Marion Turner's Chaucer: A European Life examines the Middle English poet, Geoffrey Chaucer, through the lens of space and movement. Marrying geography and chronology allows Turner to situate Chaucer in terms of a European milieu while not necessarily needing to succumb to the tyranny of strict, normative time. Events repeat, come back in new configurations, influence and reject, resurface, open, and haunt as a life does. Rather than provide detailed summaries of each chapter, especially as this book is over 500 pages, this review will provide a brief précis and discussion of each section of this literary biography. Turner titles these sections "Becoming," "Being," and "Approaching Canterbury." This literary biography is a welcome addition to Chaucer Studies, offering us a portrait of a complicated author, his works, and the ways that both are situated in a global Middle Ages that continues to touch our work and world.
One can place Turner's approach to Chaucer and space in terms of other recent works that invoke space as a guiding hermeneutic. Turner herself cites Gaston Bachelard's poetic and moving The Poetics of Space (1994), as well as Henri LeFebvre's dense and evocative The Production of Space (1991). This literary biography also belongs in a taxonomy that includes such influential works as Barbara Hanawalt's collection, Medieval Practices of Space (2000), and finds its community in more recent works such as Matthew Boyd Goldie's Scribes and Space (2019) or David Wallace's collection, Europe: A Literary History (2016), These works highlight the ways authors and literatures move across spatial boundaries, not bound by traditional national borders, and the ways in which people in the Middle Ages understood themselves and their relation to spaces both personal (the kitchen, for example) and public (the court, for example), and the easy and common overlap between the two. Boundaries are permeable, the inside is the outside, the local is the global; these are all themes that wind their way through Turner's book.
"Becoming" covers the years 1342 to 1373, from Chaucer's birth to his first trip to the Italian peninsula. This section is organized in such a way that the places Chaucer occupies and is touched by grow larger; the marks left by these spaces press deeply. From Vintry Ward to the Great Household, from England to France and Italy, Chaucer becomes a more complex figure the more he is touched by the world. No matter the size of the space, however, Turner emphasizes the multicultural environment in which Chaucer existed. Vintry Ward, a neighborhood that lay along the Thames, exposed Chaucer to the Italian language because of the importing of wine; English, French, and Latin also circulated around the neighborhood. Chaucer's family was in the wine business, and Vintry Ward itself had the most immigrants in London, mainly from Gascony, a major wine import/export center (27).
Chaucer moved into the great household of Elizabeth de Burgh, and the court is a major influential factor in his poetry for the rest of his life, both in terms of attempting to please court bureaucracy and, eventually, rejecting its rigidity. Turner's use of space moves Chaucer from center to periphery, and this movement coincides with the jobs he takes. Chaucer is always somehow connected to court life; he has various functions in his career, such as diplomat and controller of Customs at the Wool Quay. He will be a "desk-based forester" for North Petherton in Somerset (417), as well as clerk of the King's works (where he is robbed). These spatial changes lead to poetic changes. For example, his early works, such as the Parliament of Foules or Troilus and Criseyde are court-based; the voice in these poems is described by Turner as seeking out royal favor. As he moves further from the center of London, the space of his works changes, hierarchies become less important, and the global becomes the main concern. All of these appointments indicate the ways Chaucer moved, from the center of London to the forest, from the royal courts of the Dream poems to the anti-hierarchical roads of TheCanterbury Tales. This is another thread that Turner pursues successfully throughout her biography.
Perhaps one of the more amusing moments that Turner discusses is Chaucer's first appearance in documentation. In this life-record, Chaucer is described as wearing "short tunics and long, two-coloured leggings or tights, laced up together provocatively in such a way as to emphasize the genitals indecently" (48). Turner's editorializing aside, this Chaucer has entered into the sensual world of the court. Literary biography marries the historical record with the literary: thus each chapter of Turner's book traces a similar trajectory. It begins with a wider look at the historical moment, zeroes in on Chaucer and his interaction with it, and ends with an analysis of the works that are influenced by the historical space under discussion. This pattern is a way to tame the various balls that Turner is juggling, and it leaves open the wider world and how it infiltrates the texts. "Becoming" lays the ground work for the sensual world that Chaucer uses in his work and is often lauded for; for example, Turner connects luxury and consumption to the early poem To Rosamunde in which Chaucer "imagines himself as an object of consumption" (65). Or, as we will find later in The Canterbury Tales, the luxury of Theseus or the sumptuous larder of the Franklin.
The next section, "Being," covers the years 1374 to 1386. This is the period of the great bulk of Chaucer's writings. Chaucer wrote the House of Fame, The Parliament of Foules, "The Knight's Tale," Troilus and Criseyde, and the first version of the Legend of Good Women during this time. It is in these years, as Turner notes, that Chaucer invented iambic pentameter. These London texts are where we find Chaucer focused on the issues of subjectivity and its relation to the community. Even though this is Chaucer's least peripatetic period, his works still looked outward toward connections with the world. Turner highlights the ways that Chaucer's spatial movements influence the poetry itself; it is within this block of time that Chaucer is becoming the poet of The Canterbury Tales even though he is thoroughly situated in a local and vibrant London.
Chaucer lived in a fundamentally female world. As Turner demonstrates, the court of Queen Phillipa of Hainault influenced him profoundly in terms of political and poetical connections. The aforementioned Elizabeth de Burgh, Chaucer's first employer, was brought up in Phillipa's household. His wife, Phillipa of Roet, worked for Queen Phillipa, and was more highly ranked than he in Phillipa's court, eventually becoming a lady of the Queen's chamber. Turner points to Hainuyer poets in the employ of Phillipa writing for their Hainault patrons who inspired Chaucer to write in English for his own English patrons, addressing poems to Blanche of Lancaster and Anne of Bohemia. It is in this section, as well, that Turner deals with the ways in which Chaucer is embedded in social circles that are fundamentally female-driven, while at the same time being sued for rape. Turner deals with the most problematic of Chaucer's life records--that of the accusation of raptus by Cecily Champaign--boldly. In the early 1380s, Chaucer raped Cecily Champaign, and she successfully sued him for it. Turner comes out, rightly, on the side of Chaucer committing rape: "almost certainly an accusation of sexual rape" (211), Turner writes. Chaucer's personal dealings are with independent women: his mother Agnes, a landowner; his wife, Phillipa, with her own job and her own money; Chaucer's daughter, Elizabeth, a successful nun, as well as Cecily Champaign, who "sued him, in her own name, and it paid off. She didn't retreat and keep silent out of shame" (212). Though, as Turner notes, Chaucer is not patriarchal in his dealings with women, Turner does an excellent job here to emphasize his own cis-gender, hetero-normative privilege and how easily that privilege can be exploited and abused. This is an important stance to take especially in light of the ways that many white, male medievalists have twisted themselves into pretzels to excuse Chaucer's crime.
The final section of the book, "Approaching Canterbury," begins with 1386 and takes us to the end of Chaucer's life. Turner emphasizes the ways in which Chaucer turns toward the global--in her words, "between the galaxy and the cage/parliament/riot/pub" (238); his concerns are the ways that the human moves through the world. England is a peripheral kingdom, and it is through Chaucer's knowledge begot by travel and books, through exposure to community and language, that his works grapple with what it means to be a part of a larger world, as well as what it means to represent the voices of the world. From Northumbria to India, from Yorkshire to North Africa, from Norfolk to Southeast Asia, Turner proves that Chaucer's works reflect both the understanding that England is not alone in the world, and also that the interactions with the world destabilize any notion of center and periphery or any hierarchical thinking. England is not alone; its history, markets, people, money, literature, and art are bound up with a world beyond its man-made borders.
This is the period in which Chaucer worked singularly on the Canterbury Tales. It is also the period in which he himself lived on the margins, eventually residing in a house on the grounds of Westminster Abbey near or in the garden of the Lady Chapel (492) in his last year. Turner again emphasizes an open Chaucer--so much so that despite Chaucer's bodily death, Turner points out that his work continues to change and inspire. Turner writes that Chaucer is "no longer entombed and monumental, he is an inspiration for diverse writer around the globe" (508). Work done by Candace Barrington and Jonathan Hsy attests to Chaucer's global and trans-chronological reach (see https://globalchaucers.wordpress.com). Despite his many, many faults, Turner invites us to consider the ways that Chaucer moved through the spaces of the medieval world; her book challenges us to reconsider how Chaucer's movements and reach are the seeds for a literature that continues to generate new responses and ways of thinking about our global communities--both then and now.