. Rather than residing with the Canon in the concealed and concealing streets, he chooses to exist in motion with the pilgrims en route to Thomas Becket’s grave. An important difference is foregrounded here – the distinction 77

78

Christopher M. Woolgar, “The Cook,” in Historians on Chaucer: The “General Prologue” to the Canterbury Tales, ed. Stephen Rigby (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 262– 76. Woolgar further notes, “The purchases of fuel and unprepared food made for Edmund Mortimer, Earl of March, journeying from London to Scotland in May and June 1378, are testimony to cooking by his household. Even staying in an inn, members of an elite household might purchase food to be cooked rather than relying on the innkeeper to provide it” (268). It is worth noting that the potential for Cook–Host rivalry is reinforced in this final statement. Woolgar also notes Roger of Ware’s potential analogue in Roger de Ware, cook, who in the ward presentments for Langbourne confessed to being a habitual nightwalker (263).

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between errant mobility and mobility that operates according to a given structure/vector. Much of the mobility manifest in both the Cook’s Tale and the Canon’s Yeoman’s Tale is without direction. Craft seeps out of the shoppe to occupy the ambiguous space of the streets, heading sometimes east, sometimes west, sometimes north, and sometimes south. Alchemical practice destroys the Canon’s lab and raises innumerable questions regarding the economic state of England, and the Yeoman and his tale are displaced and directionless. These movements – commercial, embodied, and rhetorical – are as unproductive as the “swyving” of the Cook’s Tale; they “lak[ke]… conclusioun” (8.672). The Canterbury pilgrimage, on the other hand, heads southeast, with a specific destination in mind and waypoints familiar to medieval pilgrims. This movement is systematic, transforming a scatter plot of potential into a relatively straight line. And in The Canterbury Tales this movement actively excludes urban centers, zooming out to consider the whole of southeastern England and the spaces between London and Canterbury. Economic mobility may have threatened historically bounded spaces like the City, but turning from centers to margins shows that economic systems and networks can in fact bring order to marginalized space. In these locales, nightwalking and dislocation can give rise to “game” (8.703), with its attendant rules and objectives serving to structure the mobility therein. A middle ground again becomes visible; the Yeoman, like the Cook, is not entirely devoid of the negative connotations that accompany mobility’s penetration of a physically delimited space, but his momentum away from such a space adds to the momentum of the pilgrimage he joins and the games they play. To fully realize the means by which The Canterbury Tales offers an alternative to the fictional London narratives of the Cook and Yeoman, we must turn to the narrating voice of Chaucer the pilgrim, who most satisfactorily articulates the potential for economic mobility to redefine southeast England.

Re-Visioning Disruption in Chaucer’s Frame Narrative While the London fictions present threatening economic mobilities, the frame narrative of The Canterbury Tales presents economics as an organizing principle. In the frame, the pilgrims’ journey is located beyond the purview of both church and state; neither London nor Canterbury bookend their movement. This serves to dislocate the pilgrims, threatening a placelessness akin to the “hernes and lanes blynde” of the Canon’s Yeoman’s Prologue. The audience is offered refuge, though, in the form of three stopovers: Sittingbourne, Rochester, and Harbledown. These sites transform the pilgrims’ mobility into a vector defined not by church or state but by an emergent economy. While an urban (London) perspective – shaded by St Paul’s gothic spire and the buttresses of Westminster Palace – sees economic mobilities as threatening, the same movement is capable of organizing and containing pilgrims who are on the road, isolated from customary ordering structures.



Economic Mobilities in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales  49

Map of the Canterbury Pilgrimage, highlighting locales mentioned in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. In this already liminal space, alienation and displacement are a given. Rather than resigning himself to the negative connotations of such conditions, though, Chaucer offers a means by which to render them powerful. To do so, he looks no further than the forces that helped to create alienation and displacement in the first place: economics. He begins by establishing the economic parameters of pilgrimage. This is done primarily through his introduction of Harry Bailey and the conditions Bailey establishes as the pilgrims’ leader. Besides his commitment to mobility – “confort ne myrthe is noon / To ride by the weye doumb as a stoon. … Tomorwe, whan ye riden by the weye… / But ye be myrie, I wol yeve yow myn heed!” (1.773–4, 780–2) – Bailey represents the rewriting of spatial categories according to fields of economic power. First, Bailey is unmistakably identified as a city man: a “byrgeys” of Cheapside.79 Yet, like all of Chaucer’s pilgrims, Bailey is not inhibited by assumptions regarding his social or geographical positioning. Despite the fact that he is a city resident who owns an establishment in Southwark, he leaves on a whim. Moreover, he does so based on the promise of future economic gain. His movement, and his

79

Chaucer’s decision to make the Host a man of Cheapside is especially interesting given a later reference to Cheapside in the Pardoner’s Tale. In the beginning of his tale, the Pardoner tells his companions about the dangers of gluttony: “Now kepe yow fro the white and fro the rede, / And namely fro the white wyn of Lepe / That is to selle in Fysshstrete of in Chepe. / This wyn of Spaigne crepeth subtilly / In othere wynes, growynge faste by, / Of which ther ryseth swich fumositee / Than whan a man hath drunken daughtes thre, / And weneth that he be at hoom in Chepe, / He is in Spaigne, right at the toune of Lepe— / Nat at Rochele, ne at Burdeaux touwn” (6.562–71). In this passage, someone who is drunk in Cheapside becomes transported to another place altogether (Lepe, Spain). Cheapside is a space capable of being identified in radically different ways, connected alternatively with an English market or a Spanish wine district. As a product of Cheapside, the Host is equally unstable.

50  Mobility and Identity in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales

potentially disruptive abandonment of his hostelry, is based on the assumption that he will bring more business to his Southwark tavern and thereby position the tavern in a sphere of economic surplus, one that was traditionally reserved for establishments on the north side of the Thames. Bailey establishes the economic conditions of the pilgrimage in lines 789 and following. After describing the basics of the tale-telling contest, he tells the pilgrims that the contest’s winner will enjoy a supper at his companions’ expense, “Heere in this place, sittynge by this post, / Whan that we come agayn fro Caunterbury” (1.800–1). The economically minded Bailey ensures that, no matter the winner, he stands to benefit from the Canterbury pilgrimage – a company of twenty-nine pilgrims will spend an evening eating and drinking at his bar, at their expense. Given what we already know about the Summoner and many of his companions, who love “to drynken strong wyn, reed as blood” (1.635), this event is sure to generate a substantial tab. Moreover, Bailey ensures that the pilgrims cannot renege on this agreement by guaranteeing his authority with an ultimatum: “And whoso wole my juggement withseye / Shal paye al that we spenden by the weye” (1.805–6).80 Although he is willing to pay for his own way on the pilgrimage (a relatively meaningless show of generosity, given that this was expected of every pilgrim), he stands to gain a great deal more, and the promise of economic gain appears to be Bailey’s primary motive for participating in the Canterbury pilgrimage. In many ways, Harry Bailey serves as a microcosm of new spatial orders in the fourteenth century. He is associated with urban space, but this connection is immediately problematized by his mobility. As London’s only representative, Bailey offers an unreliable characterization of the city. In addition to readily leaving his home and business – thereby suspending his proximal relationship with London – Bailey’s connection to the city depends less on the physical landscape than on the economic gain that can come from luring outsiders in. London is only important as a space capable of being invested with monetary power that comes from outside of the city’s ostensible boundaries. Like the city he represents, Harry Bailey lacks a distinct center or margins. The space traditionally reserved for Rome or Jerusalem is rendered vacant on his mappaecorpora, and the standards of medieval mapping are eliminated in favor of a mobile and changeable body. The same is true of Chaucer’s Canterbury pilgrimage. Chaucer replaces London and Canterbury with Sittingbourne, Rochester, and Harbledown: three locales whose economies flourished as a consequence of movement toward Canterbury. In so doing he rewrites the landscape of the pilgrimage around economic mobilities; the “pilgrim economy” becomes an organizing principle that accommodates and even empowers the pilgrims’ displacement. 80

This ultimatum is repeated in lines 832–4, emphasizing their significance to the pilgrimage: “As evere mote I drynke wyn or ale, / Whoso be rebel to my juggement / Shal paye for al that by the wey is spent.”



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The frame narrative of The Canterbury Tales therefore stages a new way of thinking about the mobilities that threatened the London narratives. It suggests economic fields of power can authorize liminal spaces even as they threaten established urban centers. In The Canterbury Tales, pilgrimage bridges old and new, navigating the transition from feudalism and meditative or emplaced faith to a market economy and empowered curiositas. By the fourteenth century, pilgrimage had become more than a religious vocation. It was movement through space (or travel), and as such became intertwined with an economic system all its own: the precursor to today’s tourism industry. The cost of pilgrimage affected more than just the pilgrims themselves. In many cases, guild members were forced to share the cost of a member’s pilgrimage, with the expectation that they would share in the benefits of the pilgrim’s journey.81 Moreover, money exchanged hands in order for pilgrims to purchase the medieval equivalent of tour books, guides, and souvenirs. Like travelers today, travelers in medieval England picked up souvenirs as proof of their own travels – badges, secondary relics, and ampullae filled with water or oil. This desire for physical evidence of a successful journey even resulted in the multiplication of relics based on consumer demand.82 Pilgrimage thus became a market of sorts, dependent on supply, demand, circulation, and exchange. This nascent tourism industry became so valuable that the loss of English coin to the Continent became a major concern. As a consequence, starting in the fourteenth century pilgrims were often required to apply for licenses that limited how much money they could bring with them (especially on journeys across the English Channel). In many ways, then, pilgrimage transformed faith into a commodity. And while Augustine, Bernard, and Aquinas would certainly have objected, this transformation benefited the church, its practitioners, and the emergent economic system itself (by demonstrating its productive potential). The church benefited as an increasing number of bodies became involved in religious practice. Because it was not confined to the space of a priory or monastery, pilgrimage incorporated hostellers, stable masters, cooks, and craftsmen alongside religious practitioners. And as hostels opened along the Pilgrims’ Way, more pilgrims could be accommodated in more comfortable ways; cots and ales attenuated the travail of faith-based travel. Practitioners also stood to benefit from pilgrimage as an iteration of economic mobility. Their practice and labor was faith itself, and the movement enacted by these laborers actually brought them closer to the process or product of their labor by amplifying their faith and literally bringing religious arti­facts within reach. Unlike the Canon’s Yeoman, a “lewed” bel81 82

Dyas, Pilgrimage in Medieval English Literature, 137. Rosalind and Christopher Brooke, Popular Religion in the Middle Ages: Western Europe 1000–1300 (London: Thames & Hudson, 1984); Patrick Geary, Furta Sacra: The Theft of Relics in the Central Middle Ages (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1978).

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lows-blower unfamiliar with the process of transmutation, pilgrims became more connected with their craft by rousing their bodies, souls, and purses in service of their faith. The experience of a multi-day journey inspired, then as now, and witnessing the miraculous at a saint’s grave or reliquary promised the exponential growth of religious devotion. Curiositas enabled encounter, and the purchase of ampullae and pilgrims’ badges at holy sites allowed pilgrims to sustain this encounter with commodities as conduits. Theirs was the work of craftsmen, transforming lead replicas of the sword that slew Thomas Becket into reminders of faith’s transformative power (the Pardoner excluded). This blurring of lines that separated pilgrimage from capital exchange extended from the practitioners to the economic system itself. Beyond its laborers functioning as craftsmen in a market that accumulated faith, the pilgrim economy blended traditional values (Christianity) with emergent value (in the Marxian sense). Contrary to the movements and displacements of the Cook’s Tale and the Canon’s Yeoman’s Tale, each footstep and monetary exchange in a pilgrim economy moved pilgrims closer to salvation. Moreover, in the pilgrim economy of The Canterbury Tales the association of capital accumulation and wage labor with a loss of subjectivity is challenged insofar as the bodies driving the market are fleshed-out subjects. Unlike the nameless London tourist in Wynnere and Wastoure, Alison is a woman embroiled in feminist rhetoric and biblical glossing, and Hubert is a friar who loves ale and hates summoners. Beyond being the primary subjects of Chaucer’s poem, the pilgrims are given unique voices born from their being on the move. It is in the margins, separate from political and religious centers, that these characters are fully realized. Displacement gives way to placeless (but directed, and therefore structured) momentum, which redefines the “no place” between London and Canterbury and invests the bodies that occupy it with the power to craft place, faith, narrative, and self. This act of redefinition is enforced in The Canterbury Tales by Chaucer’s attention to Sittingbourne, Rochester, and Harbledown. These intermediate destinations are largely ignored in scholarship on the geography of The Canterbury Tales. James Dean writes, “We hear little about the pilgrimage itself after the General Prologue—a few place names along the way and perhaps an allusion to the breeches of St. Thomas in the Pardoner’s Tale.”83 And Dyas observes, “In the most commonly accepted plan of the tales, the geographical progression of the pilgrims towards the shrine of Becket is only sketchily indicated.”84 But the sketch that Chaucer provides is fundamental to the refiguration of southeast England. At the time Chaucer was writing, Sittingbourne, Rochester, and Harbledown were making improvements to attract visitors (thereby increasing their revenue) and simplify movement through the phys83 84

James Dean, “Chaucer’s Repentance: A Likely Story,” The Chaucer Review 24.1 (1989), 71–2. Dyas, Pilgrimage in Medieval English Literature, 172.



Economic Mobilities in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales  53

ical landscape, including the construction of stables, hospitals, and bridges. Their success depended on mobile bodies, and by drawing attention to these three sites, Chaucer foregrounds an English landscape that celebrates the mobility associated with a pilgrim economy. The first town Chaucer mentions in the frame narrative is Sittingbourne, a center of economic growth in the fourteenth century. In an argument between the Summoner and the Friar in the Wife of Bath’s Prologue, the Summoner exclaims: “Now elles, Frere, I bishrewe thy face,” Quod this Somonour, “and I bishrewe me, But if I telle tales two or thre Of freres er I come to Sidyngborne That I shal make thyn herte for to morne, For wel I woot thy pacience is gon.” (3.844–9)

By mentioning Sittingbourne here, Chaucer calls to mind a town whose growth was generated by tourism – an economic center that encouraged and supported mobility. It is not mentioned in the Domesday Book (1086) because it was attached to Milton at the time, but as pilgrimage increased to Canterbury following Thomas Becket’s murder, Sittingbourne and Milton were divided. Given the considerable sum of money that was spent to drain the land around Sittingbourne’s Bayford Manor and the construction of a hospital in the neighboring village of Key Street, the local historian Alan Abbey argues that the city was given away by the crown (which personally owned Milton) to encourage its economic development and promote pilgrimage as a trade “at a time when pilgrimage was financially important.”85 The separation of Sittingbourne from Milton was therefore part of a concerted effort to develop an economic center that could accommodate the fourteenth-century pilgrim economy. Shortly following this separation, Sittingbourne came to “speciali[ze] in the hospitality trade.”86 The city grew rapidly around Watling Street and served as a staging post for travelers to change horses between London, Canterbury, and Dover. When Thomas Becket’s martyrdom increased foot traffic to Canterbury, Sittingbourne immediately responded by building many hermitages to support pilgrims, including Schamel (attached to the chapel of St Thomas Becket) and the chapel of Swanstree. St Michael’s Church was also built in the thirteenth century, and in what may have been an effort to appeal to pilgrims, it was built on a spring rather than on the raised ground across Watling Street, making it an integral part of the holy well and spring route. Graffiti suggests the success of this strategic decision. On a column just through the main door, one can still see a drawing that survived the fire of 1762: a large circle above a line of smaller interlinked circles representing St Catherine’s 85 86

Alan Abbey, email, 19 June 2010. Abbey, email, 19 June 2010.

54  Mobility and Identity in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales

wheel.87 Here, the patron saint of travelers smiles down on pilgrims passing through the church doors. These building projects were encouraged by a desire to promote tourism and increase the city’s economic viability. Sittingbourne flourished precisely because it embraced the mobility of England’s pilgrims and merchants, and responded to the growing exchange of bodies, services, and money. Indeed, by the late fourteenth century Sittingbourne had become an industrial hub. The city and surrounding regions produced commodities including London stock bricks, cattle, and cherries, and, according to Canon W. A. Scott Robertson’s papers, which include an in-depth discussion of Sittingbourne’s economic growth in the Middle Ages, the purchase of property and increasing exports reflect the town’s “flourishing trade”: In 1308 we hear of Hamon, a flourishing baker, of Sittingbourne, who then invested some of his capital in the purchase of three acres of land at Bapchild, for which he paid 100s. (equal to nearly as many pounds of our money). Two years later we find another trader, named Adam le Taverner, of Sidingburne, buying a house and two acres of land here, for which he paid 20 marks. Another symptom of flourishing trade is the fact that in 1367, six beds for use in the Castle of Leeds were carried thither from Sittingbourne. The steward of the King’s Manor of Leeds enters amongst his payments for that year, “Item. For conducting one cart carrying six beds from the town of Sidingborne to Leeds Castle, 12d.”88

The local historian Peter Morgan maintains that because of these economic mobilities, Sittingbourne was not devastated by the Black Death: “people were always passing through, decreasing the likelihood of infection.”89 The city even made efforts to simplify mobility, making movement across the English landscape more viable. Among other things, Sittingbourne was known for building flat-bottomed boats that made it easier to maneuver shallow creeks. A statue on High Street now commemorates this practice, featuring a ship captain and his dog (which every boat had, since many of these flat-bottomed boats were used to carry rubbish out of London and attracted a large number of rats). In many ways, then, fourteenth-century Sittingbourne made important contributions to the pilgrim economy. In so doing, it promoted the ascendency of economic mobility over static geographical designations, and became a key feature of Chaucer’s redefined English landscape. The second locale Chaucer mentions in the frame narrative of The Canterbury Tales is Rochester. This reference occurs in the Monk’s Prologue, when 87 88

89

Similar drawings can be seen in a number of churches along the Roman Watling Street. W. A. Scott Robertson, Histories of Sittingbourne and Milton Regis (Sittingbourne: Historical Research Group of Sittingbourne, n.d.), 26–7. These papers are part of a collection Robertson submitted to the Archaeologia Cantiana in the late nineteenth century. Peter Morgan, interview, 27 July 2010. The city’s resistance to the plague could also be a consequence of the fact that high mobility prompted an antigen–antibody reaction.



Economic Mobilities in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales  55

the Host tells the Monk, “My lord, the Monk… be myrie of cheere, / For ye shul telle a tale trewely. / Loo Rouchestre stant heer faste by!” (7.1924–6). Like Sittingbourne, Rochester was a place committed to mobility. It boasted a large number of inns and hermitages, one of which – the Crown Inn – Chaucer is purported to have stayed in.90 The town was also home to Temple Manor, Rochester Castle, and Rochester Cathedral (all of which still stand today). The latter was particularly important because it housed William of Perth’s shrine, which attracted thousands of pilgrims after William was canonized in 1256. So many pilgrims visited Rochester Cathedral, in fact, that the steps leading to St William’s shrine were worn down and had to be replaced with wooden stairs.91 The stones over the doorway to the south Quire Transept (1340) also bore the weight of pilgrim mobilities. There, a Jewish figure is depicted carry­ ing an upside-down book and broken scrip, representing the certain failure of Jewish pilgrimage. Together, the Cathedral’s stones and the bodies that trod on them exemplified a mobilizing English landscape. Of course, the city’s most important contribution to Chaucer’s England was Rochester Bridge, which spanned the River Medway and enabled travel from London to Canterbury and Dover. This bridge, which is discussed more fully in Chapter 2, was the most frequently used Medway crossing for nearly 500 years. With all traffic heading southeast from London funneling across Rochester Bridge, the city quickly became an integral part of the Canterbury pilgrimage. Its prominence depended not on hierarchies established by the Church or State (geographical or otherwise), but on the quanitity of bodies flowing through and across its streets and bridges. Finally, Chaucer mentions the village of Harbledown in the Manciple’s Prologue. He writes, Woot ye nat where ther stant a litel toun Which that ycleped is Bobbe-up-and-doun [Harbledown], Under the Blee, in Caunterbury Weye? Ther gan oure Hooste for to jape and pleye… (9.1–4)

Unlike Sittingbourne and Rochester, Harbledown was a village that remains largely rural to this day. On a trip through the town one is more likely to see apple orchards than paper mills. Harbledown remains significant to Chaucer’s English landscape, though, because despite its small size, it is the location of two sites that attracted considerable pilgrim traffic. The first is St Nicholas’s Hospital, where travelers were allowed to kiss one of Thomas Becket’s slippers in exchange for alms; and the second is the Black Prince’s well, part of 90 91

S. Gordon Wilson, With the Pilgrims to Canterbury (London: The Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 1934), 3. This is also the inn featured in Shakespeare’s 1 Henry IV. The same is the case at Canterbury Cathedral, though the Pilgrims’ Steps in Canterbury have not been covered by wooden steps. Some sources indicate that Rochester was second only to Canterbury in the number of pilgrims it drew.

56  Mobility and Identity in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales

the holy well and spring route.92 This well commemorated the valiant deeds of Edward III’s eldest son, whose emblem (three ostrich feathers) is featured on the well’s keystone, and it attracted pilgrims not only because of its political significance, but also because its water was believed to be holy and therefore capable of removing pilgrims’ (literal and figurative) stains before they entered Canterbury. As home to these two sites, Harbledown served an important function on Chaucer’s refigured map of southeast England: it was a third locale that promoted the exchange of coin for encounter. Moreover, Harbledown is within easy walking distance of Canterbury’s Westgate. At higher elevations in the village, one would be able to see the city’s walls and cathedral beckoning. That Chaucer’s pilgrims do not arrive at their destination is therefore all the more significant. Like their point of departure in Southwark, their final destination – as narrated in The Canterbury Tales, at least – is on the edge of a walled urban space. While the entirety of the pilgrimage route lies beyond the purview of political and religious “setes” (MED, sete, n.[2], 2c, a word that also implies stasis in its first sense as “the act of sitting”), this literal return to the edges underscores the liminality of Chaucer’s pilgrimage. The places that bookend the pilgrims’ journey are defined by their relation to London and Canterbury, but they also define each city by serving as that which is immediately outside, even as city walls and the sociopolitical structures that separated inside from outside were shown to be increasingly porous. Because they constituted borderlands – separate but contiguous – Southwark and Harbledown also provided a liberating perspective on each urban site. From the Tabard Inn and St Nicholas’s Hospital, one could sense the nearby cities without being subject to their regulations. Alien bodies, economic networks, and discursive practices were unbound from (even as they leaked into) city histories, structures, and sees. And in each case the mobility implied by such a perspective is captured by strikingly liquid locales; as Gower gazes on London from his barge in the midst of the Thames, pilgrims’ hands drip with water from the Black Prince’s well in Harbledown. At the beginning and end of Chaucer’s pilgrimage, bodies within view of southeast England’s most imposing cities remain unconfined, multidirectional, and fluid, their travel lying entirely outside of walls, fortifications, and the ideological structures that they delineate. Finally, by ending his narrative in Harbledown, Chaucer erases the pull factors of the pilgrims’ destination and the one feature that would unquestionably ground the text, Thomas Becket’s shrine. Like the imagined tombs of Griselda’s children, and the actual tombs of Walter, Griselda, and Cecilia, Thomas Becket’s tomb would have lent spatial stability to the pilgrims’ journey. Its permanence would erase the rich movement embodied by the pilgrims, and 92

Records indicate that Colet and Erasmus visited this shrine in 1513. For more information on the hospital, see Derek Ingram Hill, The Ancient Hospitals and Almshouses of Canterbury (Canterbury: Canterbury Archaeological Society, 2004).



Economic Mobilities in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales  57

its presence would overshadow references to Sittingbourne, Rochester, and Harbledown. By stopping his narrative before the pilgrims reach Canterbury, Chaucer sustains his focus on mobility and economic exchange. He renders tombs and destinations inconsequential, making The Canterbury Tales pilgrimage one that exists almost entirely on the road, an interim space defined by emergent economic networks rather than monarchs or martyrs. Ultimately, pilgrimage manifests as a form of economic mobility in the frame narrative of The Canterbury Tales, but, unlike the mobilities that haunt the fictions told by the Cook and Yeoman, it is rendered productive and empowering. Chaucer’s pilgrims are not crafting countenaucnes or disrupting spaces, but their movement is also not mere ritual. Instead, they are constructing and participating in economic networks that transformed southeast England to the extent that new towns were created to accommodate them. By absenting authorizing sites and telling tales in the spaces between, Chaucer does not dislocate authority altogether, but instead relocates it in mobile bodies and the economies, geographies, and discourses they generate. Movement is therefore shown to produce rather than destroy, as new social and spatial identities coalesce around the road.

2 Building Bridges to Canterbury As the road emerges as a site of productive potential in Chaucer’s frame narrative, we are encouraged to consider the dynamics of medieval roads and their capacity to mediate structured and smooth space. Counter to the immobility represented by London and Canterbury’s city walls (structured space) and the omnidirectional mobility enabled by bodies of water (smooth space), roads perform and participate in directional movement. They carve vectors into the landscape, pointing toward and away from destinations at either end. But as the frame narrative of The Canterbury Tales suggests, focusing exclusively on points of departure and arrival obscures the value of what lies between. The road is both a line of motion and a place that is enabled by and enables human and nonhuman mobilities. When weather, wear and tear, negligence, or vandalism breaks a road, we become painfully aware of that road as a place. With our passage inhibited, we are forced to see the road as ground and not mere conduit. On a medieval roadway, for instance, one would recognize the impact of iron-rimmed cartwheels on the surface, the loosening of gravel after a heavy rain, and the pits dug by vandals like Prior William Bewick, who in response to a request that he repair the pavement outside York’s Castelgate Postern, dug pits in the high street.1 In contemplating alternative ways of moving through broken spaces, one would note, too, tracks stamped into the surrounding grasses or the proximity of local enclosures, avenues that either invite or prohibit continued movement. Prior to the sixteenth century, when walls and hedges were built to mark private land, alternative means of navigation were relatively easy to come by owing to customary rights of passage. Likening the medieval road to an easement, Sidney and Beatrice Webb write, it was not a strip of land, or any corporeal thing, but a legal and customary right. … What existed, in fact, was not a road, but what we might almost term an easement—a right of way, enjoyed by the public at large from 1

T. Andrew, “The Fifteenth-Century Wardmote Court Returns for York” (MA thesis, University of York, 1997), 70–80, qtd in Valerie Allen, “When Things Break: Mending Roads, Being Social,” in Roadworks: Medieval Britain, Medieval Roads, eds. Valerie Allen and Ruth Evans (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2016), 74–96. A generous reading offers that Bewick was digging for materials with which to repair the road.

60  Mobility and Identity in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales village to village, along a certain customary course, which, if much frequented, became a beaten track.2

Because the medieval road was an abstract and flexible concept, it could readily adapt to obstructions and encroachments, veering into neighboring fields to produce parallel tracks. Yet, as Valerie Allen notes, “In order to be exercised, the right of passageway… requires a certain layout of the land, namely, an unenclosed, relatively open terrain.”3 This stipulation calls to mind the fact that a “right of passageway” was not available at all points along the Canterbury Pilgrimage. In towns, for example, houses and shops located along the roadway would prohibit the simple sidestepping of an obstruction, and on bridges stone throughways presented clearly defined edges to travelers; the abstraction and flexibility of roadways that cut through open fields is not afforded to travelers suspended over a river. Indeed, breakage was most felt on a bridge, where terrain itself, let alone “unenclosed, relatively open terrain,” gave way to a watery landscape into which one could not venture. On the road to Canterbury, sidestepping a bridge obstruction would mean plunging into the Thames or the Medway, and while weather or wear could return a road to the stuff whence it came (e.g., stone to gravel, hardpack to dirt), it could result in the utter collapse of a bridge. To cross two of the most notable blockages en route to Canterbury from London, then, pilgrims depended upon the maintenance of medieval England’s most ambitious bridge projects: London Bridge and Rochester Bridge. These bridges call attention to their presence as places, imbued with history, meaning, and substance. They are both objects and affordances, representing humankind’s ability to impact the landscape (though, as we will see, this is more an incorporation than an imposition), and the environment’s accommodation of the human subject. Roads may productively be thought of as “a clearing in, rather than a man-made difference from, the environment,” as Allen argues, but bridges are built structures that simultaneously stand apart from and are fundamentally a part of the environment in which they are embedded.4 In this way, bridges are uniquely hybrid. They represent both site and transition in a space between riverbanks, challenging familiar dichotomies that set mobility against stasis, throughway against destination, and the environment against humankind. The hybrid nature of the bridges pilgrims encountered en route to Canterbury is the subject of this chapter. Specifically, I will argue that medieval bridges are “naturecultures” that commingle human/nonhuman movement and architectural stasis, and in so doing bear witness to the profound hybridity of the Middle Ages.5 Together, 2 3 4 5

Sidney and Beatrice Webb, English Local Government, vol. 5: The Story of the King’s Highway (London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1913), 5. Allen, “When Things Break,” 78. Allen, “When Things Break,” 77. On “naturecultures,” see Donna Haraway, The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People,



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bridges and the liquid landscapes they span suggest a category of geographically determined identity that saturates The Canterbury Tales: a liquid (as versus lithic) way of being that foregrounds the dynamic and generative potential of literal and ideological fluidity. I will begin by exploring the hybrid resonances of medieval bridges, and then consider how Rochester Bridge and London Bridge in particular represent new ways of conceptualizing mobility and identity in the fourteenth century. Of course, these bridges are not explicitly referenced in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, but the hybrid nature of the frame narrative, which represents a pilgrimage that happens in the space between London and Canterbury, reminds us that traditional binaries separating center from margin, fiction from frame, and presence from absence tend to oversimplify lived experience and the narratives that reflect it. The frame is not absent when a tale is underway, nor do southeast England’s bridges cease to impact the Canterbury pilgrims simply because they are not the subject of discourse. Instead, presences point toward elisions and erasures that demand reincorporation.6 As Bruno Latour observes, dualistic thinking “allows the expanded proliferation of the hybrids whose existence, whose very possibility, it denies.”7 The presence of Rochester in the frame narrative reminds readers of the absent bridge at its edge, which was integral to movement to and through the urban center; one would not exist without the other. This recognition encourages a phenomenology that values both/and over either/or categories. Recentering the bridges along the Pilgrim’s Way and valuing them alongside the tales therefore creates an important tertium quid, within which dualities dissolve, absences are highlighted, and uniquely hybrid entities are born. As Latour writes, “In the middle, where nothing is supposed to be happening, there is almost everything.”8

Reading Medieval Bridges as Hybrid Bodies It is helpful to begin by considering the various hybridities manifested by medieval bridges and their capacity to produce new ways of thinking about humankind’s navigation of and incorporation in nonhuman landscapes and ecologies. First, in recognizing the value of bridges as both conduits and meaningful sites in themselves, we come to see that they not only produce movement, but are produced by movement. They testify to social, political, and ecological structures that manifest in space, as they coalesce around and record existing human and nonhuman mobilities rather than merely dictating them. This conceit is strikingly similar to modern conceptions of airports,

6 7 8

and Significant Otherness (Chicago, IL: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2003). One might recall the “traces” of Derrida’s “Différance.” Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 34. Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, 123.

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masterfully articulated by geographer Peter Adey. Rather than accepting airports as fixed entities or nodes through which bodies and things move, Adey argues that airports are made from lines of mobility.9 He writes, Passenger mobilities are treated indivisibly. They are imagined as flows and rivers and, thus, modeled as vectors that eventually become real in the ‘real’ material environment of the terminal. Lines and flows materialise into the tube like structures of gates, tunnels, and corridors—the materialisation of what Deleuze and Guattari would know as hydraulic science.10

Significantly, in this formulation movement produces structure rather than being contained by it. Like the network born from economic movement between and within Southwark, Sittingbourne, Rochester, and Harbledown, Adey’s airport vectors consist of mobile entities being distributed “across a smooth space… producing a movement that holds space and simultaneously affects all of its points, instead of being held by space in a local movement from one specified point to another.”11 Movement is thereby rendered generative, producing hydraulic structures that allow for the physical manifestation of mobility in the “real” landscape. And architecture becomes capricious, bending to and forming around the networks that move through and across it. Because the construction of bridges is both literally and figuratively a consequence of hydraulics, we might think of bridges as vectors, “inseparable from flows… and heterogen[eous], as opposed to the stable, the eternal, the identical, the constant.”12 In fact, Deleuze and Guattari call on bridges as an example of nomad science in their “Treatise on Nomadology.” Citing structural engineer Jean-Rodolphe Perronet, they oppose “to the heaviness of the bridge, to the striated space of thick and regular piles… a thinning and discontinuity of the piles, surbase, and vault, a lightness and continuous variation of the whole.”13 Regularity is supplanted by variability, as an inspection of seemingly uniform piles reveals irregularities resulting from stone cutting, erosion, and geometric miscalculation. Bridges therefore become emblematic of nomadism as versus the static structures of state, enabling new (often resistant) formulations of identity. They are manifestations of movement suspended in architecture, engendering and engendered by mobile practice. 9

10

11 12 13

On airports as fixed and/or nodes, see Peter Adey, “Airports and Air-Mindedness: Spacing, Timing, and Using Liverpool Airport 1929–39,” Social and Cultural Geography 7 (2006), 343–63; M. Crang, “Between Places: Producing Hubs, Flows, and Networks,” Environment and Planning A 34.4 (2002), 569–74. Peter Adey, “Airports: Terminal/Vector,” in Geographies of Mobilities: Practices, Spaces, Subjects, eds. Tim Cresswell and Peter Merriman (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2011), 137–50 (140). This is one of many essays in which Adey discusses the results of his research at Liverpool Airport. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (London: Athlone Press, 1987), 363. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 361. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 365; emphasis mine.



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The hybridity of the structure itself, at once static and mobile, is echoed by the bodies that occupy it. When standing on a bridge, one is “there” (i.e., emplaced) precisely because one is between places. This dynamism becomes particularly acute when we consider the living bridges of the Middle Ages. A body loiters on a road – in the sense of Middle English loitren: “to idle away one’s time” (MED “loitren,” v.1) – but it can live on a medieval bridge.14 In medieval Paris, the Grand Pont aux Changeurs (1298), the Pont des Meuniers (1323), the Pont Saint-Michel (1379), and the Pont Notre Dame (1414) were all living bridges. Pre-dating the construction of single-use carriageways over the Seine, which promoted only elite forms of mobility, these bridges bore an abundance of human and nonhuman networks. For example, when Louis VII declared the Grand Pont aux Changeurs the exclusive site of the Parisian money-changing trade (1141), the bridge became lined with money-changing shops and practitioners’ residences. In this way, guilds “rooted” themselves in the non-soil of medieval living bridges. Alongside artists and ecclesiasts, they stimulated the construction of tollhouses, chapels, and art galleries that made bridges both via points and destinations.15 Because of these materializing networks, upon crossing France’s medieval bridges a sixteenth-century traveler was able to observe that they “are erected with so much artifice that, being on these bridges, you are unable to judge whether you are on a bridge or streets continuing from the town, as much is the whole ornamented and clothed with magnificent houses.”16 This traveler’s confusion regarding the status of the roadway (bridge or street?) reveals his sense that he is on hybrid ground. The space is both bridge and street, an artifact of mobile and mobility-supporting networks “ornamented” in stone and timber. It is both of and apart from the city, embedded in and allowing passage over the river on which medieval Paris was built. In contrast to vehicular bridges, then, the living bridge “provides a continuity within the urban fabric that is not only social and economic but also cultural, emotional and symbolic at a point where a natural break would otherwise exist.”17 It is both mobile and stable, emplaced and between places. London Bridge, which will be examined further below, would have provided Chaucer with a particularly resonant model of living bridges. In 1281 a royal writ concerning London Bridge mentions “almost innumerable people 14 15 16

17

On medieval roads (which provide a productive comparison to medieval bridges), see Valerie Allen, “Roads,” postmedieval 4.1 (2013), 18–29. The art gallery owned by Gersaint atop the Pont Notre-Dame, immortalized in Jean-Antoine Watteau’s Gersaint’s Shopsign (1720), is particularly noteworthy. G. Paradin, Memoires de l’histrorie de Lyon (Marseille: Lafitte, 1573), qtd in Ulf Strohmayer, “Bridges: Different Conditions of Mobile Possibilities,” in Geographies of Mobilities: Practices, Spaces, Subjects, eds. Tim Cresswell and Peter Merriman (New York: Routledge, 2011), 124. Peter Murray and MaryAnne Stevens, Living Bridges: The Inhabited Bridge, Past, Present and Future (London: Royal Academy of Arts, 1996), 20.

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dwelling thereon,” and a rental survey of Bridge House properties in 1358 shows that there were 62 shops on the east side of the roadway and 69 on the west side.18 By the late sixteenth century, it had evolved such that it could be described by John Norden (who engraved The View of London Bridge from East to West c. 1594) as being “adorned with sumptuous buildings and stately and beautiful houses on either side; inhabited by wealthy citizens and furnished with all manner of trades, comparable in itself to a little city.”19 The bridge was therefore far more than a determining structure, facilitating or impeding river crossings; it was a place of residence and economic exchange, a microcosm of the city suspended over the Thames.20 Beyond the momentous historical events played out thereupon (the Peasants’ Revolt, for example), daily life would have consisted of innumerable micro and macro movements: blood flowing in veins, money being exchanged for goods, and bodies flocking toward the chapel of St Thomas the Martyr or a tableau vivant at the Southwark Bridge Foot. Bridges also offered a new way of thinking about the relationship between the human and the nonhuman, natural and cultural. As Valerie Allen and Ruth Evans note of medieval roads, “A road is a road when it allows one to move on it,” such that wheat fields or grasslands offered as viable a throughway as beaten tracks.21 Writing in the eighteenth century, William Hawkins explains, “the King’s Subjects ought to have a good Passage, and the good Passage is the Way, and not only the beaten Track from whence it follows, That if such Outlets be sown with Corn, and the beaten Track be founderous, the King’s Subjects may justify going upon the corn.”22 Here the concept of a road is inscribed onto a nonhuman landscape to accommodate human use without any physical transformation of that landscape – the change is ideological. Bridges, however, reveal a far more complicated interplay between nature and culture. While natural bridges do exist (over Cedar Creek in Natural Bridge, Virginia, for example), in most cases a bridge is a material reality because it has been built; it is the product of human industry colliding with the natural world. As a result, bridges unambiguously expose the intersections between human and nonhuman that produce mobility; elemental materials including stone, wood, 18

19 20

21

22

Calendar of Patent Rolls preserved in the Public Record Office, 65 vols. (London: 1291– 1509, 1547–63, 1893–1948); C. Welch, History of Tower Bridge (London: 1894), 258–9, qtd in London Bridge: 2000 Years of a River Crossing, eds. Bruce Watson, Trevor Brigham, and Tony Dyson (London: Museum of London Archeology Service, 2001), 97–8. Murray and Stevens, Living Bridges, 15. London Bridge as both connection and barrier (the latter as a consequence of the gates thereon, the Stonegate and the Drawbridge Gate), reveals yet another sense in which medieval bridges can be read as hybrid. Valerie Allen and Ruth Evans, “Introduction,” in Roadworks: Medieval Britain, Medieval Roads, eds. Valerie Allen and Ruth Evans (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2016), 7. William Hawkins, A Treatise on the Please of the Crown, vol. 1 (London: E. and R. Nutt and R. Gosling, 1739), 201.



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and water are subjected to human art and architecture to produce a structure whose stitches reveal natural–cultural intersections. The hybridity of bridges is therefore immediately sensed, as they showcase their both/and-ness. This way of thinking about nature and culture, as components of the same whole that are always simultaneously present (ideologically and materially), has become commonplace in twenty-first-century ecotheory. Deleuze and Guattari’s “rhizomes,” Donna Haraway’s “naturecultures,” Jane Bennett’s “assemblages,” and Timothy Morton’s “ecology without nature” all suggest that the human and nonhuman intersect in ways that challenge traditional ways of thinking that prioritize either humankind (anthropocentrism) or the natural world (ecocentrism). Each critic in their own way argues that categorical boundaries are crossed but not erased, resulting in multiplicity rather than absorption. The result is a manifest hybridity that, like Adey’s vectors, is created from the intersection of natural and cultural networks. Haraway offers as an example the wolf–dog hybrids that were (unsuccessfully) bred to be attack dogs in South Africa during the apartheid era. These hybrid bodies now stalk the borders of a country that has no use for them, with sanctuaries that will only accept “pure wolves.” Confronting the history of these attack dogs reveals a “knot” of intersecting realities, which includes: The racial discourses endemic to the history of both biology and the nation; the collision of endangered species worlds, with their conservation apparatuses, and security discourse worlds, with their criminality and terrorist apparatuses; the actual lives and deaths of differentially situated human beings and animals shaped by these knots; contending popular and professional narratives about wolves and dogs and their consequences for who lives and dies and how; the coshaped histories of human social welfare and animal welfare organizations; the class-saturated funding apparatuses of private and public animal–human worlds; [and] the development of the categories to contain those, human and nonhuman, who are disposable and killable.23

Animals, humans, commerce, technology, and identity politics collide here, producing a simultaneity that underscores the degree to which humans are inextricably enmeshed in the nonhuman, and vice versa. South Africa’s genetically engineered dogs are at the center of a complex system of actants that are neither fully natural nor cultural, but always and ever both. This ideology is particularly applicable to liquid landscapes, insofar as rivers and the bridges that navigate them offer a material representation of and a means by which to articulate the blurring of natural/cultural borders. A bridge is a testament to human art and industry submerged in a river’s unremitting flow, and each stone that composes it is an aggregate of minerals that has been cut or carved by human hands; both nature and culture are evident, but where 23

Donna Haraway, When Species Meet (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minneapolis Press, 2008), 37–8.

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one ends and the other begins is not always clear. And to articulate this porousness we use liquid metaphors – nature and culture leak into and saturate one another while denying absorption and vertical hierarchies of being. What occurs instead is Deleuzian “adsorbsion”: a gathering of elements that preserves something of each element’s agency.24 Articulating this process as seepage, Steve Mentz writes, “seeping names an endless ecological process that violates boundaries without dissolving them entirely.”25 Even a phenomeno­ logical consideration of the body as water (e.g., Astrida Neimanis’s Bodies of Water) depends on distinct but permeable elemental and corporeal ontologies. A truly hybrid conception of the environment therefore blurs boundaries to jettison anthropocentric and ecocentric thought, but allows “anthro-” and “eco-” to remain. Beyond offering a rich approach to human and nonhuman worlds, this interplay reinstates the mobile/static binary, insofar as naturecultures “[torque] many of our accepted cartographies of space, time, and species.”26 As nature and culture collide, we come to think of movement on different scales – the circulation of blood in a pedestrian’s body is concurrent with and implicated in that body’s movement across London Bridge, the stones of which slowly give to the tides that are produced by celestial rotations. The body is inextricable from its terrestrial and extraterrestrial contexts such that movement and stasis are always ever-present, their simultaneity inviting multi-scalar perspectives. Even when one experiences the sensation of being in place, “multiplicity, oscillation, mediation, material heterogeneity, performativity, [and] interference” remind us that “there is no resting place in a multiple and partially connected world.”27 As human and nonhuman seep into one another, nature and culture, mobility and stasis, “movement and countermovement” manifest, revealing vectors and hybridities that override binary ways of thinking.28 On medieval England’s bridges, where mobility provided a structure around which to build (emplace) naturecultures, this is all the more redolent.

Rochester Bridge The Rochester Bridge was one of the most important bridge projects in all of England, carrying Watling Street over the Medway, and thereby linking 24 25

26 27

28

Patrick Hayden, “Gilles Deleuze and Naturalism: A Convergence with Ecological Theory and Politics,” Environmental Ethics 19.2 (1997), 185–204 (187). Steve Mentz, “Seep,” in Veer Ecology: A Companion for Environmental Thinking, eds. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen and Lowell Duckert (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2017), 294. Astrida Neimanis, Bodies of Water: Posthuman Feminist Phenomenology (New York: Bloomsbury, 2017), 4. John Law and Annemarie Mol, “Complexities: An Introduction,” in Complexities: Social Studies of Knowledge Practices, ed. John Law and Annemarie Mol (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002), 20. Mentz, “Seep,” 283; emphasis mine.



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Figure 1. View of the medieval bridge over the Medway, Rochester.

London to both Canterbury and the Continent. Originally a timber roadway supported by nine stone piers, the Roman bridge lacked balustrades and barriers and was an incredibly perilous bridge to cross. In the Anglo-Norman poem “The Harper at Rochester,” a minstrel recalls how a gust of wind blew him off the bridge, and extant coroners’ inquests often identify the bridge as having caused death.29 After the original medieval bridge (constructed c. AD 960) succumbed to the force of ice melts in 1381, Sir Robert Knolles, Sir John Cobham, and architect Henry Yevele spearheaded the construction of a second bridge.30 The importance of this bridge to Rochester (and southeast England) cannot be overstated. From its beginning, Rochester was defined by its proximity to and contention with the Medway, its Roman name being Durobrivis, a compound of two Celtic words meaning “walled town by the bridge.” The construction of the 560-foot 1391 bridge reinforced this link, serving as the most frequently used Medway crossing for nearly 500 years.31

29 30

31

James M. Gibson, The Rochester Bridge Trust (Rochester, UK: AntidoteFM, 2005). The author of the Westminister Chronicle writes, “About the feast of the Purification of the Blessed Virgin this year a great part of Rochester Bridge was destroyed. Ice had formed in vast quantities, and when it broke up, with the onset of milder weather, the massive pressure of the flores [sic] which had composed it wrecked the bridge” (The Westminister Chronicle, 1381–1394, eds. L. C. Hector and B. F. Harvey [Oxford: Oxford Medieval Texts, 1982], 2–3). It was replaced in 1856 with a bridge that better accommodated modern river traffic.

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Upon its completion, it was called “sumptuoissimus” (magnificent) by Thomas of Walsingham, and as late as the eighteenth century, it was praised by Daniel Defoe as “the largest, highest, and the strongest built of all bridges in England, except London Bridge.”32 Nonetheless, Rochester Bridge, more than most pieces of architecture, was itself a body in motion. This is in large part due to the rivers in which it was embedded and the raw materials with which it was made – a reminder that an understanding of bridges is incomplete without an analysis of the natural world, bringing the notion of an inclusive environment to the fore and colliding the mobility–stasis and nature–culture dichotomies.33 In the case of Rochester Bridge, nature was commingled with culture from the bridge’s inception. Keeping the original medieval bridge’s collapse in mind, planners chose to locate the 1391 bridge one hundred feet further upriver, “both for the fastnes of the soile, and for the breaking of the swiftnes of the streame.”34 Already soil and water were implicated in Rochester Bridge’s construction; more secure soil would better hold the pilings, and a slower current would lessen the force of water on stone. Man’s capacity to impose his will on the natural world was therefore ruthlessly tempered by that world. A failure to accommodate environmental imperatives would almost certainly result in the catastrophic collapse of a cultural emblem. Nature and culture also both impacted the construction itself. Wood, stone, chalk, and iron were molded by industry and art to produce a bridge that stood for half a millennium. The process would have started with the construction of staddles. First, iron-tipped elm piles were driven into the riverbed, establishing a base about 45 feet long by 25 feet wide that was pointed at each end, allowing tides to run in and out with minimal resistance.35 The tops of these piles were then sawed off at the low-water mark and surrounded by a protective barrier made of additional tied piles, like modern cofferdams.36 32

33

34 35

36

Thomas Walsingham, Historia Anglicana, Rolls Series, vol. 2, ed. H. T. Riley (London: 1863–4), 277; Daniel Defoe, Tour Thro’ the Whole Island of Great Britain (London: Longman & Co., 1724), 20. On inclusive “environments,” see Sven Birkert, “Only God Can Make a Tree: The Joys and Sorrows of Ecocriticism,” Boston Book Review 3.1 (1996), who writes, “Nature and its preservation is what occupies most of the ecocritics. And this imposes a kind of programmatic simplicity upon the whole movement. … How much more interesting and controversial would be an ecocriticism pledging itself to the more inclusive idea of ‘environment’” (6). William Lambarde, A Perambulation of Kent (London: H. Middleton, 1576), 303. Available at http://name.umdl.umich.edu/A72509.0001.001. These steps were determined by a firm of contractors who removed the foundations of the medieval bridge after its demolition. See R. H. Britnell, “Rochester Bridge, 1381–1530,” in Traffic and Politics: The Construction and Management of Rochester Bridge, AD 43–1993, eds. Nigel Yates and James M. Gibson (Woodbridge: Boydell, 1994), 43–59. A cofferdam is a watertight enclosure, pumped dry to create a tenable work environment within a body of water, usually for the purpose of laying a foundation. Today, cofferdams are generally built out of steel and mechanically evacuated.



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Figure 2. Plan and elevation of Rochester Bridge, showing eleven arches and ten of twelve staddles (including one land staddle).

In Rochester, the resulting cavity was packed with chalk – an abundant commodity in Kent that substituted for loose stones and rubble – and finally, the top and sides of each staddle were boarded over with elm planks. In total, twelve of these staddles were built for Rochester Bridge, resulting in eleven openings, all arched save the seventh opening from the Rochester bank, which was crossed by the royal drawbridge.37 The roadway and the piers built atop these staddles were then constructed with ragstone, much of it recycled from the previous bridge. This alone was a feat of civil engineering, but the work was far from over. Maintenance following a “completed” bridge project was constant. As R. H. Britnell notes, “medieval bridges were vulnerable structures, especially when they were large and built over a tidal river, and Rochester Bridge must have been one of the most difficult in England to maintain.”38 In the ten years following Rochester Bridge’s construction, an average of £25 per year was spent on maintenance work, including reinforcing the elm piles, repairing/renewing the wooden framing of the staddles, and packing hundreds of tons of chalk into eroded staddles and the riverbed itself. Careful records report the amount of money spent on bridgework, wardens’ salaries, administration, upkeep of bridge trust property, rents and taxes, the bridge chapel (“newly erected” in January 1393), and other necessary expenses.39 All of this suggests a structure that was far from static. Beyond being a product of human and hydraulic 37 38 39

Janet Becker, Rochester Bridge, 1387–1856: A History of Its Early Years (London: Constable & Co., 1930), 9–10. Britnell, “Rochester Bridge, 1381–1530,” 47. Becker, Rochester Bridge, 13.

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vectors, and bearing the weight of countless feet in motion (emplaced and between places), the bridge itself transformed in response to the Medway: chalk eroded, ragstone receded, and elm rotted. Most man-made structures deteriorate over time, of course, but the micro-movements of bridges are immediately and interminably sensed. Travelers can see foam building around the staddles, hear rushing water, and feel the spray of water on their faces, providing kinesthetic proof that a seemingly static bridge is perhaps better understood to be kinetic in place. The spaces around Rochester Bridge also transformed as a consequence of construction and maintenance. The impact of both on the Kentish landscape was immense, affecting water, wood, and chalk in particular. The effect on the Medway was seen in the forceful current that rushed beneath the ragstone arches, a result of the staddles having substantially decreased the width of the waterway, which made “shooting the bridge” (i.e., attempting to steer a boat between staddles, especially when the river was flooded) a favored activity among the daring, some would say reckless, youth. The need for wood, to fabricate piles and the planks that surrounded them, resulted in the deforestation of the downlands’ steep, forested slopes.40 When construction began, Richard II granted bridge contractors carte blanche to take any timber they required from all but the church’s land, resulting in the felling of thousands of trees in the vicinity of the bridge. In fact, because local reserves were exhausted by the initial construction, wood for replacement piles and planks was shipped from sites upriver between Aylesford and Maidstone, with records from the early fifteenth century reporting as many as 200 elms used in a single year.41 Chalk, too, was mined at will, with around 100,000 tons of chalk consumed during the first hundred years of bridge maintenance, and as much as 2500 tons of chalk used in a single year.42 Beyond depleting the chalk supply, this resource allocation would have affected countless vocations, including the growth of cherries, an important Kentish export that thrived on chalky soil. These figures suggest the extreme impact that medieval bridge-building had on the ecosystem. Bridges may have been one of the few architectural structures that existed coequal with – and not superior to – their immediate environment (i.e., the river), but they did not do so without affecting the surrounding, nonhuman ecologies. Specifically, as trees and calcite deposits gained value on a market that sought to accumulate goods to meet a growing demand (here, for mobility), natural resources became capital. Beyond enabling movement between commercial hubs, bridges therefore generated their 40

41 42

Though the downlands are usually associated with rolling grassland, in the Middle Ages the steeper slopes of the downs were covered with a ribbon of woodland that served as a valuable resource to the wardens and commonality. See Britnell, “Rochester Bridge, 1381–1530,” 61. Britnell, “Rochester Bridge, 1381–1530,” 63. This statistic reflects the number of elms used in 1444–5; exact information exists only for the years 1436–46. Britnell, “Rochester Bridge, 1381–1530,” 65–6. In 1415, the commonality of the bridge acquired a quarry at Walshes to meet their demand.



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own unique economy that – like the economic practices of the Cook’s Tale and the Canon’s Yeoman’s Prologue and Tale – changed the way people interacted with and conceived of the material world in which they lived. In a more immediate way than Perkyn’s illicit trades and the Canon’s alchemical practice, though, bridge economies impacted the natural world, endangering medieval landscapes and the dynamic equilibria that sustained them. As modern political ecologists argue, when livelihoods are the product of nature and culture (or socionature to use the language of political ecology), “the logic of capital/ capitalism acts as a general, uneven force that literally degrades life, overpowering socionatures that are based upon something other than the logic of efficiency and accumulation.”43 Since livelihoods are always the product of a hybrid nature/culture, and perhaps especially so in a time predating Horkheimer and Adorno’s “culture industry,” the commodification of natural resources in the Middle Ages that grew from bridge construction enmeshed bridges in a cycle of literal and metaphorical material degradation – both the matter used to build bridges and the institutional “materials” necessary for capital (re) production were endangered. And while this endangerment is problematic, it also enlivens the bridge. The natural/cultural, mobile/static object becomes an active participant in complex, hybrid networks. Like London’s economic mobilities, the bridge’s impact on nature–labor–culture can be seen as both imperiling and empowering. The effects of bridge construction were also felt by the hands and bodies that worked the construction site. The manpower demanded by such a difficult project was extraordinary; hundreds of laborers would have to contend with the Medway’s current, men and their tools submerged in what must have at times seemed a futile attempt to harness the floods. A fifteenth-century poem appended by Thomas Hearne to his edition of Leland’s Itinerary narrates this venture for us, with direct reference to the construction of late-medieval staddle bridges in the lowlands. The anonymous poet writes, Then the strengthe of the streme astoned hem stronge, In labor and lavyng moche money was lore. Ther loved hem a ladde was a water man longe, He helpe stop the streme til the werke were afore. (39–42)44

In this passage, instability reigns; the world is defined by a tumult of water, bodies, and money. Even the efforts of the water man are mitigated. Though

43 44

Brian J. Gareau, “We Have Never Been Human: Agential Nature, ANT, and Marxist Political Ecology,” Capitalism, Nature, Socialism 16.4 (2005), 127–40 (139); emphasis mine. The Itinerary of John Leland the Antiquary, 9 vols., 2nd edn, ed. Thomas Hearne (Oxford: 1744–5), qtd in David Harrison, The Bridges of Medieval England: Transport and Society 400–1800 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2004), 134–5. Some identify the poet as Richard Forman, ironmonger, who was writing in the mid-fifteenth century about events that happened in the fourth year of Henry V’s reign.

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he is praised for his work, he can only “helpe” stop the stream, and the poet’s use of the ambiguous “afore” reinforces the uncertain nature of the service the “ladde” provides. Is the work behind him, as the preposition “til” implies? Or is it still ahead of him, as the aforementioned records of costly bridge maintenance suggest?45 The latter is more likely, given that the poet takes pains to remind his reader, “Thus they were cesed and set all in oon assent / That all the brekynges of the brige the towne bere schulde” (81–2). It is according to Parliamentary procedure, in fact, that the town will be responsible for repairs: “This was preved acte also in the Perlement” (83). Such lines lead a reader to believe that the water man works to “stop the streme” only to have to do so again and again, evoking an infinite regression of pilings, and in so doing reinforcing an understanding of bridges – like their environments and the bodies that bring them into being – as hybrid. Money, labor, raw materials, and rivers circulate in perpetuity, while the bridge itself projects architectural stability. This poem also advances our thinking about the nature–culture dialectic. The laborers are identified not simply as working men, but as “water men.” It is as though their skin is permeated by the water in which they are submerged, natural and human fluids comingling to produce a hybrid species that warrants distinction from “land men.” One can imagine children on the banks of the Medway marveling at men plunging into the river to tie planks around pilings, breathing as though through gills. A similar appellation occurring regularly in extant records is “tide men,” so called because they were paid not by the day, but by the tide. These men worked the gin and the ram to drive piles into the riverbed, work that was restricted to certain states of the tide. Perhaps even more than Hearne’s water men, the tide men worked to the rhythms of tidal rivers, their culturally ingrained patterns of labor forced into alignment with nature’s patterns, dictated by the moon rather than the sun. Finally, to call the men’s work labor is to evoke the economics of medieval bridge-building. The costliness of construction is mentioned no less than five times in Hearne’s poem (including the aforementioned references to bridge repair), and the poet even concludes by insisting that one ought not be “to covetous to youre own purse, / For peril of the peynes in the pit of helle” (132–3). When the poet is not busy condemning those who oppose infrastructure improvements, he takes pains to emphasize wage labor, remarking that the laborers are paid for their work by a man named Jeffrey Barbour: “Jeffray Barbour bad pey hem her hyre” (47). A Bristol merchant who retired to the town in which this bridge was built, Barbour spent “a M. Marke” to “pay for her travel” (57–8). And although Henry VI incorporated “The Guild of the Holy Cross” to watch over the bridge in 1442, at the time of its construction the bridge’s builders – an estimated 300 laborers who were each assigned

45

The MED allows for both readings. Middle English Dictionary Online, s.v. “afore, adv., prep., conj.,” accessed July 1, 2015. Available at http://quod.lib.umich.edu/m/med/.



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jobs according to their strengths – were unaffiliated with a guild.46 This division of labor is discussed in lines 179–204, wherein “stone, lime, and gravel” workmen are differentiated from one another, while still other laborers are said to transport natural resources (recalling the ecologies implicated in bridge projects), bale water, work iron, and frame arches. Moreover, the men are said to be divided into “teams of four… / To see who worked best at their current task.” Recalling the work of the Yeoman in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, laborers are estranged from the commodity they work to produce, and competition reigns. The laborer who transports stone cannot know what the stone he carries will be used for, but if his “travel” (travail, but also – and especially in this case – travel) is accounted for with his due “hyre,” the system will succeed. These processes and the phenomena they engender reveal the degree to which matter and man intermingle in the construction of a bridge. The properties and availability of natural resources defined Rochester Bridge’s structure, and carefully engineered plans ultimately gave way to natural anomalies. Irregularities in the Medway riverbed, for example, rendered the arches and piers asymmetrical, and the Medway’s heavy tides prevented the construction of buildings atop the bridge. Moreover, unlike the spaces surrounding extant transport systems (the fields bordering roads, for example), rivers could not be easily developed. On a bridge, therefore, culture could not fully domesticate and obscure the natural world in/out of which it is built. Yet bridges are always fundamentally cultural, engaging economic systems and standing in place for centuries as testimony to man’s manipulation of the landscape. Such concessions – man to nature and nature to man – render Rochester Bridge fundamentally hybrid, built from and embedded in a natural world that reminds passersby of its presence in the sound of water rushing against man-made staddle and cultivated stone. As for the place of Rochester Bridge in the Canterbury pilgrimage, we might begin by considering architect Henry Yevele, who designed Rochester Bridge while simultaneously designing the nave of Canterbury Cathedral, after already designing the nave of Westminster, and serving as the warden of London Bridge and caretaker of its chapel. As a consequence of this one man’s work, London, Rochester, and Canterbury become an amalgam of architectural continuity; Westminster’s nave resembles the arches of Rochester Bridge, which in turn resemble Canterbury Cathedral’s nave. Church, state, and civic-mindedness also converge, each manifest in the hybrid structure of the bridge, which mobilized religious, monarchical, and local endeavors alike. These movements were not without regulation, though. As James Smith observes, unregulated movement – characterized by “fluidity” in his work – 46

Andrew P. Roach and Bridget Rosewell, “Building Bridges: Some Lessons from the Middle Ages on the Long-Term Economic Impact of Bridges over the Thames” (London: Greater London Authority, 2008), 11–12.

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was a source of anxiety for many medieval writers.47 Bernard of Cluny, for example, wrote in De Contemptu Mundi, “[the world’s] position is unfixed, its status is unstable. It goes and it returns, like the sea, now bad and tomorrow even worse.”48 Instability, represented here by going and returning, threatened human existence by gesturing toward an apocalyptic chaos, but the mobility played out across Rochester Bridge was not apocalyptic. Instead, mimicking its own simultaneity (representing both nature and culture, movement and stasis), the Rochester Bridge presupposed only regulated mobilities, coming into being as a manifestation of hydraulics, and thereafter containing otherwise unrestrained kinesis. Indeed, unlike the ferries that could traverse rivers in a multitude of ways, bridges offered mobile bodies only one option.49 As a consequence, they helped to standardize routes, distilling variable movement toward a given destination into routinized itineraries, and thereby producing a mobile practice best characterized by vectors. Such mobilities came to define England and its people, locating medieval identities (like the bridges across which they were played out) in a hybrid category that at once represented humankind’s freedom to move, and the strictures placed upon that movement.

London Bridge The same could be said of London Bridge, which like Rochester Bridge served as a meeting point for nature and culture, kinesis and stasis, economics and ecologies. More so than Rochester Bridge, though, London Bridge speaks to the ways in which Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales contends with mobilizing economies.50 As discussed in Chapter 1, the failure of both the victualler’s static shop and Perkyn’s vagrancy in the Cook’s Tale suggests that neither stasis nor unrestrained kinesis can sustain London’s economic and geographical identity. There, I suggest that the Cook’s London stands in antithesis to the structured mobilities of the frame narrative. If we turn to the silent margins of the Cook’s Tale and activate the networks within which it operates, though, we find that its commercial ventures are part of a larger economic network with London Bridge at its center. This then realizes a middle ground in the Cook’s Tale, wherein mobile bodies moving in structured ways (i.e., along vectors) produce positive meaning. London Bridge therefore operates not only as a present absence in the frame narrative of The Canterbury Tales; it also seeps 47 48 49 50

James Smith, “Fluid: A Temporal Ecology” (presentation, 47th International Congress on Medieval Studies, Kalamazoo, MI, May 10–13, 2012). Scorn for the World: Bernard of Cluny’s De Contemptu Mundi, trans. Ronald E. Pepin (East Lansing, MI: Colleagues Press, 1991), 1.71. Unless, of course, those bodies were blown off the bridge and forced to swim to the nearest refuge, an event not unheard of in the Middle Ages. See Gibson, The Rochester Bridge Trust. I use “speaks” consciously here to activate the bridge and reclaim its voice in Chaucer’s frame. Like Rochester Bridge, it is one of the present absences to which the newly drawn pilgrimage (Rochester–Sittingbourne–Harbledown) points.



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into and out of the tales themselves, complicating the divide between fiction and frame and furthering the hypothesis that bridges are at the zenith of medieval hybridities. The relationship between the Cook’s Tale and London Bridge depends on the Bridgemasters’ account roll for 1381–2, which states that the London Bridge estate owned 28 shops in Old Change and 30 shops in Paternoster Row, both in the ward of Cheap.51 Given the location of Perkyn’s apprenticeship “in Chepe” (1.4377), it is likely that Chaucer’s Cook is telling the story of a victualler’s shop that paid rent to the Bridge House.52 Though the text makes no explicit mention of this relationship, Chaucer would certainly have been aware of the interdependence between Cheapside and the Bridge, given his relationships with those who oversaw London’s commerce and the fact that he, to quote David Benson, “probably knew more about the actual workings of London than any poet who has ever lived.”53 In fact, as controller for the Port of London under Nicholas Brembre, Chaucer was especially familiar with the victuallers – his boss and patron was a member of the grocers’ guild who, as mayor in 1384, arranged it so that the victuallers would have greater representation in the common council. Given his personal and professional knowledge of the the Cook’s trade, Chaucer selects an apt setting for his tale. Nearly 50 percent of Grocers lived on Poultry and Walbrook streets, and 75 percent of Butchers and Fishmongers resided in two Cheapside neighborhoods, with the majority of London’s butchers living and working in Shambles, an open-air slaughterhouse and meat market in the ward.54 As a London resident, Chaucer would have been exposed to Cheapside’s aroma of pork, black pepper, and apples (“roten” and otherwise), to say nothing of what his work at the custom house with Brembre revealed. Combined with the explicit link between Cheapside and London Bridge outlined in the Bridgemasters’ account roll, this market reality offers a glimpse into Chaucer’s experience of London’s economy. Although he did not hold a political office, the circles within which Chaucer moved undoubtedly informed the composition of his London tales. Because these circles were rife with politically minded and economically motivated civic leaders, many of whom were integrally linked with the victuallers’ trade, Chaucer would have known that Cheapside was a space inhabited by victuallers who paid rent 51 52 53 54

London Bridge: Selected Accounts and Rentals, 1381–1538, eds. Vanessa Harding and Laura Wright (London: London Record Society, 1995). In all instances I am referring to the Colechurch Bridge, the stone bridge completed in 1209 that stood through the seventeenth century. C. David Benson, “Some Poet’s Tours of Medieval London: Varities of Literary Urban Experience,” Essays in Medieval Studies 24 (2007), 1–20 (8). Justin Colson, “Commerce, Clusters, and Community: A Re-Evaluation of the Occupational Geography of London, c. 1400–c. 1550,” Economic History Review 69.1 (2016), 104–30. This clustering was in part due to civic regulations that aimed to facilitate inspection, supervision, and disposal of waste (especially in the case of butchers and fishmongers).

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to the Bridge House. His locating the victualler’s shop of the Cook’s Tale in Cheapside, then, almost certainly invokes an economic network that coalesced and materialized over the Thames.55 Without this implied network, the Cook’s Tale only represents the failures of economic stasis and unrestrained kinesis. The victualler’s shop cannot hold Perkyn’s dynamism, and Perkyn’s hyperkinesis disrupts spatial, social, and economic order. But by locating the victualler’s shop in Cheapside, Chaucer populates the tale’s margins with a matrix of structured mobilities, invoking a hybrid term that offers a positive means by which to assess movement in the Middle Ages. Such mobilities are especially evident in the economic and theatrical movement over, under, and across London Bridge. As the Bridgemasters’ accounts attest, the Bridge had a complex economy independent of the city chamber. The wardens, workforce, properties, and rights of the Bridge were managed by the Bridge House, which balanced income from estate rents, drawbridge and road tolls, and stock rentals. The “fish and flesh” markets, clothier storage, and the milling of corn were all supported in large part by London Bridge, while expenditures included staff salaries (including an allowance for bridge dogs), the cost of services in the Bridge chapel, and the cost of materials needed for incessant bridge repairs. London Bridge was in many ways a picture of postmodern consumption, a vector of mobility-supporting networks that produced and presupposed extensive new mobilities, all of which were incorporated and regulated by the Bridge House.56 As such, London Bridge was a hybrid space both separate from and continuous with the urban environment, operating independently from but affecting the movement of people and purses in the City of London. This sense of simultaneous isolation and integration was reinforced by bridge tolls, which for many travelers were the only indication that they were on a bridge and not in the City proper. Tolls were charged both above and below the bridge, impacting foot, hoof, wheel, and hull alike. Records from the mid-thirteenth century suggest that tolls were charged at the rate of a farthing per pedestrian, a penny per horseman, and a halfpenny for every pack carried on a horse, with tolls increasing by the time Chaucer was writing to 2d per cart and 2d per ship. But the degree to which a tollhouse physically and symbolically separated London Bridge from the city varied, as an increasing number of London citizens and members of other communities claimed exemptions to the bridge toll (in fact, 55

56

Many details in the Cook’s Tale can be traced to Chaucer’s knowledge of the victuallers’ craft. One might also see connections between the tale’s treatment of citizenship and Brembre’s prohibition of aliens from engaging in trade within the city walls. For more on Brembre’s fence-straddling position as grocer and politician, see Pamela Nightengale, A Medieval Mercantile Community: The Grocer’s Company and the Politics and Trade of London (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995). On bridges as spaces of postmodern consumption, see Harrison, The Bridges of Medieval England; Alan Cooper, Bridges, Law, and Power in Medieval England, 700–1400 (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2006).



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from 1381–2 to 1420–1 income from tolls decreased from £24 8s 5d to £7 6s). Even if tollhouses did act as geographical barriers, income from tolls entered a network that reached far beyond the riverbanks, incorporating renters, fishmongers, carpenters, and stone masons. And this circulation was carefully regulated by elected wardens and their staff, which consisted of at least one rent-collector, one receiver, one tollkeeper or “clerk of the drawbridge,” and at least one additional clerk.57 This small but meticulous administrative body (evidenced in the Calendar of Letter Books of the City of London) helped London Bridge to mediate the divide between stasis and unrestrained kinesis manifest in the Cook’s Tale, structuring economic mobility in ways that the heavily bureaucratized and politicized City could not. Above the Thames, the contenaunces and wastelands of the Square Mile were replaced by patterned economic practices overseen by a centralized system small enough to successfully govern myriad mobilities. The movement of bodies across London Bridge was also necessarily structured. As the material manifestation of human vectors across the Thames, the Bridge was an ordering structure that encouraged regular, relatively linear movement according to stone and timber realities. When walking across a single 30-foot-wide roadway suspended over a rushing river, there is only so far one can wander before falling off the bridge’s edge.58 Of course, accidents happened. In 1536, for example, Anne Hewett, the young daughter of a wealthy cloth maker, fell from her house into the river. She was rescued by one of her father’s apprentices, Edward Osborne, with whom she later raised five children.59 This happy ending was far from the norm, though, and such descents were uncommon and aberrant, falling both literally and figuratively outside of London Bridge’s “structure.” For the most part, the possibility of hypermobility was foreclosed on the Bridge, as pedestrians joined assemblages moving intentionally along prescribed paths. Perhaps the most spectacular structured mobilities carried out on London Bridge were the pageants and parades that accompanied coronations, weddings, and military triumphs. Lydgate’s Henry VI’s Triumphal Entry into London is the best-known record of one such event. Narrating the king’s procession into London following his coronation in Paris (1432), Lydgate details the pageant performed on the Bridge’s seventh pier, during which three empresses (Nature, Grace, and Fortune), seven angelic maidens, and seven virgins present Henry with gifts. In addition to royal tokens (131), seven doves (179), and the promise of a mantel of prudence (200), they present him with a line of

57

58 59

From 1404, wardens were elected on September 21 and took their oaths in the Court of Husting (the City’s county court). The best known of these wardens is Henry Yevele, who will be discussed further below. The roadway was only ten feet wide at some points because of the shops on either side. Old London Bridge Lost and Found, ed. Bruce Watson (London: Museum of London Archaeology Service, 2004), 41.

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scripture excerpted from Psalm 44:5: “First undirstonde and joyfully procede / And lange to regne” (“Intende, prospere [procede] at regna”) (143–7). This scripture represents the structure of bridge pageants in two ways. First, as performance, the presentation of scripture is choreographed, playing out along predetermined avenues of mobility. Because it is directed (in space and by a pageant director), it can therefore be rendered “appropriate” and “correct,” as versus directionless itinerancy. As geographer Tim Cresswell notes in a chapter on ballroom dance in 1920s London, “freak steps” like the shimmy are historically set against “correct movements” like ballroom dance because bodily movement is almost always implicated in the reproduction of meaning and power.60 When liberal movement is rendered “degenerate” (like Perkyn’s hypermobility in the Cook’s Tale), attempts are made “to channel threatening mobilities into acceptable conduits.”61 In the Middle Ages, when mobilizing bodies and state structures threatened static ways of being and knowing, channeling movement along conduits was especially important. The choreography of bridge pageants is therefore exemplary of the period, foreclosing the possibility of hypermobility and errancy on the Bridge, while encouraging structured mobilities in service of political ends (here, procession and coronation). The presentation of Psalm 44 further enforces medieval attention to structured mobility by suggesting that procession, when it follows understanding, promises prosperity (in Henry’s case, a long reign). In Lydgate’s Middle English, “proceden” invokes a sense of order: “to go, go on, move in a certain direction.”62 Henry is therefore advised to move with moderation, to process as one does over a bridge (in a linear, structured way), and not to wander, stray, or tumble. Only in so doing can the third of three directives come to fruition: understand, then proceed/process/“proceden,” then reign long. Like the economic networks and choreographed pageants of London Bridge, this middle term discourages “freak steps” and suggests, like contemporary conduct books, that the “middle weie” is one’s best course (Pr.17).63 For Henry VI’s procession and other special occasions, pageants like this one – performed on the seventh pier alongside a tower that could support musicians, tableaux, and banners – followed the regular display of pageant-giants at Stonegate on the second pier.64 At Catherine of Valois’s welcome and coro60

61 62 63 64

Tim Cresswell, “‘You Cannot Shake that Shimmie Here’: Producing Mobility on the Dance Floor,” in On the Move: Mobility in the Modern Western World (New York: Routledge, 2006), 123–45. Cresswell, “Producing Mobility on the Dance Floor,” 124. Middle English Dictionary Online s.v. “proceden, v.1,” accessed July 12, 2017, http://quod. lib.umich.edu/m/med/. John Gower, Confessio Amantis, ed. Russell Peck (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 2006). Caroline M. Barron, “Pageantry on London Bridge in the Early Fifteenth Century,” in Essays in Early English Drama Presented to Alexandra F. Johnston, eds. David N. Klausner and Karen Sawyer Marsalek (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006), 91–104; Joseph

Figure 3. View of the medieval bridge over the Thames, London.

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nation, a pageant-giant bowed its head in obeisance, and at Henry VI’s procession a giant thrust its sword in a show of “clothing the king’s enemies in confusion” (“Innimicos ejus induam confusion”).65 The presence of such giants on Stonegate had the potential to prove threatening, evoking the Arthurian legend of Mont-Saint-Michel, the Bible’s Nimrod, and most prominently Gogmagog of Britain’s foundation myth – the giant who opposed Corineus and whose watery death was a necessary part of Britain’s colonization. Yet the threat of such literary histories was mitigated on London Bridge. The pageant-giants that greeted Catherine and Henry were ingenious automatons, but their movement was limited to a single vector that overwrote (or at least tempered) stories of giants who wore the beards of those they conquered and built towers that led to eternal linguistic confusion. The threatening colossi of poetry and prose were rendered bowing subjects and subservient champions through repetitive, structured movement capable of (re)defining their civic role. In evoking and then containing Gogmagog, London Bridge’s pageant-giants become uniquely representative of the identity-forming potential of hybrid/monstrous bodies. Like the giants in Guildhall (who also represented Gogmagog), bridge giants “materialize[d] royal power… through the invocation of a long and therefore authoritative genealogy.”66 In Gogmagog’s case, the genealogy invoked is Britain’s. According to Geoffrey of Monmouth (and Nennius before him), Brutus’s occupation depended upon his defeat of the native British giants at Totnes. Though he and his band of Trojan refugees successfully “drove the giants whom they had discovered into the caves in the mountains” (i.16), their victory was short-lived.67 Shortly thereafter, twenty-one giants attacked the Trojan company during a celebration of the gods. At this battle, the Trojans slew all of the giants but Gogmagog, who was later tossed to his death in a wrestling match with Brutus’s lieutenant Corineus. Only then does Brutus build Troia Nova on the Thames, officially occupying the island and declaring it a New Troy. Britain is built on the bones of giants. This story is particularly potent insofar as Gogmagog’s body and narrative engage hybrid ecologies and geographies. The giant is at once native of and

65

66 67

Rodriguez, “‘With the grace of God at th’entrying of the Brigge’: Crown versus Town and the Giant of London Bridge in Lydgate’s Triumphal Entry of Henry VI,” in Performing Environments: Site Specificity in Medieval and Early Modern English Drama, eds. Susan Bennett and Mary Polito (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 201–21. Literal translation: “His enemies will I clothe in confusion.” These words were inscribed on a banner that encircled the giant, according to a letter written by city clerk John Carpenter and reproduced by Henry Noble McCracken. McCracken, “King Henry’s Triumphal Entry into London, Lydgate’s Poem and Carpenter’s Letter,” Archiv für das Stadium der Neuen Sprachen und Literaturen 126 (1911), 75–102. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, Of Giants: Sex, Monsters, and the Middle Ages (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 29. Geoffrey of Monmouth, The History of the Kings of Britain, trans. Lewis Thorpe (New York: Penguin Books, 1966), 72.



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enemy of the land, capable of “[tearing] up an oak tree as though it were a hazel wand” (i.16), and a body that bears the representational burden of Albion and Britain.68 He also, like the bridge on which he perched in the later Middle Ages, represents the collision of nature and culture. When he is defeated by Corineus, Geoffrey of Monmouth explains that he was hurled far out to sea. The giant fell on to a sharp reef of rocks, where he was dashed into a thousand fragments and stained the waters with his blood. The place took its name from the fact that the giant was hurled down there and it is called Gogmagog’s Leap to this day. (i.17)

Here the (notably liquid) natural environment becomes both a blood-stained sea and a point on man’s maps, and Gogmagog becomes both flesh and earth. Contrary to assertions regarding his destruction, this moment renders Gogmagog more than he once was, complicating his body in ways that blur the line between nature and culture. Further, the site of his death simultaneously becomes the site of his immortalization, as he attains eponymous power and secures his place in a narrative of England’s foundation. As Cohen observes, “the giant became a monstrous body standing at the originary moment when a heterogeneous group… began to imagine themselves a collective entity. This movement toward communal identity was brought about through the agency of the giant.”69 By positioning Gogmagog on the bridge, then, pageant commissioners tapped into an origin myth that the evolving English nation demanded. As a new, mobile paradigm emerged, late-medieval England needed a nation-building vessel to contain emergent identities. Hybrid pageant-giants on hybrid bridges could help interpret, or at least represent, a nation in flux. Equally noteworthy is the potential reminder of St Christopher that pageant-giants provoked. As Joseph Rodriguez observes of the tableau at Henry VI’s procession, “the site and staging of the tableau itself seems intended to recall [St Christopher’s] life.”70 In the Legenda Aurea, we are told that St Christopher began as the giant Reprobus, who was baptized after carrying Christ, disguised as a crippled young boy, over a river. Hybridity is at the center of St Christopher’s identity. He is both Reprobus and Christopher, condemned (Latin: reprobus) and saved, cynocephalus and saint. As cynocephalus (an assertion first recorded in the Acta Sanctorum), he is also both human and dog, a hybrid monster that marches alongside the anthropophagi on the edges of the Psalter Mappamundi. This liminality is artfully conveyed in the narrative of St Christopher’s sanctification. In the Gilte Legende, a Middle English translation of the Legenda Aurea (via the Legende Dorée), the scene is recorded as follows:

68 69 70

Geoffrey of Monmouth, The History of the Kings of Britain, 73. Cohen, Of Giants, 31. Rodriguez, “Crown versus Town,” 212.

82  Mobility and Identity in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales Cristofore toke the childe vpon his necke and… entered into the water for to passe ouer. And the water beganne to encrece litell and litell and the childe beganne to waye greuously as lede, and the further that he went the more the water beganne to encrece and the childe to weye more vpon his [necke] so ferforthely that Cristofore [felt a] gret anguisshe and was in gret doute to be drouned. (94.72–8)71

Here Christ becomes leaden (weighing “as lede”), evoking an image of the giant bearing a lead crucifix or pilgrim badge. The body of Christ therefore becomes multitudinous, representing not only the Holy Trinity but also an amalgam of natural elements, artifice, faith, and economics. The boundary between giant and “flode” (94.62) becomes similarly blurry: “litell and litell” the two merge into a figure not unlike the water men of Hearne’s poem. In each case, the body is almost but not quite subsumed by the natural world, liquid and lithic coexisting with flesh and blood. Whether London Bridge’s pageant-giants recalled Gog and Magog/Gogmagog or Reprobus/St Christopher, then, they were hybrid bodies standing at a physical and social threshold. They mediated a geographical space at once natural/cultural and static/dynamic, and a social space in need of a new identity that better accommodated emergent mobilities, like the processions and pageants of which they were a part. In The Canterbury Tales, these pageants and pageant-giants are manifest in the ridyng[s] and revel[s] that Perkyn spectates and participates in (1.4376, 4402), activities that represent the patterned movement that came to shape and define urban space in the Middle Ages. As Barbara Hanawalt writes, “So much of London life was lived in public that [pageants, parades, and rituals] provide a good backdrop for outlining the history of London society.”72 In the Cook’s Tale, the ridings Perkyn observes are municipal, religious, guild, and royal processions, and the revels (in which he evidently participated) reference the practice of parading guilty parties to and from prison to mocking music. Like passenger mobilities in an airport, these processions defined the space through which they moved, rather than being defined by that space. To use Michel de Certeau’s words, “the walker [or pageant-goer] actualizes [spatial possibility]. He makes [it] exist as well as emerge.”73 Cheapside shifted commercially, socially, and spatially to accommodate street vendors and cutpurses, each profiting from parade spectators in their own way, and conduits and crosses were erected to serve and commemorate pageant spectators and participants alike. An Eleanor Cross, for example, was built in Westcheap in memory of Eleanor of Castile, whose funeral processed through Cheapside, and the Cheapside Conduit ran with either water or wine to satiate the thirst of 71 72 73

Gilte Legende, vol. 2, ed. Richard Hamer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 501. Barbara Hanawalt, Growing up in Medieval London: The Experience of Childhood in History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 16. Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1984), 98.



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bodies that brought Cheapside to life on parade days. These cultural geographies – fictional and historical – support an understanding of processionals as unidirectional events that bore witness to bodies performing practiced pageants in designated locations. Nowhere was this more true than on London Bridge, where warden and king, and the natural and man-made shaped and regulated movement over a spatially delimited span. Alongside evidence of rigorously organized and documented income and expenditures, this positions the Bridge as an icon of structured mobility in a city navigating a rapidly evolving world. On London Bridge mobility reigns, but is also reined in, producing regulated networks and vectors of mobility that celebrate the city’s myriad movements while avoiding the suspicious wanderings of Perkyn Revelour. This implicit connection between the Cook’s Tale and London Bridge offers readers an opportunity to reflect on the tale’s teller and the structured mobility of the Canterbury pilgrimage itself. When the Bridge was completed in 1209, the chapel thereupon was dedicated to St Thomas Becket, the revered saint sought by the Cook and his company. This site was a matter of some import to Canterbury pilgrims. Many began their pilgrimage at the chapel, and others gave thanksgiving at the chapel upon returning from Canterbury by throwing ampullae and pilgrims’ badges into the Thames. Like today’s iron-on patches and bumper stickers, these souvenirs served as visible tokens of devotion and/or travel. Ampullae were dipped into St Thomas’s well in Canterbury (and perhaps the Black Prince’s well in Harbledown), and badges were pressed against saintly relics and shrines with the belief that the souvenir would absorb the holy site’s salvific force. These tokens were so valued that many pilgrims bought two – one to mark their arrival and a second to invoke protection on the return journey – compounding the cultivation of a tourist industry around medieval pilgrimage.74 The second would then be discarded upon one’s safe homecoming, a theory confirmed by the discovery of numerous lead and pewter pilgrim badges and ampullae during a twentieth-century dredging of the Thames, and similar findings at many major European river crossings.75 It is therefore likely that Chaucer’s pilgrims would have stopped at the chapel of St Thomas the Martyr to send their souvenirs swimming before congregating in Southwark to celebrate the winning storyteller at Harry Bailey’s inn. Beyond this specific practice, the presence of a chapel on London Bridge would have reminded pilgrims of the pious nature of bridges. The pope and his bishops held the title of pontifex (bridge-builder), bridges served as links between heaven and earth in allegorical literature, and the fourteenth-century Dialogue of Saint Catherine of Siena devotes five chapters to the notion of Christ as bridge. In this text, the “Christ Bridge” is as hybrid as London 74 75

On the commodification of faith, see Chapter 1. Watson, Bingham, and Dyson, London Bridge, 109–13.

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Bridge. God tells Catherine, “But though this bridge has been raised so high, it still is joined to the earth. … So though he was raised so high he was not raised off the earth. In fact, his divinity is kneaded into the clay of your humanity like one bread” (26).76 Christ – already an amalgam of Father, Son, and Holy Ghost – is rendered high and low, of heaven and earth, immaterial spirit and (trodden-upon) matter. His materiality is reinforced by the assertion that “This bridge has walls of stone so that travelers will not be hindered when it rains,” yet these stones are also allegories for “true solid virtue” (27).77 By invoking a bridge to exemplify Christ’s abundant simultaneity, Catherine reinforces the hybrid nature of bridges while compounding their symbolic significance. In her Dialogue, medieval bridges represent not only movement/stasis and nature/culture, but also humanity’s potential salvation – a precedent that allows the economic networks of the Cook’s Tale and the religious networks into which the Cook enters via his pilgrimage to collide into a single, structured vector atop London Bridge.78 By looking beyond the tale proper to consider the larger networks in which the victualler’s shop is implicated, then, it becomes evident that the Cook’s Tale is at the nexus of a number of structured mobilities. The link between the Cook’s victualler and the Bridge House realizes the Tale’s significant contributions to the geographical, economic, and even religious projects of The Canterbury Tales, while positioning London Bridge at the nexus of the Tale and Chaucer’s frame, the City and the Canterbury pilgrimage, and the real and imaginary.

Bridging Geographical Realities and Narrative Fictions By setting Rochester Bridge and London Bridge side by side, we are presented with a picture of southeast England built around one of the most popular structured mobilities of the Middle Ages: pilgrimage. In The Canterbury Tales, Chaucer celebrates the movement of medieval bodies while demonstrating how their perceived “instability” (per Bernard of Cluny) can be regulated by human systems and the built environments that form around them. In so doing, he finds a middle ground between spatial fixity and the placeless potential of mobility, represented by the spaces between the pilgrims’ points of departure and destination. As discussed in Chapter 1, Chaucer removes London and Canterbury from The Canterbury Tales, suspending the pilgrims in a state of perpetual motion by erasing religio-political centers and landscape features. He then structures this mobility by locating the pilgrims in Rochester, Sittingbourne, and Harbledown (at 7.1924–6, 3.844–9, and 9.1–4 respectively) 76 77 78

Catherine of Siena: The Dialogue, trans. Suzanne Noffke (New York: Paulist Press, 1980), 65. Quotations are cited by chapter number. Catherine of Siena: The Dialogue, 66. Salvation is only possible and not promised because the stone way is opposed by the water way in which it rests, which “no one can cross through… without drowning” (27).



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– waypoints for travelers in southeast England with economies that flourished as a consequence of movement toward Canterbury.79 This macrocosmic structuring of movement in The Canterbury Tales would be replicated within each of the three towns Chaucer mentions. Movement through Rochester, for example, would be syphoned across Rochester Bridge, the one available route over the Medway. Given the 1381 collapse of the old medieval bridge, this river crossing could not have been far from Chaucer’s mind, especially given his work as Clerk of the King’s Works, a job that made him responsible for the construction and maintenance of royal buildings (including bridges). He writes, in the voice of the Host, “‘My lord, the Monk… be myrie of cheere, / For ye shul telle a tale trewely. / Loo, Rouchestre stant heer faste by!’” (7.1924–6). Here Chaucer offers Rochester as a defining locale in the pilgrims’ journey, yet his language unsurprisingly complicates an otherwise straightforward statement, directing our attention beyond the city itself to the more inclusive environment that defines it. Rochester “stands,” but more than that, it “stands fast.” This suggests stasis, like the (albeit illusory) stasis of the stone bridge that carried pilgrims to Rochester’s bank.80 At the same time, though, “faste” evokes an image of speed, like the rush of the Medway between the bridge’s staddles.81 Chaucer’s use of such a multivalent word therefore directs readers to consider both the static city and the movement that defines it, the latter manifest in both the built and liquid landscapes (i.e., the bridge and the river). After drawing his readers’ attention to an interim space, he foregrounds the hybridity of this space as both static and mobile, “faste” and “faste.” His embrace of such dynamism extends to the nature–culture dialectic represented by bridges’ inclusive environments. We need not look far to see that Chaucer was intrigued by the world around him. The Parliament of Fowles depicts a congress of birds, and the Nun’s Priest’s Tale challenges the boundaries that distinguish animal from human.82 Chaucer also dedicates space to a discussion of deforestation in the Knight’s Tale, and meditates on the sometimes unpredictable liquid landscape of the Franklin’s Tale.83 Indeed, the opening lines of the General Prologue unequivocally declare Chaucer’s attention to the natural environment: Whan that Aprill with his shoures soote The droghte of March hath perced to the roote, And bathed every veyne in swich licour 79 80 81 82 83

All quotations taken from The Riverside Chaucer, 3rd edn, ed. Larry D. Benson (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987). Quotations are cited by fragment and line number. Middle English Dictionary Online, s.v. “faste, adv.” def. 2, accessed July 1, 2015. Available at http://quod.lib.umich.edu/m/med/. MED, “faste, adv.” def. 10. For an ecocritical reading of The Parliament of Fowles, see Kiser’s “Chaucer and the Politics of Nature.” On the latter, see Rudd, Greenery, 139–48.

86  Mobility and Identity in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales Of which vertu engendred is the flour; Whan Zephirus eek with his sweete breeth Inspired hath in every holt and heeth The tendre croppes, and the yonge sonne Hath in the Ram his half cours yronne, And smale foweles maken melodye, That slepen al the nyght with open ye (So priketh hem Nature in hir corages), Thanne longen folk to goon on pilgrimages. (1.1–12)

Here both nature and Nature are shown to influence humankind. The wind and rain, personified as Nature in line 11, each inspire folk to go on pilgrimage. As Sarah Stanbury writes, “Nature is extrinsic but becomes instrinsic, a force out there in the world as well as within the body; similar to Aristotelian and Platonic concepts of nature, its essence is movement.”84 Like water permeating the skin of water men, Nature permeates (“pricks”) man’s heart, moving him to move. By beginning the Tales with this musing, Chaucer prepares his readers for a hybrid understanding of space that is compounded by the absence of London and Canterbury, and celebrated in the cities he calls to mind. The world represented in the frame of The Canterbury Tales is both human and nonhuman (with categorical distinctions between the two collapsing from the very start), moving in structured ways to accommodate built environments and natural rhythms alike. Chaucer’s interest in bridges, in particular, surfaces in the Reeve’s Tale, when John and Aleyn pass “a brook, and over that a brigge” in search of fruitful economic (and then sexual) exchange (1.3922). The landscape is marked by fluidity and hybridity. The presence of the brook introduces the natural world’s rhythms, even as we are reminded that it works in concert with cultural constructs including Symkyn’s business, which is powered by running water, and his hobbies: “he coude… fisshe, and nettes bete” (1.3927). The bridge also introduces a middle ground, inviting movement between Cambridge and Trumpington while restricting this movement to a single vector; the clerks enter, “pleye,” and then exit the space of the tale via the same route. It therefore comes as no surprise when we are told “John knew the wey, hem nedede no gyde” (1.4020), and the clerks’ unceremonious departure – they “greythen hem, and toke hir hors anon / And eek hire mele, and on hir wey they gon” (1.4309–10) – resonates with a sense of quotidian order that sharply contrasts the hyperactivity of Symkyn’s mill and the Reeve’s Tale. A great deal has transpired, as discussed in Chapter 3, but the unregulated mobility and multiplicity of the tale is confined to that narrative space, as the Reeve ensures John and Aleyn’s familiar passage back to Cambridge. Their story is concluded precisely where it began “on hir wey,” as their movements are once again subject to (architectural and ideological) structure. 84

Stanbury, “Ecochaucer,” 11.



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Here the clerks’ return trip actually forecloses the generative potential of their mobility, making the unfinished Canterbury Pilgrimage in Chaucer’s frame narrative all the more significant. Together with the tale’s closing disinterest in John and Aleyn, their departure along a well-trodden route conveys a sense of similitude – despite all that has happened in the Reeve’s Tale, their lives and the paths they travel remain unchanged. Transformation has instead occurred in the stage-like, almost insular space of Symkyn’s mill, where the miller and his family alone face the effects of the tale’s myriad mobilities. By contrast, the bridges of The Canterbury Tales open on to infinite possibility. Because the pilgrims never reach Canterbury Cathedral, the settled space that might be credited with transformative power is dislocated, shifting our attention to the road (/bridge) instead. In Chaucer’s telling, it is not Thomas Becket’s bones that transform the pilgrim, but the movements s/he enacts en route to Becket’s bones. To recall the language of Victor and Edith Turner’s rites of passage, if there is a liminal space to be had here – i.e., a site of transition from one state to another – it is surprisingly not the Cathedral (surprising because, as Turner observes, “nowhere has [the] institutionalization of liminality been more clearly marked and defined than… in the great world religions”85). Instead, mobilities never come to rest, rendering the kinetic body and the vectors along which it moves the only possible site and source of the limen. The hybrid bridges that constitute these vectors in the frame narrative of The Canterbury Tales – Rochester and London Bridge – are particularly suited to such a designation. As sites of transition and transformation, these bridges also point to hybridities that exist apart from geographical/economic/social designations, including the hybrid text.86 The frame narrative of The Canterbury Tales is both center and margin, a waypoint that connects tales to one another and a destination that contains Chaucer’s witty estates satire, sweaty Canons, and female autobiography. Like its material counterparts, the frame also structures mobilities. The storytelling contest that Harry Bailey establishes in the General Prologue is a means of “govern[ing]” (1.813) stories and tellers that would otherwise drift “by the weye” (1.771). As Rebecca Davis notes, this contest “enables new combinations of matter en route but does not impede its passage,” channeling literary invention in a way that celebrates its energy and motion while directing it along a goal-oriented vector.87 In this way, Chaucer’s poetry imitates London Bridge and its residents, presupposing and producing both form (stasis) and motion. 85 86

87

Victor Turner, The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure (New York: Aldine de Gruyter, 1969), 107. For more on Chaucer’s use of the material world as a metaphor for poetic invention, see Kellie Robertson, “Medieval Materialism: A Manifesto,” Exemplaria 22 (2010), 99–118. She observes that Chaucer continually grapples with “questions of how the matere of the physical world and the matere of the poet were related” (112). Rebecca Davis, “Fugitive Poetics in Chaucer’s House of Fame,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 37 (2015), 101–32 (118).

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The frame is therefore a hybrid space occupied by bodies practicing routinized movement in an environment that is equally natural, “bathed… in swich licour / Of which vertu engendred is the flour” (1.3–4), and built, like the “[wyde] chambres and the stables” of the Tabard (1.28). Like the bridges it implicitly evokes, it insists on and celebrates dialectical understanding. The pilgrims are both emplaced and between places, producing and presupposing networks of movement and exchange by their being in transit. Moreover, they move through and across spaces that cannot be clearly delineated as either architectural (cultural) or natural; each environment, and especially that of London and Rochester Bridges, is both. As Latour observes of the Pont Neuf, “the difference between stone bridges, flesh and blood organs and political bodies stems not from their nature but only from the pace at which their offices are renewed.”88 Recalling “Gogmagog’s Leap,” the space of a bridge cannot be easily separated from the flesh and blood that generates it, or the rushing water in which it rests. Nor can these spaces be separated from the fictions that represent them. Both Chaucer’s Tales and the worlds he represents, then, are fundamentally hybrid. The literal and metaphorical bridges therein exemplify this, hovering like ghosts in the margins that remind readers how order and chaos, lithic and liquid coexist in the fourteenth-century world.

88

Bruno Latour, “Plan 52, Step 13: Instituting,” in Paris: Invisible City, available at www. bruno-latour.fr/virtual/EN/index.html, qtd in Strohmayer, “Bridges: Different Conditions of Mobile Possibilities,” 130.

3 Rocking the Cradle and Quiting the Knight Chaucer’s attention to structured mobilities and hybridity in the frame narrative is significant not only because it redefines the Pilgrims’ Way and the bodies that circulate on and around it, but also because it comes to bear on the interplay between tales. This dramatic and literary interplay has been well established, and nowhere is it more apparent than in Fragment One, where settings evolve from the classical past to the familiar present, genres degenerate from romance to fabliau to fragment, and sex acts multiply, culminating in the prostitution of the Cook’s Tale.1 Noting the significance of Fragment One to the narrative game of The Canterbury Tales, Lee Patterson writes that the Knight’s Tale “functions in an important sense as the other against which the project of The Canterbury Tales is ultimately defined; and it therefore appropriately begins the game of quiting that will at once include and counter it.”2 And Helen Cooper observes that in the interplay between the Knight, Miller, and Reeve, Chaucer “constantly adds or adapts details to bring the [tales] together,” and in so doing “ensures that the tales are read initially in a specific relation to each other.”3 This relational practice of quiting has generated an abundance of critical conversation, but scholarship on the subject has not yet considered how mobility affects the tellers’ rhetorical play.4 In this chapter, I argue that movement in the Miller’s Tale and the Reeve’s Tale 1

2 3 4

Helen Cooper, The Canterbury Tales (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), wherein Cooper writes, “The Miller’s interruption substitutes a very different principle from hierarchy for articulating the tales: dramatic interplay between characters who are not going to stay humbly in their social place, and literary interplay between adjacent tales” (17; emphasis mine). On the multiplication of sex acts and the devolution from courtly love to utter satiety, see Garth A. McCann, “Chaucer’s First Three Tales: Unity in Trinity,” Bulletin of the Rocky Mountain Modern Language Association 27 (1973), 10 16. Lee Patterson, Chaucer and the Subject of History (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991), 169. Cooper, The Canterbury Tales, 115. Treatments range from Heather Boyd’s “Fragment A of the Canterbury Tales: Character, Figure and Trope” (English Studies in Africa 26, 1983, 77–97), which considers the evolution of rhetorical tropes in first fragment, to John Finlayson’s “Of Leeks and Old Men: Chaucer and Boccaccio” (Studia Neophilologica 70, 1998, 359), which considers how the bitterness and frustrations of old age play out in the quiting game. See also John H. Fisher, “The Three Styles of Fragment I of the Canterbury Tales,” The Chaucer Review 8 (1973), 119–27; Sheila Delany, “Clerks and Quiting in the ‘Reeve’s Tale,’” Mediaeval Studies 29 (1967), 351–6.

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serves to position them within a sequence of quiting that ultimately parodies the Knight’s meticulous regulation of politicized mobility. The Knight celebrates the ideological and actual practice of stasis, evincing its inherent value to chivalric fiction and its material practice as an imitation of stable and eternal god(s). He consequently denigrates movement, associating it with characters he deems politically and socially inferior. Meanwhile, the Miller and Reeve challenge this disparagement of movement and instead empower mobile bodies, celebrating chaos over order, and liberty over political, social, and religious bonds.5 In the Knight’s Tale, the Knight constructs a narrative around a preeminently chivalric character. He introduces the Duke Theseus as “lord and governour” who was “in his tyme swich a conquerour / That gretter was ther noon under the soone” (1. 861–3). A list of Theseus’s accomplishments affirms that he has conquered women and realms with “wysdom and his chivalrie,” and he is located at the center of great battles, processions, and feasts. In sum, he is an exemplar of the second estate, “the flour” of his “hoost of chivalrie” (1.982), the “pure embodiment of the French tradition, the romance ideal perfectly, superlatively fulfilled.”6 As Patterson observes, “whatever final meaning the Knight’s Tale may bear, it is clear that the Knight himself intends it to celebrate… Theseus as a model of rational governance.”7 In the Knight’s telling, Theseus is the ideal toward which one should strive. But what is the nature of this ideal? For the Knight, whose fact and fiction alike depend on an unadulterated model of chivalry, the Thesean body and the codes by which it operates are necessarily and resolutely static. In the late fourteenth century, the Peasant’s Revolt and the failure of numerous military campaigns exposed the knighthood’s increasing impotence, revealing its inability to “perform its role of policeman to society.”8 And the knights who remained were part of a steadily decreasing number, as war, laws of inheritance, and land dispersal threatened the proliferation of titles.9 Chaucer’s Knight therefore exhumes an undead fiction, calling on a method of chivalric self-fashioning that produced an internally consistent, if historically absent, notion of chivalry. In this fiction, ornamented chevaliers preserve order by 5 6

7 8 9

Instances of movement (and their centrality to the tale) are also multiplied by each subsequent teller in first fragment. Daniel Kempton, “Chaucer’s Knight and the Knight’s Theseus,” The Journal of Narrative Technique 17.3 (1987), 237–58 (241). This train of thought originates in Charles Muscatine’s Chaucer and the French Tradition: A Study in Style and Meaning (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1957). See also Patterson, Chaucer and the Subject of History; D. W. Robertson, A Preface to Chaucer (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1962); Alastair Minnis, Chaucer and Pagan Antiquity (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1982). On the Knight’s “obsolescence,” see Donald Howard, The Idea of the Canterbury Tales (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1976), 94–7. Patterson, Chaucer and the Subject of History, 198. Patterson, Chaucer and the Subject of History, 189. K. B. McFarlane, The Nobility of Later Medieval England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973).



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exerting physical and political power over the infidel and the female body, tournaments abound, and the world is flush with amors and armes. A product of the French literary tradition, it foregrounds contes d’avantures, and its telling and retelling gave rise to the medieval knight. As Susan Crane observes, historical knights “engaged in a rhetoric of gestures and appearances, in a metonymic self-presentation that depends for its meaning on literary and social conventions and precedents.”10 Never fully present, this act of selffashioning is rooted in the literary and social (not historical) past, remembered and re-presented by those committed to the ideal. Like the excommunicate of Dante’s Purgatorio, it exists outside of space and time, functionally dead but unable to die.11 Undead characterizations aside, as a product of mnemonic practice in an oú-topos, chivalric fiction provides the stasis that Chaucer’s Knight and his Thesean model require. As Mary Carruthers notes, memory is the matrix within which humans perceive present and future… both present and future, in human time, are mediated by the past. [And] ‘the past,’ in this analysis, is not itself something, but rather a memory, a representing of what no longer exists as itself but only in its memorial traces.12

The nothing-ness of this past allows for stasis because “the past”/memory is not subject to change wrought by time. Instead, memory and the concepts derived from it exist without antecedent in a self-satisfying loop, creating and recreating themselves in perpetuity. And without alloy, this replication ultimately ossifies. Noting the inertia inherent to chivalric fiction, Sachi Shimomura observes, “the history of events becomes nearly a liability, since it reveals the precarious evolution of history… rather than the static continuity of memory upon which chivalric fame depends.”13 The march of history threatens to dislodge chivalry from its suspended state by revealing its inconsistencies and impossibilities, but memory reproduces chivalric stasis. By calling on the memory of an absent chivalry rather than looking to historical models, the Knight can preserve an ideal, re-presenting a static concept in a story that depends upon and strives toward stasis. 10

11

12 13

Susan Crane, “Knights in Disguise: Identity and Incognito in Fourteenth-Century Chivalry,” in The Stranger in Medieval Society, eds. F. R. P. Akehurst and Stephanie Cain Van D’Elden (Minneapolis, MI: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 63. This comparison also calls our attention to the stasis that characterizes suspended spacetime. Upon witnessing the excommunicate, Dante explains, there “appeared to me a throng / Of souls, that moved their feet in our direction, / And did not seem to move, they came so slowly… / all crowded unto the hard masses / Of the high bank, and motionless stood and close, / As he stands still to look who goes in doubt” (3.58–60, 70–2). See The Purgatorio, trans. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (New York: Barnes and Noble Classics, 2005). Mary Carruthers, The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 193. Sachi Shimomura, “The Walking Dead in Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale,” The Chaucer Review 48.1 (2013), 1–37 (6); emphasis mine.

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Far from simply preserving an existing concept, though, the Knight invents chivalry anew, insofar as invention is “a wholly mental process of searching one’s inventory.”14 More than mere archivist, the Knight is a maker (Greek poiétés), actualizing chivalry by modeling himself and his fiction on an inventoried literary and social representation of knighthood. The notion of chivalry remains static, but its material presence multiplies. The creation of the Order of the Garter attests to this realization of mnemonic processes – individuals are knighted because they model chivalry as defined by England’s cultural memory. As if to reinforce this fact, when describing the Knight in the General Prologue, Chaucer enumerates the oft-remembered battles in which he participates: At Alisaundre he was whan it was wonne. Ful ofte tyme he hadde the bord bigonne Aboven alle nacions in Pruce; In Lettow hadde he reysed and in Ruce… In Gernade at the seege eek hadde he be Of Algezir, and riden in Belmarye. (1.51–7)

And on and on for a dozen more lines. This exhaustive (if not excessive) list of campaigns increases the likelihood that audience members will recall at least one of the battles, and thereby associate the Knight with martial glory. Lithuania and Granada become the stages on which he performs chivalry, and as a costumed member of the cast he is easily subsumed by the audience’s memory of chivalry, simultaneously created by and recreating the concept. The list also consciously evokes the spirit of the Crusades, compounding the glory to be had while reminding astute readers that the Knight’s chivalry is out of time. By the time Chaucer was writing, the Holy Land was lost and the crusading spirit had become anachronistic. By associating his Knight with a model past rather than a politically and culturally inflected present, Chaucer calls attention to the static nature of chivalry, while also leaving little doubt that the Knight is a product of and wholly committed to this stasis. The Knight’s commitment to stasis is especially evident in his narrative’s form. As critics have noted, the Knight’s Tale is “a tableau, a frieze, a set of static images… at its most dynamic a procession.”15 A large portion of the narrative is concerned with description over action, meditating on the details of the amphitheater, for example, rather than the battle that takes place therein (pars tercia is almost entirely description, compared to the seventy lines dedicated to the battle in pars quarta). Rather than following the adventures of knights-errant, we are shown a series of freeze frames occasionally interrupted by chivalric action. Any purposive “progress” in the narrative is more likely a repetition of an earlier set-piece. The tournament is a reimagining of 14 15

Carruthers, The Book of Memory, 194. Patterson, Chaucer and the Subject of History, 209.



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Palamon and Arcite’s duel in the grove, just as the hunt “at the grete hert in May” (1.1675) is a mirror of Palamon and Arcite’s hunt for Emily during her springtime observance. This is in part born of the Knight’s obsession with order, manifest in his protagonist Theseus’s selfsame obsession. V. A. Kolve observes, When Theseus declares “The lystes shal I maken in this place,” he proposes to lay down upon these woods a vast circle of marble, measured and shaped by the human mind, within whose perfect form he will ordain the most ceremonial and highly structured of all forms of human combat.16

Ceremony, structure, and order are at the center of Theseus’s worldmaking intentions, just as they are at the center of the Knight’s narrative world. But these tendencies are also born of a commitment to and dependence on stasis – a desire to represent, recreate, and remember. Both makers are, after all, the product of a meticulously standardized memory of knighthood, their identities dependent upon the structure, repetition, and inertia inherent to the term. The Knight further invokes the stasis associated with systematic memory recall by foregrounding images in his narrative. As a visual process, memory depends upon looking at the contents of one’s mind. Plato’s kerinon ekmageion (block of wax) is a particularly resonant articulation of this process. Adopted by Aristotle, Avicenna, and other philosophers of the mind, this metaphor suggests that the mind is a block of wax on which we imprint or impress perceptions. According to Plato’s Theaetetus, “we remember and know what is imprinted as long as the image lasts” (191d–e).17 In the Knight’s Tale, readers are presented with a profusion of images, ensuring the potency of the tale and the concepts it champions.18 The more images the Knight presents to his audience, the more likely he is to impress upon them a memory-image of his tale’s idealized knighthood. Nowhere is this more evident than in the description of the temples within Theseus’s amphitheater. Absent from Chaucer’s source (Boccaccio’s Teseida), these images are “mo than [the Knight] kan make of mencioun” (1.1935) and participate in the mnemonic process insofar as they recall stories with which the audience is likely familiar, while positioning the Knight’s Tale alongside these stories. Calling to mind “the mount of Citheroun… / With al the gardyn and the lustynesse” (1.1936–9), “Turnus, with the hardy fiers corage” (1.1945), and “Conquest, sittynge in greet honour” (1.2028), the painted temple walls reinforce a chivalric narrative.19 Static images of love and courage oversee the ultimate expression of 16 17 18 19

V. A. Kolve, Chaucer and the Imagery of Narrative: The First Five Canterbury Tales (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1984), 112. Plato, Theaetetus, trans. F. M. Cornford, in Collected Dialogues, eds. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1961), 294; emphasis mine. See Kolve, Chaucer and the Imagery of Narrative, 114. We might also note that the image of the garden is once again repeated, reinforcing an under-

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chivalry in Theseus’s amphitheater, feeding the re-presentation of knightly fame and honor and clearly establishing the Tale as the latest substantiation of this honor. And the images presented are particularly suited to mnemonic processes insofar as they are “‘rich’ in associations, as ‘iconic’ as possible” – features that, according to Carruthers, guarantee memory’s success.20 These images and icons also prioritize inaction. Rather than witnessing Conquest’s vigor on a bloody battlefield, we see him seated on a throne. Stasis is therefore manifest on three levels in the Knight’s description of the temples: static images of seated figures contribute to a static memory of chivalry by recreating that memory in the form of the Knight’s Tale. In its “most dynamic”/“procession[al]” moments, the tale might remind us of the bridges haunting Chaucer’s margins, but more often than not the ghosts of the Knight’s Tale are the self-satisfying loops that recreate and thereby meticulously regulate the memory of knighthood, transforming a fluid world into a collection of icons out of time and place. That the chivalric ideal is better suited to narrative than praxis (memory than history) is evident in the language of chivalry, particularly insofar as this language enforces stasis. As a knight, one is bound to his lord and god. This bondage was made explicit in knights’ oaths and trothplights. Derived from Roman military tradition, these oaths required that knights swear by the Holy Trinity and their “prince’s majesty, which according to God’s commandment is to be loved and worshiped by the human race,” to do all that is asked of them on behalf of their commonwealth.21 In his Book of the Order of Chivalry, Ramón Lull insists that this means the knight is “sworn and bound to be good and pleasing to God, and also to the people,” and John of Salisbury refers to the oath as a “binding sacrament,” by which knights were “bound… to the sacred service and worship of God.”22 In all cases, the knight’s oath does not grant him the liberty to defend the commonwealth; it binds him to the task, rendering him a serf to his appointment, draped in chains like Cenobia in the Monk’s Tale (7.2359–66). As if to reinforce this static image, Lull also suggests that knighthood requires its adherents to “remember the noble origin of chivalry” because “it is incumbent upon him that the nobility of his heart and his good behavior accord with the origin of chivalry.”23 Here the (notably ill-defined) “origin” of

20

21 22

23

standing of the Knight’s Tale as a series of reimaginings. Carruthers, The Book of Memory, 60. Carruthers also observes the potency of architecture in memory creation/recollection, making the temples in Theseus’s amphitheater even more resonant (71–9). John of Salisbury, “From the Policraticus,” in Chaucer: Sources and Backgrounds, ed. Robert P. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 176. Ramón Lull, “From The Book of the Order of Chivalry,” in Chaucer: Sources and Backgrounds, ed. Robert P. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 181; emphasis mine; John of Salisbury, “From the Policraticus,” 176. Lull, “From The Book of the Order of Chivalry,” 181; emphasis mine.



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chivalry is more important than the moment in which that chivalry is manifest. The knights practicing it are therefore not only bound by an oath, but also by the timeless memory of an ideal. They must forever perform and re-present this ideal, resulting in books of law (e.g., Die Gesetze der Angelsachsen) and Romances (e.g., Sir Gawain and the Green Knight) alike perpetuating the notion that a broken oath demands the very worst form of punishment: shame, exile, or even decapitation. The Knight’s Tale is among those texts that enforce the binding nature of oaths.24 In the context of static chivalric memory, this fact confirms the Knight’s interest in immobility. It is perhaps most evident in Palamon’s reminder to Arcite that “thou art ybounden as a knyght” (1.1149; emphasis mine). Spoken while the knights are physically bound – as a result of their being in prison, discussed further below – this line enforces chivalric stasis by insisting on knighthood as bondage. Arcite is not encouraged or persuaded to support Palamon’s bid for Emily, he is bound to do so as a knight. Whatever other titles he holds – cousin, “brother,” friend – collapse in the face of his oath to perpetuate idealized chivalry. This bondage is then compounded when, shortly after, Palamon reminds himself That man is bounden to his observaunce, For Goddes sake, to letten of his wille, Ther as a beest may al his lust fulfille. (1.1316–18)

In Palamon’s estimation, the thing that separates man from beast is his ability to maintain his oaths, to remain “bound” to his “observaunce[s].” And here the bondage is not to a secular ideal (chivalric fiction), but to God, in whose name people make oaths. It is for God’s sake that they restrain from lust, allowing social bondage to overpower individual will. In Palamon and Arcite’s prison exchange, then, the Knight enforces a static notion of knighthood by emphasizing the twofold bondage of chivalry – the ideal knight is perpetually bound to man and God, and he celebrates these ties because they are what elevate him on the great chain of being.25 24

25

See, for example, Catherine A. Rock, “Forsworn and Fordone: Arcite as Oath-Breaker in the ‘Knight’s Tale,’” The Chaucer Review 40.4 (2006), 416–32; Robert Stretter, “Rewriting Perfect Friendship in Chaucer’s ‘Knight’s Tale’ and Lydgate’s ‘Fabula Duorum Mercatorum,’” The Chaucer Review 37.3 (2003), 234–52. See also Richard Firth Green, A Crisis of Truth: Literature and Law in Ricardian England (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999). This elevation of human over beast is later literalized in the Knight’s Tale. When Palamon and Arcite’s champions Lycurgus and Emetreus are introduced, they are represented as stationary while beasts encircle them. In describing Lycurgus, for example, the Knight tells his audience, “Ful hye upon a chaar of gold stood he, / With foure white boles in the trays. … Aboute his chaar ther wenten white alauntz, / Twenty and mo, as grete as any steer, / To hunten at the leoun or the deer” (1.2138–50). Lycurgus, like Theseus after him (1.2529, see below), sits on a golden chair (i.e., a throne), while more than twenty wolfhounds pace about. Here we see the Knight applying the static chivalric model to two characters who he evi-

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As the Knight’s chivalric model, Theseus adheres to these bonds in body, speech, and politics. He is the fictional realization of an ahistorical ideal, advocating for the immobile, stable, and secure. This advocacy begins with his own body. With few exceptions, Theseus is depicted as stationary in the Knight’s Tale, either emplaced or atop his horse.26 When he is not depicted on horseback, he is standing as idol (1.1759) or punctuating speeches with lengthy pauses (1.2982–3). Preceding the final battle between Palamon and Arcite, he is described in a way that evokes the imagery of the temple paintings, rendering dynamic flesh immobile iconography: Duc Theseus was at a wyndow set, Arrayed right as he were a god in trone. The peple preesseth thiderward ful soone Hym for to seen, and doon heigh reverence, And eek to herkne his heste and his sentence. (1.2528–32)

Like seated Conquest, Theseus is sitting “as he were a god in trone.” He is meant to see and be seen, and the press of people who seek to revere him only amplify his stasis, setting frenetic energy against “noble” composure. In these lines, Theseus is preserved in a moment of absolute stillness, representing the inertia of chivalry while recreating it for a new audience. Theseus then insists that his stillness be imitated insofar as he will not satisfy the crowd’s clamor until he sees that they are “of noyse al stille” (1.2535; emphasis mine). In so doing, he safeguards chivalry, ensuring the perpetuation of chivalric stasis by demanding stillness from the bodies for whom he performs. Theseus’s stasis is perhaps most strikingly represented only thirty lines into the tale, when weeping widows implore him to properly bury their husbands after the siege of Thebes. The Knight sets the scene: This duc, of whom I make mencioun, Whan he was come almoost unto the toun, In al his wele and in his mooste pride, He was war, as he caste his eye aside, Where that ther kneled in the heighe weye A compaignye of ladyes, tweye and tweye, Ech after oother clad in clothes blake. (1.893–9)

26

dently admires as members of his own estate, enforcing the superiority of the human – and particularly of a man bound by chivalric oaths – over beast. The most notable exception is at line 2819, when Theseus carries Emily away from Arcite’s corpse – a movement that bears more on Emily’s body than Theseus’s because he dictates the movement. In fact, this moment may strengthen the relationship between Theseus and the “First Movere” whom he so highly praises (discussed below): both impose movement in service of divine and secular order, while maintaining an agential position from which they cannot be compelled to move. Theseus also “gooth so bisily / To maken up the lystes roially” (1.1883), but here it is not clear whether Theseus actually goes anywhere.



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While Theseus is mobile insofar as he is entering Athens, his body itself is static, predictably seated atop a horse.27 This stasis is highlighted by the “cast[ing]… aside” of his eye, which suggests he is unwilling to acknowledge the downcast by even as much as a turn of the head. Theseus, the model of chivalry, remains stalwart as he processes (performs) for a captive audience. This passage also establishes Theseus as superior to the rest of the Tale’s characters, associating his stasis with social and sexual power. Theseus towers over the widows, sitting astride a horse as they kneel before him.28 And when he does briefly dismount to embrace the women (for the duration of only twenty lines), it is merely a show of pity for those “That whilom weren of so greet estaat” (1.956). In this moment, which might be perceived as an act of social leveling, the Knight takes pains to enforce the social and sexual distance between Theseus and the widows he embraces. Theseus is a singular “lord and governour” (1.861), and the widows are undifferentiated has-beens. Moreover, when Theseus promises to revenge Creon, he does so not out of respect for the women, but so that “al the peple of Grece sholde speke / How Creon was of Theseus yserved” (1.962–3). In other words, he appropriates the widows’ narrative and rewrites it such that conquest and not mercy (1.950) is at its center. This brings him closer to his knighted teller, who “At mortal batailles hadde he been fiftene” (1.61), aligning the Knight’s chivalry, Theseus’s chivalry, and the mnemonic/utopic notion of chivalry, while celebrating those who uphold this notion (titled men) above those who appeal to it (“whilom” stately women). That this celebration implicates social and sexual status is particularly evident in the contrast of lithic against liquid. Theseus’s stillness stands in stark contrast to the fluidity of the weeping widows’ bodies. Movement is implicated in their kneeling and the swooning that shortly follows (1.913), and their shedding of tears reinforces medieval understandings of women as “leaky” and associates them with the monstrous and mutable. According to Galen and Hippocrates before him, women were moister and colder than men, and this theory – rooted in humoral physiology – resulted in an abundance of medical, iconographical, and oral discourse associating women with unusual excess.29

27

28

29

The word chevalier (knight) is derived from the French word for horse (cheval). Given this association, the Knight makes an effort to consistently represent Theseus atop a horse (cf. 1.974, 981, 1026, 1691, 1704, 2569). This moment also foreshadows Palamon and Arcite looking down on Emily in the garden. From their “grete tour” they too “cast [their] eye[s]” on the objectified woman (1.1056, 1077). See the Hippocratic treatise De victus ratione (Book 1, Section 34), which appears to have directly influenced Galen’s conclusions in books seven and fourteen of On the Usefulness of the Parts of the Body, wherein Galen writes, “The female is less perfect than the male for one, principal reason—because she is colder” (Galen, On the Usefulness of the Parts of the Body, trans. Margaret Tallmadge May, 2 vols. [Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1963], 628).

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As Sarah Miller observes, late-medieval texts including De secretis mulierum were “supremely concerned with the signs of monstrosity harbored in female urine, blood, menstrual fluid, and menstrual vapors, and the ways in which these seepages may deceive or harm men and infants.”30 Despite their being wholly natural, then, these deceptive and harmful “seepages” were rendered transgressive by cultural narrative: widows’ tears become liquid markers of a monstrosity rooted in the female body’s inability to stay within its bounds (i.e., to remain in place, emplaced, immobile). The Knight’s incorporation of this discourse in the exchange between Theseus and the widows is confirmed when, in the grove of pars secunda, Hippolyta and Emily weep over Arcite and Palamon’s circumstances. The Knight explains, “The queene anon, for verray wommanhede, Gan for to wepe, and so dide Emelye, / And alle the ladyes in the compainye” (1.1748–50). In this passage, it is explicitly because of her womanhood that Hippolyta weeps, and all of the company’s ladies follow. In the only two scenes depicting assemblies of women, liquidity is foregrounded. As the flod (along with its myriad apocalyptic associations) is juxtaposed to the strong and durable ok[e], the weeping women of the Knight’s Tale are juxtaposed to Theseus.31 To further problematize such unbounded bodies, the Knight locates the weeping widows in the “heighe weye,” associating them with the threat medieval highways posed to people and politics in medieval Romance (the genre to which his tale belongs). Though narratives existed that posited roads as connective and constructive to national identity – the frame narrative of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales among them32 – the majority of late-medieval Romances equated roads with the dangerous and improvisational.33 Robin Hood narratives, for example, regularly reminded readers 30 31 32

33

Sarah Alison Miller, Medieval Monstrosity and the Female Body (New York: Routledge, 2010), 5. See especially MED, flod, n., 2 (for biblical uses of “flood”) and ok[e], n., 2 (for proverbial uses of “oak”). See Chapters 1 and 2. One might also recall Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Belinus myth, wherein Geoffrey writes, “Above all [Belinus] decreed that cities and the roads leading to cities should have that right of sanctuary which Dunvallo had established. …He summoned workmen from all over the island and ordered them to construct a road of stones and mortar which should bisect the island longitudinally from the Cornish sea to the shore of Caithness and should lead in a straight line to each of the cities on the route. He then ordered a second road to be built, running west to east across the kingdom from the town of St Davids on the Demetian Sea over to Southampton and again leading directly to the cities in between. He built two more roads in a diagonal pattern across the island, to lead to the cities for which no provision had been made. Then he consecrates these highways in all honour and dignity proclaiming it to be an integral part of his code of laws that punishment should be meted out to any person who committed an act of violence upon them” (Geoffrey of Monmouth, The History of the Kings of Britain, trans. Lewis Thorpe [New York: Penguin Books, 1966], 93–4). It is especially worth noting the straightness of the roads here: orderly, linear, and without err. For an in-depth discussion of roads in medieval Romance, see Christine Chism, “The Ro-



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that robbery occurred on the road, their fictions recalling actual criminal activity on Watling Street in Barnesdale.34 In these narratives, roads were the place of outlaws and counter-courts, where merry men coopted passing networks, insisting that sheriffs and abbots abandon their dispatches to play games that drew them away from the bricks and stones of church and state. In Romance and lived experience alike, the road and those who occupied it disrupted stabilizing narratives that insisted on an orderly and hierarchical state, contradicting the stasis inherent to geographical or ideological “destinations” (Nottingham Castle or an internally consistent understanding of chevalerie). Deploying Romance convention, then, the Knight criminalizes the widows’ social and sexual otherness by locating them on the highway. As members of the road’s “fluid… social fellowships,”35 they pose a real and imagined threat to individual bodies and (albeit impossibly) static notions of the body politic. In this crucial interaction between Theseus and the widows, the Knight also introduces the ultimate (and, as he posits in his tale, desirable) stasis of death. In imploring Theseus to ensure the proper burial of their husbands, the weeping widows insist, [Creon], for despit and for his tirannye, To do the dede bodyes vileynye, Of alle oure lords whiche that been yslawe, Hath alle the bodyes on an heep ydrawe, And wol nat suffren hem, by noon assent, Neither to been yburyed nor ybrent, But maketh houndes ete hem in despit. (1.941–7)

The ultimate cause of the widows’ sorrow is the fact that their husbands’ bodies are being eaten by hounds, scattered across space in the bowels of beasts. Each soldier has been deprived of his “final resting place” in a cemetery or memorial urn. Like their wives’ bodies – which are on and of the road – the soldiers’ bodies have been forced into a state of perpetual circulation, an act deemed a “vileinye” born of malice. This attention to and valuation of eternal rest (stasis) in death serves as preamble to Theseus’s “First Movere” speech, in which Theseus underscores

34

35

mance of the Road in Athelston and Two Robin Hood Ballads,” in Roadworks: Medieval Britain, Medieval Roads, eds. Valerie Allen and Ruth Evans (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2016). R. B. Dobson and J. Taylor, Rymes of Robin Hood: An Introduction to the English Outlaw (Stroud: Sutton, 1997), 22–3. See also Gillian Spraggs, Outlaws and Highwaymen: The Cult of the Robber in England from the Middle Ages to the Nineteenth Century (London: Pimlico, 2001). Given the discussion of bridges in Chapter 2, it is worth noting the association of this region with Pontefract, or pontus fractus/broken bridge, which converged with Watling Street in Barnesdale. As Chism notes, “it is a place where connections fail” (238). Chism, “The Romance of the Road,” 225.

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the sociological and religious benefits of chivalric stasis by comparing it to divine stability. He proclaims, thilke Moevere stable is and eterne. Wel may men knowe, but it be a fool, That every part dirryveth from his hool, For nature hath nat taken his bigynnyng Of no partie or cantel of a thyng, But of a thyng that parfit is and stable. (1.3004–9; emphasis mine)

Calling upon environmental hermeneutics, Theseus posits that nature points toward a “perfect” and “stable” creator. In the tradition of Romans 1:20, which reads “For the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and Godhead,” Theseus suggests that the “First Movere’s” nature can be understood through his manifestation in the physical world. Specifically, the “ordre” (1.3003) of life, which disallows any living thing to extend its life beyond its “certeyne… duracioun” (1.2996), reflects an orderly godhead. In Theseus’s estimation, even trees, stones, rivers, and towns “hath ende” (1.3017–26), suggesting life and the spaces within which it is lived merely interrupt (and therefore threaten) eternal rest. This ironic turn, which renders the “movere” motionless, figures stasis as the divine ideal toward which humankind should strive. Though humanity is imperfect, it ought to use its “corrumpable” existence to maken vertu of necessitee, And take it weel that we may nat eschue, And namely that to us alle is due. (1.3042–4)

In his crowning consolatory speech, Theseus advises people to embrace their impending stasis (underground or in an urn), which they can effectively do by refraining from complaint and rebellion, and instead working diligently toward “security” (1.3045–6, 3049).36 Both in this life and the afterlife, stasis is L(l)ord. As the Knight’s spokesperson, Theseus’s insistence on top-to-bottom stability conveniently embraces the same static continuity upon which chivalric fiction depends. The Knight’s efforts to preserve an ideal are, in the “First Movere” speech, equated to acting in the image and likeness of god(s). This line of reasoning explains the Knight’s persistent enforcement and celebration of chivalric stasis in his tale. In an effort to preserve the sanctity of chivalry, he even imagines his model chevalier Theseus incarcerating, and therefore immobilizing, two potentially chivalric entities.37 After discovering Arcite and 36 37

One might also recall the Boethian celebration of “the ferme stablenesse of perdurable duellynge” in the Consolation of Philosophy (3.11.185–6). Even preceding their imprisonment, Theseus acts as puppet master to Palamon and Arcite.



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Palamon in Thebes, “Nat fully quyke ne fully dede” (1.1015, like the undead act of self-fashioning discussed above), Theseus imprisons the Theban cousins, prompting the Knight (as narrative voice) to ask the reader, Who hath the worse, Arcite or Palamoun? That oon may seen his lady day by day, But in prison he moot dwelle always; That oother wher hym list may ride or go, But seen his lady shal he nevere mo. (1.1348–52; emphasis mine)

Here the Knight calls for the audience’s implicit judgment of mobile bodies. Who is worse off: the knight who remains in place/emplaced (Palamon), or the knight who is estranged from his love as a consequence of his mobility (Arcite)? In the end, it is the former who gets the girl, but even forgoing this conclusion the narrative shows a preference for Palamon’s shackles over Arcite’s unboundedness. Against all contemporary understandings of incarceration, the Knight’s Tale even allows for a reading of Palamon and Arcite’s imprisonment as a show of Thesean generosity.38 In the Knight’s telling, Theseus offers stasis to the cousins in an effort to affirm their status as knights. In his foundational study of this tale in Chaucer and the Subject of History, Lee Patterson writes, it is in order to contain Theban self-destructiveness that [Theseus] first imprisons Arcite and Palamon ‘for everemoore’ (1032) and then, when they are at large in the Athenian world, seeks to channel their violence into the culturally sanctioned form of a tournament that Chaucer’s contemporaries would have recognized as a ‘duel of chivalry’ or ‘feat of arms.’39

Valuing chivalry, “a secular fraternity that imposes order first upon itself – the Order of Chivalry – and then upon an unruly world,” over “aboriginal Theban ferocity,” Theseus insists on immobilizing bodies that otherwise threaten to overrun their bounds.40 He values the rigidity of “form” and attempts to “channel” (or contain) hypermobility in the hopes of emulating and multiplying godly and chivalric stability. In this way, his imprisonment of Palamon and Arcite functions, for the Knight at least, as a means by which to deter the

38

39 40

Following the conquest of Thebes, for example, he “han hem caried softe unto the tente… and he ful soone hem sente / To Atthenes” (1.021–3). Palamon and Arcite are not simply carried; Theseus has them carried. And they are not merely sent to Athens; they are sent by Theseus to Athens. In this moment and others, Theseus is a lord who dictates others’ mobility while remaining immobile himself. This matter is especially charged as I write, given the internment and separation of refugee families at the U.S.–Mexico border. See Nomaan Merchant, “Hundreds of Children Wait in Border Patrol Facility in Texas,” apnews.com, June 18, 2018, https://www.apnews. com/9794de32d39d4c6f89fbefaea3780769. Patterson, Chaucer and the Subject of History, 200; emphasis mine. Patterson, Chaucer and the Subject of History, 201.

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noblemen from the roads traveled by weeping widows. This near-paradisiacal figuration of prison is made explicit by Arcite when he bemoans his release. While in exile, far removed from his love Emily, Arcite exclaims of Palamon’s condition, Thyn is the victorie of this aventure. Ful blisfully in prison maistow dure— In prison? Certes nay, but in paradys! (1.1237)

Compared to his “helle” (1.1226), Palamon’s imprisonment is bliss. Arcite continues, “som man wolde out of his prisoun fayn / That in his hous is of his meynee slayn… we goon wrong ful often, trewely” (1.1257–8, 1267). Finding himself like a man who prayed for his freedom only to be slain by his household, Arcite concludes he has “goon wrong” by having been party to his release. Though much of this sorrow is motivated by his distance from Emily, the foolishness associated with his departure from prison is underscored by Theseus, who scorns Arcite and Palamon’s efforts to mobilize against the stable structures of state (including their Athenian prison cell): Lo heere this Arcite and this Palamoun, That quitly weren out of my prisoun, And myghte han lyved in Thebes roially… And yet hath love, maugree hir eyen two, Broght hem hyder bothe for to dye. Now looketh, is nat that an heigh folye? Who may been a fool but if he love? (1.1791–9)

Though their imprisonment prevented them from self-destructing (in Theseus’s estimation), and the promise of incorporation – a “royal” life in Thebes – is available to the cousins, they abandon both, allowing their passions (humoral and otherwise) to run wild like the lions and tigers to which they are compared (1.1655–7). Their “heigh folye” lies in their refusal to conform to the static structures that identify the Athenian/Theban state and the order of chivalry imposed upon the tale by its teller. In breaking their prison bonds, both Palamon and Arcite are judged to be distinctly disorderly. It is within this disorder that the Thesean narrative (driven by the Knight’s chivalric agenda) begins to break down. In the cracks between narrator, narrative voice, and narrative, an exciting resistance to static structures emerges. As Patterson observes, [the tale’s] most powerful and enigmatic moments derive from a struggle between the Tale and its teller, between the unsettling meanings it insistently expresses and those other, more confirmatory assertions that the Knight seeks to promote.41 41

Patterson, Chaucer and the Subject of History, 168.



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Though the Knight (via Theseus) insists on a positive valuation of “the static continuity” of chivalric memory, and the enforcement of stasis on bodies and the body politic, Palamon and Arcite suggest the precarity of such insistence. Despite being knights themselves, and in the face of Theseus’s efforts to contain them, the Theban cousins are relentlessly on the move. This movement is most evident in pars secunda and following, after Palamon and Arcite have escaped prison, but it is the way they test their bounds while fettered that proves most interesting to the revelation of a counternarrative from within the tale. Even when immobility is enforced upon them, the cousins “romen,” practicing bodily movement despite being confined by Thesean/chivalric ideology (symbolized by a stone prison). Fewer than fifty lines after being cast into his cell, Palamon Was risen and romed in a chambre an heigh…. This sorweful prisoner, this Palamoun, Goth in the chambre romynge to and fro. (1.1065–71; emphasis mine)

And Arcite insists that, although he and Palamon must “endure” prison, “everich of us take his aventure” (1.1185–6). Like one of the most famed knights of Middle English verse, Gawain, who in the moments immediately preceding the completion of his quest, “romez up to the roffe of the rogh wonez” (2198), Palamon and Arcite remind readers that the chivalric adventure demands physical movement across geographical space. In so doing, they reinscribe mobility with representational and nonrepresentational meaning – movement can represent social action (as in a protest march) and demand the acknowledgment of an affective body that feels and experiences motion.42 In the Knight’s Tale, Palamon and Arcite’s roaming represents a denial of chivalric stasis and demands the recognition of a more complete, embodied chevalier. Even the repetitiveness of their motion (to and fro, up and down) recalls what anthropologist Tim Ingold calls “circumambulatory knowing,” reminding us that their tale is being told by a mobile teller en route to Canterbury.43 In these moments, the errancy of knights persists, even if one must wade through the rhetoric of the Knight’s tale to find it. Of course, the potential for roaming to serve the Thesean narrative remains. The agenda of the teller and the tale itself exist in a constant tension, even contesting the nuance of a single word. The Knight tells of how Arcite, finding himself overwhelmed with sorrow after having “romed al his fille,” fell into a reverie, “as doon thise loveres in hir queynte geres, / Now in the crope, now doun in the breres, / Now up, now doun, as boket in a welle” (1.1529–34). A survey of the MED confirms roaming can indicate sorrow (MED, romen, v., 1b), with roaming “to and fro” or “up and doun” conjuring 42 43

See Peter Adey, Mobility (New York: Routledge, 2010), 146–50. Tim Ingold, “Culture on the Ground: The World Perceived through the Feet,” Journal of Material Culture 9.3 (2004), 315–40.

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an image of fretful pacing.44 In representing Arcite as one who travels “up [and] doun” like a lover, a bucket, or a beast, the Knight reads the roaming body as a malfunctioning body. Arcite wanders through a cloud of sickness and sighs. Such a reading would reinforce social hierarchies (and sexual ones insofar as Emily also roams [1.1069]). Nonetheless, Palamon and Arcite have successfully introduced a means by which to read roaming as resistance. The Knight may be able to keep a tight grip on Theseus, built in his own image and likeness (as the Knight builds himself in the image and likeness of a “parfit” and “stable” god), but the rest of his characters assume lives of (and move on) their own. The Canterbury pilgrims bent on quiting the Knight are keen to this potentiality.

The Miller’s Tale Before either the Miller or Reeve open their mouths, the impossibility of a consistent chivalric narrative lingers in the margins of the Knight’s Tale. As Patterson notes, the severity of the control that the Knight imposes upon his narrative is in fact the unwilling agent of control’s subversion; and the harder he tries to civilize his materials and make them exemplify chivalry’s belief in progress, the more evidently he produces [formal stasis and moral incoherence].45

In other words, the more the Knight tightens his grip, the more his narrative slips through his fingers. This is in part due to the fictional nature of the Knight’s chivalric ideal. Although the self-conscious performance of chivalry could exist outside of time, reality (Shimomura’s “history of events”) offered a constant reminder that the practice of chivalry was affected by sociopolitical conditions including shifting understandings of class/rank and the civil unrest generated by the Hundred Years’ War.46 Just as Chaucer’s Squire, a knight for a new generation, resists his father’s model of knighthood, history challenges the static continuity of chivalry. Chivalric stability is further problematized by the fact that the chevalier himself can never be “perfectly sealed.”47 As Jeremy Citrome notes, the knight’s body leaks, fissures, and abscesses, which “undermines the fantasy 44

45 46 47

In Lydgate’s Troy Book, for example, Lydgate begins by describing how Pelleus retreats “Into a wode for to make his mone… / Where this kyng, rooming to and fro, / [Compleyned] ay of his fatal woo” (1.28–32; emphasis mine). Patterson, Chaucer and the Subject of History, 169. Here “progress” is a reinvention of rigid ideology; the Knight seeks to sustain chivalric inertia. On the “history of events” as versus the “continuity of memory,” see Shimomura, “The Walking Dead in Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale,” 6. Jeremy Citrome, “Bodies That Splatter: Surgery, Chivalry, and the Body in the Practica of John Arderne,” Exemplaria 12.1 (2001), 137–72. On the instability of knightly bodies, see also Kathleen Kelly, “Malory’s Body Chivalric,” Arthuriana 6.4 (1996), 52–71.



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of wholeness through which the chivalric subject is formed and maintained.”48 The bodily limits within which the knight ought to live, signified by the steel constraints of his armor, are in fact “fluid and dynamic.”49 Bones break and blood flows on the battlefield. In fact, the knight’s dependence on armor as a signifier, particularly evident in treatises like Knyghthode and Bataile that figure armor as near-prosthetic, itself deconstructs the representation of a whole, sealed body. In Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, wherein Gawain “sleped in his yrnes” (729), and The Squire of Low Degree, wherein a knightly suitor must “in your armure…lye” (183), the identification of a knight depends not on the body itself, but on the garb that encases the waking and even sleeping body.50 Chivalric identity is transferred from the flesh of the knight to the links and plates of his armor. Taking this argument one step further in Medieval Identity Machines, Jeffrey Jerome Cohen argues that a knight is an assemblage, a body contextualized by and dispersed across space and the myriad objects and affects that saturate it.51 Cohen writes that the chivalric code was enmeshed within essentialist and socially normative ambitions for the body. … Yet, like any overarching ideology, chivalry promised a perfection that it could never in fact bestow. … Because the trajectory of chivalric identification tended to scatter knightly identity across a proliferating array of objects, events, and fleshly forms, knighthood never precisely resided within the stable and timeless social body that chivalric myth obsessively envisioned.52

In Cohen’s estimation, chivalric identity was inextricably linked not only with armor, but also with the horse, saddle, and stirrup. Suggested first and foremost by the French word chevalier, this association was perpetuated by chivalric treatises and medieval romances alike, which insisted on the inviolability of a knight’s horse from the inception of chivalric desire (the moment in which a boy looks admiringly on a charger) to mortal battles in which the death of a mount brought shame on his rider. Applied to The Canterbury Tales, this suggests the Ellesmere’s portrait of the Knight is as much a depiction of the narrator’s destrier as it is of the Knight himself. He is human and animal flesh, saddle and sword.

48 49 50

51 52

Citrome, “Bodies That Splatter,” 141. Elizabeth Grosz, Volatile Bodies (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1994), 39. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, in The Poems of the Pearl Manuscript, eds. Malcolm Andrew and Ronald Waldron (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1996); The Squire of Low Degree, in Middle English Verse Romances, ed. Donald Sands (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1986). See also Susan Crane, “Chivalry and the Pre/Postmodern,” postmedieval 2.1 (2011), 69–87. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, Medieval Identity Machines (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 47; emphasis mine.

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These chinks in the armor (of the Knight and his tale) make way for the tales of the Miller and Reeve, who queer the stable, normative categories of the Knight’s Tale.53 Their tales reveal the “discomfiting limit of any circumscriptive system (of space, of time, of identity) that parcels the world into discrete phenomena and impossibly immobile categories.”54 In quiting the Knight, they not only challenge his highly regulated geographies and generic conventions; they also and perhaps more significantly reject his insistence on static, iconographic narrative and praxis. The immobile, oaken bodies of the Knight’s Tale are rendered fools subject to the fluid and dynamic in the tales that follow. Even the act of quiting itself, which initiates what Patterson refers to as an “ostentatiously nonaristocratic poetic project,” upends the Knight’s insistence on order and hierarchy.55 For both the Miller and the Reeve, movement empowers the mobile body and instability and dispersal are generative rather than destructive. The narrator begins by setting the Miller against the Knight and his Thesean model, explaining that the Miller sat “unnethe upon his hors” (1.3121). Unlike the towering Theseus, who lords over leaky women as he sits sturdily atop his steed, the Miller sits with difficulty, swaying in his saddle like the tide, overfull with libation. Like the bodies of Hippolyta, Emily, and the weeping widows of the Knight’s Tale, his is a saturated and kinetic body whose contact with the “heighe weye” seems immanent. The Miller’s first words highlight this instability, introducing his interest in the dis-assemblage of holy bodies when he exclaims, By armes and by blood and bones, I kan a noble tale for the nones, With which I wol now quite the Knyghtes tale. (1.3125–7)

Christ’s body, the chivalric exemplar, is torn to pieces as the Miller separates Christ’s arms from their trunk and reminds his listeners of how blood and bones break their bounds. Both the tale-teller’s body and the inspiration for his telling stand in direct contrast to his predecessor; the gauntlet has been thrown. The tale proper then challenges the Knight’s stable, normative categories by establishing John the carpenter as the Knight (Theseus’s equivalent) and subordinating him to characters who both embrace and are themselves assemblages, open to the fluid movement of self and space that deconstructs

53

54 55

On this use of the word “queer,” see Karma Lochrie, “Mystical Acts, Queer Tendencies,” in Constructing Medieval Sexuality, eds. Karma Lochrie, Peggy McCracken, and James A. Schultz (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 180–200. Lochrie argues that queering is a “project of contestation” that challenges simple categorizations of being (by gender, class, etc.). Cohen, Medieval Identity Machines, 39. Patterson, Chaucer and the Subject of History, 40.



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the stasis inherent to chivalric memory and the idealization of a “parfit” and “stable” creator. The head of his household, John shares the Knight’s interest in hierarchy enforced by degrees of (im)mobility. Like the Knight’s Thesean exemplar, he is particularly invested in the containment and immobilization of unstable bodies. He holds his wife Alison “narwe in cage, / For she was wylde and yong” (1.3224–5) – reminding readers of Palamon and Arcite’s imprisonment and the confinement of a “rom[ing]” Emily within garden walls (1.1069) – and he bemoans the “tikel” (unstable or changeable) nature of the world (1.3428), suggesting a preference for certainty and stability.56 Moreover, although John travels to nearby Osney for work, his business trips are only significant insofar as they make space for domestic play. As Linda Tarte Holley observes, they are “understood specifically in terms of their return to the activity in John’s house,” rendering his movements ancillary and foregrounding his association with the supposedly (but, as it turns out, not at all) stable structure of the home.57 Yet, as these moments suggest, John’s efforts to uphold static ideology and practice are futile. His wife refuses to be confined, his chastisement of an unstable world prefigures his wife’s lascivious actions (insofar as “tikel” can also refer to a loose woman or “tikel tail”),58 and his association with the home ultimately serves to underscore the home’s leakiness. As the embodiment of Theseus’s resolute immobility, John is undone. His fear of having “demed hymself been lik a cokewold” is realized (1.3226), and he quakes, weeps, and wails in anticipation of a faux flood (1.3614–21). Rendered “sely” for these sighs and swoons, he cannot contain the shudders and seepages that come to define him in the closing lines of the Miller’s Tale. When he plummets from the ceiling in his kneading trough and breaks his arm, his unboundedness is literalized (he is “brosten,” 1.3829), and he becomes the laughing stock of his community, who “turned al his harm unto a jape” (1.3842).59 The fantasy of a sealed body, latent in the Knight’s Tale, is made explicit as the Miller unseals the carpenter, making a joke of his attempts to contain himself and social/ sexual hierarchies. The impossibility of securing (ideological or embodied) stasis is further amplified by John’s subordination to characters who embrace and embody mobility. Nicholas, Alison, and Absalon are repeatedly associated with hyperkinetic assemblages. The Miller begins by dispersing each character’s identity 56 57 58

59

MED, tikel, adj., 1c. Linda Tarte Holley, Chaucer’s Measuring Eye (Houston, TX: Rice University Press, 1990), 98. MED, tikel, adj., 1b. This sense of the word “tikel” is perhaps best captured in the carol “Loke er þin herte,” which reads “Madenys… be bothe fals and fekyl, And vnder the tayl they ben ful tekyl” (in The Early English Carols, ed. Richard Leighton Greene [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1935], 270–1). Here we also see the Miller’s penchant for breaking arms, as we are reminded of the oath in which he dismembers Christ (1.3125–17).

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across categories. Nicholas, the first character described in depth, is immediately associated with water when the Miller explains that his astrological study has allowed him to determine “Whan that men sholde have droghte or elles shoures” (1.3196). His knowledge – itself unconventional and deemed threatening to the body insofar as it could lead a man who “walked in the feeldes for to prye / Upon the sterres” to “in a marle-pit yfalle” (1.3458–60) – concerns the coming and going of floods. He is a diviner of water, defined by and dependent upon the element’s restless movement and circulation. Nicholas also readily admits his leakiness when he confesses to Alison, “Ywis, but if ich have my wille, / For deerne love of thee, lemman, I spille” (1.3277–8; emphasis mine). Traditionally translated as “perish,” the Middle English word “spille” also means “to overflow a container” (MED, spillen, v., 7a) or “dissolve” (5c), rendering Nicholas’s hypothetical undoing a liquidation. He will not simply expire if Alison rejects him; he will melt away – his skin, bones, and self seeping into the world around him. The same is true of the Miller’s female character, who refuses to be contained by either her husband John or the static ideologies that open the first fragment of The Canterbury Tales. Like the Knight’s female characters, Alison leaks, but unlike Emily and the widows she actively and successfully moves to overturn social and sexual power dynamics. With her co-conspirator Nicholas, she reveals her “jalous” husband to be a fool and empowers herself through sexual promiscuity. At the tale’s conclusion, John is “sworn adoun” (1.3845) – reduced or “deposed” (MED, adoun, adv., 4) – while Alison is contentedly “swyved” (1.3850), positioning her outside of John’s cage and beyond the purview of his (masculine, patriarchal) power.60 And while the male characters get their just desserts (a kiss with a “nether ye,” a branded ass, or a broken arm), Alison escapes punishment. As Helen Cooper observes, “the tale is grossly unfair… to Alison because she gets away with everything.”61 She is the victor of the Miller’s fabliau, having gained autonomy and authority in the space of John’s home. Alison’s unboundedness is also represented in body, as the Miller scatters her across animal, vegetable, liquid, and solid substances, which are valued for their aesthetic, commercial, and mechanical value. Alison is likened to a “[noble] in the Tour” (1.3256) a “bragot or… meeth, / Or hoord of apples leyd in hey or heeth” (1.3261–2) “a joly colt” (1.3263), and “a prymerole, a piggesnye” (1.3268). Far from being confined by the self-perpetuating memory of an absent ideal (the exemplary wife, for example), she enters into very real 60 61

This concept will be discussed further in Chapter 4with respect to the Wife of Bath (the Wife of Bath’s Prologue), and Griselda (the Clerk’s Tale). Cooper, The Canterbury Tales, 101–2. Cooper continues to observe that this is not unexpected of a fabliau: “it is worse to be a fool than a knave” (102). See also Michael G. Cornelius, “Sex and Punishment in Geoffrey Chaucer’s ‘The Miller’s Tale,’” in Human Sexuality, ed. Blake Hobby (New York: Bloom’s Literary Criticism, 2009), 95–104, wherein Cornelius discusses various critical approaches to Alison’s punishment (or lack thereof).



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systems of commerce, some of which are particularly suited to the teller, who is invested in and inundated by “bragot” and “meeth” (drinks made of ale and honey).62 And, as part of the economic system, she both is and is antecedent to monetary exchange: she is the apple lying in the meadow before it has been collected by the orchardist and the coin used to buy the apple once it has entered the market. Moreover, she is elided with the natural world when she is equated to primroses, cuckooflowers, and horses. Beautiful and functional, she crosses between the human and nonhuman world. If these figurations alone do not queer the Knight’s static/sealed bodies, Absalon’s branding of Nicholas – long the subject of scholarly critique – allows for a more literal reading of queered bodies in the Miller’s Tale. As Kathleen Bishop observes, because Chaucer’s father was involved with the deposition of King Edward II, Chaucer would have been familiar with Edward’s homosexual relationship with Hugh Dispenser and his consequent assassination.63 This and Chaucer’s association with Jean Froissart, who wrote about Edward’s sexuality in the Chronicles, nearly guarantees that the “hoote kultour” (1.3775) of the Miller’s Tale is an allusion to the hot poker with which Sir Thomas Gurney sodomized the King. In evoking a sodomitic narrative without enacting penetration, the branding scene therefore destabilizes Nicholas’s heteronormativity.64 He is not sodomized, but the potential is realized in the proximity of the coulter to his anus and the reminder of Edward’s demise. The function of the coulter as versus the “shaar” (1.3763) (or another forged implement, for that matter) reinforces this narrative. Phallic in shape, the coulter cut the soil vertically to create deep furrows for planting; it generated the repository for seed. Although no seed is planted, Nicholas’s rear has been permanently marked by the hand of another man. The brand is Absalon’s work, and the stripping of the skin “an hande-brede aboute” (1.3811) invokes the image of a literal handprint on Nicholas’s ass. A claim is staked on a man by a man, forever visible to anyone exposed to Nicholas’s rear. Even more interesting is the way in which the branding introduces what Glenn Burger refers to as the “new man.” A historical reference to late-medieval gentlemen who were identified as gentile but worked as literate tradespeople rather than landowners, this term takes on new meaning in the context of the Miller’s Tale’s “slippery and sliding signifiers.”65 For Burger, this 62 63

64

65

Here we might be reminded of the refigured geography of the Canterbury pilgrimage (see Chapter 1). Kathleen A. Bishop, “Queer Punishments: Tragic and Comic Sodomy in the Death of Edward II and in Chaucer’s Miller’s Tale” in The Canterbury Tales Revisited – 21st Century Interpretations, ed. Kathleen A. Bishop (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars, 2008), 16–26. For a discussion of gender and sexuality in the Miller’s Tale, see Martin Blum, “Negotiating Masculinities: Erotic Triangles in the Miller’s Tale,” in Masculinities in Chaucer: Approaches to Maleness in the Canterbury Tales and Troilus and Criseyde, ed. Peter G. Beidler (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1998), 37–52. Glenn Burger, “Erotic Discipline or ‘Tee Hee, I Like My Boys to Be Girls’: Inventing with

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slip’n’slide depends upon the inclusion of Alison in the fabliau’s trick. While European analogues depend exclusively on men thrusting their asses out of windows, in Chaucer’s version of the tale, Alison’s rear is kissed and Nicholas’s is branded. Concluding with the branding of a male ass may normalize the narrative trajectory, but “branding and the kiss remain contiguous and mutually constitutive,” suggesting that the maleness of Nicholas’s rear is constantly queered by the simultaneity of a female one.66 The application of the term “new man” may therefore extend beyond late-medieval social categories; in the Miller’s Tale, it suggests a new and distinctly queer category of gender identity. Nicholas occupies a subject position that is both male and female. In consciously deviating from his source material and allowing for this category confusion, the Miller unambiguously quits the Knight. His tale destabilizes the rigid categories that the Knight depends upon. Beyond establishing dispersed, mobile, and queered characters as his tale’s protagonists, the Miller reinforces the abnormality of immobility through Nicholas’s feigned illness, the defining feature of which is stillness. When Nicholas fails to emerge from his chamber after a day or two, John presumes that he has fallen “in some woodnesse or in som agonye” (1.3452), and when he breaks into Nicholas’s room he finds him “ay as stille as stoon, / And evere caped upward into the eir” (1.3472–3). Despite enforcing stasis on his wife, the carpenter perceives its manifestation in a male body as madness, illness, or death. This explicitly challenges the Knight’s ideology in two ways. First, it figures immobility as unnatural, a consequence of despair or possession (by elves, in John’s imagining, 1.3479). Second, and more significantly, it reminds us that the greatest proponent of stasis in the Miller’s Tale cannot sustain the association of stasis with power. While mnemonic practice can recall undead fictions, as the Knight’s romance attempts to do in its re-presentation of a chivalric ideal, the gritty world of the fabliaux dissembles such ideology, revealing its impossible application to strikingly real (bawdy) bodies. John both desires stability and fears it; the male body should contain or imprison threatening bodies, but a static male body is as good as dead. In his quiting of the Knight, the Miller’s most Thesean character is revealed to be a disorderly mess. In this moment, the elemental figuration of Nicholas may also be significant – he appears to have transformed from liquid to solid, water to rock – yet this transformation undoes itself in the very moment it is established. As Cohen articulates in Stone: An Ecology of the Inhuman, stone is far from intransigent. It astounds (Middle English astoned), charms, allures, and magnetizes; it “does not cease to move.”67 In the context of the Miller’s Tale, it provides a

66 67

the Body in Chaucer’s Miller’s Tale,” in Becoming Male in the Middle Ages, eds. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen and Bonnie Wheeler (New York: Garland Publishing, 1997), 245–60 (252). Burger, “Erotic Discipline,” 251. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, Stone: An Ecology of the Inhuman (Minneapolis, MN: University of



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catalyst for historical time, invoking a temporality that works in direct opposition to the circularity of the Knight’s chivalric (social) time. Upon encountering the “stony” Nicholas, John exclaims, “What, Nicholay! What, how! What, looke adoun! / Awak, and thenk on Cristes passioun!” (1.3477–8). Here Nicholas is commanded to recall a singular narrative. Though Christians were certainly called upon to model Christ’s humility – in his Summa Theologica Thomas Aquinas would write, “religious perfection consists chiefly in the imitation of Christ” (2.2.186.5) – the passion itself was a historical moment not to be repeated. Mendicancy and martyrdom could approximate the passion, but humankind’s original sin could only be redressed by one man, at one point in time. By invoking the passion, then, John imposes a forward-moving chronology on Nicholas’s perceived stasis, a biblical history inaugurated by Christ’s crucifixion that perpetually marched toward the Last Judgment. Nicholas’s stillness therefore proves to be transportive and agentic, transporting us backwards in time and anticipating a radically changed future, all witnessed by geologic time. As Cohen writes, “A universal and a specific entity at once, of a certain time and yet a materialization of time out of memory, stone… carries a past surpassing human enframing.”68 It overwhelms the static continuity of memory upon which chivalry depends, positioning the Miller’s Tale within a temporal matrix that admits its own end while denying narrative containment. In fact, the “petric poetics” enabled by Nicholas’s stoniness recalls more than just biblical history, enmeshing the moment in a multiplicity of related narratives. In John’s command to recall Christ’s passion, one may hear echoes of Beowulf’s initial “Whæt!”: an activation of narrative, story inaugurated. And when John exclaims, “Blesse this hous from every wikked wight, / For nyghtes verye, the white pater-noster! / Where wentestow, Seinte Petres soster?” (1.3484–6), one may recall the derivation of Peter’s name from stone. Moreover, in the context of this stony abundance, John’s attribution of “the white pater-noster” to apostolic kin may remind us of the “white magic” of Deucalion and Pyrrha, which enlivens stone. Called upon to repopulate the world by casting the bones of their mother behind them, Deucalion and Pyrrha cast stones – the “bones” of mother earth – over their shoulders, which become humankind. By gesturing toward these and other stories, John’s panic to erase Nicholas’s stoniness invokes a narrative web in which the supposedly solid stuff of earth is activated and agentified: “stille… stoon[es]” become ambulatory men, women and saints, who literally and figuratively generate the Christian world. A line referencing St Peter that is generally dismissed as “confused” and “comic” instead transmits biblical narrative and Ovidian story alike, while hinting toward the magic of mobilized stone. Nicholas’s stoniness turns out to be game, narrative, catalyst; movement remains at his center and the center of the Miller’s Tale.

68

Minnesota Press, 2015), 133–4. Cohen, Stone, 8; emphasis mine.

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This is even more evident in the flood narrative that drives the plot of the Miller’s Tale. Upon “awakening” from his stony condition, Nicholas tells John that on the following Monday, Shal falle a reyn, and that so wilde and wood, That half so greet was nevere Noes flood. This world… in lasse than an hour Shal al be dreynt, so hidous is the shour; Thus shal mankynde drenche, and lese hir lyf. (1.3517–21)

Noah, Deucalion, and Pyrrha may have survived apocalyptic floods, warns Nicholas, but none will survive the flood to come without taking immediate action. In these lines, Nicholas reminds us of the medieval world’s hypermobility as expressed through water. As David Macauley notes in Elemental Philosophy, “the very hallmark of water… is restless movement.”69 This was certainly the case in the Middle Ages, when fluid worlds generated life (as fons et origo), invited ebbs and flows, and threatened dissolution (through dissolving matter or, in the case of shipwreck, ending life). Albrecht Classen observes that in narratives ranging from Marie de France’s Lais to Boccaccio’s Decameron water acts as catalyst.70 In Marie’s imaginary worlds, water facilitates love and threatens to (or does) kill, and in Boccaccio the Mediterranean acts as fortune’s agent, shuttling willing and unwilling bodies alike toward fated amorous encounters. Lived experience was also deeply affected by water’s capacity to move. Medieval annals record numerous instances of torrential rains, floods, and excessive humidity (amplified by the Medieval Warm Period from the eleventh to the mid-thirteenth century), but daily life also saw the movement of and over water enabled by water wheels, irrigation systems, and bridges.71 On the micro-level, water nourished, bathed, and baptized, and on the macro-level it engendered economic and social (religious, political, cultural) networks by moving goods and people across the globe. David Sedlak speculates, “If water is the essential ingredient of life, then water supply is the essential ingredient of civilization.”72 And this ingredient had the capacity to both create and destroy. Water was a source of physical and spiritual energy. It powered mills and cleansed people of their sins, both in the baptismal font and on pilgrimage, 69 70 71 72

David Macauley, Elemental Philosophy: Earth, Air, Fire, and Water as Environmental Ideas (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2010), 47. Albrecht Classen, Water in Medieval Literature: An Ecocritical Reading (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2018). The latter is considered in depth in Chapter 2. David Sedlak, Water 4.0: The Past, Present, and Future of the World’s Most Valuable Resource (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2014), 1. See also Lincoln Paine, who observes in The Sea and Civilization: A Maritime History of the World that “much of human history has been shaped by people’s access, or lack of it, to navigable water” ([New York: Knopf, 2013], 8).



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as an increasing number of individuals traveled to Jerusalem by sea following the fall of Acre in 1291. Meanwhile, despite the increasing dependence on waterways, traveling by ship continued to be a source of consternation as a consequence of storms, shipwreck, and piracy; and for those unable to afford maritime travel, the pervasive narrative of Appolonius of Tyre reinforced an association between the sea and volatility. Whether mobile in body or not, water reminded the medieval mind that like the sparrows flying through Bede’s rafters, humankind was perpetually moving through time and space. In the Miller’s Tale, water carries both positive and negative connotations, but the latter are ultimately overwritten by laughter. First, water enlivens Alison by allowing her escape from John’s “cage” and potentially bestows life upon her through its association with fertility. Though the queer encounter between Absalon and Nicholas is without seed, the fictional flood could very well have filled Alison’s womb. Ensuring her union with Nicholas, the threat of water renders her womb a sort of fountain in the Melusine tradition, a site where regenerative potential is realized, as when the Scottish King Elinas encounters Presine at a potable well (established as life-giving in contrast to the saltwater of the sea nearby), resulting in the birth of three daughters, one of whom (Melusine) is ultimately transformed into a serpentine hybrid. In both narratives, the proximity of fertile female bodies to water – even if that water is imaginary, as in the Miller’s Tale – unseals bodies and destabilizes categorical understanding. In Jean d’Arras’s Roman de Melusine (1393), this manifests literally in the hybrid form of Melusine. In the Miller’s Tale, these conditions are the catalyst for regeneration, penetration, and fragmentation, much of which revolves around, if not within, the assemblage of Alison’s body. The tale’s protagonists revel in this generative potential. Alison and Nicholas enjoy the “bisynesse of myrthe and of solas” amidst “revel and… melodye” (1.3652–4), and even Absalon, the butt of their joke, is “heeled of his maladie” through their play (1.3757). He denounces love and turns instead to the generative potential of storytelling, promising the smith Gerveys that he will “telle… thee to-morwe day” of the night’s endeavors (1.3784). Like Brutus in Chaucer’s Legend of Lucretia or Horatio in Shakespeare’s Hamlet, he will “let the peple calle, /And openly the tale… [telle] hem alle” (185–6). Yet the catalytic nature of liquid that enlivens these characters is simultaneously perceived by John as a threat. Water is what ultimately realizes the dissolution of his title as husband and head of household. Beyond rendering John cuckold (one might imagine the unsealing of his body as horns grow from his head), the biblical flood triggers his active imagination such that he “thynketh verraily that he may see / Noees flood come walwynge as the see,” which causes him to “wepeth, weyleth, maketh sory cheere” (1.3615–18). Here John is transformed into the very bodies that the Knight’s Thesean exemplar scorns. He overflows like the “wrecche[s]” who “wepe and wayle” after having been widowed by Theseus’s military campaign (1.931), failing to uphold his static

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ideology as tears dissolve his masculine body. And his identity is challenged by his association not only with the weeping widows, but also with the flood itself, as the heavy “w” alliteration of Chaucer’s lines links John’s weeping and wailing with the “walwing” of the water. His association with liquidity renders him feminine – he is both a leaking body and a body of water imbued with the element’s maternal potential.73 The “hidous shour” also threatens the physical structure of John’s home. In Nicholas’s proposal, he suggests that, when the water comes, we may go, And breke an hole an heigh upon the gable Unto the gardyn-ward, over the stable, That we may frely passen forth oure way. (1.3570–3)

These lines indicate the house’s permeability, first introduced when John, separated from a stony Nicholas by a chamber door, commands his servant Robin to “haaf [the door] it of atones” and “Into the floor the dore fil anon” (1.3470–1). Already rendered a throughway to cats – a comic detail delivered when Robin finds “An hole… ful lowe upon a bord, / Ther as the cat was wont in for to crepe” (1.3440–1) – the door becomes a throughway for any and all desirous bodies. Insofar as it is meant to offer privacy, separation, and stability, John’s chamber door utterly fails.74 This and the proposed decimation of the gable introduce a notion of architectural fluidity that was not uncommon in the Middle Ages. Michael Twomey and Scott Stull observe that houses like John’s, i.e. two-chamber homes consisting of a hall and bedroom, were largely without privacy: beds were regularly shared, and economic/domestic distinctions collapsed.75 The family home often served as an “in” or “hostelrye” as it does in the Miller’s Tale (1.3188, 3203, 3622), and living spaces doubled as storage for ploughs, sickles, and kneading troughs. In fact, the openness of halls was such that they were often used as public rather than private spaces. Christopher Dyer writes, “Formal business such as witnessing a deed or marriage agreement might have been conducted in the public space of the hall,” and if the hall was too small, witnesses would spill outside where they could see and hear through 73

74

75

A Vedic hymn reads: “the waters, which are our mothers and which desire to take part in the sacrifices, come to us following their paths and distribute their milk to us” (qtd in Macauley, Elemental Philosophy, 47). On privacy in the Miller’s Tale, see María Bullón-Fernández, “Private Practices in Chaucer’s Miller’s Tale,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 28 (2006), 141–74; Valerie F. Woods, “Private and Public Space in the Miller’s Tale,” The Chaucer Review 29 (1994), 166–78; Karma Lochrie, “Women’s ‘Pryvetees’ and Fabliau Politics in the Miller’s Tale,” Exemplaria 6 (1995), 287–304); Tomas J. Farrell, “Privacy and the Boundaries of Fabliau in the Miller’s Tale,” English Literary History 56 (1989), 773–95. Michael W. Twomey and Scott D. Stull, “Architectural Satire in the Tales of the Miller and Reeve,” The Chaucer Review 51.3 (2016), 310–37.



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an open door.76 The frequency with which charges of eavesdropping were brought before the manor court suggests that this act of witness also occurred without homeowners’ consent. In 1312, a Yorkshire widow reported having “[seen] by a certain window in the… chamber” illicit relations between Walter Cobbe and Matilda Nun.77 What happened in the medieval bedroom did not stay in the medieval bedroom. In the Miller’s Tale, this permeability is underscored not only by the gable and chamber door, but also by the numerous encounters at the “shot-wyndowe” (1.3358, 3676, 3695), which include illicit relations like those witnessed by the Yorkshire widow.78 A window that can be closed and secured is instead flung open, bearing witness to the passage of beards (fore and hind), farts, and pokers that permeate not only the physical structure itself, but also the identities of the bodies passing through. Even were the flood not to come, sparing the gable that Nicholas suggests will be burst by the kneading tubs and preventing the “free passage” that he celebrates (1.3573), John’s house proves anything but stable. It is as fluid as those who occupy it, refusing to function as the “cage” John so desires. The same prayer that invokes the white magic of Saint Peter’s sister, recited “on foure halves of the hous aboute, / And on the thresshfold of the dore without” (1.3481–2), is unbounded in space: John’s house is imagined with only three sides, and the threshold that supposedly separates within from “without” is in fact nothing more than an open gate for the spirits he fears. By foregrounding the porousness of architecture, the Miller reveals the artifice of Theseus’s (and the Knight’s) painstakingly designed structures; the rigidity of the prison, the theater, and even chivalry itself is shown to be a fiction. The world is instead a place of movement, passage, and flow, defined by gaping windows, unhinged doors, and walls decimated by flood. Although John perceives this hypermobility as threat, it is ultimately a source of laughter in The Canterbury Tales. The Miller’s fabliau acknowledges the Knight’s dependence on stasis, undoes the notion of a static world, and demonstrates that those who fail to embrace life’s mobile condition are fools who will themselves be “brosten.” John’s body and reputation alike are unsealed as “The folk gan laughen at his fantasye… And turned al his harm unto a jape,” and every clerk “anonright heeld with oother. / They seyde, ‘The man is wood, my leeve brother’” (1.3840–9). As if any question remains regarding John’s foolishness, the narrator repeats a second time, “every wight gan laughen at this stryf” (1.3850), and the Canterbury pilgrims respond in kind. In the prologue to the Reeve’s Tale, Chaucer the pilgrim tells us, 76 77 78

Christopher Dyer, “Living in Peasant Houses in Late Medieval England,” Vernacular Architecture 44.1 (2013), 19–27 (24); emphasis mine. Dyer, “Living in Peasant Houses,” 24. On the shot window, see Peter Brown, “‘Shot Wyndowe’ (Miller’s Tale, 1.3358 and 3695): An Open and Shut Case?” Medium Aevum 69 (2000), 96–103.

116  Mobility and Identity in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales Whan folk hadde laughen at this nyce cas Of Absolon and hende Nicholas, Diverse folk diversely they seyde, But for the moore part they loughe and pleyde. Ne at this tale I saugh no man hym greve. (1.3855–9)

Save the Reeve, who, as a carpenter, is offended by the Miller’s treatment of John (and whose subsequent quiting will be discussed shortly) the pilgrims are tickled by the Miller’s Tale. John is the foil against whom they define themselves; they are bodies on the move, happy to leave stable structures awash in the ebb and flow of fellowship on the road. John’s buffoonery in the context of this fellowship reminds us of Boccaccio’s Simone de Villa, who in the ninth story of the eighth day of the Decameron is taken to task by Buffalmacco and Bruno. Desirous of joining a fanciful secret society fabricated by the two painters, Simone dutifully waits on a tombstone for a beast who will carry him to one of the society’s necromantic festivals. The beast turns out to be Buffalmacco, and the “festival grounds” turn out to be a privy ditch. Boccaccio writes, “In those days there were ditches in that quarter into which the farmhands would put their offerings to the Contessa di Crappa in order to enrich their fields” (274).79 Having been tossed into this ditch, Simone finds himself “grieving and miserable… covered in filth from head to foot, having swallowed several drams of the stuff” (274), and upon returning home he contends with the threat of becoming a public laughing stock. Just as Simone is covered in and inundated with liquid waste, John’s body is threatened by a flood that promises to make waste of mankind (“Thus shal mankynde drenche, and lese hir lyf” [1.3521]). And both men literally and figuratively fall; Simone falls into a privy, John falls from the rafters, and both suffer a social nosedive when they are turned into “japes” (1.3842) as a consequence of their “vanytee” (1.3835). Although John is never literally dragged through the shit, it seems a happy coincidence that his “shot wyndowe” is linguistically (and perhaps functionally) no different from a “shit window.” Peter Brown observes shot was a derivative of both Middle English sheten, to eject or expel, and shiten, to shit.80 He writes, “The ambivalence of meaning enables a pun such that ‘shot wyndowe’ becomes associated not so much with ballistic discharges… but with bodily ones.”81 We are reminded that Nicholas had “risen for to pisse” (1.3798) before he sticks his rear out the window, and the tale’s play on privy, prively, and pryvetee ultimately figures John’s home as a giant latrine. In both the Miller’s Tale and Chaucer’s Boccaccian source, then, men who depend upon rigid social structures end up floating amidst crap to the sound of derisive laughter. 79 80 81

Giovanni Boccaccio, The Decameron: A New Translation, trans. and ed. Wayne A. Rebhorn (New York: W. W. Norton, 2016). MED, sheten (v.), shiten (v.). Brown, “‘Shot Wyndowe,’” 99.



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Furthering comedy at the expense of stable structures and those who sustain them, the Miller undoes the threat of maritime travel when he asks his fellow pilgrims to imagine the kneading troughs that will serve as sailboats to John, Alison, and Nicholas (woe poor Robyn). Nicholas advises John, Anon go gete us faste into this in A knedyng trogh or ellis a kymelyn, For ech of us, but looke that they be large, In which we mowe swymme as in a barge. (1.3547–50)

One used for kneading dough, the other for brewing or bathing (something that John as Simone’s analogue may desperately need), neither “knedyng trogh” or “kymelyn” are built to withstand a flood greater than Noah’s, which by Nicholas’s own formulation promises to destroy mankind. John’s failure to question this supposition alone warrants laughter, but the reader is also called upon to imagine three large tubs hanging from the rafters of a quite small, and already relatively crowded, two-chamber home. Bursting with the bodies of John, Alison, Nicholas, Robyn, a house cat, and countless additional nonhuman creatures (to say nothing of these bodies’ accoutrements), the space will now also host three “troghs” large enough for grown adults and their victuals to “swimme” in. It is as though John has hung three giant chandeliers and replaced their elegant light and glass with heavy wood and copper. A unique design choice, to be sure. Once John secures these tubs, Nicholas assures him that when the flood rages, “thanne shaltou swymme as myrie, I undertake, / As dooth the white doke after hire drake” (1.3575–6). If the tubs are not enough of a source of humor, we are now presented with an image of John as a merry duck – and a female duck at that, given the feminine pronoun hire – contentedly paddling about in the flood. Given his dependence on the “kymelyn,” we may also imagine the hybrid carpenter–duck floating in a bathtub, resembling for modern readers a bobbing yellow ducky with a smile permanently stenciled onto its face. In these formulations, the maritime is rendered silly. Sailing is reduced to bobbing in a bath, the storms as nonthreatening as a sponge. The latefifteenth-century Boke of Nurture tells us that when a lord bathes, his servants ought to hang shetis round about þe rooff; do thus as y meene; euery shete full of flowres & herbis soote & grene, and looke ye haue sponges .v. or vj. þeron to sytte or lene: looke þer be a gret sponge, þer-on youre souerayne to sytt; þeron a shete, & so he may bathe hym þere a fytte; vndir his feete also a sponge, ȝiff þer be any to putt. (376–82)82

82

John Russell, The Boke of Nurture: Folowyng Englondis Gise, ed. Frederick J. Furnivall (London: Early English Text Society, 1868).

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This image, in which the greatest threat is the absence of a sponge on which to rest one’s feet, is as far from shipwreck as one can get. Any perceived threat associated with water is utterly negated as it pools in a space associated with domestic play. And if we are to read the “kymelyn” as a tub used specifically for brewing, a decidedly unholy water (beer) offers salvation from holy water (a biblical flood), a formulation that would suit the drunken Miller and his sense of humor well. In either case, the destructive and volatile qualities of an element that refuses capture is denied. The damage the flood may (or does) cause to John, John’s house, and humankind, were it to materialize, dissolves into laughter, leaving behind the dynamism of flux, flow, and movement. The knight’s fantasies of containment, sealed bodies, and chivalric stasis are undone. Ultimately, while addressing both the destructive and generative potential of water, the closing message of the Miller’s Tale celebrates elemental and narrative movement. The tale’s protagonists are queer assemblages. Their bodies and their situational limits are unbounded, scattered across the human/ nonhuman, hetero-/homo-, domestic/public, water/stone. They move between categories and through space, celebrating the generative potential of their mobility. The one character who refuses this ideology is ridiculed, left in a prone position that invites mockery and derision, having himself been subjected to the protagonists’ hybrid formulations as male/female man/duck/cuckoo (cuckold). His body is literally and metaphorically unsealed. Meanwhile, on an elemental level we are reminded that all matter, even stone, belies motion. As Macauley vis-à-vis Heraclitus notes, “all materiality is liquified into flows of various rates and viscosities… even static nouns and seemingly inert things can be dissolved potentially or set into motion – ‘verb-ed’ we might say – so as to indicate their aboriginal fluidity and ongoing change.”83 The liquidity of the Miller’s Tale is evident, but insofar as the Miller acts to quit the Knight he also reveals that the supposed fixity of the Knight’s Tale ultimately dissolves into associations and assemblages. The Knight’s tale (and the ideology it evinces) is “verb-ed,” tell-ing long after it has been told.

The Reeve’s Tale The Reeve Oswald takes this act of quiting one step further by amplifying the Miller’s attention to movement, with a particular focus on embodied movement and movement through space. With less sophistication than the Miller, the Reeve builds an entire narrative around movement for movement’s sake. His aim is not to demonstrate a fundamental flaw in the Miller’s formulation of mobile bodies, but instead to simply introduce more mobile bodies, moving with greater frequency. His quiting depends on his ability to demonstrate to the Canterbury pilgrims not that he can produce a better or more representative narrative than the Miller, but that he can produce more than the Miller. 83

Macauley, Elemental Philosophy, 46.



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Although his ability to productively employ the language of kinesis pales in comparison, and he may in fact reveal his own flaws more than the Miller’s, he nonetheless plays the game and quits the Knight by telling a tale about movement, chaos, and the capacity for expression in dynamic (specifically domestic) spaces. The Reeve begins by establishing himself as someone desirous of play. Perhaps in an effort to distinguish himself from the Miller’s antagonist, who remained ignorant to play and suffered as a consequence, the Reeve declares in his Prologue that as an old man I fare as dooth an open-ers— That ilke fruit is ever lenger the wers, Til it be roten in mullok or in stree. We olde men, I drede, so fare we: Til we be roten, kan we nat be rype; We hoppen alwey whil that the world wol pype. …Oure wyl desireth folie evere in oon. For whan we may nat doon, than wol we speke. (1.3871–81)

Far from growing old and rotten, the Reeve has grown old and ripe (or, more specifically, his ripeness derives from his perceived rottenness). The word “rype” is rich with meaning in Middle English. In the Reeve’s Prologue it pertains most immediately to a maturity in wisdom that manifests in speech (MED, ripe, adj. 3a), yet there is also room for reading the aging Reeve as “ready for reproduction” (1a) or “of marriageable age” (2a).84 Each reading underscores the Reeve’s desired distance from his carpentering counterpart in the Miller’s Tale; John’s fall (from grace and the rafters) may be humorous, but by Oswald’s account it defames John alone. Unlike John, he is capable of satisfying his wife such that she will not stray – he can ensure she is one of the “thousand goode ayeyns oon badde” (1.3155) – and despite (or because of) his old age he is also prepared to beget upon her a child, an improbability within the marriage of the Miller’s Tale. Using the metaphor of ripe fruit, Oswald makes it clear that he is not yet in the winter of his old age; his streams have not yet frozen over, and he defies impending stasis by “hopp[ing] alwey wyl that the world wol pype.” In an almost pastoral image, he calls upon the reader to imagine him amidst lusty shepherds, dancing to the tune of a pipe while livestock quench their thirst nearby. Mobility is at the center of this self-portrait, both figuratively in its expression of playfulness, and literally in the Reeve’s “hopp[ing].” He even touches on liquidity by rendering his life a “tappe”: For sikerly, whan I was bore, anon Deeth drough the tappe of lyf and leet it gon; 84

MED, rype (adj.)

120  Mobility and Identity in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales And ever sithe hath so the tappe yronne, Til that almoost al empty is the tonne. The streem of lyf now droppeth on the chymbe. (1.3891–5)

Turning from the medlar fruit to the wine cask (perhaps not so great a turn if we consider the use of fermented fruit in alcoholic beverages), he imagines his life spilling from the tun – almost but not quite empty – seeping into the world/bodies around him and catalyzing action like Nicholas’s biblical flood. It is as though he is working to confirm his understanding of the Miller’s formulation; he wants his fellow pilgrims to know that he is as liquid and playful as the forces that power the Miller’s story. Yet the Reeve’s choleric nature is not entirely obscured. His nods to liquidity are offset by his even greater attention to the elemental powers of earth and fire. His interest in the earthen manifests in his emphasis on the medlar fruit, or “open-arse” fruit, a reference that is certainly meant to remind us of the “open asses” of the Miller’s Tale. The medlar is a small, apple-like fruit with a rough, russeted skin and one open end. Like a hybrid between an apple and a hellmouth, its open end gapes to reveal a dun interior, and, when split, its flesh proves the color and texture of a heavily spiced apples auce. Far from flattering, this image invokes wrinkled, brown skin and a mushy interior, yet it is these very features that indicate the fruit is ready (“rype”) to eat. Like compost, its decomposition is what bestows value upon it, and through this comparison it recalls the interdependence between humanity, earth, and fruit – people derive life from, create, and cultivate soil. A sort of assemblage is constructed here: Oswald is of the earth and carries within him the Gaia-like capacity to create life (akin to Alison, who the Miller compares to an apple). Yet the medlar tree is self-pollinating; unlike most fruit trees, it does not require a companion to grow fruit. In the same moment that his body is unsealed, the Reeve’s spreading capacity (and the generative potential therein) is cut off and turned inwards. As though two elements were not enough, the Reeve also moves to incorporate fire when he insists that “in oure asshen olde is fyr yreke” and “foure gleedes han we” (1.3883–4). Herein lies the key to his character as described in the General Prologue. Associated with a choleric temperament and short-temperedness in Galen’s humoral theory, fiery natures abound in medieval character portraits. Like all those born under Aries, “the colerik hoote signe” (5.51), the Reeve is “a sclendre colerik man” (1.587), and in comparing himself to burning ashes and coals he confirms this characterization. By his own account, the “foure gledes” that “longen unto eelde” are boasting, lying, anger, and avarice (1.3885–6), and he is shown to be an avaricious liar when Chaucer tells us in the General Prologue that he “yeve and lene [his lord] of his owene good, / And have a thank, and yet a cote and hood” (1.611–12). Earning rewards by loaning his lord goods that already belonged to him, such that he “koude bettre than his lord purchace” (1.608),



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Oswald proves himself to be a scar on his lord’s manor: he festers like embers. This allegiance with fire then sparks a sense of irony in his use of the word “rype,” which paired with “reeve” in the term “ripe-reve” referred to an estate manager tasked with guarding crops against theft at harvest time.85 This is precisely the opposite of what the Reeve practices, and Symkyn’s theft of the clerks’ harvest proves central to his tale. He and his narrative alike are, like fire, incapable of supporting life. What we end up with, then, is a character keen to the Miller’s interest in liquidity whose attempt to ally himself with the protagonists of the Miller’s Tale (associated with vivacity, reproduction, fluidity) is undone by superfluity. Metaphors concerning medlar fruit, fire, and a wine barrel collide in the space of fifteen lines, and the Reeve’s more is more philosophy confuses his efforts to distinguish himself from John. He is at once fluid, earthen, and fiery (is he perhaps molten?), old and lusty, rotten and ripe. Despite his attempt to use the Miller’s quiting strategies against him by acknowledging and employing a rhetoric of play and liquidity in his Prologue, Oswald’s tendency toward abundance – why reference one element when you can reference three? – ultimately precludes any successful rebuttal.86 Yet while the Reeve fails to invalidate the Miller’s scorn (and, it turns out, for good reason), his tale does successfully amplify mobile bodies and motile spaces, quiting the Knight and intensifying the game even if he fails to respond directly to the Miller. He shows that the world is – like narrative – three-dimensional, driven by action over stasis, verbs over adjectives, progress through time over mnemonic timelessness. In the tale proper, this is first manifest in the setting, which establishes Symkyn’s world as one alive with mobile networks. As Peter Brown notes, the descriptive details included in the Reeve’s Tale (unique to this telling of the cradle-swapping story) “confer upon the poem a three-dimensional reality of an unusual kind.”87 This starts with the introduction of Symkyn’s home, which doubles as his place of work: At Trumpyngtoun, nat fer fro Cantebrigge, Ther gooth a brook, and over that a brigge, Upon the whiche brook ther stant a melle; And this is verray sooth that I yow telle. (1.3921–4)

Here, place is saturated, invoking the hybridity and mobility of brooks and bridges discussed in Chapter 2 above. The presence of the water-driven mill – a cultural construction whose functionality depends upon the natural flows 85 86 87

MED, ripe-reve (n.) I will soon demonstrate that the same is true of Symkyn, who tries and fails to use the clerks’ rhetoric against them. Peter Brown, “The Containment of Symkyn: The Function of Space in the ‘Reeve’s Tale,’” The Chaucer Review 14.3 (1980), 225–36 (228).

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of the water in which it is submerged – establishes a rich interplay between the human and nonhuman, and the bridge invites movement to and from a space that is at once domestic and commercial. These details are then framed by the economic network within which Symkyn participates – “He was a market-betere atte fulle” (1.3936) – and amplified by the medieval association of mills with sexual encounter. As Beryl Rowland observes, “from the earliest times the grinding of corn into life giving flour was seen as analogous to the procreative act”88 – an analogy recalled euphemistically when we are told “the hopur wagges til and fra” (1.4039), and the “mele falles doun / Into the trough” (1.4042–3). From the beginning, the world of the Reeve’s Tale is in motion: water, money, and bodily fluids alike move through and sustain the Miller’s space. This attention to mobility continues on the micro- and macrocosmic levels as the Reeve describes the importance of blood to Symkyn’s dynasty and bodies running amok on the fen. Of Symkyn’s twenty-year-old daughter we are told, This person of the toun, for she was feir, In purpos was to maken hire his heir. …For hooly chirches good moot been despended On hooly chirches blood, that is descended. Therfore he wolde his hooly blood honoure. (1.3977–85)

Symkyn stands to gain from this arrangement insofar as the parson is his father-in-law (1.3943). Though he is not heir to the church’s “good,” his largesse will grow by virtue of the blood flowing through his wife’s and daughter’s veins. The parson invites this spillage by imagining his estate as liquid, figured by blood rather than landholdings. As a microcosmic river it will intermingle with Symkyn’s own substance, creating an “allye” that is at once matrimonial alliance and material alloy (1.3945). Recalling the “ful many a panne of bras” given to Symkyn as dowry, this “allye” testifies to flow despite manifesting in independent (and seemingly solid) substances. Just as brass pans are an alloy of copper and zinc, Malyne and Symkyn’s infant son are assemblages whose apparent coherence dissolves across categories, extending to the holy church’s “good” and beyond. As William Woods notes, “When the daughter finally marries, perhaps into some great family, and when the little boy hoists Symkyn’s wealth upon fresh shoulders, then will Symkyn himself be transformed into the father of a dynasty.”89 This empowerment of liquid lineages establishes an unexpected link between Symkyn and his teller 88

89

Beryl Rowland, “The Mill in Popular Metaphor from Chaucer to the Present Day,” Southern Folklore Quarterly 33 (1969), 69–79 (70). See also Rodney Delasanta, “The Mill in Chaucer’s ‘Reeve’s Tale,’” The Chaucer Review 36.3 (2002), 270–6. William Woods, “Symkyn’s Place in the Reeve’s Tale,” The Chaucer Review 39.1 (2004), 17–40 (33).



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Oswald. Although Symkyn is meant to resemble the Miller, the character’s attention to reproduction reminds us instead of the Reeve. Like Oswald he is “rype” in his old age, rearing a son twenty years after a daughter, and his primary interest is self-propagation, manifest in his aggressive protection of his wife – there was “noon so hardy that wente by the weye / That with hire dorste rage or ones pleye, / But if he wolde be slayn of Symkyn” (1.3956–8) – and his business. The rape of Malyne, which robs her of her maidenhood and Symkyn of his dynasty, may be the real insult of the Reeve’s Tale, which reflects more on the Reeve than the rival he aims to quit.90 A more immediate sense of movement is introduced when Symkyn loses John and Aleyn’s horse on the fen. Having heard of the clerks’ intent to watch him mill their grain, Symkyn devises a means by which to divert their suspicious eyes. By stripping their horse of its bridle, he unleashes a flurry of movement, beginning with the horse himself and ending with the clerks in pursuit. Even Symkyn’s wife partakes in the rush of mobile bodies when she “cam lepinge inward with a ren” to tell the clerks “youre hors goth to the fen / With wilde mares, as faste as he may go” (1.4079–81). The parallel pursuit of female companionship – the horse pursues a mare just as the clerks will pursue Symkyn’s wife/daughter – is echoed by the pursuant bodies’ shared frenzy. Upon learning of the horse’s newfound liberty, John commands Aleyn to “step on thy feet!” and proceeds to brag about his own speed: “I is ful wight, God waat, as is a raa, / By Goddes herte [the horse] sal nat scape us bathe” (1.4086–7). He is as swift as a roe but evidently not as fast as his lord’s palfrey, a horse deemed suitable for riding because of its tendency to amble rather than trot or gallop. John and Aleyn stalk the fens long into the night, as the Reeve tells us: Thise sely clerkes rennen up and down With “Keep! Keep! Stand! Stand! Jossa, warderere!”… They koude nat, though they dide al hir myght, Hir capul cacche, he ran alwey so faste. (1.4100–6)

Despite the clerks’ calls for stasis, hypermobility persists. And by drawing attention to the speed of this movement – John is “ful waat,” the clerks run “ful faste” and the horse “ran alwey so fast” – the Reeve abandons premeditation in favor of a sort of instinctual action. The humor derived from liberating mobilities in the Miller’s tale is rendered slapstick in the Reeve’s as bodies react to the loosing of other bodies and in so doing reproduce those bodies’ movements (here resulting in a direct comparison between human and nonhuman: clerks and deer/horses). The intent appears to be to compound movement. 90

We know Symkyn values maidenhood insofar as it was a requisite for his marriage. The Reeve tells us, “Symkyn wolde no wyf, as he sayde, / But she were wel ynorissed and a mayde” (1.3947–8).

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Though the Miller may be insufficiently quit – as noted above, the Reeve’s more is more philosophy often misses the mark – this chase allies the Reeve and Miller in a denigration of stable structures. Specifically, the “rennen up and down” of the clerks reminds us of the cousins in the Knight’s Tale who “romen” up and down.91 In each tale, two related youths (cousins and clerks) engage in circumambulatory movement. For Palamon and Arcite, this is an act of resistance within the confined and carefully cultivated space of the Knight’s narrative/Theseus’s prison. For John and Aleyn, it is a full expression of movement that amplifies and assures the cousins’ roaming. As horse and clerks sprint across the fen (itself a space defined by liquidity), Palamon and Arcite are recast in the clerks’ bodies.92 Through an act of doubling, the Reeve’s Tale observes and celebrates their refusal to conform to chivalric stasis under Theseus. The clerks may, for the time being at least, be the butt of Symkyn’s joke, but their freedom to act independently of any rigid social structure – even their manciple, upon whom they wish death by the “wanges in his heed” (1.4030) – is evident. While these scenes alone establish the Reeve’s place in the quiting game and his attempt to outdo the Miller by incorporating more movement and more mobile bodies into his narrative, his efforts are nowhere more evident than in the final scene, when John and Aleyn redress Symkyn’s theft of meal and flour by sleeping with his wife and daughter. This scene is introduced by way of Symkyn’s challenge to the clerks. Hearing their professed need for lodging after a long night in the fens, Symkyn tells John and Aleyn, Myn hous is streit, but ye han lerned art; Ye konne by argumentes make a place A myle brood of twenty foot of space. Lat se now if this place may suffise, Or make it rowm with speche, as is youre gise. (1.4122–6)

Just as Oswald attempts to use the Miller’s quiting strategies against him in his Prologue, Symkyn attempts to play the clerks’ game in these lines by facetiously employing their academic wit. He challenges them to use their “lerned

91 92

We might also recall the Reeve’s description of Aleyn and Symkyn’s fistfight, during which the characters “up they goon, and doun agayn anon” (1.4279). On the imaginative potential of fens as liquid spaces, see Jeremy DeAngelo, Outlawry, Liminality, and Sanctity in the Literature of the Early Medieval North Atlantic (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2018); Justin T. Noetzel, “Monster, Demon, Warrior: St Guthlac and the Cultural Landscape of the Anglo-Saxon Fens,” Comitatus: A Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 45 (2014), 105–31; Gillian Rudd, Greenery: Ecocritical Readings of Late Medieval English Literature (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007), 91; Kelley M. Wickham-Crowley, “Living on the Ecg: The Mutable Boundaries of Land and Water in Anglo-Saxon Contexts.” in A Place to Believe in: Locating Medieval Landscapes, eds. Clare A. Lees and Gillian R. Overing (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2006), 85–100.



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art” to expand the space of his modest home. Beyond suggesting architectural volatility and thereby recalling the fluid spaces of the Miller’s Tale, Symkyn’s challenge invites hypermobility, and, as Brown observes, “Aleyn and John find the small space of the bedchamber quite adequate to their purposes. … They dominate the space of the miller in his own home.”93 The assumption that twenty feet cannot accommodate a mile’s worth of play is wholly disproven as the clerks transform the bedroom into a pitch, making sport enough for many Nicholases in the “streit” space of the Miller’s home. The scene begins with Aleyn rising from bed to sleep with Symkyn’s wife, and John regretting his comparative stillness. While “[lying] stille a furlong wey or two” (1.4199), John complains, Allas!…This is a wikked jape; Now may I seyn that I is but an ape. …I lye as a draf-sak in my bed. And when this jape is tald another day, I sal been halde a daf, a cokenay! I wil arise and auntre it, by my fayth! “Unhardy is unseely,” thus men sayth. (1.4201–10)

In a radical departure from the celebration of stasis in the Knight’s Tale, John equates stasis with unhardiness, defined as cowardice or fear.94 He is certain that when his tale is told, he will be its laughing stock unless he moves to avenge the Miller; failing to do so will render him nothing more than a “drafsak”: a bag of waste. He consequently sparks such a flurry of movement within Symkyn’s bedchamber that the room can hardly contain it. In the next 100 lines (1.4211–312), John rises and relocates Symkyn’s son’s crib; Symkyn’s wife rises to relieve herself and mistakenly returns to John’s bed rather than Symkyn’s; an abundance of “swyving” takes place; Aleyn mistakenly joins Symkyn in bed to reveal that he has “Thries… swyved the milleres doghter” (1.4265–6); and a chaotic fight breaks out. In these lines, movement is amplified by the Reeve’s abundant use of the verbs gon, comen, and spede. When describing the wife’s return to the chamber, for instance, he uses these verbs in six of seven lines (wente, cam, mysgoon, goon, ysped, gooth). And he renders hypermobility expressive through his use of adjectives: John goes “softely,” the wife goes “faire and wel,” and when the wife joins John in bed he “leep[s]” upon her. Movement is both quantified and qualified in the Reeve’s closing scene; his amplification of the Miller’s Tale and quiting of the Knight is evident. It is also noteworthy that he emphasizes the three-dimensional nature of Symkyn’s bedroom by focusing on movement through rather than visions of the space. This is in part due to the darkness in which the room is enveloped. Oswald makes it clear that the only light in the room is the moonlight allowed 93 94

Brown, “The Containment of Symkyn,” 232. MED, unhardi (adj.).

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through a small opening in the bedchamber. When the wife joins the brawl, she sees: A litel shymeryng of a light— For at an hole in shoon the moone bright, And by that light she saugh [Alwyn and Symkyn] bothe two, But sikerly she nyste who was who. (1.4297–300)

The light allows the wife to identify two bodies, but there is not enough light for her to distinguish between her husband and a relative stranger. As a consequence of this darkness, we do not see the room so much as we experience it through the characters’ movement; touch trumps sight as Symkyn’s wife, John, and Aleyn grope their way through the dark. Failing to find the cradle where she expected to, the wife “groped heer and ther” (1.4217) until she finds it and then “gropeth alwey forther with hir hond” (1.4222) to find the bed to which it is adjacent (now John’s rather than Symkyn’s). Aleyn too “fond the cradle with his hand” (1.4251), leading him to Symkyn’s bed rather than John’s, and during the fight that ensues after Aleyn’s confessed encounter with Malyne, John “graspeth by the walles to and fro” (1.4293) in search of a weapon. Grasping hands mediate our experience of the space, producing a sense of navigation rather than witness. We move through the space with the characters rather than having it described to us by a stationary narrator. This attention to navigation is compounded by the Reeve’s attention to distances. In addition to Symkyn’s challenge being dependent on distance (the clerks are asked to make “a mile of twenty foot of space” rather than enlarge the room’s square footage, for example), the positioning of beds is entirely relative. Symkyn’s bed is “ten foot or twelve” (1.4141) distant from John and Aleyn’s and “by and by” (1.4143) Malyne’s, which is itself “a furlong wey or two” (1.4199) from the clerks’. It is as if we are being called upon to pace the room in order to get a sense of it, even if that sense is ultimately dislocating. A furlong, or approximately one-eighth of a mile, far exceeds the “twenty foot” extent of Symkyn’s bedchamber, and yet this manipulation of space is perfectly in line with the architectural volatility introduced by the Miller and amplified by the Reeve (while also affirming the clerks’ ability to match wits with Symkyn). Given that the arrangement of space is central to the Reeve’s Tale, Oswald’s coyness may seem erroneous, but by requiring his audience to move through the space rather than painting a (static) picture, he demands our participation in the tale’s kinetic structure. If amplification is his goal, he has successfully achieved it here by inviting movement to spill off the page into the bodies of those reading it. Whether this constitutes a quiting of the Miller remains in question, but the Reeve has certainly generated mobility in excess of the Miller’s Tale, and his attention to distance, movement, and touch acts in direct contrast to the tableau of the Knight’s Tale. While the latter depends upon categorical and carefully regulated spaces, the Reeve’s Tale insists upon displacement. In so



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doing, it also hearkens to medieval theories of movement rooted in Aquinas’s speculations regarding the substance and accidents of things (the accidents are the qualities that inhere in an object, and the substance is that which underlies them).95 Discussing the eucharist in particular, Aquinas argues that – contrary to arguments made by Aristotle and others – the host can bear the body of Christ because the substance of Christ can be contained beneath the host’s accident. Although the bread still looks, feels, and tastes like bread, the indivisible body of Christ comprises its substance after the bread’s transubstantiation. As Woods observes, the substance is “there in a spiritual sense, as substance which contains the idea of dimension… but no length or breadth. Consequently, it does not matter that the body of Christ is larger than the host.”96 This allowed philosophers and scientists to suggest that because God could make a quantity/substance with no inhering qualities/accidents (i.e., the body of Christ without physical dimension), he could also create movement as a phenomenon rather than a disposition. In other words, movement could exist as an independent entity that does not require a body in which to inhere – it can exist without being limited by an object’s dimensive qualities. The implication for the Reeve’s Tale is that John and Aleyn can make Symkyn’s bedchamber – one little room – an everywhere: the accidents of the room can contain a substance that far exceeds them (a mile within twenty feet), and this substance can be movement itself, which transforms a “streit” space into a vacuum with unlimited volume. By successfully surmounting Symkyn’s challenge, John and Aleyn demonstrate the ability to erase space altogether, leaving behind only infinite movement. Insofar as this advances the first fragment’s attention to movement, the Reeve has successfully outdone the Miller, but time and time again his characterization of Symkyn appears to reflect more on him than on the object of his derision. Beyond their shared obsession with their own reproductive capacity, discussed above, Symkyn and Oswald both also lack the capacity to use their opponents’ rhetoric against them. Symkyn’s attempt to use clerkly wit backfires, resulting in the “swyving” of his wife and the spoiling of his daughter (who is no longer a maiden), and Oswald’s efforts to use the rhetoric of movement and liquidity introduced by the Miller are only partially successful. As shown, the Reeve’s attention to abundance does result in an amplification of movement beyond what we see in the Miller’s Tale, but it also confuses his deployment of elemental language (is he fluid, earthen, and/or fiery?) and results in a tale that seems to condone rape. This detail has posed a perennial challenge to scholars, many of whom invoke fabliau conventions to explain the tale’s violence. As Kathleen Bishop notes, “comedy and violence have long been allied, and Chaucer would have found a wealth of examples of comic violence in the Old French fabliaux that routinely deal with 95 96

Woods discusses these theories in full in “Symkyn’s Place,” 26–8. Woods, “Symkyn’s Place,” 26.

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sodomy, castration, and the like.”97 And quoting Thomas J. Farrell, Michael Cornelius writes, “‘sexual triumph and physical battery’ are the hallmarks of a fabliau; in these stories, ‘sex occurs outside the social institution of marriage, and quite often as an extramarital attack on the institution; violence almost inevitably privileges individual vindictiveness (or whim) over social order.’”98 Yet the Reeve’s Tale is carefully positioned in a quiting sequence that is about more than genre, and to dismiss the tale’s violence as generic is to ignore how it affects Oswald’s deployment of mobility – and specifically gendered mobility – in the first fragment’s game. Likewise, scholarship that suggests Malyne’s rape is an empowering erotic rebellion because she appears to consent in the end (she neither cries out nor physically resists Aleyn, and in returning the clerks’ stolen grain she seems to sanction Aleyn’s actions) overlooks her objectification: even in her most liquid form – as the blood of the holy church – she is immutable fodder to be bargained with.99 She may enter a network of exchange, but she does so only as the apple, never as the coin (unlike Alison, whose substance is powerfully dispersed when she is explicitly compared to both), and the exchange is always between men. Malyne functions either as a body to be sold for the benefit of Symkyn’s “allye,” or an instrument that enables the completion of Symkyn’s exchange with John and Aleyn (grain for meal/bread). As Holly Crocker observes of the Reeve’s Tale, “feminine feeling is reduced to sexual complicity, making rape a crime that men commit against one another in a world where women are simply instruments for social gain.”100 She is not given the opportunity to be anything but complicit, as she “lay uprighte, and faste slepte” (1.4194), mute and as immobile as an embalmed body. In a tale that depends entirely upon movement, she is effectively erased. Given the playfulness and participation allowed Alison in the Miller’s fabliau, and the express complicity of female characters in the many analogues to the Reeve’s Tale (the French fabliau Gombert et les deus clers and Le Meunier et les deus clers to name two), the choice to “devalue feminine agency except as it enables men to differentiate themselves” is striking.101 There is no attempt to represent the moment of Aleyn’s approach as anything but an attack – he is so stealthy that “he so ny was, er she myghte espie, / That it had been to late for to crie” (1.4195–6); Oswald appears too concerned with articulating the clerk’s movements to consider the greater contexts into which his tale’s mobilities enter. Instead, movement is entirely for its own sake in the Bishop, “Queer Punishments,” 21. Cornelius, “Sex and Punishment,” 96. 99 Holly A. Crocker observes that Malyne’s failure to publicly protest would have resulted in a quick dismissal of her case in the medieval court. See “Affective Politics in Chaucer’s Reeve’s Tale: ‘Cherl’ Masculinity after 1381,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 29 (2007), 225–58. 100 Crocker, “Affective Politics,” 246–7. 101 Crocker, “Affective Politics,” 256. 97 98



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Reeve’s Tale, wherein more is better, and the mobile world is defined by men, for men. Kinesis serves as a platform for the Reeve’s quiting of the Miller and John and Aleyn’s quiting of Symkyn, with Malyne and Symkyn’s wife (who is never even given a name) relegated to the margins, reminding us more of the Knight’s Emily and Hippolyta than the women who are so often central to fabliaux. In this single-mindedness we see the Reeve’s failure. The Reeve’s Tale, like Symkyn himself, unsuccessfully attempts to deploy an established rhetoric. Oswald recognizes the importance of movement and stasis to the game at hand, but rather than craftily using it to make a fool of the Miller as Symkyn’s analogue, he ultimately only ends up making a fool of himself. His multiplication and amplification of mobile bodies and movement has its merits when we consider movement as phenomenon, but these merits are undercut by his tale’s naïveté and the problematic encounters and agencies narrated therein. The Miller’s Tale ultimately mobilizes male and female, human and nonhuman to greater effect. Nonetheless, when viewing the three tales alongside one another, a progression is evident. The Miller’s Tale and the Reeve’s Tale clearly celebrate movement over stasis, rejecting the Knight’s static ideologies, and both tales locate liberating mobilities in the domestic sphere, turning away from ceremonial spaces that are themselves stationary and dictate the station of those occupying them. As Gerhard Joseph notes, enclosures in fabliaux, “far from being the prisons that keep lovers from their ladies, actually become the essential arena for the joyous union of man and wench.”102 The Knight’s Tale is transformed as Palamon and Arcite are transported from the state prison to the fen – a site of resistance into which hypermobile bodies are loosed. Moreover, the Knight’s interest in containment and self-perpetuating, atemporal chivalric stasis is replaced by queer, leaky bodies and plot-driven narratives that propel characters through time. Space becomes distance, stability gives way to the volatility of (near-blind) navigation, and stone is revealed to be slippery. In these ways, the Reeve and the Miller establish their position in the first fragment’s game, celebrating precisely that which the Knight marginalizes and undermining static principles and the efficacy of immobilizing “enclosures.” The Knight is successfully quit, but not without some awareness of the flaws of those executing the quiting.103 The result is a literary world that evades capture, built on free play rather than any identifiable convention. The Canterbury Tales is an assemblage on the move – told en route to Canterbury – that toys with amplification, interpersonal and inter-class rivalry, and the generative capacity of bodies and 102 Gerhard

Joseph, “Chaucerian ‘Game’ – ‘Earnest’ and the ‘Argument of Herbergage’ in The Canterbury Tales,” The Chaucer Review 5.2 (1970), 83–96 (89). 103 This sequence continues in the Cook’s Tale – the final tale of the first fragment – but because I have discussed this tale’s mobilities in Chapters 1 and 2, I will refrain from repeating myself here.

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narrative. It shifts from human to nonhuman such that each is loosed upon the other and directs readers’ attention from tale to frame in ways that blur boundaries. It is a hybrid beast that sets up expectations (the Reeve quits the Miller quits the Knight) to reroute them (the Reeve may ultimately fail), and builds (architectural, social) structures to topple them. It is ultimately a tale(s) about chaos, mutability, and superfluity.

4 “Translating” Female Bodies and (En)Gendering Mobility The queering of sealed, stationary bodies that occurs as part of the quiting game in the First Fragment also manifests in individual tales on the Canterbury pilgrimage. A careful consideration of the Clerk’s Tale, in particular, shows that movement authorizes female bodies who thoughtfully deploy it within the context of existing, patriarchal systems. Unlike Alison, though, whose leaky body dismantles marital, architectural, natural, and even sexual categories, Griselda stages resistance from within hegemonic structures.1 By expressing powerful iterations of movement from within, she reveals the instability of the status quo without having to tear doors from their hinges (à la John of the Miller’s Tale), while also staging the potential for female empowerment through mobility and dispersal. In this chapter, I will begin by demonstrating that Griselda’s perceived steadfastness is in fact a constant willingness to yield, resulting in a surplus of movement that, unlike the surplus of the Reeve’s Tale, operates in accordance with current understandings of Christian virtue and wifely obedience. Though this surplus is frequently read as an “emptiness,” we might benefit from recognizing it instead as an “overfullness” that renders the female body enigmatic while denying the possibility of male inscription – the body is always already being inscribed. Moreover, by figuring her mobility in terms of fluidity, the Clerk evokes a liquid ecology that merges Griselda’s tidal body with its physical environs to dismantle borders and boundaries. To evoke the language of contemporary social scientists, Griselda proves that “neither boundaries nor relations mark the difference between one place and another. Instead, sometimes boundaries come and go, allow leakage or disappear altogether, while relations transform themselves without fracture.”2 Griselda’s movement has this very effect, erasing boundaries and transforming relations to reveal innovative, agentified ways of being. 1

2

Kathryn L. McKinley notes that although Griselda is from rural origins, she “is the antithesis of the country wench familiar in fabliaux, such as the Miller’s Tale’s Alison.” See McKinley, “‘The Clerk’s Tale’: Hagiography and the Problematics of Lay Sanctity,” The Chaucer Review 33.1 (1998), 90–111 (98). John Law and Annemarie Mol, “Regions, Networks and Fluids: Anaemia and Social Topology,” Social Studies of Science 24.4 (1994), 641–71 (643).

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Critics have repeatedly seen Griselda as lacking agency. Kathryn McKinley insists that she “has been purged of any human perplexity, anguish, or struggle which might be the indicators of an authentic subjectivity,” and in emphasizing her “stoic endurance” and “patience” critics including Marga Cottino-Jones and Alfred Kellogg suggest Griselda is only capable of deploying passive or static virtue.3 In discussing Griselda as a metaphor for textual translation (a matter that will be taken up later in this chapter), Carolyn Dinshaw equates her with “a text to be read and interpreted by men… passed between men, stripped, and reclothed for the bridal,” and Emma Campbell figures her as an “empty body” onto which meanings are “imposed.”4 Following Dinshaw and Campbell, Leah Schwebel presents Griselda as the page on which Boccaccio, Petrarch, and Chaucer inscribe their auctoritas, establishing themselves as part of an authorial tradition while insisting on the inferiority of their predecessors.5 In each case, Griselda’s passivity is paramount: she does not perform, she is performed upon. But if Griselda is utterly flattened by the male bodies that perform upon her, why does she continue to excite the critical imagination? And how does a reader contend with the Clerk’s marked dislike for Walter (e.g., 4.460, 621, 733), which leaves his tale without a protagonist if Griselda is emptied of substance? These questions might be answered by a more nuanced attention to how Griselda renegotiates the routes that sustain conventional patriarchal structures. Griselda may not upend social, religious, and textual hegemonies, but she demonstrates her capacity to move within them and redefine the tenets on which they are built. In so doing, she discloses the latent fluidity of such structures, revealing them to be navigable assemblages rife with queer potential.6 She denies the notion of sealed identities, and destabilizes the terms that characterize her – obedient (4.230), meek (4.538), patient (4.624) – and the frameworks that seek to contain her. In this way, Griselda enacts an accretive notion of identity similar to that proposed by Judith Butler in Gender Trouble

3

4

5 6

McKinley, “Hagiography and the Problematics of Lay Sanctity,” 106; Marga Cottino-Jones, “Fabula vs. Figure: Another Interpretation of the Griselda Story,” Italica 50 (1973), 38–52; Alfred L. Kellogg, “The Evolution of the ‘Clerk’s Tale’: A Study in Connotation,” in Chaucer, Langland, Arthur: Essays in Middle English Literature (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1972), 271–329. Carolyn Dinshaw, Chaucer’s Sexual Poetics (Madison, WI: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1989), 133; Emma Campbell, “Sexual Poetics and the Politics of Translation in the Tale of Griselda,” Comparative Literature 55.3 (2003), 191–216 (208). Both acknowledge that the designation of this body as female may ultimately produce associations that threaten masculine authorial impositions, but in their formulations Griselda ultimately remains without agency: “translated away” (Dinshaw 147). Leah Schwebel, “Redressing Griselda: Restoration through Translation in the Clerk’s Tale,” The Chaucer Review 47.3 (2013), 274–99. This should remind us of the volatile chivalric fiction of the Knight’s Tale, discussed in Chapter 3.



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and Bodies that Matter.7 Like twenty-first-century drag queens, she performs her roles (daughter, wife, subject) in a way that reveals the contingency of the systems from which they emerge, while still operating within those systems.8 Her performance of wifely obedience, for example, does not establish her as an exemplar of fixed marital structures (indeed, the Clerk insists on this fact in 4.1141–7 and 4.1183–8); it instead reveals the degree to which her marriage with Walter depends upon her reiterative practice of wifely obedience. Walter’s security as lord and husband is therefore remarkably volatile. It depends not on an original, authentic understanding of lordship, but on the repeated performance of obedience by a subject/wife. This disavowal of stable (and specifically male) lordship is first staged when Griselda assents to Walter’s marriage proposal. Though she performs obedience by agreeing to marry, the terms of her agreement contradict his precepts, revealing the precarious foundation upon which their marriage is built.9 In a “tretys” (4.331) more concerned with eliminating dissent than generating assent (“will you not say no” rather than “will you say yes”), Walter asks that Griselda be… redy with good herte To al my lust, and that I frely may, As me best thynketh, do yow laughe or smerte, And nevere ye to grucche it, nyght ne day? And eek whan I sey ‘ye,’ ne sey nat ‘nay,’ Neither by word ne frownyng contenance? (4.351–6)

In response, Griselda performs extravagant assent: “as ye wole youreself, right so wol I” (4.361–2), rewriting the terms of the contract and dismantling Walter’s authority. Her agreement differs both in quality and quantity from what Walter asked for: it is both more than and willing (“wol”). As Linda Georgianna writes, “What Griselda promises and simultaneously performs is a mysteriously self-authorized and positive assent, an act of the will in which forms of ‘I’ and ‘will’ appear ten times in six lines.”10 Here Griselda is transformed from a “cardboard figure” lacking “authentic volition” to an agent capable of navigating within and through existing hegemonic structures.11 She agrees with Walter but does so on her own terms, showing obedience in her willingness to conform while ensuring space for her voice and self, which 7

8 9

10 11

Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990); Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex (New York: Routledge, 1993). For a discussion of drag performance, see Butler, Gender Trouble, 171–80. See Linda Georgianna, “The Clerk’s Tale and the Grammar of Assent,” Speculum 70.4 (1995), 793–821. This essay offers a much-expanded perspective on Judith Ferster’s Chaucer on Interpretation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 101–2. Georgianna, “The Clerk’s Tale and the Grammar of Assent,” 802. McKinley, “Hagiography and the Problematics of Lay Sanctity,” 109, 96.

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subtly undermines the proposal of her lord and husband. Her performance therefore upholds the hierarchical, hegemonic structure of lord/husband over subject/wife, but only through an act of subversion that reveals the structure’s instability and activates her unique volition. This not only reveals the contingency of Walter’s lordship; it also ironically contradicts medieval notions of patience and demonstrates how Griselda’s behavior should be read as a superfluity rather than a privation of action. In the same way that she consents to marriage without agreeing to the terms – renegotiating the route by which she arrives at the destination – she performs patience without subscribing to its association with the static, stoic, and passive. The latter notion is first articulated by Aquinas in his Summa Theologica, wherein he insists: Now those virtues which are effective of good, incline a man more directly to good than those which are a check on the things which lead man away from good: and just as among those that are effective of good, the greater is that which establishes man in a greater good (thus faith, hope, and charity are greater than prudence and justice); so too among those that are a check on things that withdraw man from good, the greater virtue is the one which is a check on a greater obstacle to good. … Therefore patience is not the greatest of the virtues, but falls short, not only of the theological virtues, and of prudence and justice which directly establish man in good, but also of fortitude and temperance which withdraw him from greater obstacles to good. (2.2.136.2)12

In other words, saying yes is better than not saying no, and patience traditionally falls in the latter category – it safeguards against that which impedes goodness. Critics often cite this passage to support a passive reading of Griselda. Yet, as demonstrated above, Griselda does not not say no; she says an emphatic yes. And despite the association of patience with negation over affirmation, Griselda’s yes is the first in a series of events that repeatedly mark her as “patient” (4.623, 644, 677, 929, 1149, 1187). This paradox challenges the link between patience and passivity and suggests a malleability inherent to the framework that sustains it. Indeed, there is more to Aquinas’s formulation – a qualification that may realize the fluidity of theological terms and allow patience to be interpreted as an active form of imitatio Dei. Specifically, Aquinas allows for a relationship between patience and grace that identifies the former as a route by which to achieve the latter. He writes, “Now the fact that a man prefers the good of grace to all natural goods, the loss of which may cause sorrow, is to be referred to charity, which loves God above all things. Hence it is evident that patience, as a virtue, is caused by charity, according to 1 Cor. 13:4, ‘Charity is patient’” (2.2.136.3). This for12

Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae: Latin Text and English Translation, Introductions, Notes, Appendices, and Glossaries (Cambridge: Blackfriars, 1964).



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mulation defines charity as that which inclines man toward grace (a good superior to natural goods like self-preservation, procreation, and the knowledge of God) and insists that charity is and causes patience. In equating these two terms, Aquinas suggests that patience need not only “check … the things which may lead man away from good.” It can also actively lead humankind toward one of the greatest goods: the grace of God himself. Moreover, the citation from 1 Corinthians reminds us that a charitable God is himself patient, and that exercising patience is therefore a means by which to imitate God. This formulation is perhaps best represented in the Pearl Poet’s Patience. When Jonah loses the woodbine God grew for him, God remarks, If I wolde help My hondewerk, haf þou no wonder; Þou art waxen so wroth for þy wodbynde, And trauayledez neuer to tent it þe tyme of an howre. …Þenne wyte not Me for þe werk, þat I it wolde help, And rwe on þo redles þat remen for synne; Fyrst I made hem Myself of materes Myn one, And syþen I loked hem ful longe and hem on lode hade. And if I My trauayl schulde tyne of termes so longe. … Þe sor of such a swete place burde synk to my hert. (496–507)13

Here God professes his love for all of creation – human and nonhuman alike – as he endeavors to help the woodbine and pities the “redles” who lament their sins. He claims responsibility for that which was created “of materes myn one,” and suggests that his caritas is accompanied by suffering, the duration of which warrants repeating (“ful longe” and “of terms so longe”). He then insists that patience is vital to his enduring humankind’s shortcomings: “Wer I as hastif as þou here, were harme lumpen; / Couþe I not þole bot as þou, þer þryued ful fewe” (519–20). In a strikingly flippant way, God remarks that if he were hasty he would simply wipe man off the map out of frustration: some don’t even know “What rule renes in roun bitwene þe ryȝt hande / And his lyfte” (511–12). It is patience as a consequence of love (charity) that helps him to endure such stupidity. And the closing lines of Patience remind us that the chuckle derived from comparing humankind to a toddler with its shoes on the wrong feet is always and ever accompanied by suffering: “Forþy penaunce and payne topreue hit in syȝt / Þat pacience is a nobel poynt” (529–30; my emphasis). Elizabeth D. Kirk amplifies this suffering even further by suggesting it extends to Christ’s bodily torments: “God’s role as creator must be completed by his choice to save the world, and to do so not by legislation or conquest but by participating in the suffering, through the Incarnation and the Atonement.”14 13 14

The Poems of the Pearl Manuscript, ed. Malcolm Andrew and Ronald Waldron (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1978), 204. Elizabeth D. Kirk, “‘Who Suffreth More Than God?’: Narrative Redefinition of Patience in Patience and Piers Plowman,” in The Triumph of Patience, ed. Gerald J. Schiffhorst (Orlando, FL: University Presses of Florida, 1978), 88–104 (97).

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Far from being a passive acceptance of dictates, then, patience is an active imitation of God’s suffering that realizes His grace. It is an agentified choice to endure pain (specifically pain caused by humanity’s shortcomings) that mobilizes humankind rather than rendering it static, inclining people toward virtue rather than simply impeding that which would lead them away from it.15 Griselda models this dynamism, insisting from the start of her marriage to Walter that she will articulate the parameters of their partnership and that her actions as wife, including her patience, are performed according to her will. Her patience and consequent suffering are not simply endured but chosen (perhaps in the spirit of imitatio Dei), ensuring her room for autonomy under the “blisful yok” of marriage (4.113). Her affirmation may uphold hegemonic structures insofar as she agrees to be obedient to Walter – “And heere I swere that nevere willyngly / In werk ne thoght I nyl yow disobeye” (4.361–2) – but she supplants passive acceptance (a “check” or restraint, to recall Aquinas) with active willing, something “effective of good” that is itself capable of producing or constructing. In other words, by enacting patience and obedience rather than denying (or simply not denying) it, Griselda demonstrates that Walter’s ethos as lord/husband is contingent on her will. She may be constituted by the patriarchal institution of marriage, but she also constitutes it by drawing attention to its illusory authenticity; it depends upon reiterative practice, not an identifiable and fixed origin. As Campbell notes of such performance, the point is “not to step outside the symbolic systems that establish primary and stable identity; the point is, rather, to expose––from a station within symbolic regimes––both identity and the stability with which it is associated as effects of continuous citation.”16 Griselda finds room to exercise agency within her marriage, employing techniques found within a tradition of biblical commentary that was for the most part written and consumed by men, and demonstrates the volatility of hegemonic structures and their subjugation of women while allowing for these structures to stand. The question that might remain is: to what degree does Griselda’s performed identity constitute antagonism? She rewrites the terms of her marriage contract with Walter and proves her ability to employ patience as an active virtue, but are we meant to read these moments as effective displacements 15

16

Chaucer’s adherence to this model of patience is evident in the Franklin’s Tale, where he writes, “Pacience is an heigh vertu, certeyn, / For it venquysseth, as thise clerkes seyn, / Thynges that rigour sholde nevere atteyne” (5.773–5). In these lines patience actively vanquishes, and does so more effectively than “rigour” or mastery. In so doing it paves the way for love, dismantling the roadblocks that will inevitably arise since lovers “ful ofte… doon amis or speken” (5.783). Patience therefore facilitates mobility, enabling movement toward (or in imitation of) secular and divine caritas. As Jill Mann observes, the “very essence [of patience] is in movement and change. … Far from implying frozen immobility, patience expresses itself as flexibility, pliability” (89–90). See: Jill Mann, Feminizing Chaucer (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2002). Campbell, “Sexual Poetics,” 196.



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of hegemony in the context of performative subversions? As Butler herself notes, “there must be a way to understand what makes certain kinds of parodic repetitions effectively disruptive, truly troubling, and which repetitions become domesticated and recirculated as instruments of cultural hegemony. … [Parodic displacement] depends on a context and reception in which subversive confusions can be fostered.”17 So, does the Clerk’s Tale provide this context and prepare its audience to receive Griselda’s subversion? The simultaneity of inner/outer embodied by Griselda suggests that the answer is a resounding yes. The Clerk takes pains to show that Griselda’s internal and external lives are one and the same (thereby deconstructing dichotomies in the same way that Chaucer’s marginal bridges do in the frame narrative, discussed in Chapter 2). She will not disobey Walter “in werk ne thoght” (4.362), and, even when he ejects her from court, she insists that she does not repent having given him “myn herte in hool entente” (4.861). When Walter explains that he will be “serv[ing]” (4.641) her son, she declares “if I hadde prescience / Youre wyl to knowe, er ye youre lust me tolde, / I wolde it doon withouten necligence” (4.659–61), and Walter observes of Griselda’s response, “nevere koude he fynde variance. / She was ay oon in herte and in visage” (4.710–11). In each case, Griselda’s thought and deed are confederate. Contrary to the “rhetoricity” of Walter and the nobles, her words and actions reflect her inner desire and intent.18 This simultaneity flies in the face of hegemonic systems that depend upon impermeable, fixed boundaries between the internal and external. Categories like husband, lord, and man depend upon the externalizing (or expulsion/abjection) of that which they are not. Man is not woman, lord is not subject, and so on. As Butler observes, “the operation of repulsion can consolidate ‘identities’ founded on the instituting of the ‘Other’ or a set of Others through exclusion and domination.”19 This practice was rampant in the Middle Ages. The Christian world regularly defined itself through the expulsion/abjection of those whom it deemed other – the cannibal Saracens of Andreas, the monstrous races on the edge of the Psalter Mappamundi, and the libelous Jews in The Life and Miracles of St William of Norwich among them. In the Clerk’s 17 18

19

Butler, Gender Trouble, 176–7. Along these lines, Georgianna argues, “by internalizing the demands of the contract, Griselda moves her assent beyond the bonds of the law. … Walter had asked Griselda to conceal the gap between her will and his; she responds with mysterious confidence and power… that there will be no gap to reveal” (802). Jay Schleusner agrees that Griselda is always wholly present, “body and soul” (Jay Schleusner, “Body and Soul in Chaucer’s Clerk’s Tale,” paper read at the 25th International Congress on Medieval Studies, Kalamazoo, Michigan [1990], qtd in Georgianna, 802, n.17). On “rhetoricity” in the Clerk’s Tale, see David Wallace, “‘Whan She Translated Was’: A Chaucerian Critique of the Petrarchan Academy,” in Literary Practice and Social Change in Britain 1380–1530, ed. Lee Patterson (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1990), 156–215. Butler, Gender Trouble, 170. See also Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (New York: Routledge, 1966).

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Tale, we see that Walter time and again defines himself against those who might threaten his hegemony. When we first see him, he is “hauk[ing] and hunt[ing] on every syde” (4.81), establishing his domination over the natural world, and when the people offer to choose a wife for him, he insists, Lat me allone in chesynge of my wyf— that charge upon my bak I wole endure. But I yow preye, and charge upon youre lyf, What wyf that I take, ye me assure To worshipe hire whil that hir lyf may dure. (4.162–6)

In the almost petulant “Let me alone” Walter forcibly expels his subjects from what he hopes to be his stable, coherent, and volitional self. To recall Julia Kristeva’s argument in Powers of Horror, he renders the people excrement, and secures their “otherness” through ceremony as they “[Knel] upon hir knees ful reverently” (4.187). As they are abjectified, their bodies conjoin with the mud and filth with which Walter has identified them.20 Further demonstrating Walter’s desire to separate “self” from “shit” is his practiced dissemblance: his thoughts are separate from his deeds, with his skin serving as a stable and distinct boundary between interior/exterior. For him, “what constitutes through division the ‘inner’ and ‘outer’ worlds of the subject is a border and boundary… maintained for the purposes of social regulation and control.”21 Griselda notes of her husband, “Ye semed [gentil and… kynde] by youre speche and youre visage / The day that maked was oure mariage” (4.852–4; emphasis mine), suggesting that his gentility and kindness have since proven false. And when Walter tests Griselda for the second time and observes her patient acceptance of what appears to be filicide, “forth he goth with drery contenance, / But to his herte it was ful greet plesance” (4.671–2). He seems distraught – he is, after all performing the role of a man about to kill his son – but his heart is giddy. The fact that there is no distinction between internal and external for Griselda is remarkable by contrast; deed is simultaneous with thought, and her will is simultaneous with Walter’s (even as it remains active willing). This simultaneity offers a context within which to read Griselda’s performance as antagonistic. Her body is itself a permeable space that refuses the division between internal/external upon which hegemony depends, and she proves her capacity to mobilize that space (i.e., her porous “self”) and navigate the spaces into which her porous self seeps. By taking action without acting in the theatrical sense, Griselda defies the posturing bodies that surround her, revealing their “contenance[s]” to be costume pieces that signify the volatility 20 21

See Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982). Butler, Gender Trouble, 170. Butler notes that this boundary is “tenuous,” which is the very point that Griselda’s body highlights through its simultaneity.



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of the bodies that wear them. She is party to her abjection when she proclaims her wedding vows (rendering her wife/subject to Walter’s husband/lord) and demonstrates the patience and obedience that is requested of her, but her performance reminds us that Walter’s authority depends on her abjection; it is inauthentic, without a stable origin. As “excrement,” she proves that hegemonies are “confounded by… excremental passages” that puncture boundaries the patriarchy would rather see sealed.22 And from this position she demonstrates her capacity to exhibit volition. The vows she makes are her own, and the patience she practices is active: an emphatic yes rather than a not no. She is a model of the antagonistic abject, a simultaneous body – at once inside/ outside – that participates in iterative practice to reveal the folly of the systems dependent on such practice. The result is that Griselda remains “clearly part of hegemonic, misogynist culture,” but she “denaturalize[s] and mobilize[s]” this culture by foregrounding the porous, the fluid, and the displaced.23 She demands our recognition of superfluity and simultaneity, demonstrating through her own extra-bodied experience that the dislocation of female bodies reveals the hegemony’s contingency on those bodies. This simultaneity comes to define Griselda and her place in the Clerk’s Tale – she bears multiplicities that repeatedly challenge dichotomous thinking. Rather than being emptied out (à la Campbell), she is overfull, exuding a surplus of meaning. For instance, in addition to her modeling a simultaneous internal/external self, Lynn Shutters observes Griselda’s embodiment of both Christian and pagan ideology: Chaucer’s Griselda does not conform solely or simply to the virtue of classical matrons. … Nor does Griselda’s feminine virtue constitute a form of sanctity, as some medieval conduct books suggest. Because the occasional allusions to Christian figures or values and the Christian allegory of the Clerk’s Tale at times mesh uncomfortably with Griselda’s more pagan devotion to Walter, the Clerk’s Tale lays bare the multiple traditions and values informing late medieval concepts of female virtue, and, in doing so, exposes the “ragged seams” of “womanhede” itself.24

The discomfort that Shutters identifies here is precisely what empowers Griselda: she forces her readers to contend with her simultaneity, challenging them to see her “ragged seams” as productive junctures rather than threatening collisions. In these moments it becomes possible to reabsorb that which has been “othered.” Georgianna, too, notes a breakdown in the separation of social from spiritual, writing, “the narrative neither probes nor clarifies the origins of Griselda’s virtue. Instead, social and spiritual values simply mesh, as though poverty and goodness go naturally hand in hand.”25 22 23 24 25

Butler, Gender Trouble, 170. Butler, Gender Trouble, 176. Lynn Shutters, “Griselda’s Pagan Virtue,” The Chaucer Review 44.1 (2009), 61–83 (78). Georgianna, “The Clerk’s Tale and the Grammar of Assent,” 798.

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This simultaneity has led many critics to label the Clerk’s Tale purposefully enigmatic. J. Allan Mitchell proposed as much in his “Chaucer’s ‘Clerk’s Tale’ and the Question of Ethical Monstrosity,” and Shawn Normandin builds on Mitchell’s work in “‘Non Intellegant’: The Enigmas of the Clerk’s Tale.”26 Mitchell argues that “the narrative is fascinating because it is polyvalent in its moral exemplarity, not pointless; because it runs a surplus of meaning rather than a deficit,” and suggests that this polyvalence or surplus is what sparks moral deliberation in Chaucer’s audience.27 Evoking the language of mobility, he writes, “One way to speak about the effect of the Clerk’s Tale is to say it forms a dynamic force field that resists all static positions—including ironic or skeptical ones.”28 Likewise Normandin argues that Chaucer/the Clerk’s use of parable, “a literary form long associated with interpretive difficulty,” is meant “not to communicate meaning, but to confuse the audience.”29 While both critics are more interested in the narrative than its characters, these comments are equally true (if not more so) of Griselda. Despite operating within hegemonic structures, she challenges such structures by consistently embodying an enigmatic hybridity and activating her simultaneous body in opposition to these structures’ precepts. The hybridity of her both/and body might lead one to read Griselda as monstrous, insofar as “the monster is the harbinger of category crisis.”30 As Jeffrey Jerome Cohen observes, monsters are disturbing hybrids whose “incoherent bodies resist attempts to include them in any systematic structuration. And so the monster is dangerous, a form suspended between forms that threatens to smash distinctions. … The monster’s very existence is a rebuke to boundary and enclosure.”31 Indeed, her power in the narrative is derived from her ability to challenge traditional thinking along binary lines. Though more subtly than the characters of the Miller’s Tale, she offers queer potentiality as a body that practices radical absorption while being repeatedly cast off and reabsorbed by a patriarchal authority. One might even argue that her female body is queered through its association with traditionally masculine and patriarchal “stedefastnesse” (4.564, 699, 789, 1050, 1056). Given her essential role as daughter, wife, mother, and subject in the Clerk’s Tale, though, divorcing her steadfastness from her irrefutably female body seems a misstep. Rather than comparing her to a lord, whose identity depends on a stability derived from strictly 26

27 28 29 30

31

J. Allan Mitchell, “Chaucer’s ‘Clerk’s Tale’ and the Question of Ethical Monstrosity,” Studies in Philology 102.1 (2005), 1–26; Shawn Normandin, “‘Non Intellegant’: The Enigmas of the Clerk’s Tale,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 58.2 (2016), 189–223. Mitchell, “Ethical Monstrosity,” 3. Mitchell, “Ethical Monstrosity,” 17. Normandin, “The Enigmas of the Clerk’s Tale,” 189. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, Monster Theory: Reading Culture (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 6. Mitchell suggests as much when he writes, “Griselda is the monster that haunts our reception of the moral tale” (25). Cohen, Monster Theory, 6–7.



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enforced boundaries, we might read her steadfastness as a uniquely feminine constant willingness to yield – a superfluity that is substantiated by humoral theories that rendered women leaky.32 In contrast to the men who surround her, who grasp at their authentic “selves” by rejecting that which they deem contrary, Griselda perpetually moves between and incorporates binary and hierarchical categories, transforming her seeming steadfastness into what is instead a steadfast mobility. This supposition is borne out by the Clerk’s closing statements. Before launching into his envoy, he addresses his audience directly to say, But o word, lordynges, herkneth er I go: It were ful hard to fynde now-a-dayes In al a toun Grisildis thre or two; For if that they were put to swiche assayes, The gold of hem hath now so badde alayes With bras, that thogh the coyne be fair at ye, It wolde rather breste a-two than plye. (4.1163–9)

This commentary is striking first and foremost for its pluralization of the proper noun Griselda. The Clerk’s protagonist is multiplied, her identity enlivened by its iteration in bodies other than her own. Though she is not meant to serve as an exemplar for wifely obedience – the Clerk insists, “This storie is seyd nat for that wyves sholde / Folwen Grisilde as in humylitee, / For it were inportable, though they wolde” (4.1142–4) – he deems her worthy of archetypal treatment insofar as she is capable of being incorporated by others. This plural rendering of Griselda amplifies her iterative practice by allowing for its recurrence even after she has died; the same identity that she performs in the Clerk’s Tale can be performed by others across space/time to reveal the perpetual contingency of hegemony. Yet each of these performances is separate and distinct, such that we are left not with the Griselda (akin to the hero or the villain), but a Griselda/Griseldas. The membrane that separates internal from external, already stretched by Griselda’s simultaneity, is shattered as she is redistributed across bodies, reminding readers that her “monstrous” hybridity and superfluity allow her to forever deny containment. As Cohen observes, the monster’s threat lies in its “propensity to shift.”33 Like the ever-recurring giant of Mont-Saint-Michel, or the vampire that is regenerated in forms ranging from sexy (Dracula) to self-loathing (Nosferatu), Griselda shifts from her iteration in the Clerk’s Tale to a multiplicity of potential iterations thereafter, all capable of performing the inauthenticity of origins (both their own and that desired by the patriarchal bodies whose authority depends upon stable, sealed borders). By multiplying her in this way, the Clerk suggests that Griselda 32 33

This matter is discussed in Chapter 3, with respect to the weeping widows of the Knight’s Tale in particular. Cohen, Monster Theory, 5.

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cannot be reduced to either a singular entity or a transcultural, transtemporal phenomenon. Instead, her reappearances are “construct[ions] and reconstitution[s].”34 She may be declared “deed, and eek hire pacience, / And bothe atones buryed in Ytaille” (4.1177–8), but she can (and will) be reanimated. She is mobile even in death, her abundance and superfluity breaking the bounds of the grave as “Griselda” is performed by bodies other than her own. The Clerk’s emphasis on pliability (“plye”) further supports a reading of Griselda’s steadfast mobility. She is like pure gold, which unlike brass alloys will bend when subject to pressure rather than “burst[ing] a-two.”35 Recalling Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde, in which Pandarus explains to Troilus, “And reed that boweth down for every blast, / Ful lightly, cesse wynd, it wol aryse; / But so nyl nought an ook, whan it is cast” (2.1387–9), the Clerk suggests that malleability ought to be celebrated, as it empowers a body to “aryse” in the face of subjugation. Rather than remaining emplaced, immobile, and “oaken,” Griselda’s movements disrupt the systems that seek to subjugate her by dislocating or displacing the bodies upon which they depend (her own included). Bowing and bending, she refuses to assume her place in hierarchical structures by denying emplacement altogether. She is neither there nor not there because she is everywhere, a radical affirmation rather than a negation, multiple rather than empty, steadfastly mobile rather than merely steadfast.36 This superfluity is represented in four different facets of the Clerk’s Tale: Griselda’s mobility is geographical, religious, textual, and ecological, each of which will now be considered in turn.

Geographical Mobility: Making Space for Movement Griselda’s movement across geographical space is both travel in the traditional sense and a crossing that leads to the dissolution of domestic and court boundaries. This is perhaps most evident in the shuttling of Griselda to and from Janicula’s home and Walter’s court, but even before these “translations” (a term that will be taken up shortly), she is shown to be hypermobile. The Clerk explains, “for she wolde vertu plese, / She knew wel labour but noon ydel ese” and these labors manifest in her “fostering” Janicula, keeping “a fewe sheep, spynnynge,” and gathering herbs that she “shredde and seeth for hir lyvynge” (4.216–27). Griselda is a shepherd, a weaver, an herbalist, and a caretaker: “She wolde noght been ydel til she slepte” (4.224). A Jill-of-alltrades, Griselda shows herself to be multifaceted and ever on the move – she is only still when she sleeps. More so than any other character in the Clerk’s 34 35 36

Cohen, Monster Theory, 6. We might recall that the Reeve alludes to alloys in his use of the word “allye” when discussing Symkyn’s bloodline (see Chapter 3). Georgianna notes that this is in direct contrast to the weakness of Walter’s “sturdinesse,” deemed obstinacy in lines 698–707 (816).



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Tale, she performs multiple roles (to say nothing of her impending matrimony and motherhood), reinforcing her pliability in mind and body: her hands are kept busy at the loom as her eyes scan the herd and she remains alert to the scent of medicinal herbs. This flexibility is further emphasized in her first encounter with Walter. Griselda returns from having fetched water at a well, And as she wolde over hir thresshfold gon, The markys cam and gan hire for to calle; And she set doun hir water pot anon, Biside the thresshfold, in an oxes stalle, And doun upon hir knes she gan to falle. (4.288–2)

First, the introduction between Griselda and Walter is marked by water. Griselda is carrying water pots, and when she sets them down she does so in an oxen stall. In medieval bestiaries, oxen were capable of divining rain and their horns were used as drinking cups – they had knowledge of and served as a conduit for liquid. As discussed in Chapter 3, “the very hallmark of water… is restless movement”; thus, by positioning Griselda in close proximity to liquid phenomena when she is introduced to Walter, the Clerk anticipates her forthcoming fluidity.37 Perhaps more significantly, this meeting occurs at a “thresshfold” or doorsill.38 Like Griselda herself, the space from which she embarks on her matrimonial adventure is in between: both indoors and outdoors, domestic and public. And like the weeping widows of the Knight’s Tale, Griselda kneels there, associating her body with liminal space. Even before she is moved outside of her village, she haunts horizons, demonstrating her capacity to shift and bend so as to incorporate multiplicities. The matter of her movement between Janicula’s house and Walter’s court also demands further consideration. Beyond simply representing her mobility – she is sent from one domain to the other no less than three times – these transitions collapse the distinction between domestic and courtly space. As we have already seen in Chapter 3, traditional associations of domestic space with privacy were challenged by the architecture of medieval homes, but one would expect at least some degree of separation from noble eyes in a house owned by the “povrest of hem alle” in Saluzzo (4.205).39 Instead, Griselda proves to be very much on display, anticipating her move into Walter’s court and challenging categorical distinctions between public and private. The Clerk explains that Walter 37 38

39

David Macauley, Elemental Philosophy: Earth, Air, Fire, and Water as Environmental Ideas (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2010), 47. Middle English Dictionary Online, s.v. “thresh-wold(e, n.” It is worth noting here that a common use of the word “threshold” was in the context of St Peter’s and St Paul’s graves, as in the “holi thresholdis of the apostles peter and poule,” a use that would even further reinforce Griselda’s association with liminal space (here also between life and death). For a detailed discussion of medieval homes, see Chapter 3.

144  Mobility and Identity in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales Ful ofte sithe… sette his ye… And whan it fil that he myghte hire espye, He noght with wantown lookyng of folye His eyen caste on hire, but in sad wyse Upon hir chiere he wolde hym ofte avyse. (4.232–7)

We are led to believe that Walter frequently watches Griselda, and when he does so it is not brief, since he has time to contemplate (“avyse”) her countenance. Yet Griselda is unaware of his leering, as she is caught by surprise when he appears in her home: she were astoned To seen so greet a gest come in that place; She nevere was to swiche gestes woned… (4.337–9)

As a consequence of her captivating presence, Janicula’s home is transformed into a sort of stage, its fourth wall more theatrical convention than physical presence.40 Indeed, when Walter arrives to propose marriage, an “audience” appears as witness: “The peple cam unto the hous withoute, / And wondred hem” (4.332–3). Though Griselda has not yet assumed the identity of wife/marchioness, her surroundings anticipate this move. Janicula’s home becomes both humble domicile and spectacle as a consequence of her presence. Upon moving to the court, Griselda assumes her expected public role, but not without a reminder that public display and private experience coexist. Specifically, her womb exists in contradiction to the costume changes that are meant to mark her clean transition from the “litel oxes stalle” (4.207) to the palace.41 The Clerk begins by narrating Walter’s concerted efforts to divorce Griselda from the private/domestic space of Janicula’s home by stripping her of her lowly smock: for that no thyng of hir olde geere She sholde brynge into his hous, he bad That wommen sholde dispoillen hire right theere. (4.372–4)

40

41

We might recall John’s imagined three-walled home in the Miller’s Tale, following the destruction of its fourth wall by the tubs John hangs from his rafters in anticipation of a biblical flood (1.3570–3). The scholarship on Griselda’s clothing, especially with respect to its relationship with translatio, is extensive. In addition to Dinshaw’s Sexual Poetics, see: Wendy Harding, “Griselda’s ‘Translation’ in the Clerk’s Tale,” in The Medieval Translator, Traduire au Moyen Age, vol. 6, eds. Roger Ellis, René Tixier, and Bernd Weitemeier (Turnhout: Brepols, 1998), 194–210; Lesley Johnson, “Reincarnations of Griselda: Contexts for the Clerk’s Tale?,” in Feminist Readings in Middle English Literature: The Wife of Bath and All Her Sect, eds. Ruth Evans and Lesley Johnson (London: Routledge, 1994), 195–220; Charlotte Morse, “The Exemplary Griselda,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 7 (1985), 51–86. This matter will be discussed further below.



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Her parade into town “with joyful peple that hire ladde and mette” (4.390) then suggests the success of this tactic, as the publicity of her behavior and the presence of a witnessing audience is foregrounded. The people repeatedly pass judgment on her, to the extent that she is said to be “published” near and far: Noght oonly of Saluces in the toun Publiced was the bountee of hir name, But eek biside in many a regioun, If oon seide wel, another seyde the same; So spradde of hire heighe bountee the fame That men and wommen, as wel yonge as olde, Goon to Saluce upon hire to biholde. (4.414–20; emphasis mine)

The “corone on hire heed” and “nowches grete and smale” appear to invite the public eye to such an extent that she effects a change in public space, serving as a sort of tourist attraction for visitors from outside of Saluzzo (4.380–1). Yet when Griselda faces a second parade, this time back to her birthplace, she reminds us that there is more at stake than her clothing, asking Walter that she be permitted to cover her womb. She insists, “Ye koude nat doon so dishonest a thing, / That thilke wombe in which youre children leye / Sholde biforn the peple, in my walking, / Be seyn al bare” (4.876–8) and requests that Walter yeve me, to my meede… a smok as I was wont to were, That I therwith may wrye the wombe of here That was youre wyf. (4.885–8)

Middle English “wombe” could refer to Griselda’s stomach or her uterus (MED, womb(e, n. 1, 5), rendering her request unusual since digestive and reproductive processes alike are hidden as a result of their being internal to the body – a smock could not cover them any more effectively than one’s skin. Yet “wombe” also refers to the “surface of the human body over the stomach or abdomen” (MED, womb(e, n. 3). Having already established that Griselda’s inner thoughts are confederate with her speech and action, here the Clerk suggests her body’s machineries also permeate the skin. Griselda’s concern with the public bearing witness to her body’s most private functions – the conversion of waste, the creation of life – is therefore legitimated by her recognition that the womb is both within and without. Indeed, insofar as it refers to her uterus, Griselda’s womb is often the subject of public conjecture and celebration: the people are glad when she gives birth to her daughter because “She may unto a knave child atteyne / By liklihede, syn she nys nat bareyne” (4.447–8), and when a son is born “al [Walter’s] contree merye / Was for this child” (4.615–16). By asking that the womb “in which [Walter’s] children leye” be hidden, then, Griselda acknowledges the simultaneity of her body while suggesting

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that something remains to be hidden. It is not her beauty or deeds alone that are on display, but also that which defines her as a woman, mother, and successful wife/servant to Walter (insofar as she has borne him an heir). Her effort to cover her womb is a reminder that although the “wombe” can be witnessed through its elision with the skin’s surface, and the productivity/products of her womb have been published, her maternity remains her own. The hiccups of her baby girl in utero and the sense of skin stretched by embryonic hands and feet are felt experiences, not to be replicated for public consumption. By asking to be covered, she therefore calls attention to the paradox of her public womb – it has been seen and judged as a consequence of her transparency and simultaneity, yet some part of it remains essential to her alone. Like a microcosm of the space she inhabits, her private parts are made public even as their exposure reminds us of what remains withheld. Finally, Griselda’s return to the court following Walter’s request that she serve as a housemaid demonstrates the ways in which Griselda’s body both is and effects hybrid space. In this second stint at court, she is relegated largely to the space of the bedchamber, where her mobility spreads to the bodies around her as she peyned hire to doon al that she myghte, Preyynge the chambereres, for Goddes sake, To hasten hem, and faste swepe and shake. (4.976–8)

Here Griselda serves the court by remaining out of sight, yet she is as exposed as ever as the public judge her against her daughter: For she is fairer, as they deemen alle, Than is Grisilde, and moore tendre of age, And fairer fruyt bitwene hem sholde falle, And moore plesant, for hire heigh lynage. (4.988–91)

The Clerk is dismayed by the peoples’ judgment – they are deemed “stormy… Unsad and evere untrewe! / Ay undiscreet and chaungynge as a fane” (4.995– 6) – but by recording their judgment he foregrounds the continued public role Griselda assumes even after she is stripped of her rich clothes and (in the eyes of those who judge her, at least) her title. She is the palace domestique, at once servant and marchioness, publicly judged despite her private role in the traditionally public space of Walter’s court. Here the public and the private are irrevocably collapsed. The space of the hall is confused, prepared for the public by hands that are not meant to be seen. Yet the reader is given a closer glimpse at those hands, and they are revealed to be Griselda’s – the appendages of a simultaneous body that cannot be designated domestic or courtly, public or private, because it is very much both. The abundance that marks Griselda comes to mark the spaces that she fills, as categorical distinctions disintegrate and a fluid passage between domains becomes the rule. Each of Griselda’s dislocations, then, underscores the saturation of the Clerk’s Tale,



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showing how multiplicities inhere in corporeal and geographical bodies that themselves lack borders. Mobility and superfluity are the rule. These qualities are rendered even more meaningful in Griselda when she is associated with voids. On two occasions, the Clerk describes her movements as “voidings.” First, when Walter insists that she return to Janicula to make space for his new wife, he tells her “Be strong of herte, and voyde anon hir place” (4.806), and later a suspicious Janicula admits to having always believed Walter would “voyden hire as soone as ever he myghte” (4.910). By employing this terminology, the Clerk recalls medieval theories regarding God’s ability to move the world, specifically those articulated in the 1277 Paris Condemnations, which depended upon an understanding and affirmation of voids. Commissioned by Pope John XXI and issued by the bishop of Paris, Étienne Tempier, the Condemnations were meant to “reinstate the omnipotence of God in the physical world” by liberating him from classical cosmology that “hamper[ed] God’s powers unduly.”42 Articles 34 and 49 of the Condemnations, in particular, contested Aristotle’s claim “that God could not move the heavens/world with rectilinear motion… [because] a vacuum would remain,” where rectilinear movement (de moto rectu) meant motion along a straight line, which by Aristotelian standards could only be defined in relation to other bodies/places.43 In other words, Aristotle argued that globe one could not be moved if its movement could not be measured against globe two, and globe two did not exist.44 This then meant that globe one would have to move into/out of a void, which was prohibited by the Aristotelian hypothesis that voids were nothing, and God could not create nothing. Two components of this hypothesis were contested in the Condemnations. First, article 34 rejected the fact that there were no other celestial bodies against which one could measure the movement of our own, proposing that there are other worlds than these. And, they continued in article 49, even if God had not created other worlds, our world could be moved in/through a void. Bishop Tempier contended, there could be “a sheer motion… in an absolute space––a space in which locations are not relative to each other.”45 Where Aristotle’s reasoning depended upon an understanding of space as finite, the Condemnations proposed that space was absolute and infinite, capable of exceeding the finitude of a celestial body. An omnipotent God was capable of creating an infinity of worlds, and because these worlds must share a space that is larger 42 43

44

45

Edward S. Casey, The Fate of Place: A Philosophical History (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2013), 135–6. “The Condemnation of 1277: A Selection of Articles Relevant to the History of Medieval Science,” in A Source Book in Medieval Science, ed. and trans. Edward Grant (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1974), 45–9 (48). This theory of movement that recalls the push–pull factors of contemporary mobility theory, which seek to understand movement only in relation to the places from/to which a body is traveling. Casey, The Fate of Place, 137.

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than any one of them, there must also be an infinite void. One could measure the world’s movement in relation to other worlds, but one could also measure it independently of those bodies as sheer motion through space. Summarizing what he calls the relational and absolutist views in articles 34 and 49 respectively, Edward Casey explains, the plurality of worlds at issue in article 34 encourages a relational model of infinite space inasmuch as these various worlds serve as reference points— that is, cosmic places—for each other’s positions in a vast intercosmic void. On the other hand, the movement of a single world (and in particular our world), which is at stake in article 49, induces the spectacle of an endless space in which locations are not determined by reference to the positions of other entities.46

By two different avenues, then, the Condemnations suggested (1) that the cosmos is infinite, and (2) that bodies can move of their own volition, independently of the galactic stuff that may or may not surround them. By associating Griselda’s movements with voids, then, the Clerk’s Tale inserts her into a medieval dialogue that proposed infinitude and independence. When Walter asks that she “voyde [a] place” for his new wife (their daughter), he grants her a sort of cosmic agency. Like God, she can create voids, and as a (celestial) body moving into and out of these voids, her movements express infinite possibility. The possibility of de moto rectu in particular recalls the volition of Griselda’s wedding vows and her active patience by allowing for autonomous movement regardless of the presence/absence of external bodies. By relational reasoning, Griselda is empowered by the present structures within which she operates. They literally make space for her to move insofar as they become the bodies against which her movements are measured. By absolutist reasoning, her movement necessitates and begets voided space, suggesting that the “structures” that surround her (i.e., the places into/out of which she moves) might be better understood to be absent. By the latter account, the patriarchies of the Clerk’s Tale are emptied out, literally rendered (null and) void. Either way, the incessant movement of Griselda’s body, like the cosmic bodies Aristotle and Tempier discuss, reveals that its embeddedness in hegemonic systems is inauthentic. Her willingness to yield allows her to inhabit and create voids, filling once empty spaces with the multiplicities she contains, and impacting the hegemonies she vacates through her absence. Indeed, it seems Walter only invites Griselda’s departure because he knows the void she creates will be immediately filled by his new wife/daughter. He even goes so far as to attribute the space to his new wife prior to her physical presence: “voyde anon hir place.” In an effort to plug the hole upon which his lordship is contingent, Walter imagines its already being filled with a second female 46

Casey, The Fate of Place, 109–10.



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body. The anxiety implicit to this statement reinforces an understanding of his patriarchies (lord/subject, husband/wife) as contingent upon the bodies they suppress/expel, or even emptied of meaning entirely. Janicula’s fear that Walter would “voyden [Griselda] as soone as ever he myghte” can also be read positively in light of the Condemnations and related theories. Though the impulse may be to read this as a potential erasure of Griselda (and – although contemporary criticism overlooks this line – we have seen the critical impulse to render her “empty”), such reasoning depends upon a body’s capacity to contain voids. In the Middle Ages, hypotheses on this matter differed significantly from the debate over whether bodies could move through/create voids, and more often than not figurations of internal, corporeal voids transferred their infinite capacity rather than their association with empty space/place. Bishop Tempier, Thomas Bradwardine (mathematician, natural philosopher, and theologian at Oxford University), and Albert of Saxony (Aristotelian philosopher at the University of Paris) each grappled with whether a body could contain voids.47 In his De causa Dei contra Pelagium, Bradwardine argued that “by means of his absolute power, God could make a void anywhere that he wishes, inside or outside of the world,” and though Albert rejected the idea of natural voids, he “conceded that a void space was supernaturally possible.”48 What is striking is that both hypotheses suggested that corporeal voids invited infinitude, rendering the body a sort of Russian doll rather than an empty container. Albert writes, “we can imagine several eccentric [i.e., concentric] worlds. … One does not lie wholly outside the other, but there is another world in some part of our world” (1.11).49 And recalling the parable of the mustard seed in Matthew’s gospel, he argued that God could place a body as large as the world inside a millet seed… without any condensation, rarefaction, or penetration of bodies. Within that millet seed, God could create a space of 100 leagues, or 1,000, or however many are imaginable. A man inside that millet seed could traverse all those many leagues simply by walking from one extremity of the millet seed to the other.50

The “voiding” of Griselda would therefore not efface her but reinforce her capacity to contain multitudes. Her corporeal body – already defying limits 47

48

49 50

William Woods discusses these thinkers in “Symkyn’s Place in the ‘Reeve’s Tale,’” The Chaucer Review 39.1 (2004), 17–40. These discussions of infinitude also support the argument in Chapter 3 that Symkyn’s twenty-foot bedchamber can contain a mile. Thomas Bradwardine, De causa Dei contra Pelagium et De virtute causarum, trans. Edward Grant, in A Source Book in Medieval Science, 560; Edward Grant, Planets, Stars, and Orbs: The Medieval Cosmos, 1200–1687 (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 170. Albert of Saxony, Questions on De caelo, trans. Edward Grant, in A Source Book in Medieval Science, 548. Grant, Planets, Stars, and Orbs, 171, n.8; emphasis mine.

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through its porousness – would be bounded only by the limits of one’s imagination. Janicula’s fears therefore prove to be unfounded. Beyond Walter’s failure to “void” Griselda (the tale never substantiates this fear), we learn that – according to fourteenth-century theories on corporeal voids – any attempt to do so would only further multiply her. In this way, the Clerk’s emphasis on voids empowers not only Griselda’s embodied movements but also her body itself. Both the movements she practices and contains are infinite: she is overfull. By first introducing Griselda in the context of her multiplicities, foregrounding her movement across space/domains, and finally associating her movement with voids, the Clerk insists that readers recognize Griselda’s surplus. She is always more than, both/and, monstrous. Her body and the mobility it manifests therefore empower her despite her abject position, allowing her to reveal the instability of the status quo. Movement is power, and Griselda does a lot of it.

Religious Movement: Translating Saintly Bodies In addition to moving through space, Griselda invites the potential for others’ movement through her figuration as a relic. Many critics have considered the relationship between the Clerk’s Tale and hagiographic modes in an effort to associate Griselda with medieval saints and martyrs. Most conclude that the tale only reveals contradictions inherent to the genre. Shutters argues that Griselda’s sanctity is challenged by an “at-times discordant overlapping of ‘Christian’ and ‘pagan’ elements,” and McKinley suggests that the hagiographic narrative is conflicted by the teller’s incorporation of romance elements.51 Yet a focus on how Griselda’s mobility is represented affirms her association with Christian tradition, if not with canonized saints. Instead, her movement is described in terms traditionally applied to saints’ and martyrs’ bones (an entity synechdocal but not equal to their living bodies), and her ability to inspire others to move invokes pilgrimage, the very practice that initiates and frames the Clerk’s telling. In both cases, her exemplarity is rooted in this world, serving popular imagination and practice by recalling physical encounters with the earth and its ephemera. Like the Virgin Mary’s tears – liquid, maternal, and capable of being witnessed – Griselda moves and prompts others’ movement after the fashion of a saint, even if she is not one. First, Griselda’s movements recall religious doctrine by aligning her with Aquinas’s definition of theological perfection. In his Summa Theologica, Aquinas proposes a threefold model that assigns perfection to (1) God, (2) 51

See Shutters, “Griselda’s Pagan Virtue,” 65; McKinley, “Hagiography and the Problematics of Lay Sanctity,” 105. For more on the religious aspects of the Clerk’s Tale, including nominalist and other readings of the text, see Chaucer’s Religious Tales, eds. C. David Benson and Elizabeth Robertson (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1990).



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the lover in heaven, and (3) the lover on earth. In the latter case, perfection is achieved through the “removal of obstacles to the movement of love towards God” (2.2.184.2; emphasis mine). Here, in the only case applicable to the terrestrial realm of the Clerk’s Tale, theological perfection is figured in terms of movement. It is only through unobstructed mobility that one can love God perfectly. As we have already seen, Griselda proves to be hypermobile, capable of occupying thresholds with unlimited kinetic potential and collapsing categorical spatial distinctions like those that separate domestic/private from civic/public space. She moves through, occupies, and creates voids that invoke God’s infinitude, and in so doing invites a contemplation of divinity, opening up space for others’ movements by removing obstacles (literally, in the case of her own body) on the path toward God. Yet these movements are of a different order than those of Saint Catherine or Saint Cecilia of the Second Nun’s Tale, who defy despotic commands to embrace paganism and suffer physically as a consequence. Even as Griselda finds room to move within and contest the structures to which Walter subscribes, she practices obedience, allowing for filicide rather than calling “scorne… and laugh[ter]” upon him as Cecilia might (8.505–6). We must therefore look beyond traditional sainthood to find an analogue for Griselda. Her constancy is fluid rather than adamant; she bends to patriarchal will rather than resolutely standing amidst flames in defiance of it.52 This fluidity and the movements with which she is associated suggest that we ought to consider her similarity to the relics that follow saintly renunciations rather than the saints themselves. She is not like the living models of Catherine or Cecilia, but like the oil that streamed from Catherine’s body as she was stretched on a breaking wheel (itself an image of mobility), or the blood that stained Cecilia’s sheets after her failed beheading. This comparison is invited by the Clerk, who uses vocabulary traditionally associated with the movement of relics to characterize Griselda’s initial relocation from home to court. When Griselda is first moved from Janicula’s home to Walter’s, we are told “Unnethe the peple hir knew for hire fairnesse / Whan she translated was in swich richesse” (4.384–5; my emphasis). The Middle English “translated” here is rich with meaning. At its simplest it denotes movement, but it can also mean “to convey (a saint’s relics, the body of a saint, etc.) for enshrinement elsewhere; also, disinter (bones or a body from a place of burial).”53 Here the verb refers exclusively to the relocation of what remains after one’s soul has ascended, and it is applied to traditional saints 52

53

It is worth noting that verbal echoes associate Griselda with the hagiographic tradition, even if her exemplary nature does not parallel what we see in the legends of Saint Catherine and Saint Cecilia. In the Second Nun’s Prologue, for example, Chaucer writes that Cecilia was “Ful swift and bisy evere in good wekynge, / And round and hool in good perseverynge” (8.116–17), reminding us of our introduction to Griselda in lines 215ff. Middle English Dictionary Online, s.v. “translaten, v. 1a, 1c.” The word is glossed as “transformed, elevated” in the 3rd Norton Critical Edition.

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and royal martyrs alike. In Ranulf Higden’s Polychronicon, for example, both Saint Swythun and Edward the Martyr (AD 975–78) are translated: “Seynt Ethelwold… translated seynt Swythyn his body out of the eorthe” (7.45), and “some of [Edward’s] body was translated to Leof Manaster, besides Herford, and som to Abyndoun” (7.37). By suggesting that Griselda is translated, the Clerk acknowledges her proximity to traditional hagiographic narrative without confining her to saintly exemplarity: like Edward in Higden’s record, Griselda’s name need not carry the honorific “saint.” Her movement can conform to the ritualized practice associated with moving saints’ bones even as her life challenges taxonomic sainthood. As with the political and gendered hierarchies discussed above, she can simultaneously exist within and stretch the limits of institutional Catholic structures. Like Edward, too, her translated body collapses disparate places. To render Edward whole, one must imagine Leof Manaster and Abyndoun converging. His division between these two locales serves to unite them, their shared custodianship of his bones like the ligaments that connect humerus and ulna. In the same way, we have seen Griselda collapse space, blurring distinctions between the privacy of Janicula’s home and Walter’s public court. And as a consequence of her presence, both sites become associated with spectacle, as Walter casts his eye on her and his people wonder at her (4.236, 333). Like reliquaries, Edward’s and Griselda’s bodies encourage congregation and witness, drawing bodies toward them for the miraculous effects that physical encounter may allow. But in both cases, as pull factors inciting pilgrimage, their bodies are moving targets. Geographically, Edward exists in two towns, and Griselda is simultaneously of town and country, urban and rural. The pilgrimages that coalesce around them are therefore necessarily ambiguous, encouraging those who partake to wander between multiple destinations (suggesting curiositas is welcome) rather than being drawn to the stony interior of a singular, sanctioned space like Canterbury Cathedral or Westminster.54 And wander they do. In the interest of witnessing Griselda, Walter and the people of Italy seek proximity to her, transforming the space she inhabits into a pilgrimage destination even as it spills over into multiple categories and places. As we have seen, when Griselda first arrives at Walter’s court, So spradde of hire heighe bountee the fame That men and wommen, as wel yonge as olde, Goon to Saluce upon hire to biholde. (4.418–20)

This movement in service of “beholding” is then repeated as the Clerk emphasizes Griselda’s capacity to invoke wonder, a word used no fewer than fifteen times in his tale. When Griselda bends to Walter’s request that she surrender her son to his sergeant, Walter “wondreth that she may / In pacience suffre al

54

For a discussion of curiositas, see Chapter 1.



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this array” (4.669–70), and shortly thereafter he “wondred, evere lenger the moore, / Upon hir pacience” (4.687–8). Likewise, when the people witness Griselda’s return to the court as a housemaid, they …wondren what she myghte bee That in so povre array was for to see, And koude swich honour and reverence, And worthily they preisen hire prudence. (4.1019–22)

As Georgianna notes, this recurrent wonder marks a “nonrational, affective recognition of mystery” rooted in “suprarational wonder at the mystery of Griselda’s love.”55 In the case of the courtiers, this wonder even motivates “praise” informed by her “reverence,” suggesting a sort of secular worship of Griselda. She provokes wonder because she is extra-, super-, always exceeding what one can sense or rationalize. This power to evade categorization is the very same quality that encourages the Clerk to speak of her being translated and that invites her comparison to saints and martyrs despite her failure to uphold church/narrative convention. She exists at the threshold of multiple categories, exuding a simultaneity and abundance that puts her in the position to be praised but not canonized, sought as a saintly relic but not sanctified, serving as an exemplar to religious and lay readers alike. Griselda’s ability to augment the space she inhabits such that it can no longer be rendered singular also reminds us of how relics challenge geographical and epistemological stability. Although her comparison to a relic threatens to render her a passive object rather than an agentified subject – setting manuscript images of a surprisingly animate Death aside, bones did not move of their own accord – medieval relics actually tend toward multiplicity.56 As we know from the Pardoner’s Prologue, for example, relics were fabricated and multiplied to such an extent that their verity was uncertain. The “sholder-boon… of an hooly Jewes sheep” (6.350–1) can pass as a saintly relic capable of healing domestic animals, and a pillowcase can pass as the Virgin Mary’s veil (1.694–5). If reconstructed, the pieces of the “true cross” – found in places as far flung as Paris, Serbia, and Boalsburg, Pennsylvania – could easily produce more than one crucifix. These “false japes” (6.394) allow for a splinter from a felled olive tree to evoke the same magnitude of praise as a piece of the cypress upright that held Christ’s body. As the Dutch humanist Erasmus wrote in the sixteenth century, “they say of the cross of our Lord, which is shown publicly and privately in so many places, that, if all the fragments were collected together, they would appear to form a fair cargo for a merchant ship.”57 55 56 57

Georgianna, “The Clerk’s Tale and the Grammar of Assent,” 815. One might think of the skeletal “Rider on the Pale Horse” (MS Additional 22493), or my personal favorite, the welcoming, gleefully crowned death of MS Additional 37049. Quoted in Darran Anderson, Imaginary Cities: A Tour of Dream Cities, Nightmare Cities,

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Yet the falsity of a relic does not prevent its capacity to satisfy those who visit it. As the Cistercian monk Caesarius of Heisterbach notes, “sometimes the Lord works miracles through false relics to the honour of the saints to whom they are ascribed, and for those who do honour to them in good faith.”58 He then cites as an example an instance in which a knight purchases an ordinary bridle said to belong to Thomas Becket’s horse, which proceeds to perform miracles despite its being entirely ordinary. Like the queer assemblages discredited by the Knight but embraced by the Miller in the First Fragment (see Chapter 3), the questionable veracity of relics had the power to threaten or empower. The church could see false relics as a challenge to holy authority, while the people who possessed or witnessed them could feel genuinely inspired or even experience authentic miracles. A multiplication of relics may have therefore (paradoxically, from the perspective of the Catholic Church) afforded more opportunities for ritual pilgrimage by providing a greater number of sites toward which bodies could move to behold the supernatural, even if the wondrous relics were in fact the most natural of pig’s bones (1.700). The Pardoner’s “gobet of the seyl / That Seint Peter hadde, whan that he wente / Upon the see” (1.696–7) did not need to be sanctioned by the Catholic Church in order to effect phenomenological change, just as Griselda does not need to be sanctified or stabilized to invite pilgrim mobilities. The multiplicity of relics also operates on a hermeneutic level. Combined with the reliquaries that hold them, relics exude layers of literal, metaphorical, and metonymic meaning. This is due in part to the fact that most relics were hidden from view beginning in the early twelfth century, translated from tombs or “speaking reliquaries” (i.e., reliquaries shaped like the body parts they contained) to feretory shrines. Thomas Becket’s remains, originally encased in a meager tomb shrine with portholes or fenestellae that allowed pilgrims to touch the sarcophagus, were translated to a cathedral feretory behind the high altar in 1220, where they rested atop an eight-foot shrine base.59 This distancing of shrine from supplicant required mediation, and language– both the dissemination of relic discourse and the practice of “reading” reliquaries – came to fill the gap. As Robin Malo observes, “relic discourse became a critical way to understand and shape the value and meaning of objects that were largely hidden.”60 This discourse demanded that pilgrims come to understand the container as a metaphor for the thing it contained. As Thiofrid of Echternach wrote of relics in Flores epytaphii sanctorum (c. 1200),

58

59 60

and Everywhere in Between (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2015), 184. Caesarius of Heisterbach, The Dialogue of Miracles, trans. H. von E. Scott and C. C. Swinton Bland, 2 vols. (London: George Routledge & Sons, 1929), qtd in Jay Zysk, Shadow and Substance: Eucharistic Controversy and English Drama across the Reformation Divide (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2017). Robin Malo, Relics and Writing in Late Medieval England (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2013), 30–9. Malo, Relics and Writing in Late Medieval England, 27.



“Translating” Female Bodies, (En)Gendering Mobility  155 And so, just as the soul is not visible in the body and nevertheless does wondrous things through the body, so the treasure of this precious dust, even though it cannot be seen, nevertheless… transfers the abundance of its holiness into all the materials that conceal it both inside and outside.

Here the reliquary assumes the power of the object it conceals, facilitating rather than deferring interpretation. Touching the leg of a feretory shrine is “as if one were touching the very thing hidden within” (2.3.12–22).61 The comparison with Griselda is apt. In the same way that relic and reliquary elide, Griselda defies binaries that separate internal from external. She is often as enigmatic as the holy bones hidden behind a high altar, but she nonetheless speaks through the literal and figurative containers that surround her, the hegemonic ideologies within which she operates and her physical body alike functioning as speaking reliquaries. By inviting a multiplication and transfer of meaning, these containers reveal rather than conceal what lies within, enabling their own dissolution as they become confederate with the relics they bear. This simultaneity then erodes abjection. As the reliquary assumes the power of the relic, the perceived barrier that separates secular from sanctified is rendered transparent, granting supplicants immediate access to the holy. In the same way, Griselda calls attention to the inauthenticity of political and social hegemonies by demonstrating their dependence on artificial othering/abjection. That which separates Griselda from Walter as woman, wife, and commoner is revealed to be immanently unstable, a boundary so porous that it ceases to be a boundary at all. Like a relic within a reliquary then, Griselda moves within but also seeps through the structures that ostensibly contain her. An immanently mobile body, she models the fungibility of interior and exterior, deferral and discovery, calling attention to the limits of negation and separation (upon which Walter relies) by modeling resounding affirmation and simultaneity. As though performing miracles from within a feretory shrine, she performs resistance from within and in league with established structures rather than seeking to dismantle them. The same can be said of Griselda’s soul/thought, repeatedly shown to be confederate with her body/deed. As Thiofrid notes, the soul is not visible in the body, but it can be seen through the body. Given Griselda’s simultaneity, those who gaze upon her witness not just material accidence but also substance: “the very thing hidden within.” The clothing that Walter gives her becomes a soluble container that fails to transmit a narrative separate and external to the thing contained. Instead, Griselda transfers her performance of pliability/ mobility and abundance to the “corone” and “nowches grete and smale” that encircle her, both underwriting and overwriting Walter’s attempt to author/ authorize her. Her uniquely feminine self persists. This and other attempts 61

Thiofrid of Echternach, Flores epytaphii sanctorum, ed. Michele Camillo Ferrari, Corpus Christianorum Continuatio Mediaevalis CXXXIII (Turnhout: Brepols, 1996).

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at textual translatio will be discussed further below, but in reading Griselda as relic it is important to note that narrative is activated by the transparency and simultaneity of medieval reliquaries. Discourse surrounds the enshrinement of a relic, and pilgrims must be willing to read, a statement that applies as much to supplicants at Canterbury as to the audience of the Clerk’s Tale. While the former seek access to Becket’s bones by reading the feretory shrine and narratives confirming its miraculous potential, the latter – ambulatory pilgrims of Chaucer’s frame narrative and twenty-first-century readers alike – seek to access the enigmatic Griselda through the complicated narrative web that surrounds her (including but not limited to Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, Chaucer the pilgrim’s frame, and the Clerk’s tale). Reading reveals what is ostensibly concealed, and what little remains withheld – like Griselda’s maternal experience discussed above – can be accessed (if not fully known) through what Carolyn Dinshaw calls an act of “discovering, interpreting, and carrying over.”62 The hermeneutics of Griselda’s body/soul thus bear a striking resemblance to those of relic/reliquary: container and thing contained spill into each other, transferring value and meaning across borders and boundaries, and dissembling notions of separation and negation, while underscoring the multiple ways in which Griselda enacts and enables mobility. In addition to sharing an empowering multiplicity and simultaneity with relics, Griselda’s body and an abundance of saintly remains share a tendency toward fluidity. While bones, rings, and brooches were common, many relics were liquid in nature, including blood, tears, and breastmilk. A review of Becket’s Lives, for example, reveals that his liquid remnants were the source of popular fervor. In Herbert of Bosham’s account, immediately preceding his martyrdom Becket reputedly cries, “I am poured out like water, and all my bones are out of joint.”63 And in the aftermath of his death Benedict of Peterborough tells us, “As [Becket] lay still on the pavement then, some daubed their eyes with blood, others who had brought little vessels made away with as much as they could, while others eagerly dipped in parts of their clothes they had cut off.”64 In both accounts, the saintly body’s fluidity is foregrounded, and Herbert even goes so far as to literalize Becket’s dissolution by invoking Psalm 22:14: he spills his bounds as his bones – traditionally stable and incorruptible artifacts – splinter. An image of despair in the Bible insofar it is meant to invoke the pain of the crucifixion, this quotation carries promise in the context of Becket’s hagiography by anticipating the dispersal of his body. His bones will be all the more easily translated as a consequence of their being fragmented (potentially to multiple locations), and as Benedict 62 63 64

Dinshaw, Chaucer’s Sexual Poetics, 134. Michael Staunton, Thomas Becket and His Biographers (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2006), 204. Michael Staunton, The Lives of Thomas Becket (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001), 204.



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notes, his overflow will be gathered by witnesses and circulated as secondary/contact relics. William fitz Stephen perpetuates this focus on Becket’s liquidity in discussing the early cult of St Thomas, describing how the “water of Saint Thomas” and ampoules of water mixed with the martyr’s blood performed an abundance of miracles; and in a remarkably poetic Icelandic account, Thómas Saga Erkibyskups, a “fair and desirable well” springs up through the stones in the Canterbury Cathedral crypt, and the marble floor “departed from its nature” to absorb Thomas’s blood at the site of his martyrdom.65 The chronicler writes, His blood did not flow over the floor of the church, as might seem likely it would, but had run together on the marble into small cups so that it might be easily taken up. And it is seen ever since, how the marble departed from its nature, whereas it grew soft and sank in for to receive the blood.66

In this last account, Becket’s fluidity is transferred to the world around him as marble metamorphoses into cup-like impressions that cradle his blood. The stony world is proven soft, mutable, and mobile as it comes into contact with the saint. Indeed, across all accounts of his martyrdom, geographic and hermeneutic stability is overwritten by movement: Becket’s body flows across and into space, catalyzing translation and circulation rather than remaining fixed and immobile. While Becket’s life is particularly resonant in the context of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, this tendency toward fluidity is even more common in female saints’ lives and is thus all the more relevant to Chaucer’s Griselda. Many of the most recognizable female saints of the Middle Ages, including Saint Catherine and Saint Agnes, died in pools of blood or milk, and their incorruptible bodies exuded sweet-smelling oil that was collected and circulated in ampoules. Focusing on a uniquely feminine liquidity, venerations of Saint Agatha evoked women’s capacity to produce breast milk, even if saintly chastity often precluded this possibility. Her excised breasts – removed with pincers by the Roman prefect Quintianus as a form of torture – became iconographic, carried on a platter as in Raphael Vergos’s fifteenth-century Saint Agatha, or represented in pastry form as Minne di Sant’Agata. And perhaps most of all, Marian worship depended on the consecration and display of liquid excretions. Because of her assumption, Mary left only secondary relics, largely in the form of textiles carrying traces of breast milk or birthing fluid

65

66

Staunton, Thomas Becket and His Biographers, 212–13; The Life of Archbishop Thomas Becket in Icelandic, vol. 1, ed. Eiríkr Magnússon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 551. In this account the marble also “changes its nature” to receive Becket’s footprints. See also Charles Freeman, Holy Bones, Holy Dust: How Relics Shaped the History of Medieval Europe (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011), in which Freeman discusses the circulation of ampoules containing Becket’s diluted blood (32). The Life of Archbishop Thomas Becket in Icelandic, 551.

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(the sancta camisia in Chartres, for example, is believed to have been worn by Mary when she gave birth to Christ). In each case, the female saint’s afterlife depends upon the liquids she leaves behind, as her humoral body overflows with blood, milk, and tears. Each of these narratives is commensurate with Griselda’s portrayal in the Clerk’s Tale. Her constant willingness to yield alone enforces her liquidity, but the Clerk takes pains to emphasize this link further when Griselda is reunited with her children. When Walter explains that her children are alive, … aswowne doun [Griselda] falleth For pitous joye, and after hire swownynge She bothe hire yonge children to hire calleth, And in hire armes, pitously wepynge, Embraceth hem, and tendrely kissynge Ful lyk a mooder, with hire salte teeres She bathed bothe hire visage and hire heeres. (4.1078–85)

Like Saints Thomas and Catherine, whose bodies expire in pools of blood and milk, Griselda lies prostrate in a pool of tears. And as her tears wash over her children, we are reminded not of a mother bathing her infant babes (her daughter is old enough to wed her husband, after all), but of holy fluid transferred from saint to supplicant. Just as those who witness Becket’s martyrdom daub their eyes with his blood in the interest of assuming or experiencing its transformative power, Griselda’s children receive her “salte teres” and are transformed from Bolognian outsiders to Saluzzo’s heirs. This generative (even miraculous) quality of liquid excretions is then heightened when the Clerk uses language reminiscent of childbirth to describe the exchange between Griselda and her children. He writes that she so sadly holdeth… Hire children two, whan she gan hem t’embrace, That with greet sleighte and greet difficultee, The children from hire arm they gonne arace. (4.1100–4)

Like newborns from the womb, Griselda’s children struggle to separate themselves from her embrace, and when they finally do, they find themselves covered in bodily fluids – the ocular replacing but gesturing toward the amniotic. Griselda’s saltwater tears are thus imbued with procreative potential, reminding us that water functions as fons et origo, filling baptismal fonts and bearing seafaring pilgrims to Jerusalem.67 Her tears promise new life through their cir67

In an argument posed by Katharine Goodland, tears could even reverse the gendering of bodily liquids by acting as semen. See Katharine Goodland, Female Mourning and Tragedy in Medieval and Renaissance English Drama: From the Raising of Lazarus to King Lear (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005), 31–2. It is also worth noting that a commentary in PseudoAlbertus’s Women’s Secrets suggested that tears facilitated conception by releasing excess



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culation, restoring her children’s identities and even spreading to the faces of those who witness their rebirth, as “many a teer on many a pitous face / Doun ran of hem that stoden hire bisyde” (4.1104–5). Like a liquid relic, Griselda’s body conveys and transfers a divine affect capable of effecting change in the world. She moves those who touch and witness her, rendering herself and the world around her liquid. Insofar as her tears spread to surrounding bodies, we are reminded of the gratia lacrymarum tradition, or “Gift of Tears.” As Kimberley-Joy Knight observes, this gift reflected one of the highest degrees of perfection as the soul reached union with God and had a foretaste of the beatific vision. … Recipients are recorded to have been overflowing or flooded with God’s grace as it poured into them as if it were liquid. The tears that spilled out from their eyes signified the spiritual fulfillment of contact with the ineffable.68

Gratia lacrymarum then had the capacity to infect witnesses who were themselves stirred to tears and/or moved to perform devotional acts. This is perhaps most notoriously seen in The Book of Margery Kempe, wherein Margery’s worship consists almost entirely of tears gifted to her by Christ. In Chapter 84, Christ tells Margery that her tears “arn my gracys and my gyftys, and thes arn myn owyn special gyftys that I geve to myn owyn chosyn sowlys the which I knew wythowtyn begynng schulde come to grace and dwellyn wyth me withowtyn endyng” (4883–5). Even before this revelation equates Margery’s tears with gratia lacrymarum, though, we see their potential to spread, as those who hear Margery’s laments were “oftyntyme steryd … to wepyn ryt safly” (850). Like relics acting upon those who witness them, Griselda and Margery’s tears are liquid contagion, moving outside of their bodies to beget tear-stained faces.69 Griselda therefore shares with relics the quality of multiplicity, liquidity (including the generative potential and mobility associated with elemental water) and their capacity to move others. This only further reinforces her hybridity. The same breakdown of internal/external that applies to relics ostensibly concealed in (but actually revealed by) reliquaries is applicable to

68

69

moisture in the womb. See Psuedo-Albertus Magnus, Women’s Secrets: A Translation of Pseudo-Albertus Magnus’s De Secretis Mulierum with Commentaries, trans. and ed. Helen Rodnite Lemay (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1992), 137. Kimberley-Joy Knight, “Si Puose calcina a’ propi occhi: The Importance of the Gift of Tears for Thirteenth-Century Religious Women and Their Hagiographers,” in Crying in the Middle Ages: Tears of History, ed. Elina Gertsman (New York: Routledge, 2012), 136–55 (136–7). We might also recall Mary’s tears, given the shared focus on maternity in Griselda and Marian narratives. Though more explicit in the Petrarchan version of the Clerk’s Tale, in which Griselda emphasizes her role as a servant and embodiment of Christian virtue, Chaucer also invites comparisons with the Virgin Mary. See, for example, James I. Wimsatt, “The Blessed Virgin and the Two Coronations of Griselda,” Mediaevalia 6 (1980), 187–207.

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Griselda’s liquefied body, as her tears both root her in a uniquely feminine corporeality and allow her to transcend that corporeality.70 She is simultaneously embodied and disembodied, internal to and externalized from herself. Cohen observes of Kempe: [she] draws power from her body, but contra the medieval stereotype of woman, she transcends mere corporeality. Wepyng and sobbyng anchor her in the somatic while providing an anagogic line of flight to transport her beyond the limits of personhood and individuality. Tears and screams make Kempe known to the world in her singularity, but they are also in their amplifying and dispersive plenitude the instrument of her self-dissolution.71

The same is true of Griselda. Though she is less dependent upon non-verbal communication, her tears render her multiple and transcendent. She exists outside of herself and defies structural containment, leaking into her surroundings and asking those present to acknowledge her capacity to disrupt borders and boundaries. As Slavoj Žižek notes of voice – an articulation that, like tears, cannot be reduced to words or contained by a linguistic system – it “resists meaning, it stands for the opaque inertia that cannot be recuperated by meaning. … [It] threatens the established order.”72 Griselda’s tears are also pure inertia; they literalize her constant willingness to yield by associating it with an elemental fluidity whose source is internal to her, even as its path extends far beyond the limbs of her body. Through her tears she becomes a conduit of liquid grace, functioning, like a relic in a reliquary, as a site of transfer, simultaneity, and liminality. The dissolution of Griselda into a teary female body therefore embeds her in a tradition of divine association without requiring that she be officially sanctified. Her narrative need not adhere to hagiographic convention for her body and its excretions to be physically and hermeneutically associated with relics. Instead, like Edward (a popular martyr long before he was canonized) and Margery Kempe (a mystic), Griselda and her corpora move through and act on the world. As readily as she is translated, she translates the people and places with which she comes into contact.

Textual Movement: Translating the Clerk’s Tale Beyond functioning as a verb that describes saintly mobilities, the word translate also reminds us of the rich textual tradition that informs Chaucer’s Clerk’s Tale. Translated by both Boccaccio and Petrarch before 70 71 72

On the uniquely feminine nature of gratia lacrymarym, see Knight, “Si Puose calcina a’ propi occhi,” 139–40. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, “The Becoming-Liquid of Margery Kempe,” in his Medieval Identity Machines (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 178. Slavoj Žižek, “‘I Hear You with My Eyes’; or, The Invisible Master,” in Gaze and Voice as Love Objects, ed. Renata Salecl and Slavoj Žižek (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996), 90–126 (103).



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Chaucer, the tale is subject to an abundance of critical inquiry that seeks to locate Chaucer in a lively conversation regarding adornment, the vernacular, and authorship. Because this scholarship is already so plentiful, I will refrain from discussing the tale’s implications for medieval exegesis, but it is critical to note that the geographical and spiritual movements enacted by Griselda resonate in the concomitant movement/circulation of her narrative. Like Griselda herself, the text is hypermobile and polyvalent, inviting interpretation and criticism that ultimately reinforces themes of movement and multiplicity. First, Chaucer calls attention to his engagement with Petrarchan (and less so Boccaccian) models by placing Griselda’s narrative in the voice of an erudite Clerk who credits Petrarch with his tale in the Prologue. In so doing, Chaucer foregrounds the text’s movement from Italy to England, and anticipates its further circulation on the road to Canterbury. Second, his recognition of Griselda’s female body as a metaphor for the text forces the eye to shift from male auctoritas to female autonomy. It sets up the illusion of masculine inscription only to undermine it by demonstrating that Griselda writes herself (or, at the very least, dismantles the notion of her being subordinate to and outside of male authorial traditions). Textual artifact and metaphor alike therefore perpetuate Chaucer’s interest in mobility, emphasizing both the transmission of narrative across space/time and the ways in which texts move to overwrite narrative intent. Chaucer’s embeddedness in a long tradition of translation is immediately articulated in the Clerk’s Prologue. The Clerk tells his fellow pilgrims, I wol yow telle a tale which that I Lerned at Padowe of a worthy clerk, As preved by his wordes and his werk. He is now deed and nayled in his cheste; I Prey to God so yeve his soule reste. Fraunceys Petrak, the lauriat poete, Highte this clerk, whos rethorike sweete Enlumyned al Ytaille of poetrie… But deeth, that wol nat suffre us dwellen heer, But as it were a twynklyng of an ye, [Petrarch] hath slayn, and alle shul we dye. (4.26–38)

In this passage, the Clerk allows for Petrarch’s presence while also making a concerted effort to bury him. He is both “slayn,” and “deed and nayled in his cheste,” his entombment carrying a sense of finality as his casket is fastened with iron nails and his soul is given “reste.” This effort to immobilize Petrarch – securing his inanimate condition such that he is not subject to saintly translation or transportation – reveals a desire to distance the Clerk’s Tale from its Petrarchan predecessor. The Clerk acknowledges his indebtedness to a textual tradition while establishing his tale as an entity separate and dis-

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tinct from that which precedes it. Of course, the Clerk’s navigation of source material has long been the subject of critical inquiry, so this comes as no surprise. But the mobile dimensions of the text’s transmission across space and time have yet to be fully explored. First, Chaucer acknowledges and enables the propulsion of texts by translating Griselda’s narrative into the English vernacular – the Clerk’s Tale is a temporal and geographical move away from Petrarch. At the same time, he animates the narrative’s “corpses,” mobilizing prior authors and texts in such a way that allows for their presence while acknowledging their expiration. The entombment of Petrarch in the Prologue therefore sets up a monstrous enlivening of decayed bodies, introducing a sort of queer time that depends upon historical distance while demonstrating how the practice of textual transmission/translation defies the separation and stasis that such distance implies. The separation that the Prologue desires from Petrarch is itself an echo of Petrarch’s intent for his Insignis obedientia et fides uxoria, the source of Chaucer’s Clerk’s Tale. As David Wallace notes, Petrarch was committed to stabilizing texts, a desire conveyed in part through his incessant editing, arranging, and rewriting. In the interest of “escap[ing] history entirely… Petrarch dreamed of producing finalized texts of permanent value.”73 He and the academy of literati that coalesced around and succeeded him were committed to “self-classicizing, of exempting texts from the erosions of time.”74 This is perhaps most evident in his translation of Boccaccio’s Decameron 10.10 from vernacular Italian into Latin. Deploying what Rita Copeland calls “vertical translation” (i.e., translating a language of lesser prestige to a language of greater prestige), this both associated Petrarch’s text with the transcendent classical corpus and distanced it from unwanted interpretation and circulation.75 His work belonged to the erudite and eternal, not the “undiscreet and chaungynge” Italian masses (4.996). As he wrote in a letter to Boccaccio in 1366, “the short things I once wrote in the vulgar tongue are, as I have said, so scattered that they now belong to the public rather than to me… I shall take precautions against having my more important works torn to pieces in the same way.”76 Using language that conveys a fear of spatio-temporal dispersal – he disapproves of the “scattering” of his vernacular texts – Petrarch declares an intent to shroud his most valued narratives in Latinate garb, where they will remain firmly in his grasp until they achieve atemporal permanence and spatial stability. A classicized Griselda will not only stand the test of time but escape it.

73 74 75 76

Wallace, “Whan She Translated Was,” 161. Wallace, “Whan She Translated Was,” 163. See Rita Copeland, “Rhetoric and Vernacular Translation,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 9 (1987), 41–75 (48). Petrarch, Letters, trans. James Harvey Robinson and Henry Winchester Rolf (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1909), 207–9.



“Translating” Female Bodies, (En)Gendering Mobility  163

This desire to surpass Boccaccio’s Decameron in both language and time is further evidenced by Petrarch’s mythologizing and moralizing of Griselde.77 In his Insignis Obedientia, Griselde is universalized, her moral value and Christian exemplarity emphasized to such a degree that readers cease to acknowledge her embodied subjectivity. As one of Petrarch’s friends commented, “I believed, and still believe, that this is all an invention. If it were true, what woman, whether of Rome or any other nation, could be compared with this Griselda? Where do we find the equal of this conjugal devotion, where such faith, such extraordinary patience and constancy?” (17.4).78 In this reading, Griselde ceases to be a substantial character. She is “beyond imitation,” identified with the disembodied human soul rather than the female body (17.3). Indeed, Petrarch admits that his intent in writing Griselda is to “lead my readers to… submit themselves to God with the same courage as did this woman to her husband” (17.3). His translation is ultimately interested in the soul’s relationship with God over the woman’s relationship with her husband/ lord. In Petrarch’s telling, then, Campbell’s “empty body” hypothesis comes to fruition. As Griselde’s material conditions evaporate in Petrarch’s Insignis Obedientia, her “‘reality’… become[s] problematic.”79 This erasure of Griselda’s corporeality also serves to elide her with the text. For Petrarch, Griselde’s vestments are coequal to his act of translation. He writes in Seniles 17.3 that the process of altering Boccaccio’s story is one of “mutata veste” (changing its garment), recalling the repeated stripping and ornamentation of Griselde. Yet garments are never at the center of Petrarch’s work; he deemphasizes Griselde’s garments by directing the reader’s gaze to her universal exemplarity. When Walter describes Griselde, he focuses not on her manners and beauty (as in Boccaccio’s Decameron), but her exceptional virtue. He observes, “[she was] remarkable for the beauty of her body, but of so beautiful a character and spirit that no one excelled her” (17.3). While her physical attractiveness is acknowledged, the “but” conjunction supplants it with a focus on her inner beauty. The act of re-dressing Griselde that takes place shortly thereafter is therefore only a show. It associates her character with prestige, but like the Latin in which Petrarch shrouds his most valued texts, this prestige is only important insofar as it points away from historical and geographical contingencies. What matters is not the clothes Griselde wears, but the fact that her exemplarity outshines even the most brilliant coronet. She transcends materiality, occupying what Wallace deems “a classical, perpetual present that displaces past and future.”80 In this way, Griselde func-

77 78 79 80

To distinguish Petrarch’s Griselda from the other Griseldas to whom I refer, I will use the Latinate spelling “Griselde.” Petrarch, The First Modern Scholar and Man of Letters, trans. James Harvey Robinson and Henry Winchester Rolf (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1899). Campbell, “The Politics of Translation,” 206. Wallace, “Whan She Translated Was,” 191.

164  Mobility and Identity in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales

tions as an ideal metaphor for Petrarch’s translation. The gesture away from Griselde’s body to her soul dramatizes what Petrarch desires for his oeuvre: an escape from the material conditions that lead to improper translation and transmission. His mutata veste is therefore revealed to be a removal of vestments – a refusal of his text’s materiality that allows for its displacement from space/time. Just as a body cannot be buried if there is no body, an immaterial text cannot be scattered. Reminiscent of chivalry in the Knight’s Tale (see Chapter 3), these efforts seek stasis in the creation and circulation of an ideal. History, as versus the “static continuity of memory,” was a liability to Petrarch’s pursuit of eternal fame, threatening to commit his texts to posterity rather than allow for their omnipresence.81 He did not want succeeding generations to determine the future of his work; he wanted his work to escape time entirely, to foreclose reader-response and evade the “unstable earth and shifting sand” so easily leveled by the “common herd.”82 But unlike the undead fiction of chivalry – functionally dead but unable to die – Petrarch fails to escape history in Chaucer’s writing. He is factually a corpse, his desire for the immaterial universality he models in Griselde undermined by the reminder that he lies under six feet of Italian dirt. He may have aimed for incorporeality, removed from the march of time and through space, but his time is definitely up, and his emplacement is ensured by a well-carpentered coffin. Griselda’s universalization is similarly disallowed in the Clerk’s Tale, as Chaucer buries her alongside Petrarch in his envoy: “Grisilde is deed, and eek hire pacience, / And bothe atones buryed in Ytaille” (4.1177–8). Far from being a utopic/ouchronic phenomenon, Griselda is shown to be in and of time. As discussed above, she is rendered multiple insofar as she is regenerated – she is one of multiple “Grisildis” (4.1165) – and transcendent insofar as her liquid excretions function as relics, but her regeneration/consecration does not exclude her corporeality or the finality of her being buried in the envoy. As Judith Butler argues in “Restaging the Universal,” the reiteration/translation of any discourse shows that discourse “works” through its effective moment in the present, and is fundamentally dependent for its maintenance on that contemporary instance. The reiterative speech act thus offers the possibility… of depriving the past of the established discourse of its exclusive control over defining the para­ meters of the universal. … [It] recites and restages a set of cultural norms that displace legitimacy from a presumed authority to the mechanism of its renewal.83 81 82 83

Sachi Shimomura, “The Walking Dead in Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale,” The Chaucer Review 48.1 (2013), 1–37. For a more in-depth discussion of this phenomenon, see Chapter 3. Petrarch, Letters, 207–9. Judith Butler, “Restaging the Universal: Hegemony and the Limits of Formalism,” in Contingency, Hegemony, Universality: Contemporary Dialogues on the Left, eds. Judith Butler, Ernesto Laclau, and Slavoj Žižek (London: Verso, 2000), 11–43 (41).



“Translating” Female Bodies, (En)Gendering Mobility  165

Through translation, Chaucer demonstrates that Petrarch’s claims to the universal in both his letters and his mythologizing of Griselda are mis- but not (as he may have hoped) dis-placed. Such claims are disrupted the moment Petrarch’s text is translated – moved from one context to another – and Chaucer reinforces this point with the literal burial of Griselda, Petrarch’s metaphorical text. Anticipating Butler’s argument by nearly a millennium, he proves the contingency of universalizing claims by locating those claims in corpses. Beyond challenging Petrarch’s claims to the universal, these acts of burial and translation encourage a closer examination of the place/time of the Clerk’s Tale. As Wallace writes, Chaucer “sees the Petrarchan text as a response to a particular historical and political moment. As that moment recedes Chaucer needs to translate Petrarch into his own cultural present.”84 He therefore moves Petrarch’s text from Italy, or from Petrarch’s imagined no-place, to fourteenth-century England, where it is relayed by a traveling clerk on the road. Each of these details works to contradict Petrarch’s universalizing assertions, focusing the reader’s attention instead on the movements of texts through space and in time. First, Chaucer relegates Griselda’s narrative to voice, embracing Petrarch’s notion of immateriality but in a way that he would surely find appalling. The Insignis Obedientia has not only been translated back into the vernacular, but it is now scattered to the wind on the road to Canterbury. As noted above, voice “resists meaning,” opposing Petrarch’s pursuit of textual stability by circulating as pure inertia. Locating the tale in the oral tradition also invites improvisation and misunderstanding, anathema to the Petrarchan academy. The Clerk could take liberties in the English vernacular approximation of Latinate terms or in his use of rhyme, and everyday road noise – the bleating of a flock of sheep or a passing cart of Kentish cherries – could easily disrupt the text’s transmission.85 Moreover, Chaucer mobilizes the tale by locating it on the road, itself a liminal space that literalizes what Arnold van Gennep and Victor and Edith Turner identify as the second of three stages in anthropological rituals: (1) Separation, (2) Limen/margin, and (3). Aggregation.86 It is an uncertain, transitional space occupied by bodies moving away from a secure socio-cultural condition toward an often-unknown assimilation/consummation at the road’s end. On the road, the traveler and the tales he tells are “betwixt and between all familiar lines of classification.”87 In the Middle Ages in particular, the liminal84 85

86

87

Wallace, “Whan She Translated Was,” 191. Even the written record of the Clerk’s voice is unstable, as Chaucer admits to being an amateur reporter in the General Prologue. After a long discourse on recording speech, he concludes, “My wit is short, ye may wel understonde” (1.746). See Arnold van Gennep, The Rites of Passage, trans. Monika B. Vizedom and Gabrielle L. Caffee (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1960); Victor Turner and Edith Turner, Image and Pilgrimage in Christian Culture: Anthropological Perspectives (New York: Columbia University Press, 1978). Victor and Edith Turner, Image and Pilgrimage, 2.

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ity of roads was underscored by their function as marginal spaces that themselves lacked clear borders. Beyond serving as the limen of a pilgrimage – one of many “interpenetrating ellipses” with a shrine at their center – medieval roads were hermeneutically and materially unstable.88 Subject to variations in language, law, and the landscape, what ultimately defined a road was not form but function. As Valerie Allen and Ruth Evans note, whether it is called a wei, a strete, or a thurgh-fare, “a road is a road when it allows one to move on it.”89 Legally, medieval roads often functioned more like rights of way than singular lines of access, and on the landscape they bled into the fields surrounding them, enabling pilgrims like Margery Kempe to travel “be the wey and in the feldys” (2378; my emphasis). Indeed, aerial photographs of vestigial country roads show that before the enclosure of private lands in the sixteenth century, roads regularly splintered into a series of parallel tracks, formed when travelers moved to one side or another of a flood or obstruction. Medieval roads were therefore literally multiplied: “smooth spaces” (to invoke Deleuze and Guattari) defined by rather than defining mobilities. As such, they were both of and multiplied across space, material realities that shifted to accommodate the bodies they bore. By moving Petrarch’s text from the bound page to the unbound road, Chaucer denies his claims to universality while foregrounding the instability of narrative. Insignis Obedientia, now the Clerk’s Tale, is geographically located, but its location is unstable and multiple: it is “betwixt and between” places, on the move, across or alongside an English road. A quest for the place of the Clerk’s reimagining would lead not to a point, but to a plane of possibilities, one of many roads (plural) to Canterbury. Chaucer’s record of the Clerk’s Tale also complicates its temporal location. As it is presented in The Canterbury Tales, the tale is a posthumous record; its telling is past even if Chaucer’s text is present. It therefore exists not outside of time, as Petrarch may have hoped, but in multiple times simultaneously. Both past and present, the Clerk’s Tale “questions the very possibility of occupying a ‘present’ moment,” pointing instead to the inexorability of time and the “movement of history.”90 Comparing this historical movement to the mobilities associated with medieval roads, we see a consistent attention to lines and planes over points in Chaucer’s translation. The geometry he imposes on Griselda’s narrative depends not on singularity and stability, but on multiplicity and momentum. As Peter Adey writes of the new mobilities paradigm, “it is not the nodal point which dominates discussion, but it is rather the line––the connector––between these points.”91 Chaucer’s text is both unique 88 89

90 91

Victor and Edith Turner, Image and Pilgrimage, 22. For more on medieval roads, see Chapter 2. Valerie Allen and Ruth Evans, “Introduction: Roads and Writing,” in Roadworks: Medieval Britain, Medieval Roads, eds. Valerie Allen and Ruth Evans (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2016), 1–32 (7). Wallace, “Whan She Translated Was,” 191; my emphasis. Peter Adey, Mobility (New York: Routledge, 2010), 57.



“Translating” Female Bodies, (En)Gendering Mobility  167

to fourteenth-century England and suspended between Boccaccio, Petrarch, Chaucer, the Clerk, and future tellers. It maintains its spatio-temporal specificity (as an historical point) but its pointedness also dissolves to become part of a line that points away from and collapses back in on itself. The Clerk’s Tale is therefore contingent on but also capable of moving through time, making room for play within the construct that defines it and demonstrating the power derived from embeddedness in rather than an escape from time – it is the tale’s subjection to spatio-temporality that enables its mobility.92 By modeling this ontology, Chaucer overrides and perhaps even mocks Petrarch’s claims to universality and atemporality. He shows that Petrarch’s attempts at self-classicizing miss the mark and drives this point home by writing the past into the present, reanimating Petrarch but insisting on his own and his tale’s presence (and ultimately usurpation) by rendering the Insignis Obedientia “a thyng impertinent” (4.54).93 The result is a narrative that queers time, showing it to be asynchronous and simultaneous. The past is never disassociated from its place/time, but it can appear in new places/times, with each resurfacing collapsing time in a way that disallows atemporality and complicates linear temporality by insisting instead on multi-temporality. Nowhere is this more poignant than in the reanimation of Petrarch’s corpse. He does not stay confined to the Italian dirt, as Chaucer literally incorporates him into the Clerk’s Prologue. He is granted presence insofar as his “rethorike sweete / Enlumyned al Ytaille of poetrie” (4.32–3), but even more significantly his body and soul are figuratively reassembled. The Clerk tells his fellow pilgrims, But forth to tellen of this worthy man 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…. (4.39–43)

Petrarch’s soul may no longer be housed in the body “deed and nayled in his cheste” (4.29), but corporeality presents itself in the form of Griselda’s tale. By translating the Insignis Obedientia, Chaucer can “tellen… this worthy man” into a new “body,” albeit one that is itself spatially and temporally contingent, since “alle shul we dye” (4.38). In so doing, Chaucer makes Petrarch present even as his corpse – self-classicizing hand included – remains very much past. The result is a sort of haunting, wherein Petrarch cohabits a 92

93

Chaucer emphasizes his own temporality by admitting that he and his tale are also subject to death: “But deeth, / that wol nat suffer us dwellen heer, / But as it were a twynklyng of an ye, / Hem bothe hath slayn [i.e. Petrarch and Giovanni da Legnano], and alle shul we dye” (4.36–8). As Rita Copeland notes in Rhetoric, Hermeneutics, and Translation in the Middle Ages, “vernacular translation is able to assert its service to an authoritative source even as it “displaces the originary force of its models” (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 4.

168  Mobility and Identity in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales

body (the text) filled with characters familiar to him. Disallowed an authorizing role outside of the text, he becomes a character moving through the very narrative he sought to stabilize. Ironically, had his efforts succeeded, there would be no room for his (re)animation. Chaucer thus shows that author and authored alike are empowered by the very “unstable earth and shifting sand” that Petrarch feared. The media on/through which the Clerk’s Tale is transmitted (voice, pen, road) are improvisational. It erupts from and is erased by new contexts, yet each eruption further enriches the text and mobilizes its past tellings, allowing for the presence of hybrid bodies: living/dead, encoffined/ mobile, past/present. By modeling queer temporality, Chaucer demonstrates that by allowing one’s text to destabilize and roam across space and time, it can – like the roads on which it wanders – come to create meaning, rather than simply transmitting a predetermined meaning.94 This also transfers to Griselda as textual metaphor. Correcting for Petrarch’s failed mutata veste (insofar as Griselda’s corpus is erased in the Insignis Obedientia), Chaucer re-centers Griselda’s body/clothing, inviting a metaphorical reading wherein her dressing and undressing represent reimaginings of her textual body. In so doing, he explicitly invokes a second sense of the Middle English verb translaten as it appears in the line “she translated was in swich richesse” (4.385). Beyond being moved as relic, Griselda is “translate[d]… from one language into another… also, capture[d] in translation.”95 Despite the suggestion of “capture,” though, Chaucer reminds us that Griselda is not simply “translated, redressed, and trundled back and forth between male authorities.”96 Instead, she consents to her translation, creating space for literary interpretation and the literal movement of ideas and texts across linguistic and geographical boundaries. Her consent reinforces her steadfast willingness to move and is empowered by the movement stimulated by translation. Moreover, each interpretive act is mediated by her femininity, which resists and even overwrites masculine inscription. She is clothed by men, but she strips herself, and the body that moves remains uniquely feminine. Griselda’s equivalence with the text has a long tradition in both medieval exegesis and contemporary criticism. The feminization of texts began in the classical period, when the protection of a woman’s purity was associated with the protection of literary truth and wisdom. It was believed that both women and texts needed to be obfuscated, such that – as Boccaccio observes in his Genealogia deorum gentilium – the “gaze of the irreverent” could not “cheapen [them]… by too common familiarity.”97 This act of obfuscation was often

94 95 96 97

See Jacques Derrida on the relationship between roads and writing: “Freud and the Scene of Writing,” in Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (London: Routledge, 2002), 246–91. Middle English Dictionary Online, s.v. “translaten, v. 6.” Schwebel, “Redressing Griselda,” 280. Giovanni Boccaccio, Genealogia deorum gentilium, ed. Vincenzo Romano (Bari: Laterza, 1951), 14.13.



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figured as a sort of veiling, a covering of literary truth that necessitated textual interpretation. In his translation of Eusebius’s Chronicle, for example, Jerome laments that readers of biblical translations “looking at the surface, not the substance, shudder at the squalid dress before they discover the fair body which the language clothes” (“Superficiem, non medullam inspiciunt, ante quasi vestem orationis sordidam perhorrescant, quam pulcrum intrinsecus rerum corpus inveniant”).98 Here he employs a veiling metaphor to separate the text’s substance (its fair body) from its surface (its squalid dress), while subtly reinforcing the text’s feminine attributes with the adjective pulcher. The “fair” textual body is a feminine body, protected and obfuscated by lowly language that takes the form of a fetid cloth. Richard of Bury builds on this metaphor in his Philobiblon, making the gendered nature of literary interpretation explicit when he writes, “The wisdom of the ancients devised a remedy by which to entice the wanton minds of men by a kind of pious fraud, the delicate Minerva secretly lurking beneath the image of pleasure.”99 Here readers are instructed to seek the “delicate” goddess of wisdom beneath an “image of pleasure.” While Richard has replaced Jerome’s squalid dress with seductive garments that invite wonton minds rather than invoking shudders, he retains the notion that a text’s words/verba veil its sense/sensus, and the latter is consistently figured as female.100 Indeed, even when it is subject to male translation, the kernel of the text – its feminine body – remains unchanged. Chaucer engages this tradition of the female body as textual metaphor. Beyond explicitly referencing Griselda’s translation, he invokes a textual idiom to qualify her movements, and dwells on her clothing to an extent unparalleled in his Petrarchan source. Because this matter is central to an abundance of literary criticism (see n.41), I will not dwell on its implications for medieval exegesis. In the context of Griselda’s mobility, though, her figuration as text transports her beyond Italy and the Italian language, and she invites her reader to follow in search of her sensus, transforming herself into the grail sought by questing exegetes. Only thirty lines after she is established as a “translated” text, Griselda is “publiced” (4.415). Usually glossed as “made known” (MED, publishen, v., 1a), this verb also reinforces her association with texts/textuality and locates her within the public’s purview. The textual resonance of the verb – “to make public (writings, contents of a document); present (a book) to the public” (MED, publishen, v., 1e) – is employed in the Clerk’s Tale itself, when counterfeit bulls from the Pope declare

Jerome, “Preface to Interpretatio Chronicae Eusebii Pamphili,” in The Principal Works of Jerome, trans. W. H. Fremantle (Grand Rapids, MI: Christian Classics Ethereal Library, 1959), 895, qtd in Dinshaw, Chaucer’s Sexual Poetics, 137. 99 Richard of Bury, Philobiblon, ed. and trans. Ernest C. Thomas (London: Kegan Paul & Co., 1888), 13.180. 100 See Alastair Minnis, Medieval Theory of Authorship: Scholastic Literary Attitudes in the Later Middle Ages (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1988). 98

170  Mobility and Identity in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales That [Walter] hath leve his firste wyf to lete, As by the popes dispensacion… thus seyde the bulle, The which they han publiced atte fulle. (4.745–9; my emphasis)

Here the Clerk consciously links the circulation of bodies and texts: both Griselda and the Pope’s bulls are made available to the people “atte fulle,” implying a widespread movement of text, body, and textual body. Indeed, Griselda’s publication not only invites visitors to Saluzzo; it also allows Griselda to “spradde… in many a regioun” such that the people even begin to locate her beyond the terrestrial world, assuming “That she from hevene sent was” (4.416–18, 440). This alone implies a (supra-)geographical movement, but the fact that publishen also carries the sense of something having been made a “public affair” (MED, publishen, v., 2) allows for her movement to assume figurative resonance as well. Like the Clerk’s Tale – one pilgrim’s posthumous interpretation of a tale voiced by a teller who himself learned the tale secondhand – Griselda relinquishes control over her sensus. Opposing the Petrarchan impulse to stabilize narrative/identity, she surrenders herself to the wind, even when it becomes “stormy” and “chaungynge as a fane” (4.995–6). Her reception cannot be dictated or secured by any single hand (her own included), as she spreads beyond the confines of Walter’s embrace, the city walls, and the Italian border, moving from one reader to another and inviting response.101 She belongs to no one and everyone as she consents to her translation, publication, and widespread circulation. Unlike the published counterfeit bulls that are ultimately without sense (purely fabric/fabricated), though, Griselda is all sense – her thought and deed are confederate such that her very self is consistently exposed. It is here that we see Griselda challenging masculine inscription by finding space to move within a traditionally patriarchal system. She resists the division between substance and surface articulated by male exegetes including Jerome and Richard of Bury by eliding the two and insisting that her body/the textual body is always exposed. Any male efforts to veil her are inconsequential, because she is “ay oon in herte and in visage” (4.711). This subversion of male inscription is perhaps most evident when Griselda “voids” the court for Walter’s second wife, a moment that is noticeably more acerbic in the Clerk’s Tale than in the Insignis Obedientia. In Chaucer’s telling, Griselda agrees to leave the court, but not without first discrediting Walter’s attempts to allegorize her. First, she acknowledges the metaphorical resonances of Walter’s dressing and undressing her, revealing that she has been party to his authorizing efforts from the start. She tells him,

101 This

invitation to respond is modeled by the Clerk’s Tale in its inclusion of Petrarch’s envoy, the Clerk’s envoy, and the words of the Host. The end matter far surpasses that of any other Canterbury tale.



“Translating” Female Bodies, (En)Gendering Mobility  171 My lord, ye woot that in my fadres place Ye dide me streepe out of my povre weede, And richely me cladden, of youre grace. To yow broghte I noght elles, out of drede, But feith and nakednesse and maydenhede. (4.862–6)

Yet this passage echoes an earlier telling of this moment in lines 654–8, wherein Griselda claims agency over her disrobing: For as I lefte at hoom al my clothyng, Whan I first cam to yow… Lefte I my wyl and al my libertee, And took youre clothyng.

With this reminder of Griselda’s participation in her own veiling, the “ye woot” of line 862 becomes instead a sly “I woot.” Griselda insinuates to Walter, “you and I both know what you’ve done,” and she reveals that he could not have done it without her consent. As Carolyn Dinshaw observes, we hear the woman speaking from inside the allegorical image. … But this time she reveals the sense of having been used. … Griselda reads herself as allegorical image and thereby “authorizes” us to read her allegorically, but at the same time she gives us a sense of what it feels like to be made into a figure of speech, what is left out when she is read translative.102

Of course, what is ostensibly “left out” is Griselda’s sensus, veiled by male verba, but by calling attention to her conscious participation in masculine acts of translation and publication, she shows that she was partner and not subject to these acts. Like unalloyed gold (4.1167), she proves herself to be steadfastly pliable, accommodating Walter’s authorial hand without allowing for the erasure or adulteration of her substance. Before departing from Walter’s court, Griselda also demonstrates her capacity to self-authorize, even if this potential is never fully realized in the Clerk’s Tale. First, she employs metaphorical language to compare herself to a worm, appropriating the rhetoric of her hegemonic oppressors: “Lat me nat lyk a worm go by the weye” (4.880). She then strips herself for the second time: Biforn the folk hirselven strepeth she, And in hir smok, with heed and foot al bare, Toward hir fadre hous forth is she fare. (4.894–6)

In this sober cabaret (a moment that may recall Butler’s drag shows of n.8), Griselda literally exposes her body, reminding onlookers that she was never displaced by her clothing, that the surface never fully obfuscated the sub102 Dinshaw,

Chaucer’s Sexual Poetics, 146–7.

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stance. Moreover, by calling attention to her womb even as she seeks to cover it, she reminds us that her body is uniquely feminine and generative. Here she submits to the traditional reading of texts as female bodies but insists on their power to create meaning (to say nothing of human life), rather than having meaning thrust upon them. Even the Clerk’s use of the verb publishen hints at this tradition of female textual bodies, as it also meant “to people (a country), populate; refl. multiply, breed” (MED, publishen, v., 3). In fact, Chaucer uses this sense of the verb when he writes in his translation of Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy, “How greet is the diligence of nature, for alle thinges renovelen and publysschen hem with seed ymultiplied” (3.11.121–4). Like Nature, universally figured as female in medieval allegory, Griselda is uniquely capable of renewal and publication through multiplication. Beyond being multiplied across time and existing at the threshold of categories that render her hybrid (both/and), she proliferates as both woman and metaphor. Even if a male hand is requisite, she remains the substance and source of organic and textual (re)production. The veiling of female texts by male authors/translators is therefore ultimately underwritten by a message of female autonomy in the Clerk’s Tale. Women, like the substance of a text, can accommodate translation (across space, time, language), while denying erasure and making room for feminine agency. Male inscription is even shown to be potentially threatening insofar as it may replace signified with signifier, rendering a body/text all surface and no substance as in the case of the “countrefete” bull written and circulated by Walter (4.743). This male-authored publication, the only literal text we see in the Clerk’s Tale, is strikingly barren. It is an empty vessel without truth or substance, leaving its readers with nothing but trivial words. Griselda, by contrast, presents her readers with pure substance, which Chaucer amplifies by returning her story to the vernacular and allowing her to strip herself. In so doing, he locates textual power beyond the word in the agentic (textual/female) body, reminding us of Dante’s opinion on superfluous rhetoric as “analogous to burying a lovely lady beneath extravagant apparel,” an inappropriate means of embellishment that conceals the “natural beauty” (naturale bellezza) of the thing it adorns.103 Not only does Chaucer remove Petrarch’s Latinate garb, he exposes Griselda by directing his reader to dwell on her naked body in moments of translation, showing her to be a present and active participant in these moments– an ever-present female body that withstands authorial dressings and enacts her own undressings, reminding us that she will not be erased or overwritten.

103 Schwebel,

“Redressing Griselda,” 293.



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Ecological Movement: When Rivers Shape Mountains The final iteration of mobility in the Clerk’s Tale appears in the Prologue, wherein Chaucer prefigures Griselda’s pliability (her constant willingness to move) by foregrounding the fluid landscape from which her tale emerged. Reproducing prefatory material unique to Petrarch, he describes the Po River as a generative, mobile body of water that “ay encresseth” (4.50), anticipating the overflowing female body at the center of the tale to follow. Attributing the material to Petrarch, Chaucer writes, … discryveth he Pemond and of Saluces the contree, 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, That estward ay encresseth in his cours To Emele-ward, to Farrare, and Venyse, The which a long thyng were to devyse. (4.43–52)

The contrast between mountain and river here is noteworthy and grows from a rich literary tradition that reveals the central role of mobility in Chaucer’s conceit. This is an instance of Chaucer rewriting Petrarch rewriting Dante, who includes a simile regarding Monviso and its rivers in Canto 16 of Dante’s Inferno. In The Divine Comedy, the river Phlegethon is compared to the roar of the Aquacheta, which “is first to take its own course toward the east, after Mount Viso… before it falls down into the low bed and loses its name at Forli, as it thunders there above San Benedetto de l’Alpe, when falling in one cascade where it usually descends by a thousand” (16.94–102).104 As it cuts through the seventh circle into the eighth, the Phlegethon (like the river to which it is compared) invokes an image of transportive hyperactivity. Beyond leading Dante and Virgil to Geryon, their monstrous vehicle to the eighth circle, the falling river generates a sound like bees buzzing in a hive (16.1–3), and its movement is replicated by the Florentine sinners who spin around Dante like a wheel, their feet moving perpetually forward while their heads pivot to remain ever-fixed on Dante’s face (16.19–27). This tumult, which bombards one’s ears and eyes alike as the reader confronts a dragon–lion–scorpion–man hybrid and Florentines whose heads spin like Regan’s in The Exorcist, serves as the source of Petrarch’s own mediation on geography. In his Seniles, he replaces the Aquacheta with the river that actually rises from Monviso, the Po, and writes that the mountain, 104 Dante,

Inferno, in The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri, ed. and trans. Robert Durling and R. Martinez (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996).

174  Mobility and Identity in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales famous for its size, but even more as the source of the Po which, flowing from a tiny spring from its side, moves toward the rising sun, and soon swollen by amazing tributaries over a short downward course, becomes not only one of the greatest streams, but is called “the king of rivers” by Virgil; with its strong current, it divides Liguria, then separates Emilia, Flaminia, and Venetia, and finally empties with many huge mouths into the Adriatic Sea. (17.3)105

In both treatments, the river’s multiplication and its capacity to cut through categorical and geographical boundaries is foregrounded.106 Though certainly less nightmarish in Petrarch’s telling, the Po nevertheless swells to such a size that it is deemed “fluviorum… rex” before it empties “with many huge mouths” into the sea. And it remains the Po even as it crosses geopolitical boundaries and merges with tributaries, absorbing but not erasing the conduits with which it collides. As Warren Ginsberg observes of Petrarch’s prefatory material, “the Po’s own excellence… has nothing to do with the perturbations it undergoes; whether churning in rapids or flowing majestically, until it empties into the sea, it is always the Po. Its nature is deep-seated, unchanging, like the fixity of Griselda’s sacrifice of will.”107 Ginsberg’s attention to stability here is in line with Petrarch’s literary agenda, and in recognizing the deep-seated nature of the river he sets the stage for a comparison between the Po and Griselda; yet where he sees (and Petrarch desires) fixity, Chaucer sees agentic flow. This flow inundates the Clerk’s Tale from the moment that the Po and Monviso are incorporated into the Prologue. By retaining what might be deemed mundane prefatory material (the Canterbury pilgrims are unlikely to be excited by the geographical minutiae of an Italian river’s trajectory), Chaucer reminds astute readers of the landscapes that define the sixteenth canto of Dante’s Inferno and Petrarch’s Seniles. In so doing, he anticipates the fact that the Clerk’s Tale will be a space of hybridity and hyperactivity. While his tale remains uniquely English, told in the vernacular on the most famous pilgrimage route in England, he locates the metaphorical resonances of Dante’s and Petrarch’s Italian landscapes in his characters, eliding Griselda with the Po’s rushing waters and Walter with Monviso’s noble mass. While there is a deep-seated substance that inheres in Griselda (she remains Griselda in the face of translation, just as the Po endures until it empties into the sea) Chaucer underscores her watery nature through his attention to her movement and 105 Petrarch,

Seniles, 656–7. similarity is compounded by Dante’s attention to clothing in Canto 16 (e.g., lines 8–9), a theme that also seeped into the Griselda narrative, reaching its height in Chaucer’s Clerk’s Tale. 107 Warren Ginsberg, “From Simile to Prologue: Geography as Link in Dante, Petrarch, Chaucer,” in Through a Classical Eye: Transcultural and Transhistorical Visions in Medieval English, Italian, and Latin Literature in Honour of Winthrop Wetherbee, eds. Andrew Galloway and R. F. Yeager (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009), 157. See also Ginsberg, Chaucer’s Italian Tradition (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2002), 259–61. 106 This



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multiplicity. She swells and spreads like a river, empowered by her liquidity in form and function as humoral woman and agentified protagonist. Ultimately, she is shown to be a metaphorical and literal body of water whose dynamism, like the Po’s, locates her at the heart of mountainous structures including Walter’s hegemony and the Clerk’s Tale itself. Walter’s comparison to Monviso is immediately evident when he and his “worthy eldres hym bifore” are said to be “of that lond”: a “lusty playn [at the roote of Vesulus the colde]… Where may a tour and toun thou mayst biholde, / That founded were in tyme of fadres olde” (4.58–64). He is of the “colde” Vesulus – cold because of its altitude and perhaps because it is a non-volcanic mountain chain, formed by the collision of continental crust rather than the eruption of molten lava – marked by stable structures including towers that have withstood the test of time. Everything about this image invokes lithic permanence. Stone towers at the foot of a rooted and rocky Monviso are as enduring as the line of elders that trace to Walter, and landscape and lineage alike are frozen in place, the snow-capped mountains invoking stillness even when water’s usually kinetic presence is admitted. The Clerk’s gaze petrifies as it recounts a long-written history that originates in founding fathers whose age is twice emphasized (“olde… eldres”), all the more patriarchal for their not being named. Time and the mountain itself fortify Walter, lending magnitude, stability, and gravity to his characterization. Griselda serves as a stark contrast to this hulking geological and historical mass, both metaphorically and literally embodying aqueous flow. Her metaphorical liquidity should by now be evident, manifest in her social, geographical, religious, and textual movements. She proves the inauthenticity of hegemony by showing that Walter’s patriarchal status is contingent upon her movement. His authority over her abject body requires that he excrete her across a boundary whose illusory nature is suggested by her own porousness; she is both internal and external, her body a permeable site that absorbs and secretes substances like a river merging with and spilling into its (dis)tributaries. And her simultaneous body moves across and multiplies geographical space, dismantling spatial categories (e.g., public/private) and creating voids that invoke infinitudes. Likewise, her “translation” figures her as both liquid relic and circulating text. She transcends material, political, and linguistic boundaries as her metaphorical body seeps across the gold confines of a feretory shrine and incorporates Latinate and vernacular registers alike. In all cases, Griselda is defined by flow and superfluity. Like the Phlegethon and Po, she moves across and cuts through borders and boundaries, repeatedly manifesting the metaphorical resonances of fluid mechanics.108 Yet her comparison to the natural world does not depend upon metaphor and mechanics alone. As we have already seen, her introduction to Walter is 108 On

fluid mechanics, see Luce Irigiray, “The Mechanics of ‘Fluids,’” in her This Sex Which Is Not One, trans. Catherine Porter (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985).

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marked by water, and her humoral liquidity is central to her figuration as relic. The watery qualities that Griselda exhibits are therefore also literal. She is an elemental body, interacting with and seeping into the world around her. As Stacy Alaimo observes, channeling current trends in posthumanism, Imagining human corporeality as trans-corporeality, in which the human is always intermeshed with the more-than-human-world, underlines the extent to which the substance of the human is ultimately inseparable from “the environment”. … By emphasizing the movement across bodies, trans-corporeality reveals the interchanges and interconnections between various bodily natures. But by underscoring that trans indicates movement across different sites, trans-corporeality also opens up a mobile space that acknowledges the often unpredictable and unwanted actions of human bodies.109

Perhaps more than any other element, water renders the body trans, as it is actively and passively transferred across body and world. When we catch snowflakes on our tongues or when bathwater is absorbed percutaneously, we merge with the “more-than-human” world to form assemblages that depend upon substances and subjects outside of ourselves.110 Indeed, we become with the environment every time we ingest or expel water in the form of rain, reservoirs, urine, and sweat. Like many of the metaphors discussed above, this ecological trans-corporeality challenges traditional understandings of discrete and coherent bodies; the body cannot, and perhaps should not, be contained. This theory is all the more potent in the Middle Ages, when humoral theory dominated understandings of the body, and the body was believed to be a microcosm of the world. According to Avicenna’s Canon of Medicine (1015), which synthesized Galenic medical theory and Aristotelean philosophy in a text that was widely translated and circulated across Europe, the body was defined by the quantity and quality of liquid it contained. Specifically, it worked to regulate the four humors – blood, yellow bile, black bile, and phlegm – liquids associated with the creation and circulation of blood.111 These liquids impacted health, temperament, and even one’s moral integrity. An overly impulsive body exhibiting Alaimo’s “unwanted actions,” for example, could be diagnosed sanguine due to an excess of blood, in which case a medical practitioner might prescribe bloodletting. Here, diagnosis and prescription alike speak to the transferability of liquids within and across the body. Balancing one’s humors meant forcefully leaking into the world, conveying blood from veins to diffuse repositories outside of the body, including the leeches likely to have been used in the bloodletting process. The resulting assemblage is 109 Stacy

Alaimo, Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2010), 2; emphasis mine. 110 On the assemblage, see Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2015). 111 Yellow and black bile were both byproducts of blood-production: foam carried to the gallbladder and sediment carried to the spleen, respectively.



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unquestionably trans, as blood and its associations with heritage, purity, and vivacity circulates from human to leech, circulatory to digestive system, with the help of complex enzymes and doctors who were themselves called “leeches” as early as the tenth century. Humoral theory and its implications for the trans body are rooted even more firmly in ecological understanding when the passions are taken into consideration. One of Galen’s six non-naturals (the factors that determined a body’s well-being, including air, diet, exercise, sleep, and retention/evacuation), the passions were liquid entities associated with the mind, body, and world. The source of human emotion, they ebbed and flowed in response to external stimuli and sense impressions produced by the memory and imagination, with imbalances affecting first the mind, then the body (since the humors, beyond responding to the same sense material, were often spurred by the passions). This meant that the human condition was directly impacted by atmospheric and climatic change wrought by the elements. As the sense organs processed one’s physical place, they stirred the passions: the wet, salty air of the Kentish coast would impact one’s bodily fluids differently from the cool, earthy air of the Devon moors. As John Sutton observes of Avicenna’s writings, “the body was by nature open, the internal environment always in dynamic interrelation with the external environment.”112 According to humoral theory, the body could therefore be rendered “seasonal” and the passions “ecological,” such that Plutarch could write in his Moralia, “in the summer by reason of the heat, we long for earth-born, upland air, not because it is itself chill, but because it has sprung from the naturally and primordially cold and been imbued with its earthy power, as steel is tempered by being plunged in water” (954).113 Like steel seeking an ideal balance of physical properties, man regulated himself by seeking an environment that would balance his passions through a sort of elemental therapy. In the Moralia, the ancient air of the uplands offers a suitable remedy for a hot temperament (likely also manifest in a choleric body), and the air that Plutarch imagines is suitable not because it is inherently cold, but because it is “earthy.” The elemental stuff itself (earthborn air), and not just its physical properties (its primordial coolness), seeps across human membranes to effect embodied change. Given that the passions absorbed and responded to worldly elements, they were closely linked to medieval microcosmic thought, which proposed that the body and its functions mirrored the cosmos. Making explicit the connec112 John

Sutton, Philosophy and Memory Traces: Descartes to Connectionism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 95. 113 Plutarch, Moralia, Volume XII: On the Principle of Cold, trans. Harold Cherniss, and W. C. Helmbold, Loeb Classical Library 406 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1957), 276. I credit Gail Kern Paster with the term “ecological passions.” See her “Becoming the Landscape: The Ecology of the Passions in the Legend of Temperance,” in Environment and Embodiment in Early Modern England, eds. Garrett Sullivan and Mary Floyd-Wilson (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 137–52.

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tion between body and world, Isidore of Seville observes in De natura rerum, “mundus conpetenter homo significatur”: the world is signified human, and the human is signified world, for “as [the world] is constituted from the four elements, so is [the human] made from the four humors mingled in one temperament.”114 This dual signification challenged binary thinking that divorced human from nonhuman, and resulted in the body’s passions being articulated in elemental ways – passions flowed like rivers, and the pneuma was both the passionately affected soul in the body and the wind without. In her Causae et Curae, for example, Hildegard of Bingen uses the notion of pneuma/spiritus as both soul and wind to demonstrate that the body and world were coequal: “as the soul holds together the whole human body, so the winds sustain the whole firmament, so that it not be shattered, and they are invisible as the soul is invisible, coming from the mystery of God.”115 Here the winds of the world correspond to the soul: beyond serving the same function, both are sourced from the same stuff (e.g., the mystery of God). The comparison slips from analogical to literal, suggesting that the microcosm both signifies and is the world. And as the elements that constitute body/world are recognized to be one and the same, the assemblage of which the medieval (and perhaps unexpectedly posthuman) body is a part comes to contain one less component part: the “human” soul and “worldly” winds are in fact the same substance. This combined with an understanding of the passions as liquid matter reifies a becoming with the environment in the medieval world that resonates particularly powerfully with respect to water. Liquid passions confronted with liquid environments need only accommodate liquid – hardly an accommodation at all. What are traditionally thought of as leakages from human to nonhuman or vice versa might therefore instead be read as tides. Rather than polluting the bodies/worlds implicated, the transfer of liquids across membranes is a natural part of the ebb and flow that defines watery bodies. Given this milieu, Griselda’s liquid excretions literally equate her with the landscape – her watery body is an ecological body, and her comparison to the Po is more than metaphorical. In line with the traditional understanding of women as phlegmatic, her body is moist, and the environment accommodates her liquid excretions as she accommodates her environment. Beyond her tears, discussed above, Griselda is marked by breastmilk and blood. We are told after the birth of her daughter that she “had souked but a throwe” (4.450). In a time when wet nurses were common, especially in wealthy households like Walter’s, the fact that Griselda nursed at all is remarkable. And although the Clerk implies that she only nursed for a short time, we learn this is not a choice, but a necessity prompted by Walter’s first test. Had he not torn her 114 Isidore

of Seville, De Natura Rerum, qtd in Timothy J. Reiss, Mirages of the Selfe: Patterns of Personhood in Ancient and Early Modern Europe (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003), 273. 115 Hildegard of Bingen, Causae et Curae, qtd in Reiss, 277–8.



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daughter away from her, there is no telling how long Griselda would have fed her infant, passing her humors across/through membranes such that mother and daughter became implicated in the same liquid ecology. This detail regarding Griselda’s maternity is all the more potent in a period when iconography and veneration of the Madonna Lactans was reemerging. Particularly popular in Italy from the thirteenth century, representations of Mary breastfeeding underscored her physical connection with Christ’s body and blood. Breastmilk was believed to be womb-blood transferred by a special vein to the breasts where it was converted into milk. A mother therefore fed her child with the same substance both in utero and after birth, building and nourishing new life with various expressions of menstrual blood. This meant that Mary’s milk was the same substance that circulated in Christ, having been what created and sustained him in the womb. As a result, she was linked to the savior not only biologically, but also eucharistically. Her breastmilk was the saving blood of Christ, a liquid that commemorated Christ’s covenant as potently as his own blood in the eucharist. Beyond carrying and birthing Christ, then, she remained a vessel for his humoral substance even after the umbilical cord was severed; no distinction could be drawn between her menstrual/ womb/breast-blood and what circulated in Christ and the blessed sacrament of the Catholic Church. This resulted in the visual representation of Mary emphasizing her breasts when she interceded for human souls, and the comparison between Christ’s wounds and her breasts in images like Christ and the Virgin Interceding with God the Father in the Turin–Milan Book of Hours.116 Amidst this imagery and the attendant cult of the Virgin’s milk, Griselda’s liquidity takes on new dimensions. Her breastfeeding is more than a maternal act; it implicates her in a tradition that associated nursing women with the food of the eucharist, and further underscores her participation in a liquid ecology that resonated far beyond her own body. In her response to Walter’s insistence that their daughter be killed, Griselda may cleverly remind him of this fact: Lord, al lyth in youre plesaunce. My child and I, with hertely obeisaunce, Been youres al, and ye mowe save or spille Youre owene thyng: werketh after youre wille. (4.501–4)

This statement subtly reminds us of the breastmilk that spills from Griselda’s body, calling upon spillen as a verb that refers to the flowing of a substance, particularly a bodily one, “from a container onto the ground” (MED, spillen, v. 7). Without a designated receptacle, Griselda’s milk will now literally spill into the world. Even more so, though, Griselda’s statement of obedience draws on the medieval definition of spillen as “to kill” (MED, spillen, v. 1). 116 See

Caroline Walker Bynum, Holy Feast, Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1987).

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She asserts that she and her child may be saved or sacrificed according to her Lord’s will. Of course, Walter is the secular referent of her lordly address, but given that the defining detail of Griselda’s relationship with her daughter to this point is her “souking,” we might also see her playing a Marian role, recognizing God’s will to sacrifice his child for the salvation of humankind. In this reading, Griselda processes and accepts her loss as a mother, not as an obedient wife. Her breasts, womb, and the fluids associated with both haunt the periphery of her conversation with Walter, empowering her as one in a line of women who give life through liquids. For reasons having to do with its transmutation into breastmilk, Griselda’s blood is also at issue in the Clerk’s Tale. Before it was milk, it was wombblood, and, as we have already seen, Griselda is remarkably attentive to her womb when she voids the court in anticipation of Walter’s second wife’s arrival (i.e., her daughter’s return). Beyond this, though, blood makes an appearance when Walter figures his son as the “bloody” product of Griselda’s lineage. Parroting the (fictional) voice of his people, he explains to Griselda that their son must be eliminated because, Whan Walter is agoon, Thanne shal the blood of Janicle succeed And been our lord, for oother have we noon. (4.631–3)

This statement is significant first and foremost because it supplants a body with blood, tapping into the liquid resonances associated with Griselda. Further, it suggests the potency of Griselda’s lineage and the prevalence of humoral understandings of the body. Though their son is as much biologically Walter’s as he is Griselda’s, Walter implies that he is entirely Griselda’s. The truth of this statement lies in a foregrounding of literal blood over metaphorical “bloodlines.” In the context of humoralism, their son is in fact the “blood of Janicle”: it is Griselda’s womb-blood that created and nourished him, and that very substance is what courses through his body. Perhaps unintentionally, then, Walter’s second test displaces his power by prioritizing liquids and the bodies that most forcefully convey them. By his own account, Griselda’s tidal influence on the bodies with which she comes into contact (human and nonhuman alike) carries more bearing than his name or his role in the conception of their son. Moreover, in suggesting that Griselda and her son after her are their humors, he allows that they are only ever temporarily contained or balanced, always threatening movement and reintegration into larger ecological systems. As a humoral body whose tears, milk, and blood permeate the Clerk’s Tale, Griselda is therefore metaphorically and literally fused with the liquid landscape. She is a watery body that capitalizes on its replication of the “ever-increasing” Po to exhibit a uniquely feminine agency. By means of her breastmilk and womb-blood alike, she taps into the “numerous life-worlds and webs of significance people have spun around water as natural phenomena,” such



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that she becomes the Madonna Lactans and fons vitae of her tale.117 Like the Po through Monviso, she carves through Walter’s mountainous mass to show that she will not be confined by his rigid patriarchy and that her tidal body is ultimately what makes him “even more… famous.” Her effluvia constitute his legacy in the form of an heir (in their fiction) and the Clerk’s Tale itself (in the Canterbury Tales frame). And the Clerk’s subtle but frequent references to Griselda’s fluidity further underscore the fact that her agency depends upon movement; she is empowered by her ability to pass between bodies and across boundaries, to the extent that her actions – even those that read as passive obedience – are performed on her own terms. Of course, we would be remiss not to acknowledge that the Clerk dismisses Petrarch’s prefatory material, including his reference to the Po, as a “thyng impertinent” (4.54). But its impertinence need not derive from a dismissal of the liquid landscape or water’s conceptual resonances. Indeed, as we have seen elsewhere in the frame narrative of The Canterbury Tales, rivers and the economic and material infrastructure surrounding them are very much a part of Chaucer’s text and his figuration of medieval England.118 Rather, we might read this dismissal as an effort to submerge the Po alongside Petrarch, making space for the upswelling of England’s Thames and a vernacular Griselda whose mobility is often figured in the connotative quality of English verbs like voiden, translaten, and spillen. As Campbell observes, “the Clerk’s prefatory remarks also trace a geographical shift from Italy to England. … The framing of the Clerk’s narrative thus re-establishes the boundaries of cultural authority in both geographical and ideological terms.”119 Chaucer’s spatial and temporal lens in the Clerk’s Prologue suggests that texts are produced by and produce a complex web of mobilities, and that the emplacement of a text (or displacement as it moves from Italy to England) impacts the text and the world in which it circulates alike. The move from Latin to English is mirrored in the move away from the Po, and, as Griselda inundates the English literary tradition, her ability to move and move others takes on new resonances as well. Ultimately, a careful meditation on movement in the Clerk’s Tale shows that Griselda is empowered by her geographical, religious, textual, and ecological mobilities. All four forms of (metaphorical and literal) movement carve out space for feminine agency within the patriarchy established by Walter, staging resistance from within rather than seeking to utterly dismantle hegemonic structures. Like a river, always moving, accommodating, multiplying, and yet retaining something of its essential substance, Griselda absorbs and generates multitudes without losing herself. She consistently 117 Terje Tvedt

and Terje Oestigaard, “Introduction,” in A History of Water: The World of Water, series 1, volume 3 (London: I. B. Tauris, 2009), ix–xxii (xv). 118 See Chapter 2. 119 Campbell, “The Politics of Translation,” 209.

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exerts agency on the world in the form of active willing, while generating mobile potential for herself and others by destabilizing rigid structures and participating in her (religious and textual) translation. As she moves through geographical and epistemological spaces, she creates new throughways and carves paths that – like the Po through “Emele-ward, to Farrare, and Venyse” – separate but also unite, as she becomes the site of transport, contact, and exchange. Far from being fixed, she and the rivers that prefigure her steadfastly spread. In the end, she is a hypermobile body that offers new opportunities for expression, prompting her readers to reflect on how they navigate the world, and how their doing so may, like Haraway’s bodies of water, “[reset] the stage for possible pasts and futures.”120

120 Donna

Haraway, “Ecce Homo, Ain’t (Ar’n’t) I a Woman, and Inappropriate/d Others: The Human in a Post-Humanist Landscape,” in Feminists Theorize the Political, eds. Judith Butler and Joan W. Scott (London: Routledge, 1992), 86–100 (86).

Conclusion: Mobilizing Medieval and Modern Identities The twenty-first century is marked by hypermobility. A global economy, social networking, and the celebration of invention and innovation motivate us to move. Our technology reflects this propulsion: streaming television services give us as little as five seconds of credits before catapulting into the next episode, Instagram abbreviates posts longer than 125 characters to encourage scrolling, and video games implement carefully calculated reward schedules to keep players online. Rare is the moment when one sits quietly, content in a mind and body at rest. The impulse is to attribute these movements to modernity. Lee Patterson writes, philosophers since Hegel have asserted that the first step in moving from the closed immobility of traditionalism to the open dynamism of modernity is to endow the self with autonomous desire: the transformation of institutions requires and entails the transformation of individuals.1

Here modernity is aligned with mobility, characterized as open, dynamic, and transformative. In this positive valuation, modern subjects climb corporate ladders and display pinned maps on their walls to broadcast their worldliness. But, as Patterson goes on to observe, such transformations also entail an overwhelming sense of loss. …To be modern is to find ourselves in an environment that promises adventure, power, joy, growth, transformation of ourselves and the world––and at the same time, threatens to destroy everything we have, everything we know, everything we are.2

Indeed, studies show that technological interferences in the form of cell phones and email notifications encourage users to jump between multiple tasks rather than focusing on and accomplishing a single goal, subjecting our bodies and minds to a carousel of information as our attentions spin from one device to 1 2

Lee Patterson, Temporal Circumstances: Form and History in the Canterbury Tales (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 175. Lee Patterson, Temporal Circumstances, 176.

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the next. We accomplish less because we are exposed to more.3 And social media has cultivated a new sort of curiositas that has modern subjects seeking to know whatever their friends and acquaintances are willing to share online. Like the concupiscentia oculorum condemned in Book 10 of Augustine’s Confessions, these digital curiosities are eschewed by modern scholars who cite studies that link social media use to a rise in mood disorders among young adults.4 One is therefore left to wonder: is mobility indicative of dynamism and progress, or does it signify the deterioration of the unfragmented subject? This question is at the root of the new mobilities paradigm articulated by Mimi Sheller and John Urry, and while a trend toward the positive valuation of mobility in the twenty-first century is evident, particularly in cultural geographical studies, the question of its impact on identity remains contested.5 Physical and ideological mobilities alike multiply and fragment. One’s view of the world expands as s/he travels the globe, while exposure to new cultures may highlight fissures in one’s own society. And digital media opens up a world of knowledge while also potentially hindering our ability to absorb that knowledge. Like the movements discussed in this book, mobility is never unidirectional. It is a hybrid entity that inundates our world and ourselves, impacting our identities as social, intellectual, and ecological beings. Significantly, the question of movement’s impact and value is not exclusive to modernity. Despite dichotomies that set modern mobility against “traditional” immobility (to use Patterson’s language), movement has been part of lived experience since the very beginning. In the Middle Ages, troubadours towed instruments from court to court, ship captains steered vessels through narrow straits, and penitential pilgrims counted footfalls rather than beads. These embodied movements took place amid a maelstrom of mobile ideas – economic systems, social strata, and transport networks all moved to accommodate and integrate emerging markets, an increasingly mobile workforce, and architectural in/re-novation. From the rising middle class to the bridges of southeastern England, movement and the networks that supported it redefined the physical and ideological landscape of the medieval world. Mobility and Identity in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales demonstrates how mobilities like these inhere in Chaucer’s oeuvre. In the Tales, movement occurs across space, and within and across both human and more-than-human bodies. It is literal, referring to the movement of pilgrims towards (but never into) Canterbury, and figurative, referring to social, political, and gendered mobilities. In the frame narrative, which reflects the very real landscape of

3 4

5

See, for example, Adam Gazzaley and Larry D. Rosen, The Distracted Mind: Ancient Brains in a High-Tech World (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2016). Among them, Jean M. Twenge et al., “Age, Period, and Cohort Trends in Mood Disorder Indicators and Suicide-Related Outcomes in a Nationally Representative Dataset, 2005–2017,” Journal of Abnormal Psychology 128.3 (2019), 185–99. See pp. 9–14 of the introduction for a discussion of the new mobilities paradigm.



Conclusion  185

southeast England, Chaucer represents structured mobilities, allowing for movement while demonstrating that a sense of order can be derived from that mobility (it is structured by and structures economic exchange, for example). Navigating the space between urban chaos and pastoral idyll, the frame offers a meditation on middle grounds, exploring what defines and is defined by the road, where one is on and en route, and what separates man from matter in assemblages that incorporate liquid and lithic, circulatory systems and circulating goods. In this space, locales like Rochester and its conduits emerge as symbols of medieval mobility, encompassing the economic networks and ecological flows that impacted medieval identities. Meanwhile, in the pilgrims’ fictions, Chaucer experiments with hypermobilities that unbind traditional categories and defy structuring tendencies, (sometimes literally) liquifying dichotomies that define inside against outside, natural against cultural, and static against mobile. In all but the London tales, which convey a conservatism echoed by the city’s walls and fortifications, categorical understanding runs amok. In the first fragment and the Clerk’s Tale in particular, Chaucer shows that political, economic, social, and ecological movement can empower disenfranchised bodies. The Miller and the Reeve can voice opposition to the Knight and each other through their representations of social and spatial mobility, and Griselda can find room to move within a seemingly rigid patriarchal system, her tidal body introducing subversive power structures through its association with geographical, religious, textual, and ecological mobilities. As John and Aleyn grope through the dark, and Griselda kneels on the threshold of her father’s home – simultaneously entering and exiting – we are called upon to consider where these characters are going, how they experience movement, and how their mobility changes them and the worlds in which they live. We are also tasked with identifying how these fictions represent and shape the historical moment to which they belong. Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales is an exchange between word and world. Exploring this exchange reveals that economic networks connect Perkyn’s endeavors in the Cook’s Tale with the London Bridge estate (see Chapter 2) and that the hermeneutics of medieval reliquaries informs the practice of reading women (see Chapter 4). In these moments, The Canterbury Tales emerges as an amalgam of lived experience and the poetic imagination, chronicling and constructing fourteenth-century England. Seemingly stable structures like medieval homes and highways are represented in Chaucer’s fictions, but they are also shown to be kinetic and malleable as they assume fictional shapes, subject to articulation and interpretation amid the exchange of stories, goods, services, and ideas that transpires along the Pilgrims’ Way. The consequent assemblages – fact and fiction, ontology and ideology – reveal a remarkably vibrant medieval world. Literal and figurative mobilities abound as human and more-than-human bodies cross borders and dissolve boundaries. Replicating in body and voice the connective function of medi-

186  Mobility and Identity in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales

eval bridges, Chaucer and his pilgrims navigate poetic, social, and ecological landscapes to meld chevalier with cavalerie, and women with roads and rivers. In so doing, their narrative work confirms the suspicion that mobility threatens to destroy ourselves and our worlds: the unfragmented subject is indeed lost. But this loss enables dynamic transformation, and, insofar as it is integral to Chaucer’s Tales, it proves that mobility is not solely the purview of the modern; the medieval world was ripe with potential becoming. In fact, much remains to explore. While a consideration of mobility in The Canterbury Tales does uncover adventure, power, joy, growth, and transformation, the story of immobile and immobilized bodies remains largely untold. These subjects fall outside the scope of the current project, which takes as its focus the fluid, porous, and hybrid middles produced by bodies in motion, but they demand future consideration in the interest of dissolving dichotomous thought. Like many of its subjects, then, The Canterbury Tales continues to retreat, challenging us to follow, to dive deeper, to see more in its overfullness. Its own identity, like those whose identities it represents and helps to shape, is always and ever on the move.

Acknowledgments It is a pleasure to conclude the writing of this book by thinking of all those who helped me to create it. Having evolved from a single dissertation chapter written nearly a decade ago, it has been seen and touched by many. Thanks first to those who oversaw the project in its infancy: Robert R. Edwards, Patrick Cheney, Scott Smith, and Lorraine Dowler. Their guidance helped me to identify the dissertation’s strengths. Thanks, too, to those who threw bags and played games with me when my writing stalled, and to those who resurrected my ghost when it was complete. Among them Michael DuBose, in whose memory I write words. I am also grateful to my colleagues at Skidmore College and Duquesne University, whose support reminded me that my thoughts were worth thinking, and then publishing. A special thanks to Dr Mason Stokes and Dr Greg Barnhisel, who chaired the departments for which I worked, and to Dean Jim Swindal at Duquesne University for his enduring support of junior faculty research. With his help, this book benefited from Wimmer Family Foundation grants and a Presidential Scholarship Award. In the classroom, I have been blessed with excellent students. Thanks to Sean Fairweather and Will Adams who, with the assistance of a Faculty-Student Collaborative Research Grant, helped me generate the argument of the third chapter. Thanks also to Courtney Druzak for reminding me that waste has a place in ecocritical inquiry, and to my graduate research assistants Nathan Shuey, Amy Dick, Joshua Nisley and Jesse Jack. A special thanks to Jesse, whose careful reading and thoughtful suggestions helped me see the project through to its conclusion. Students in my fall 2015 Chaucer course, spring 2018 Medieval Pilgrimage course, and fall 2018 Early Period Ecocriticism course also offered valuable insights that helped shape this project. As words became chapters, my editor Caroline Palmer proved a constant source of positivity and support, and Mike Begnal provided thorough copyediting and indexing services. Their patience with a protracted timeline in the monograph’s final months allowed me time to wrap things up without having to sacrifice infant snuggles and family dance parties. Beyond the academy, I am deeply grateful to Peter Morgan, founder of the Sittingbourne Historical Society, and his wife June for giving me a place to stay and showing me around Sittingbourne. They were gracious hosts whose kindness taught me to embrace curious strangers. Thanks, too, to Christine Furminger, whose lovely tour of Rochester included special access to the Rochester Bridge Trust, which inspired the second chapter. I would also like

188  Mobility and Identity in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales

to thank Michael Baldwin, Alan Abbey, and Helen Allinson for their many helpful emails and conversations. Last but certainly not least, thank you to my family, whose unending support motivated early-morning and late-night writing sessions. Thank you to my mom and dad for encouraging me to read and write for as long as I can remember, and for always reading my words, even when they are on archaic subjects. An extra-special thanks to Sully for always being by my side, to Cora for inspiring me to voice my opinions, and to Trevor for giving me the time I needed to do so before blessing our home with his love. These three little ones move me in ways I couldn’t have imagined. Finally, I can’t begin to express the depths of the thanks I owe to my loving husband Mike, whose patience, perseverance, and whole person is my inspiration. Without him, this book would not exist.

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Index Abbey, Alan, 53 Adam of Usk, 25 n.13 Adey, Peter, 9, 10 n.23, 13 n.32, 62, 65, 103 n.42, 166 Adorno, Theodor, 71 Agatha, St, 157 Agnes, St, 157 Alaimo, Stacy, 176 Albert of Saxony, 149 alchemy, 36–9, 41, 43–4 Alighieri, Dante, 91, 172, 173–4 Allen, Valerie, 28 n.21, 32 n.29, 59 n.1, 60, 63 n.14, 64, 166 Appolonius of Tyre, 113 Aquinas, Thomas, 5, 22–3, 47, 51, 111, 127, 134–6, 150 Aristotle, 5, 8, 93, 127, 147–8 assemblages, 15, 65, 105–8, 118–20, 122, 132–3, 176–8, 185 Augustine, St, 1, 21–3, 47, 51, 184 authorship; see also translation (textual), 11, 155, 161, 171–2 Avicenna, 93, 176–7 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 10–13, 16 Baudrillard, Jean, 9 Bauman, Zygmunt, 14, 16 Becket, St Thomas, 3, 47, 52–3, 55–6, 83, 87, 154, 156–8 Bede, 22–3, 113 Benedict of Peterborough, 156 Bennett, Jane, 14–16, 65, 176 n.10 Benson, David, 2 n.4, 33 n.35, 40 n.57, 75, 150 n.51 Benson, Larry, 3 n.5, 3 n.7, 31 n.26, 44– 5, 85 n.79 Beowulf, 111 Bernard of Clarivaux, 22–3, 47, 51 Bernard of Cluny, 74, 84 Birkert, Sven, 68 n.33 Bishop, Kathleen A., 109, 127 Black Death, 27, 35, 39, 54 Boccaccio, Giovanni, 93, 112, 116, 132, 160, 162–3, 167, 168

Boethius, 172 Boke of Nurture, 117 Boyd, Heather, 89 n.4 Bradwardine, Thomas, 149 Brembre, Nicholas, 32, 35, 75 Bridget, St (of Sweden), 1 Britnell, R. H., 68 n.35, 69–70 Brown, Peter, 27 n.18, 115 n.78, 116, 121, 125 Burger, Glenn, 109–10 Butler, Judith, 132–3, 137–9, 164, 182 n.120 Caesarius of Heisterbach, 154 Campbell, Emma, 132 Canterbury (city), 48, 53, 83, 86, 156 Canterbury Cathedral, 3, 20, 55 n.91, 73, 87, 152, 157 Carruthers, Mary, 91–2, 94 Casey, Edward, 147–8 Catherine, St, 53, 83–4, 151, 157–8 Catherine of Valois, 78, 80 Cecilia, St, 37 n.46, 56, 151 Certeau, Michel de, 10–13, 82 Chaucer, Geoffrey, works of Canon’s Yeoman’s Tale, 18, 36–45 Clerk’s Prologue, 161–2, 167, 173–5, 181 Clerk’s Tale, 18, 20, 131-186 Cook’s Tale, 18, 30-36, 44–6, 74–8, 82 Franklin’s Tale, 85, 136 n. 15 General Prologue, 3, 47, 48–57, 85– 6, 87, 92, 120 The House of Fame, 3, 7–8 Knight’s Tale, 18, 19–20, 85, 90–104, 129 Man of Law’s Tale, 41 Miller’s Tale, 18, 19–20, 104–118, 129 Monk’s Prologue, 54–5 Monk’s Tale, 94 Nun’s Priest’s Tale, 17, 85 The Parliament of Fowles, 3, 17, 85 Pardoner’s Prologue, 153

206  Index Physician’s Tale, 17 Reeve’s Tale, 18, 19–20, 86–7, 118– 130 Reeve’s Prologue, 116 Second Nun’s Prologue, 151 n.52 Second Nun’s Tale, 37 n.46, 41, 151 Chaucer, residence of (Aldgate), 24–5, 27 Cheapside (London district), 25–6, 28, 31, 49, 75–6, 82–3 chivalry, 90–7, 100–3, 104–6, 111, 115, 164 Christopher, St, 81 Citrome, Jeremy, 104 Classen, Albrecht, 17 n.48, 112 Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome, 16 n.46, 17, 66 n.25, 80–1, 105–6, 110–1, 140–2, 160 Cooper, Helen, 31 n.26, 89, 108 Copeland, Rita, 162, 167 n.93 Cornelius, Michael G., 108 n.61, 128 Courtenay, William, 5 Crane, Susan, 91, 105 n.51 Cresswell, Tim, 9, 13, 62 n.10, 63 n.16, 78 Crocker, Holly A., 128, 128 n.99 cultural geography (discipline), 8–13, 13–14, 18 Dante, 91, 172–4 Dean, James, 52 Defoe, Daniel, 68 Deleuze, Gilles, 15 n.40 Deleuze, and Félix Guattari, 10–12, 13, 15, 18, 26, 62, 65, 166 Derrida, Jacques, 43, 168 n.94 Dialogue of Saint Catherine of Siena, 83–4 Dinshaw, Carolyn, 132, 156, 171 Domesday Book, 53 Douglass, Rebecca M., 16 Dunbar, William, 36, 37, 46 n.75 Duns Scotus, John, 5 Dyas, Dee, 23 n.6, 51 n.81, 52 Dyer, Christopher, 35, 114–5 ecocriticism (discipline), 13–17 Edward II, 109 Edward, the Black Prince, 55, 56, 83 Edward the Martyr, 152, 160 Erasmus, 56 n.92, 153 Evans, Ruth, 28 n.21, 31 n.28, 32 n.29, 59 n.1, 64, 98 n.33, 144 n.41, 166

fabliau, 115, 127–9 Farrell, Thomas J., 114 n.74, 128 Finlayson, John, 89 n.4 fire (element), 120–1 fitz Stephen, William, 17, 25, 26, 157 Galen, 97, 120, 176, 177 gender identity, 6, 109–10, 128, 132–9, 168–72, 181–2 Geoffrey of Monmouth, 80, 81, 98 n.32 Georgianna, Linda, 133, 133 n.9, 137 n.18, 139, 142 n.36, 153 Ginsberg, Warren, 174 Gogmagog, 80–2 Goodland, Katharine, 158 n.67 Gower, John, 4, 17, 26–7, 42 n.60, 56, 78 Grennan, Joseph, 37 n.46 Gurney, Sir Thomas, 109 Hanawalt, Barbara, 82 Hanrahan, Michael, 27, 40 n.57 Haraway, Donna, 60 n.5, 65, 182 Harbledown (town), 19, 48, 50, 52, 55–7, 62, 74 n.50, 83, 84 Harvey, David, 13 Harwood, Britton J., 37 n.47, 38 Hawkins, William, 64 Hearne, Thomas, 71, 72 Henry IV, 38 Henry V, 71 n.44 Henry VI, 38, 44 n.70, 72, 77–8, 80, 81 Herbert of Bosham, 156 Higden, Ranulf, 152 Hildegard of Bingen, 178 Hippocrates, 97 Holley, Linda Tarte, 107 Horkheimer, Max, 71 Howarth, William, 15 humoral theory, 97, 102, 120, 141, 158, 176–81 hybridity; see also simultaneity, 19, 20, 60, 63–5, 81, 85, 86, 140–1, 159–60, 174 identity (performance of); see also gender identity 133–9, 155 Ingold, Tim, 103 Instagram, 183 Isidore of Seville, 178 Jackson, John Brinkerhoff, 9 Jean d’Arras, 113 Jerome, St, 169, 170

John XXI (Pope), 147 Joseph, Gerhard, 129 Kellogg, Alfred L., 132 Kempe, Margery, 2, 159–60, 166 Kingsolver, Barbara, 16 Kirk, Elizabeth D., 135 Knapp, Peggy, 39, 44 Knight, Kimberley-Joy, 159 Kolve, V. A., 93 Kristeva, Julia, 138 n.20 Langland, William, 30 Latour, Bruno, 14–15, 61, 88 Lefebvre, Henri, 28 Legend of Lucretia, 113 liminal; liminality, 49, 51, 56, 81, 87, 143, 165-6 liquid; liquidity, 4, 8, 11, 13–15, 26, 39, 56, 65–6, 81–2, 97–8, 105–6, 112–14, 119–22, 143, 151, 156–9 Lochrie, Karma, 106 n.53, 114 n.74 London (city), 17, 18–19, 21, 24–30, 31– 4, 36, 40, 42–3, 45–6, 50, 86 London Bridge, 63–4, 66, 74–84 Lull, Ramón, 94 Lydgate, John, 77–8, 78 n.63, 104 n.44 Macauley, David, 112, 114 n.73, 118, 143 n.37 Malo, Robin, 154 Mandeville, Sir John, 2, 42 n.61 Marx, Karl, 29, 37–8, 52 Mary, St (The Virgin), 157–8, 159 n.69, 179–80 McKinley, Kathryn, 131 n.1, 132, 133 n.11, 150 Medway, River, 55, 67, 70–3 Mentz, Steve, 66 Miller, Sarah Alison, 19 n.50, 98 Mitchell, J. Allan, 140 monsters; monstrosity, 80–1, 97–8, 137, 140–2, 150, 162, 173 Monviso (mountain), 173–5, 181 Morgan, Peter, 54 Morte Arthure, 2, 3 Morton, Timothy, 65 motherhood; see also womb, 2, 111, 114, 146, 158–9, 178–80 Neimanis, Astrida, 66 new materialism, 14–15 new mobilities paradigm, 9–12, 13–14,

Index  207 184 New Troy, 17, 80 nomadism; see Deleuze and Guattari Norden, John, 64 Normandin, Shawn, 140 pageant; pageantry, 19, 24, 27, 77–83 Paine, Lincoln, 112 n.72 Paris (city), 63, 77, 153 Paris Condemnations of 1277, 147–9 Paster, Gail Kern, 177 n.113 Patterson, Lee, 37, 43–4, 89, 90, 92 n.15, 101, 102, 104, 106, 137 n.18, 183, 184 Pearl Poet, 16, 135 Peter, St, 111, 115, 143 n.38, 154, Petrarch, Francesco, 132, 160–8, 170 n.101, 172, 173–4, 181 Piers Plowman; see Langland, William Plato, 44, 93 Plutarch, 177 Po, River, 20, 173–5, 178, 180–2 queer; queering, 20, 106, 109–10, 118, 129, 132, 140, 154, 162, 167-8 quiting, 89–90, 106, 110, 118, 121, 124– 6, 128–9 Raybin, David, 27 relics, 151-6 Relph, Edward, 9 rhizome; see Deleuze and Guattari Richard II, 26, 70 Richard of Bury, 169, 170 Richard Coer de Lyon, 2 roads, 4, 19, 28, 32, 59–60, 63–5, 87, 98–9, 165–6, 168 Robertson, Kellie, 87 n.86 Robertson, W. A. Scott, 54 Rochester (town), 19, 54–5, 61, 85 Rochester Bridge, 19, 66–74 Rodriguez, Joseph, 78 n.64, 81 Rothauser, Britt C. L., 17 Rowland, Beryl, 122 Rudd, Gillian, 16 n.46, 17, 85 n.83, 124 n.92 Schleusner, Jay, 137 n.18 Schwebel, Leah, 132, 168 n.96, 172 n.103 Sedlak, David, 112 Shakespeare, William, 55 n.90, 113 Sheller, Mimi, 9, 184 Shimomura, Sachi, 91, 104, 164 n.81

208  Index Shutters, Lynn, 139, 150 simultaneity; see also hybridity, 65-6, 74, 84, 137-9, 145-6, 155-6 Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, 2, 95, 103, 105 Sittingbourne (town), 53–4 Smith, James, 8 n.17, 73 Sobecki, Sebastian, 17 Southwark (London district), 19, 34, 40, 46, 49–50, 56 Spade, Paul Vincent, 5 Spufford, Peter, 28 The Squire of Low Degree, 105 Stanbury, Sarah, 17 n.49, 86 stone, 8, 41, 55, 65, 68, 73, 84, 97, 103, 110–12, 118, 157, 175 Strohm, Paul, 24, 31 n.28, 32 n.30 Stull, Scott, 114 Sutton, John, 177 Swythun, St, 152 Tempier, Étienne, 147, 148, 149 Thames, River, 26–7, 56, 83, 181 Thiofrid of Echternach, 154–5 Thomas of Walsingham, 68 Thómas Saga Erkibyskups, 157 Thoreau, Henry David, 16 Thrupp, Sylvia, 28, 36 n.43 tourism, 51, 53–4 translate (in space), 20, 151–4, 156, 175, 182

translation (textual); see also authorship, 20, 160–72, 175, 182 Turner, Marion, 35, 40, 45 n.73, 46 Turner, Victor, 87, 165 Turner, Wendy, 43 Twomey, Michael, 114 Urry, John, 9, 13–4, 184 van Gennep, Arnold, 165 voids; voiding, 20, 147–50, 151, 170, 175, 180 Wallace, David, 20 n.51, 27, 30, 137 n.18, 162, 163, 165, 166 n.90 waste, 11–12, 25, 33, 116, 137–9 water (element); see liquid; liquidity Webb, Sidney and Beatrice, 59 White, Lynn, Jr., 16 n.46, 17 William of Ockham, 5–8, 12–13, 14 William of Perth, 55 womb, 2, 113, 114-6, 158, 172, 179–80 Woods, William, 31 n.28, 122, 127, 149 n.47 Woolgar, Christopher M., 47 Wynnere and Wastoure, 28 n.22, 29, 52 Yevele, Henry, 67, 73, 77 n.57 Zacher, Christian K., 21 Žižek, Slavoj, 160, 164 n.83

CHAUCER STUDIES I II

MUSIC IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER, Nigel Wilkins CHAUCER’S LANGUAGE AND THE PHILOSOPHERS’ TRADITION, J. A. Burnley III ESSAYS ON TROILUS AND CRISEYDE, edited by Mary Salu IV CHAUCER SONGS, Nigel Wilkins V CHAUCER’S BOCCACCIO: Sources of Troilus and the Knight’s and Franklin’s Tales, edited and translated by N.R. Havely VI SYNTAX AND STYLE IN CHAUCER’S POETRY, G. H. Roscow VII CHAUCER’S DREAM POETRY: Sources and Analogues, edited by B. A. Windeatt VIII CHAUCER AND PAGAN ANTIQUITY, Alastair Minnis IX CHAUCER AND THE POEMS OF ‘CH’ in University of Pennsylvania MS French 15, edited by James I. Wimsatt X CHAUCER AND THE IMAGINARY WORLD OF FAME, Piero Boitani XI INTRODUCTION TO CHAUCERIAN ENGLISH, Arthur O. Sandved XII CHAUCER AND THE EARLY WRITINGS OF BOCCACCIO, David Wallace XIII CHAUCER’S NARRATORS, David Lawton XIV CHAUCER: COMPLAINT AND NARRATIVE, W. A. Davenport XV CHAUCER’S RELIGIOUS TALES, edited by C. David Benson and Elizabeth Robertson XVI EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY MODERNIZATIONS FROM THE CANTERBURY TALES, edited by Betsy Bowden XVII THE MANUSCRIPTS OF THE CANTERBURY TALES, Charles A. Owen Jr XVIII CHAUCER’S BOECE AND THE MEDIEVAL TRADITION OF BOETHIUS, edited by A. J. Minnis XIX THE AUTHORSHIP OF THE EQUATORIE OF THE PLANETIS, Kari Anne Rand Schmidt XX CHAUCERIAN REALISM, Robert Myles XXI CHAUCER ON LOVE, KNOWLEDGE AND SIGHT, Norman Klassen XXII CONQUERING THE REIGN OF FEMENY: GENDER AND GENRE IN CHAUCER’S ROMANCE, Angela Jane Weisl XXIII CHAUCER’S APPROACH TO GENDER IN THE CANTERBURY TALES, Anne Laskaya XXIV CHAUCERIAN TRAGEDY, Henry Ansgar Kelly XXV MASCULINITIES IN CHAUCER: Approaches to Maleness in the Canterbury Tales and Troilus and Criseyde, edited by Peter G. Beidler XXVI CHAUCER AND COSTUME: The Secular Pilgrims in the General Prologue, Laura F. Hodges XXVII CHAUCER’S PHILOSOPHICAL VISIONS, Kathryn L. Lynch XXVIII SOURCES AND ANALOGUES OF THE CANTERBURY TALES [I], edited by Robert M. Correale wtih Mary Hamel

XIX XXX XXXI XXXII XXXIII XXXIV XXXV XXXVI XXXVII XXXVIII XXXIX XL XLI XLII XLIII XLIV XLV

THE MANUSCRIPT GLOSSES TO THE ‘CANTERBURY TALES’, Stephen Partridge FEMINIZING CHAUCER, Jill Mann NEW READINGS OF CHAUCER’S POETRY, edited by Robert G. Benson and Susan J. Ridyard THE LANGUAGE OF THE CHAUCER TRADITION, Simon Horobin ETHICS AND EXEMPLARY NARRATIVE IN CHAUCER AND GOWER, J. Allan Mitchell CHAUCER AND CLOTHING: Clerical and Academic Costume in the General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales, Laura F. Hodges SOURCES AND ANALOGUES OF THE CANTERBURY TALES [II], edited by Robert M. Correale with Mary Hamel THE LEGEND OF GOOD WOMEN: CONTEXT AND RECEPTION, edited by Carolyn P. Collette CHAUCER AND THE CITY, edited by Ardis Butterfield MEN AND MASCULINITIES IN CHAUCER’S TROILUS AND CRISEYDE, edited by Tison Pugh and Marcia Smith Marzec IMAGES OF KINGSHIP IN CHAUCER AND HIS RICARDIAN CONTEMPORARIES, Samantha J. Rayner COMEDY IN CHAUCER AND BOCCACCIO, Carol Falvo Heffernan CHAUCER AND PETRARCH, William T. Rossiter CHAUCER AND ARRAY: Patterns of Costume and Fabric Rhetoric in The Canterbury Tales, Troilus and Criseyde and Other Works, Laura F. Hodges CHAUCER AND FAME: Reputation and Reception, edited by Isabel Davis and Catherine Nall CHAUCER’S DECAMERON AND THE ORIGIN OF THE CANTERBURY TALES, Frederick M. Biggs CHAUCER’S BOOK OF THE DUCHESS: Contexts and Interpretations, edited by Jamie C. Fumo

T

SARAH BRECKENRIDGE WRIGHT is an assistant professor of English at Duquesne University. Design: Toni Michelle Cover: Miniature depicting a man who personifies idleness riding a donkey across a bridge, surrounded by boats and bodies in motion. From an early fifteenth-century Book of Hours made in Paris. © The British Library Board, Yates Thompson MS 3, fol. 162r.



Sarah Breckenridge Wright

he Canterbury Tales is a collection of stories told by pilgrims en route to Canterbury; but how does their movement shape the world around them, and how are they shaped by their world? This volume seeks to answer these questions by exploring expressions of mobility in Chaucer’s frame narrative and tales. Combining the theoretical and historical methods of literary analysis with the interpretive tools of cultural geography and ecocriticism, it argues that movement is the medium through which identity is performed in The Canterbury Tales. This unique interdisciplinary approach shows how physical and ideological mobilities shape and are shaped by geographical, ecological, sociopolitical, and gendered identities. As human and more-than-human bodies cross borders and dissolve boundaries, they contribute to a fluid, permeable, and hybrid world that challenges traditional perceptions of boundedness, security, and fixity. By examining this kinesis alongside contexts including medieval bridge building, economics, and biology, this book reveals a rich exchange between word and world. In the end, The Canterbury Tales emerges as an amalgam of lived experience and the poetic imagination that both chronicles and constructs a world in the process of becoming.

Mobility and Identity in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales

Chaucer Studies

Mobility and Identity

Sarah Breckenridge Wright