Editor Helen Fulton’s introduction to this engaging set of wonderful essays is a model for such collections: short, sweet, thoughtful, humane, accessible, present, cogent--a solid, respectful overview of existing scholarship and what this book and its various contributors hope to accomplish in building upon past work. Fulton by no means condemns prior work but explicitly wants to move past a direct “sources and analogues”-style approach. So these essays are indebted in particular to scholars who have sought more cultural than textual comparisons, and they seek further to explore “how Chaucer imagines Italy, not simply as memories of the physical places he visited but as a multifaceted location whose vibrant city life, urban politics and closeness to Latinate culture, both linguistically and intellectually, inspired him to change the angle of his own work” (6).
This book does not say this explicitly, but I believe its focus is something that teachers will very much appreciate as we re-fashion Chaucer for an ever more diverse, in some communities an ever more Latinx, student audience. “Italy,” signaling Latinity, and multilingualism should not be in the background of Chaucer studies, and Chaucer rather should be configured in a broad European (even global) context so that modern bilingual and multilingual readers (themselves often negotiating the complexities of European, Anglo-American, Indigenous, and non-Western consciousness) can further do the work of making Chaucer their own. I believe this book will contribute to the labor of teachers who are engaged in such an important project.
William T. Rossiter begins the collection with essay entitled on “Chaucerian Diplomacy,” reconsidering work done by David Wallace and others concerning Chaucer's Italian influences, as Rossiter explores “the potential benefits of a diplomatic turn in late medieval literary studies” (23). He helpfully and very convincingly argues that we have to understand Chaucer's work, particularly in the Clerk's Tale and the Tale of Melibee, as part of his ongoing engagement with the changing face of diplomacy. Chaucer himself participated in diplomatic missions to Italy, missions themselves that reflect evolutions and changes in the role of the humanist scholar-as-ambassador, which had begun with Petrarch. And just as Petrarch contemplates these issues in his translation of the Griselda story, so too does Chaucer as he examines the relationships among authority, power, wisdom, and diplomacy. Chaucer, in this context, “understood the representation of the role of the humanist diplomat or civic humanist” (30). This solid, convincing study of diplomacy and the role of the ambassador also has implications for periodization, because some of the humanist changes previously associated with the pre-modern era must be backdated to reflect these evolutions and changes in the medieval era.
James Robinson, in another very well-written piece, discusses “The Haunting of Geoffrey Chaucer” where he takes on recent tendencies in Chaucer criticism to focus on empirical data and space, something which can indeed sound a bit dry and overwrought. He doesn't want to be critical of Marian Turner's recent biography of Chaucer, but he very powerfully critiques the premise that one could learn everything important about a writer by applying space theory, which can be “poetically myopic” (49), he wants to engage in an “immaterial” poetic here, focusing on how Chaucer's experience of loss and absence made him “uniquely receptive to the ghostly dynamics of a trecento poetics in the works of Dante and Boccaccio which revolves around a form of textual haunting” (49-50). Some detailed, engaged close reading takes us on a hunt for Guido Cavalcante and then, in Chaucer’s own work, for Dante himself. The second mini-essay offers a similar ghost whispering with the rarely studied Anelida and Arcite, finding more hidden Dante here than was previously thought. I might have asked this author to trim the essay to match its mates in the collection, but the arguments are exciting and sound as we hunt for “present absence” (51) among the poets.
Then Fulton herself contributes a fine essay on Chaucer’s use of the ancient art of “chorography,” a specific type of topography in his description of the Italian peninsula at the start of the Clerk’s Tale. Fulton provides a great overview of the genre in classical historical writers including Ptolemy, Pomponius Mela, Isidore, and then in the British historians Bede and Higden. Chaucer--in following Petrarch’s version of the story that includes the description, by giving it to the Oxford Clerk, and by rearranging the content of the description--provocatively engages his English readers with a number of ideological issues. Employing a phrase of Saskia Sassen, Fulton sees Chaucer making a statement about “the political economy of urban territoriality” (108). That is, Chaucer’s adaptations draw our attention to “the fertility and wealth of the region” (111), with a broader awareness of developed trade route and “the necessary merging and interdependence of country and city as part of the same economic system” reflecting upon the “economic significance of Walter and Griselda’s marriage as a union between a wealthy and powerful man and a poor and disempowered woman” (111). All this would be of interest to the “emergent mercantile gentry of Chaucer’s London,” where “urban values--the values of the market in which all transactions, including marriage, are commodified--can be inspected and social roles interrogated” (113, 112). So “gender politics...class politics” (112) but also issues of labor and exploitation arise from Chaucer’s choice to include (and adapt rhetorically) Petrarch’s chorographic description.
Robert S. Sturges, in an eloquent, beautifully written piece, explores the role of “vision and touch” in Dante and Chaucer. He argues that text such as the Troilus and La Vita Nuova need not have a direct, source relationship but can be seen as “neighbors,” sharing affinities. These texts each connect to Dante's Convivio, and in these comparisons we discern the “sensory aspect of love as each poet understands it” in particular in terms of the “relationship between vision and touch” (123). Sturges takes us into an exciting survey of perception and consciousness in Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, and Aquinas, as adapted by Dante concerning both “the effect that the lover’s glance has on her lover [and] how God is present to the beatified in heaven” (126). Dante transforms Beatrice from an object being looked at to a “medium which allows his direct vision of the divine" (134) in opposition to Troilus’s equally tactile, but nontranscendent, visual embrace of his (bound, earthly, carnal) love.
Andrew James Johnston then looks at the planets, painting, and politics in Italian art history as influences on in Chaucer's Knight’s Tale. Astrological murals and commemorative paintings in Italy flourished in the 14th century, often in commemoration of important battles and to support authoritarian ascendancy to power, as Italian rulers try to substantiate and “celebrate their sense of a rationally organized polity" (150). We learn here of an important astrological set of paintings by the great Giotto, which no longer exist in their original form, and how this genre of astrological painting as a model for political order spread throughout Italy. This informative history of civic art, art theory, and pictorial practice allows us to understand (though not absolutely considering Chaucerian ambiguity) the art that Theseus produces in the Knight's Tale. This argument succeeds because the tale is very much about control, agency, and political power. Chaucer, writes Johnston, “clearly displays and uncanny awareness of different aesthetic styles and their potential for political signification” (163). Tensions between the precise, the mathematically correct, and what is depicted as “vague” and uncertain (in art, politics, and literature) become intriguing questions in the final pages of this rewarding essay.
The uniform excellence of the collection continues with Victoria Flood’s bracing essay on how the House of Fame, particularly in its use of Dante’s Commedia, participates in the larger tradition of contemporary apocalyptic thought, since Chaucer’s poem “has yet to be located by scholars in the broader context of what was a specific engagement with and contemporary circulation of prophetic literature” (169). Flood examines the figure of the “eagle” “whose revelatory and imperialist potential is both invoked and denied by Chaucer” (170). Flood moves from Italy to England and Wales, developing her prior work on English and Welsh prophecy. And in the process, we have a new way of understanding the House of Fame as less about simple literary self-reflection and more in a broader eschatological context. Flood concludes convincingly that Chaucer never concretizes his engagement with prophetic images, maintaining an “extreme diffidence about the future” (186) whether civic or eschatological. “The influence of imperial prophesy...[w]e find it everywhere,” says Flood, “except in Chaucer” (186) preserving our traditional sense of The House of Fame as ambiguously finessing authoritative conclusions. Highlights here include (among other sources) a look at the ever-amazing Calabrian monk Joachim of Fiore, the tale of the Holy Oil of St. Thomas, and Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Prophetiae.
Leah Schwebel, in a delightfully suspenseful essay, then takes up an old crux in Chaucer's Monk’s Tale, where a character named Trophee is cited as an authority on the adventures of Hercules. Scholars conclude that Chaucer got confused in reading his source and thought that this was some named figure who was telling the story rather than simply a word that means “pillar.” Schwebel offers a “new explanation...[that] does not take as its premise the poet's erroneous translation or memory of a Latin passage” (195). Chaucer knew what he was talking about and he meant a “Triumph” in the sense of a worthy monument to a great victory in the context of the Roman practice--associated with Hercules in fact--of commemorating permanently a transient military achievement--lest it fade from memory too quickly. Chaucer is here flexing his poetic powers of immortalization by celebrating, with full knowledge of what the word meant, the triumphs of Hercules. Therefore, this character Trophee--capitalized and allegorized or personified or what you will-- is “literally, a monument of Triumph...[and] is in this regard, a perfect synecdoche for the tale as a whole, which provides a more permanent form to narratives of fleeting Fortune, as well as a pointed reminder that Fame is the domain of the poet” (209).
Teresa A. Kennedy closes the excellent volume with a study of Chaucer’s journey from imitation to invention in his (ever skeptical, doubt filled) composition of the House of Fame and later Fragment VII of the Canterbury Tales, “the fragment most concerned with language” (227). She makes VII so exciting with such themes as the “problems of comprehension,” the “futility of counsel” (229), the “stability of textual authority” (230), how “conflicting authorities and interpretations contribute to...chaos” (231), and with questions about the “capacity for external referentiality in the fallen world” (232). Kennedy trace a dramatic evolution in Chaucer’s work as a reader and interpreter, as he attempts early to translate his reading “into his own ‘authoritative’ vernacular project” (217), while finally in the Canterbury Tales gaining “control over his own sense of his agency as an author,” when he becomes a “rhetorical innovator” (226). In the NPT Chaucer creates a fascinating Augustinian microcosm, a wayward “city of man,” allowing Kennedy to end the essay with a memorable emblem of Chaucerian doubt: “human beings are like chickens in the theater of eternity” as “Chaucer provides a parodic resolution to the question of the power of language to assert truth by illustrating its limitations to aspire to certainty” (234). A somewhat scant index and hearty bibliography round out this humane, scholarly, accessible, and deeply genuine set of essays.