Abstract
Surprisingly, the life and work of Geoffrey Chaucer (1340-1400) have only recently been evaluated explicitly in terms of the idea of cosmopolitanism. Nevertheless, the history of Chaucerian criticism abounds with debates whose implicit stakes seem to be a verdict on the nature or limits of the author’s cosmopolitan outlook. Numbering among these discussions are questions concerning: the “Englishness” of Chaucer’s poetry; his debt to the French and Italian literary traditions; his representations of Jews, Muslims, and pagans; and the impact that his role as courtier, ambassador, and London customs agent may have played in shaping his literary imagination.1 “The Man of Law’s Tale,” which inaugurates Fragment II of The Canterbury Tales, has been the subject of fascinating scholarship about the Middle Ages’ role in the foundation of modern Orientalist and imperialist thought.2 The narrative structure of the “Man of Law’s Tale” was drawn from two earlier fourteenth-century versions of “the Constance legend”—Nicholas Trevet’s Cronicles (written in Insular French prose in the first decade of the fourteenth century) and John Gower’s Middle English verse adaptation of Trevet’s tale in his Confessio Amantis.3 Of these three versions of the Constance story, Gower’s seems the least interested in examining the problems and possibilities of communication across linguistic and cultural divides.
In The Man of Law’s Tale, Chaucer invites readers to appreciate the humble, discontinuous histories of cosmopolitan improvisation that are usually rendered invisible by universal history’s eschatological framework and by Christian triumphalism.
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Notes
A few representative entries in this vast bibliography might include Derek Pearsall, “Chaucer and Englishness,” Proceedings of the British Academy 101 (2000): 77–99.
Charles Muscatine, Chaucer and the French Tradition (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1965);
David Wallace, Chaucerian Polity: Absolutist Lineages and Associational Forms in England and Italy (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999).
For a recent evaluation of Chaucer explicitly framed through the concept of cosmopolitanism, see John M. Ganim, “Cosmopolitan Chaucer, Or, the Uses of Local Culture,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 31 (2009): 3–21.
These considerations were launched by the groundbreaking essay by Susan Schibanoff. See Susan Schibanoff, “Worlds Apart: Orientalism, Antifeminism, and Heresy in Chaucer’s ‘Man of Law’s Tale,’” Exemplaria 8 (1996): 59–96; Carolyn Dinshaw, “Pale Faces: Race, Religion, and Affect in Chaucer’s Texts and Their Readers,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 23 (2001): 19–41;
Kathryn L. Lynch, “Storytelling, Exchange, and Constancy: East and West in Chaucer’s Man of Law’s Tale,” Chaucer Review 33.4 (1999): 409–22;
Kathleen Davis, “Time Behind the Veil: The Media, the Middle Ages, and Orientalism Now” in The Postcolonial Middle Ages, ed. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen (New York: Palgrave, 2000), pp. 105–22;
Patricia Claire Ingham, “Contrapuntal Histories,” in Post Colonial Moves: Medieval through Modern, ed. Patricia Claire Ingham and Michelle R. Warren (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2003), pp. 47–70.
Chaucer and Gower worked from very similar manuscripts of the Cronicles. For the relationships among these three writers, see Peter Nicholson, “The Man of Law’s Tale:What Chaucer Really Owed to Gower,” Chaucer Review 26 (1991): 153–74;
Robert A. Pratt, “Chaucer and Les Cronicles of Nicholas Trevet,” in Studies in Language, Literature, and Culture of the Middle Ages and Later, ed. E. Bagby Atwood and Archibald A. Hill (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1969), pp. 303–11;
Robert M. Correale, “Gower’s Source Manuscript of Nicholas Trevet’s Les Cronicles,” in John Gower: Recent Readings, ed. R. E Yeager (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute, 1989), pp. 133–57;
and Robert M. Correale, “The Man of Law’s Prologue and Tale” in Sources and Analogues of the Canterbury Tales, Vol. II, ed. Robert M. Correale and Mary Hamel (Cambridge: Brewer, 2005), pp. 277–350.
Skeptics of cosmopolitanism have suggested that the concept is either deceptive (a form of false consciousness) or inadequately compelling when compared to other ideals such as religious or national identity. Both positions question the realities that might emerge out of appeals to the universal or to a deterritorialized “cosmos.” Karl Marx frequently derided the “cosmopolitan” character of capital and saw the customs of nations as a stumbling block to capital’s standardizing drives. Antonio Gramsci likewise decried the “cosmopolitan” orientation of Italian intellectual elites (see “Introduction” to this collection for details). For more recent considerations of the political ineffectiveness of the concept, see Chantalle Mouffe, “Which World Order: Cosmopolitan or Multipolar?” Ethical Perspectives 15.4 (2008): 453–67;
Bruno La Tour, “Whose Cosmos? Whose Cosmopolitics?” Common Knowledge 10.3 (2004): 450–62;
Benedict Anderson, “Nationalism, Identity, and the World in Motion: On the Logics of Seriality” in Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling Beyond the Nation, ed. Pheng Chea and Bruce Robbins (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), pp. 117–33.
On the astrological glosses, see Graham D. Caie, “‘This Was a Thrifty Tale for the Nones’: Chaucer’s Man of Law,” in Chaucer in Perspective: Middle English Essays in Honour of Norman Blake, ed. Geoffrey Lester (Sheffield, 1999), pp. 47–60.
For a more general consideration of astrology in the tale, see Chauncey Wood, Chaucer and the Country of the Stars (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1970), pp. 208–34.
All citations of Chaucer are based on The Riverside Chaucer, 3rd ed., ed. Larry D. Benson (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1987).
On the idea of the “international” courtly culture in medieval England, see Elizabeth Salter, “An Obsession with the Continent” and “Chaucer and Internationalism” in English and International: Studies in the Literature, Art, and Patronage of Medieval England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 1–99, 239–44.
Assessments of Custance’s powerlessness have been various. Critics who have seen the character largely determined by misogynist commonplaces have included Schibanoff, “Worlds Apart”; Sheila Delany, “Womanliness in the Man of Law’s Tale,” in Writing Women (New York: Schocken Books, 1983), pp. 36–46;
and Carolyn Dinshaw, Chaucer’s Sexual Poetics (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin, 1989), pp. 65–87.
There is also an allegorical tradition of reading the powerlessness of Custance, exemplified by V. A. Kolve, Chaucer and the Imagery of Narrative: The First Five Canterbury Tales (Stanford, CA: Stanford University, 1984), pp. 297–355. Jill Mann observes that Custance’s misfortunes are part of a larger pattern of destabilizing easy distinctions between power and submission.
See her Feminizing Chaucer (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2002), pp. 100–114.The most forceful case made for the agency of Custance can be found in Elizabeth Robertson, “The ‘Elvyssh’ Power of Constance: Christian Feminism in Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Man of Law’s Tale,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 23 (2001): 143–80.
On the nearly ubiquitous link in preindustrial civilizations between political authority and the reification/appropriation of geographic distance, see Mary W Helms, Ulysses’ Sail:An Ethnographic Odyssey of Knowledge and Power (Princeton. NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988).
Murasaki Shikibu, The Tale of Genji, trans. Royall Tyler (New York: Penguin, 2003), p. 136.
Benjamin of Tudela, The Itinerary of Benjamin of Tudela: Travels in the Middle Ages, trans. Marcus Nathan Adler (New York: Nightingale, 2004), p. 97.
The Arabian Nights, ed. Muhsin Mahdi and trans. Husain Haddawy (New York: Norton, 1990), pp. 36–40.
William of Rubruck, The Mission of Friar William of Rubruck: His Journey to the Court of the Great Khan Mongke, 1253–1255, ed. and trans. Peter Jackson and David Morgan (London: Hakluyt Society, 1990).
For these and more sources, see Henry Yule and A. E Cordier, The Travels of Marco Polo, vol. 1 (London, 1903), pp. 386–87, n. 4.
For an overview, see Victoria Kirkham and Maria R. Menocal, “Reflections on the Arabic World: Boccaccio’s Ninth Stories,” Stanford Italian Review 7 (1987): 95–110.
See also Suzanne Conklin Akbari, Idols in the East: European Representations of Islam and the Orient, 1100–1450 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2009), pp. 262–69.
The presence of foreign scholars and physicians was, indeed, visual shorthand for the power and wisdom of a ruler. In rendering the unparalleled magnificence of the Great Khan’s court, John Mandeville notes the prominence of the “many philosophers learned in many sciences such as astronomy, necromancy, geomancy, pyromancy, hyrdromancy, augury” in the ruler’s court. John Mandeville, The Book of John Mandeville with Related Texts, ed. and trans. Iain Macleod Higgins (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 2011), p. 141.
My understanding of the functions of Rome in the narrative is nearly the opposite of the one advanced in Sarah Stanbury, “The Man of Law’s Tale and Rome,” Exemplaria 22.2 (2010): 119–37. When comparing Chaucer to both Gower and Trevet, it seems fairly clear that Chaucer lessens Rome’s association with international commerce, even going so far as to say that the Syrian merchants are traveling to Rome for unknown, rather than for business, reasons.
While Dominicans in general were less interested in external missionary activity than they were in enforcing orthodoxy among Latin Christians, several prominent members of their order advocated for the teaching of foreign languages for the purpose of proselytizing. Like Trevet, many of these proponents of mission-oriented language training (Dominicans and Franciscans alike) studied or taught at Oxford. See Robin Vose, Dominicans, Muslims, and Jews in the Medieval Crown of Aragon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), pp. 21–59.
I have examined this idea in greater depth in Shayne Aaron Legassie, “Chivalric Travel in the Mediterranean: Converts, Kings, and Christian Knights in Pero Tafur’s Andanças,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 41.3 (2011): 515–44, see especially 530–38.
On the special place that the ocean and the shore occupied in literary imaginings of medieval English culture, see Sebastian I. Sobecki, The Sea and Medieval English Literature (Cambridge: Brewer, 2008).
Important volumes include: Robbins and Cheah, Cosmopolitics; Carol A. Breckenridge, Sheldon Pollock, Homi H. Bhabha, Cosmopolitanism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002);
James Clifford, Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard, 1997).
William Rothwell, “The Trilungual England of Geoffrey Chaucer,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 16 (1994): 45–67 (especially at 53–54) has seen the “corrupt” Latin spoken in this scene as a reference to the macaronic mixing of English, French, and Latin that abounds in documentary sources dating from Chaucer’s lifetime. Given Chaucer’s firsthand acquaintance with the vernaculars of Italy, there is no reason not to believe that this first English translator of Boccaccio did not have in mind his own experience of decoding trecento Tuscan, no doubt aided by his knowledge of Latin. Middle English locutions similar to Chaucer’s “maner latyn corrupt,” can be found in chivalric romances, and they suggest that Chaucer may very well be referring to Italian vernacular in this passage.
See J. A. Burrow “A Maner Latyn Corrupt” Medium Aevum 30.1 (1961): 33–37.
See the excellent book by John M. Fyler, Language and the Declining World in Chaucer, Dante, and Jean de Meun (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). For the widespread association of linguistic change with moral corruption and historical decadence, see especially 35–44.
J. D. Pickles and J. L. Dawson, A Concordance to John Gower’s Confessio amantis (Wolfeboro, NH: D.S. Brewer, 1987). Compare the sole use of bysne to the numerous entries for blynde and its variants.
This is one of the recurring ideas of Julia Kristeva’s Strangers to Ourselves (New York: Columbia, 1994). The self-strangeness of England in the Man of Law’s Tale has been explored brilliantly by Davis, “Time Behind the Veil”; Ingham “Contrapuntal Histories”; and Dinshaw, “Pale Faces.”
As Paul Strohm, “Storie, Spelle, Geste, Romaunce, Tragedie: Generic Distinctions in Middle English Troy Narratives,” Speculum 46.2 (1971): 348–59, has observed, Chaucer frequently uses geste (or geeste) to signify a narrative set in antiquity that records deeds and actions, and that it is a very “inclusive” generic rubric (at 353–54). In this context, however, another assumption seems to be operative: that a geeste—as opposed to a tale of the kind that the Man of Law purports to have learned from merchants—will frame its events within a dynastic-historical framework (as do the works that we today call chansons de geste).
Kathy Lavezzo, Angels on the Edge of the World: Geography, Literature, and English Community 1000–1534 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006). pp. 93–103.
Compare this de-politicization of the western Mediterranean with Chaucer’s portrait of the Knight in the General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales (lines 55–59): The Knight has fought many battles “in the Grete See” (the Mediterranean), particularly at the threshold of southern Iberia and Northern Africa: in “Gernade” (Granada), “Algezir” (Algerciras, a port on the straits of Gibraltar), and “Belmarye” (the Marinid kingdom of Morocco). On the fourteenth-century struggle for Gibraltar, see Sir William G. E Jackson, The Rock of the Gibraltarians: A History of Gibraltar (London and Toronto: Associated University Press, 1987), pp. 39–62.
Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy: Inferno, vol. 1, trans. Charles S. Singleton (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1970), pp. 277–79.
Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy: Paradiso, vol. 1, trans. Charles S. Singleton (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1970).
On this point, see J. C. Eade “‘We ben to lewed or too slowe’: Chaucer’s Astronomy and Audience Participation,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 4 (1982): 76–82.
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© 2013 John M. Ganim and Shayne Aaron Legassie
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Legassie, S.A. (2013). Among Other Possible Things: The Cosmopolitanisms of Chaucer’s “Man of Law’s Tale”. In: Ganim, J.M., Legassie, S.A. (eds) Cosmopolitanism and the Middle Ages. The New Middle Ages. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137045096_10
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