Social Chaucer

"I wanted one of my five choices to be a book of literary criticism. It was quite hard to choose which one, because there are so many great ones. This is one I first read when I was an undergraduate. Back then, when it was a very new book, it really radically changed how I thought not only about Chaucer but about what’s possible in modes of historical literary criticism. Paul Strohm talks about the idea of “a mixed commonwealth of style.” He argues that that Chaucer, instead of talking directly about class conflict, displaces it onto the level of genre. He shows us this, for instance, in the romance- fabliaux conflict between the knight and the miller. Strohm makes the point that the poly-vocality, the multiple voices of the Canterbury Tales is itself a political statement. By having this mixed commonwealth—by simply allowing this heterogeneity—that is itself political. You don’t have to be saying as an author what you think about that; simply having those voices is political. That’s really important. “Feudal time is church time: in it, time is endless, and your relationships in time are always the same” He has another chapter called ‘Time and the social implications of narrative form’ in which he juxtaposes the idea of feudal time and merchant’s time. Feudal time is church time: in it, time is endless, and your relationships in time are always the same. You have the same relationship with your lord as your father had with your lord’s father, and that your grandfather had with your lord’s grandfather. These things will never change. It’s the idea that that we are all put into a place, and that time moves on in this unchanging way—as opposed to merchant’s time, or mercantile time, where we make transactions. We make our own opportunities. Things change all the time; everything can be bought or sold. There are all kinds of problems with living in that way, but we don’t have to live in the same way as our ancestors lived. We can live in a world of happenstance and chance where we take advantage of opportunities, and we can rush through time. We can do different things. He shows how different genres are appealing to those different kinds of ideas of time, and how narrative is implicated within that. That’s not just relevant for thinking about Chaucer: it’s relevant for thinking about social change across the Long Middle Ages, and much later; those different kinds of models of existence have an ongoing relevance. For me, I think if people were thinking about reading books of literary criticism, I would say that’s a really excellent one to start with. If I could just mention a few more, Chaucer’s Sexual Poetics by Carolyn Dinshaw was another one that really changed how I thought about Chaucer. It came out at the same kind of time as Social Chaucer— now about 30 years ago, but it is still very influential and field-changing. Dinshaw talks in particular about models of reading as gendered across time: the idea that men are expected to be readers and interpreters and women are used as metaphors for the text. They are things to be interpreted. And Dinshaw shows how even many 20th century critics were still using that kind of language and imagery. Chaucerian Polity by David Wallace, which very much focuses on the Italian political and literary context as well as on Chaucer’s texts, is also a very important book in thinking about the different kinds of literary and political social models that Chaucer would have experienced when he went to Italy and saw both a tyrannical state and oligarchic city-states. And he engaged with different kinds of Italian literature, which are implicated in those different social and political constructs as well. Wallace focuses on Italian contexts in the round—literary, political, artistic—and his work was also field-changing for Chaucer studies, and deeply influential on me personally. In terms of thinking about my own biography of Chaucer, when you write an enormous book like that, so many major critical works help and inform what you do. Those are just some of the critics—Strohm, Dinshaw, Wallace—that have really helped me over the decades to approach Chaucer. But of course I could name hundreds more. “There hasn’t been a full biography of Chaucer for a generation” It’s notable that there hasn’t been a full biography of Chaucer for a generation. Whereas there are so many biographies of Shakespeare , for example—many of which are great and take different approaches, of course—there hasn’t been a full biography of Chaucer for a long time. What I’ve done is focused on spaces and places, so that each chapter is a location or institution – ranging from Vintry Ward in London, to Genoa and Florence, to the Great Household, to Thresholds, or Peripheries. For me the focus on spaces and places has really helped me to focus on Chaucer’s imagination, and to think about what he saw and how he lived. I’ve tried to find a new way of cutting across his life, and to explore different ways of thinking about the relationship between life and texts. It was fascinating to have the scope to explore places ranging from his daughter’s London nunnery, to Olite and Roncesvalles in Navarre, to places that he thought about philosophically, such as the Milky Way. I hope that I’ve opened up new aspects of his life and thought. But I don’t feel like this should be the last biography of Chaucer—there’s actually lots of interesting opportunities for biography. People are thinking about all kinds of innovative ways of writing biographically. I don’t think there should ever be the definitive life—the authorised life—of anyone, and certainly not Chaucer, who was deeply suspicious of anything authoritative."