Chaucerian Polity (David Wallace)

This book felt remarkably familiar, then I realized where I’d met the topics discuss before: Strohm’s Social Chaucer and Patterson’s Chaucer and the Subject of History. But before dropping these dogs in the pit together, I’ll synopsize a bit!

This is a big, tenacious book: it flushes out some basic concepts then chases them up every tree it can. But this, I think, is the heart of it: the contrast between hierarchical and associational forms of social structure, and the differences those structures make in the production of individual social subjects.

The historical tableaux in which Chaucer witnessed these two models (in extreme modes) pitted against one another was Italy. Chaucer visited two cities: Florence (1373) to negotiate trade agreements as wool customs controller, and Milan (1378) to negotiate for the military assistance of mercenary general Sir John Hawkwood. According to Wallace, “[i]n visiting Florence and Lombardy [Milan], Chaucer was exposed to the most crucial material and ideological conflict of the Italian Trecento: the conflict between republican libertas and dynastic despotism” (1). This conflict was poetic as well as political, and Chaucer knew it: “Chaucer […] read and interpreted the works of Dante, Boccaccio, and Petrarch within (and as a part of) this framework: Dante and Boccaccio he associated with Florentine polity, and Petrarch with Lombardy” (1).

The Republic of Florence was a beautiful city, dominated by the arts and trade. Its officials were elected, but the shortness of their terms of office and the strictures on their rule ensured that most of the power lay in the hands of the professional civil servants. Their historic aristocrats, the magnates, were not permitted to hold political office: they were seen as greedy and power-hungry, and therefore liable to destabilize the republic. Instead, officials were drawn from the ranks of merchants and craftsman. The Duchy of Milan, on the other hand, was not a beautiful city: it was instead big, dirty, productive (many ironworks), and dominated by the buildings of the government. The ruler, the Visconti, ruled absolutely and arbitrarily, for instance in his imposition of a unified Northern European Gothic style of architecture on the city and other cities under his rule.

Wallace argues that Chaucer saw correspondences between his own England and both Milan and Florence. The influence of guilds and burghers in London seemed a step in the direction of Florentine egalitarianism, while Richard II’s attempts to wrest control from the merchants and cement it in his own bureaucratic state were like the opening fanfare of Lombard despotism.

Chaucer’s interest in associational polity may be seen in the General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales, in which he describes the mutually agreed-upon felaweshipe of a vocationally diverse group of pilgrims. The possibility of such a felaweshipe lies in the familiarity of guild polity to English subjects of all walks of life. While many guilds were centered on trade, others were open to anyone. Guilds offered a model of society based on voluntary association for mutual profit; the Canterbury pilgrims embody such a society. This felaweshipe also resembles the band of Florentine travelers in Boccaccio’s Decameron.

There’s a lot more besides, but I’d like to return to my first point: the comparison of Strohm, Patterson, and Wallace. Patterson identifies Chaucer as a man between classes, yet fitting truly in none: the ultimate outsider, he is socially positioned to view the received ideologies with skepticism and forge instead his own. Strohm, on the other hand, sees Chaucer not as socially unmoored, but as a typical member of a new middle class, whose lack of a clear ideology permits it a freedom of mobility and self-invention. Wallace casts further afield, locating Chaucer not only in an English social context, but also an international context: individualism, freedom, and social mobility are Florentine ideals. As Wallace puts it, Chaucer “balanc[es] allegiances to associational and hierarchical structures in the attempt to form a new form of authorial identity” (216). Chaucer is not revolting against a monolithic social structure, nor merely representing a new class in a single hierarchy, but instead radically aware of the options of polity, both actually in Italy and potentially in England. The associational and anti-tyrannical themes of his poetry can be seen as an attempt to throw his own meager weight into the struggle, understanding the possibility of a “Boethian ending” (216).