Chaucer was a city man--born in London and employed there for most of his life. Nevertheless, he writes very little about London per se and, although cities provide settings for some of his poems, he does not seem overly interested in urban culture. This disjunction is the backdrop for Ardis Butterfield's edited collection of essays Chaucer and the City which tackles the subject from four general perspectives and addresses as many topics as there are contributors. About half of the twelve essays are revisions of papers read at the 2002 First London Chaucer Conference; the remaining essays were written especially for this collection.
The first section of the collection ("Locations") is, to my mind, the least convincing because 1) some of the essays' use mundane observations to come to ingenious conclusions and 2) the essays invoke various theories in order to support the existence of Chaucer's interest in the city, something all writers agree is hard to detect. For example, Marion Turner argues that London was not homogeneous but full of antagonisms and conflict. That cities are socially diverse and contentious places will be apparent to anyone who has lived in one. That medieval cities were no different in this regard (albeit to different degrees and for different reasons) is an idea that even Lewis Mumford (a self-described "generalist" who was himself inclined to accept the idea of medieval homogeneity) wrote about in The City in History (1961). So unity and homogeneity act as straw men in Turner's essay and, not surprisingly, are easily overcome because "an understanding of the incoherence and diversity of contemporary London at once enables us to recognise the presence--even the prevalence--of the city in Chaucer's writings" (28). Ruth Evans's essay also stresses London's disunity and uses the work of Lefebvre, Ranciere, and Agamben to "evoke and analyse some of the social spaces, orders and topologies of the medieval city" (44) and argue that Chaucer's "poetry [is] not about, but of, the city" (44). Evans use of accounts from the Historia Mirabilis Parliamenti to illustrate "how medieval urban space is imagined and produced" (46) is only loosely connected to Chaucer or his works but serves (insufficiently I think) to highlight Evans's understanding of medieval space. When Evans does focus on Chaucer's works she shifts her discussion to politics rather than space but ends by insisting that "in Chaucer's poetry the medieval city is a powerful virtual presence" (56). The last essay in this section, by Barbara Nolan, focuses on how Troilus and Criseyde uses Trojan space and especially dwellings. Of the three essays in this section, this essay is the hardest to connect with the greater project of this collection, perhaps because Nolan focuses so much on individual dwelling and devotes too much of her essay to following the plot of the poem.
The second section of the collection ("Communities") also takes a liberal view of the headword's meaning but benefits from being grounded in London's words and institutions. Like the preceding group of essays, Christopher Cannon's essay also founders a bit on the rocky paradox of finding the presence of the city in its absence from Chaucer's writing "with the result that urbanity, for him [Chaucer], was to be found in evocations of what the city was not " (82). However, the attention Cannon pays to Chaucer's use of specific London words and "craft sounds" in the Canon's Yeoman's Tale brings this essay to shore. Cannon then artfully connects this special craft vocabulary to the exclusive and inclusive work it performs within its specific craft community and thereby to what Cannon calls Chaucer's "liberal" "idea of the city" (94). Derek Pearsall finds community in an essay that provocatively proposes an all-male, non-courtly, over- the-hill and urban audience for Chaucer's last work, the Canterbury Tales . Who else, Pearsall asks, would appreciate the way Chaucer makes love seem so ridiculous or the inexplicable "gibe[s] at sex and women and marriage" (101)? It is an interesting question but, except in passing, Pearsall avoids addressing the sense some very perceptive readers (notably Jill Mann) have that many of the Canterbury Tales illustrate Chaucer's sympathetic attitude toward women. Helen Cooper's essay develops some of the same ideas as Pearsall by asking readers to think about the possibility that Chaucer competed in literary contests held in confraternaties or puys , and shows how the contest set up in the General Prologue reflects the organization of similar contests in puys . A big obstacle here is that puys were uncommon in England and there is no evidence that any existed there during Chaucer's lifetime. Still, this essay raises interesting questions about Chaucer's audience and reminds us of how different the Canterbury Tales is from the lyric verse that was popular in puys .
Section three ("Institutions") also benefits from a degree of concreteness associated with the word institutions. David Benson devotes most of his essay to the Cook's Tale and a bit to the Canon's Yeoman's Tale which he claims reveal "the benefits, in fiction if not in life, of the outrageous and disruptive" (130) found in "an underworld of immorality, fraud, misrule, and other threats to decency and the good order of the city" (129). As in other essays in the collection, Benson mines the public records such as London's Letter Books and the Plea and Memoranda Rolls to illustrate "Chaucer's knowledge of London and London life..." (137) and argues that "they provide another context for [The Canterbury Tales's ] contesting voices" (139). Indeed, Benson argues that "the format of these city records is echoed in the very arrangement of the Canterbury Tales " (139). Elliot Kendall uses the idea of the city to explore the competition and intersection of aristocratic and merchant interests in The Shipman's Tale . Being well-grounded in historical research, Kendall convincingly shows how Chaucer used The Shipman's Tale to show how in fourteenth-century urban culture, the traditional lines between commercialism (as seen in the merchant) and non-commercialism (as seen in the monk) become blurred when the merchant acts with some degree of largesse and the monk violates the spirit, if not the letter, of "trouthe" in his affair with the merchant's wife. In the last essay in this section, John Scattergood argues that Chaucer's Complaint to his Purse reflects the rise of a money-based economy and that we should accept Skeat's interpretation of line 17 ("Out of this toune helpe me thurgh your myght") that Chaucer's financial straits made him wish to retire from London to a cheaper, less threatening place.
The final section of this collection ("Afterlives") examines how Restoration and Victorian readers responded to Chaucer. Paul Davis's essay, which focuses on Dryden and Pope, begins by showing that the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries generally saw Chaucer as a poet of the country. But, in an interesting reading of Dryden's Introduction to the Fables Ancient and Modern , Davis argues that Dryden, who was himself barred from the city late in his career, used Chaucer to soften the anti-city position he took in his satires. Unlike Dryden who, according to Davis, embraced change and thus the city, Pope feared change and the evanescence associated with the city, and we can see this see in his translation of the House of Fame as well as his own Dunciad which, Davis argues, "was designed to obviate that fear" (191). By contrast, the early Victorian reaction to Chaucer depicted by Helen Phillips at first seems strikingly simple: Chaucer, the poet of nature, appealed to the industrialized and mechanized city folk of nineteenth-century England. But Phillips points out that this perception was based on an erroneous view established by a Chaucer canon that had been augmented with many apocryphal works that showed "the author" communing with nature. Later in the nineteenth century views of Chaucer changed as city life improved or writers came to appreciate the nitty-gritty aspects of urban life. Phillips does a good job of tracing the trajectory of Chaucer's reputation over the course of the century.
That Chaucer's work should have something to say about cities seems logical given his urban background. The task for people writing about this influence is locating it and then interpreting its role in his work and for his readers. Ardis Butterfield attempts to set up these issues in her introduction to the collection but her reliance on Walter Benjamin and Michel de Certeau is not especially helpful. Indeed, I believe that Butterfield's own insights into Chaucer and city culture would provide an adequately convincing rationale for the collection. As literary critics, we too often feel compelled to attach our work to an important name or theory as a form of legitimation. The most successful essays in this collection do not respond to that call but move surely and swiftly to thought-provoking conclusions.