In a profoundly dense yet immensely rewarding book, David Wallace ranges widely among types of criticism -- political, economic, philological, feminist, and new historicist -- in assessing anew the relationship between Chaucer and his Italian antecedents. Wallace doesn't pretend to have uttered the last word on these connections: indeed, as the heft of his book makes clear, the task of reading Chaucer in light of Petrarch and Boccaccio is complex and consuming. Wallace's bona fides for the task include two previous books on Boccaccio and a host of articles on the relationships between Italian and English medieval literature. His immersion in these materials results in a frame of reference that challenges, even dazzles, the reader. His most pressing concerns -- to read medieval texts in their political context, to deconstruct the divide between medieval and Renaissance, and to reread the humanist project -- leads to an argument at once historicist, feminist, and literary about how fully Chaucer's poetry responds to English and Trecento politics and culture.
The first chapter, "Chaucer in Florence and Lombardy," establishes Wallace's rationale for his book: Chaucer the diplomat, first in Florence in 1373 and then in Milan (Lombardy) in 1378, encounters Florentine associational polity -- rule by committee -- and Milanese absolutist government -- rule by the Visconti. A literary figure exemplifies each city and its attendant polity: Boccaccio and his brigata exemplify Florentine association, while Petrarch and humanism flourish under Lombard despots. Chaucer's poetry, including the Canterbury Tales and the Legend of Good Women, reveals his refiguration of these polities' conflicts. Furthermore, Chaucer stages these political formulae in ways particularly apt for an English audience experiencing its own upheavals under the tyrannical rule of Richard II.
In Chapter 2, "The General Prologue and the Anatomy of Associational Form," Wallace looks at the numbers of associational forms operating, in various configurations, in medieval England, including universitates, guilds, and confraternities, and sees them as providing a "basic grammar of group behavior" (66) for Chaucer's pilgrims. The relationship between the Host and the pilgrims represents the larger social conflicts between associational and absolutist forms of government, and the proof of the importance of these conflicts lies in the number of terms used for these associations ( felaweshipe, compagnye, communitas) and their deployment by Augustine, Innocent IV, and Moerbeke in his translation of Aristotle's Politics. Wallace sees Chaucer's pilgrims reflecting guild thinking, "the self- constituting dynamics of associational form" (65), in their "company," while he also posits Chaucer's own doubts about such "difficult, precarious" (79) forms, paralleling "misgivings about the ethical value" (81) of his own literary, vernacular project, the Tales. Chaucer's "writing ambitions of European magnitude" (81) -- the way his first authorial signature in the General Prologue as "sixth of six" alludes to the figure's use by Jean de Meun, Dante, and Boccaccio -- paradoxically and wittily suggests Chaucer as the Wife of Bath's putative sixth husband. This apparent affection for the Wife (on both Chaucer's and Wallace's parts) characterizes Chaucer's care with female eloquence, which Wallace demonstrates in a number of the tales as well as, most emphatically, the Tale of Melibee, fully explored in Chapter 8.
The third chapter, "'From Every Shires Ende': English Guilds and Chaucer's Compagnye," moves from the crown's 1388 demand for guild registry, the result of which is a treasure- trove of late fourteenth-century English political associations called the "guild returns of 1389," to the elimination of guilds, confraternities and chantries ordered by Henry VIII in 1547. Wallace contrasts Chaucer's recognition of the difficulties inherent in associational polity with the Florentine Boccaccio's brigata, its "wide range of social voices . . . mediated through the univocal narration of one social class and a single, homogenized literary form -- the nobility and the novella" (103). As Henry VIII's regime eliminated the guilds, so sixteenth-century English literary tastes rejected the multi-voiced Canterbury Tales, using the term 'Canterbury Tale' "as a term of opprobrium" (102).
Chapter 4, "'No Felaweshipe': Thesian Polity" analyzes the Knight's Tale not only in light of the Teseida -- the expected Italian connection -- but also as refigured in Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream. This chapter fully engages Wallace's three main directions in the book: situating the disquisition on tyranny inside Italian sources, forging sight lines to the Renaissance, and assessing the gender politics of women's speech. The payoff in this chapter is especially spectacular as Wallace, who has already convincingly related Chaucer's interest in "felaweship" to guilds and confraternities, sees Chaucer as Bottom the Weaver in Midsummer Night's Dream. The subtlety of the move -- its humor as well as its suggestiveness -- is belied by my brief description. Suffice it to say that, when the chapter's last pages return briefly to Alisoun of Bath (another weaver), the reader feels the nuances of Wallace's project.
In Chapter 5, "Powers of the Countryside," Wallace examines the interdependence of city and countryside evident in the Miller's Tale, the Reeve's Tale, and a number of stories in the Decameron, contrasting Chaucer's recognition of economic interdependence with Boccaccio's picture of characterological opposition. Wallace evaluates Fragment 3 (Wife of Bath, Friar, Summoner) in light of this opposition, not only examining the tales in the context of the Decameron but even providing charts of relationships observed in two novelle (1.1, 4.2). The charts signal how complex and wide ranging this chapter is. It is apparent that, for Wallace, Chaucer and Boccaccio must be read together in order to see how Boccaccio's derision of the countryside contrasts with Chaucer's recognition of the English countryside's power, especially in the wake of the Rising of 1381: "The countryside proves capable of saving itself" (154).
Chapter 6, "Absent City," elaborates the theme of associational polity in the organic, self-regulated city, again contrasting Florence and London, Boccaccio and Chaucer. Decameron 6.2 ties the personal bonds of the feudal to the associational bonds of the guild in "a ceaseless movement back and forth across city space" (166). Chaucer's Cook, in contrast, shows the "limits of associational ideology" in his identification with Flanders (the subject of Wallace's New Chaucer Society plenary address in July 1996) and embodies the dangers associated with his tale's meynee. Chaucer's poetry, as in the Canon Yeoman's embodiment of betrayal, responds to the fear of association outlined in late fourteenth-century mayoral proclamations and guildhall court cases. The picture these sources paint explains the inability of Chaucer's poetry to formulate a successful associational polity, while simultaneously pointing out how Chaucer's motifs both reveal and silence "the recent history of the city" (181), that is, the Rising of 1381.
In Chapter 7, "'Deyntee to Chaffare': Men of Law, Merchants, and the Constance Story," Wallace reads the Man of Law's Tale through London mercantile interests and "the impact of merchant capital on the political order" (190), using the frescoes of Florence's Dominican chapter house of Santa Maria Novella (the place where Boccaccio's brigata gathers, Wallace reminds us) to investigate the links among capital, science, law, and theology. The frescoes depict Aquinas, whose writings legitimate mercantile profit. The "tensions" between "commercial and religious obligations" (198) bring Wallace to a brief consideration of Piers Plowman, noting both poets' understanding of the "commensurate" (202) nature of legal pleading and poetry (here Wallace could have benefited from a reading of Kathy Eden's Poetic and Legal Fiction in the Aristotelian Tradition, Princeton UP, 1986) before he turns to Decameron 5.2, Boccaccio's version of the Constance story. Gostanza's position as worker within a female community challenges the way commercial forces treat gender in the continuing narrative of capitalism. It is an attractive thesis, again contrasting the English and the Italian, but perhaps moving too quickly to convince (and further considerations of class could amplify the last parts of the argument).
Chapter 8, "Household Rhetoric: Violence and Eloquence in the Tale of Melibee", and Chapter 9, "After Eloquence: Chaucer in the House of Apollo," complement each other, the first analyzing the effects of female counsel as emblematic of associational polity, the second using the Manciple's Tale in tandem with a deconstruction of Petrarchism to demonstrate the continuity between humanism and tyranny. As Wallace began the book contrasting Florentine, Boccaccian, associational polity with Milanese, Petrarchan, absolutist rule, so these two chapters rely on that contrast and deepen it. Wallace's work on Melibee will be the book's most influential chapter and, while profiting from previous chapters' exposition of the contrast, can stand on its own as a powerful and useful reading for the classroom. Chapter 9's reading of the Manciple's Tale uses the Dantean and Ovidian sources for Apollo's wrath to situate Apollo's violence against his wife within the expected frame of Lombard despots and the unexpected, yet compelling, frame of Ricardian court politics. The poet's place within this circle of violence and fear first invokes Gower -- a survivor, like Chaucer -- and then invokes Thomas Usk, who suffered the fate of Apollo's dead wife. The poet's precarious position mirrors the outspoken wife's, and only the endless play of literary pretense can save either one.
In Chapter 10, "'Whan She Translated Was': Humanism, Tyranny, and the Petrarchan Academy," Wallace takes on the Griselda story as figured by Boccaccio in Decameron 10.10 and Chaucer in the Clerk's Tale, along with Petrarch's reading of Boccaccio's story as "a timeless exemplum of obedience to God" (282). Wallace sees Petrarch's fame as resting on his having elided slavery and tyranny by escaping history -- and Wallace will have none of it. Wallace removes the humanist ornament from the despotic elements of the Tale and anatomizes why humanism, and Petrarch, would take pains to mythologize the story. Such a reading owes less to fashion than to careful research into Italian politics, particularly the despotic Viscontis. Along with Boccaccio's critique of Petrarch, this chapter brings the Big Three -- Chaucer, Petrarch, and Boccaccio -- to focus on the Clerk's Tale and its vision of tyranny. Chaucer understands "this complex of humanistic vision, religious mystification, and tyrannous power" (286) and answers it with the comedy of the Merchant's Tale, the story of a Lombard knight, January, who gets his.
The last two chapters of the book, "All That Fall: Chaucer's Monk and 'Every Myghty Man'" and "Legends and Lives of Good Women," treat in sequence the Monk's de casibus tragedies, noting especially the destabilizing effect of the up-to-the-minute news of Bernabo Visconti's death, and the Legend of Good Women. The context of Lombard despotism pays off in a comparison between the Monk's Tale and Petrarch's De viris illustribus, wherein illustrious men are "men of action, statesmen, and military commanders; physicians, poets, and philosophers are not included" (301). Boccaccio's De casibus virorum illustrium, on the other hand, recognizes "'the sweat of the people that makes royal honor shine'"(304) and invokes Dante; Chaucer's work "within the mixed compagnye of Canterbury pilgrims" (334) responds more to Boccaccio than to Petrarch. The de casibus tradition parallels the poet's literary afterlife with the despot's, and the case of Richard II suggests both "fallen princes and ruined texts" (334). Chapter 12's reading of the Legend of Good Women substantiates the courtly, political, and literary lesson of "saying the right thing at the right time as the most crucial principle of household or courtly rhetoric" (351) and situates the Legend within a biography of Anne of Bohemia. Alceste's defense of Chaucer before the God of Love becomes a setpiece of wifely eloquence and a prelude to Anne's death and Richard's deposition. In both of these chapters the specters of Richard and Anne haunt the proceedings as Wallace outlines the subtle ways the state is affected by fiction, legend, and wifely counsel -- or the lack thereof.
The book's conclusion takes a theme Wallace has warmed to previously -- the sight lines from Chaucer to Shakespeare -- and reads the two Henry IV plays as memorializing fifteenth-century English associational forms in the Boar's Head tavern while recognizing the relentless march of Hal's emerging absolutist polity over the heads of an Oldcastle/Falstaff. Finally, using these same sight lines, Wallace reads the beheading of Anne Boleyn as a signal failure of the wifely counsel on which Chaucer's texts, and Chaucer's era, had so heavily relied.
Wallace's suggestive readings of Shakespeare by means of Chaucer's texts,which are themselves read in terms of their associational forms -- guilds, taverns, pilgrimages, the stuff that underpins the imagination of Tales, stage, and polity -- not only mark a welcome shift in scholarship, but can reinvigorate teaching: these arguments seem designed for the literature survey class where Chaucer and Shakespeare deservedly loom large. What Wallace might do, were he to treat Bernabo Visconti's relation to Macbeth, or read Coriolanus through Melibee, or anatomize the household rhetors Paulina (in Winter's Tale) or Isabella in Measure for Measure, can only be ardently wished for on the strength of Chaucerian Polity. The "systematic alienation from local custom and familiar modes of social relationship . . . pioneered . . . by those despotic regimes of northern Italy that sponsored Petrarch's eloquent expressions of self-estrangement" (380) didn't end with Shakespeare, but continues to regulate and stymie our own culture's vocabulary of association, replaced, in the apotheosis of humanism, with despotic individualism, the final blow against Chaucer's compagnye. Wallace's Chaucerian Polity provides not only a wide-ranging, up to the moment, provocative assessment of the relationship among Chaucer, Boccaccio, and Petrarch, but gives the reader a tantalizing, productive reformulation of the legacy of humanism.