Abstract
Modernity in the late Middle Ages is not an historical period or cultural imaginary but a form of consciousness. In recent literary scholarship, it is virtually inseparable from concerns with subjectivity and the construction of selfhood. The most influential criticism rejects the notion of an autonomous individual and argues instead that external forces at once generate and control inwardness, reflection, and identity.1 The description of modernity I want to offer for Chaucer and Boccaccio differs somewhat in its emphases from this account. What modernity registers most profoundly in the narratives of Chaucer and Boccaccio is the experience of change. Both writers see modernity as heterogeneous and hybrid, improvisational and uncertain. In the Canterbury Tales, Chaucer’s pilgrims establish an artificial, temporary community last shown moving toward but still falling short of its symbolic and spiritual destination, which will also mark its dissolution as an imagined social body. In the Decameron, Boccaccio’s young women and men return at the end of their retreat to a city that remains in the political, social, and moral crisis they had earlier fled. In the stories that Chaucer and Boccaccio locate within these narrative frames, the dynamics of modernity center on human agency and social relations within structures that are themselves transforming.
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Notes
For a useful formulation of these issues, see John M. Ganim, ‘Chaucer, Boccaccio, Confession, and Subjectivity,’ in The ’Decameron’ and the ‘Canterbury Tales’: New Essays on an OId Question, ed. Leonard Michael Koff and Brenda Deen Schildgen (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2000 ), pp. 128–47.
Vittore Branca, Boccaccio: The Man and His Works, trans. Richard Monges and Dennis J. McAuliffe (New York: New York University Press, 1976), pp. 276–307
Vittore Branca, Boccaccio medievale e nuovi studi sul Decameron, rev. and corr. edn (Florence: Sansoni, 1996 ), pp. 134–64.
K.B. McFarlane, ‘Bastard Feudalism,’ Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research 20 (1943–45): 161–81. McFarlane means by the term not feudalism modified but an essentially different structure of relations superficially similar to feudalism.
For applications and assessments of McFarlane’s ‘bastard feudalism,’ see Paul Strohm, Social Chaucer ( Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989 ), pp. 15–21
and David Wallace, Chaucerian Polity: Absolutist Lineages and Associational Forms in England and Italy ( Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997 ), pp. 62–4.
Anne Middleton, ‘War by Other Means: Marriage and Chivalry in Chaucer,’ Studies in the Age of Chaucer Proceedings 1 (1984): 130.
N.S. Thompson, Chaucer, Boccaccio and the Debate of Love: A Comparative Study of ‘The Decameron’ and ‘The Canterbury Tales’ ( Oxford: Clarendon, 1996 ), p. 220.
Derek Pearsall, The Canterbury Tales (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1985), pp. 169–70.
Derek Brewer, ‘The Fabliaux,’ in Companion to Chaucer Studies, ed. Beryl Rowland, rev. edn ( New York: Oxford University Press, 1979 ), p. 297.
R. Howard Bloch, The Scandal of the Fabliaux ( Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986 ), pp. 72–100.
For the details about the clerk’s social position and roles, see J.A.W. Bennett, Chaucer at Oxford and Cambridge ( Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1974 ), pp. 44–8.
E. Talbot Donaldson, ‘The Idiom of Popular Poetry in the Miller’s Tale,’ in Speaking of Chaucer ( New York: Norton, 1970 ), pp. 13–29.
Robert E. Kaske, ‘The Canticum Canticorum in the Miller’s Tale,’ Studies in Philology 59 (1962): 479–500.
Winthrop Wetherbee, The Canterbury Tales ( Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989 ), p. 59.
R.A. Shoaf, Dante, Chaucer, and the Currency of the Word: Money, Images, and Reference in Late Medieval Poetry (Norman, OK: Pilgrim Books 1983), pp. 167–72, distinguishes ‘vertical’ quiting (within each tale) from ’horizontal’ quiting (between pairs of tales).
Ellesmere: ‘Vim Vi repellere’; John M. Manly and Edith Rickert, eds., The Text of the Canterbury Tales, 8 vols. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1940), 3: 492.
The Riverside Chaucer, p. 851; Helen Cooper, The Canterbury Tales, Oxford Guides to Chaucer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), p. 109.
See Alain de Libera, Penser au moyen age (Paris: Seuil, 1991) on philosophy and intellectual elites.
Thomas A. Hahn, ‘Money, Sexuality, Wordplay, and Context in the Shipman’s Tale,’ in Chaucer in the Eighties, ed. Julian N. Wasserman and Robert J. Blanch ( Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1986 ), pp. 236–9.
Albert H. Silverman, ‘Sex and Money in Chaucer’s Shipman’s Tale,’ Philological Quarterly 32 (1953): 329–36.
Lee Patterson, Chaucer and the Subject of History (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991), p. 354. In the Politics 1.10–11 (1258a-b), Aristotle distinguishes wealth-getting as an aspect of household management and therefore natural from wealth-getting as an aspect of exchange (commerce, interest, service for hire) and therefore unnatural. Aristotle’s view is that all economic activity outside the agricultural world (and needed by the household, oikonomia) is unnatural. I am grateful to Cosimo Perrotta for sharing a draft of his introductory essay to From Starkey to A. Smith — The Hunger for Goods, vol. 1 of Consumption as Investment: The History of a Missing Idea.
Jill Mann, ‘Satisfaction and Payment in Middle English Literature,’ Studies in the Age of Chaucer 5 (1983): 45–8, points out that ynogh is ’elusive of definition’ in the Shipman’s Tale; it is not what is required for present needs but what will cover contingency and maintain appearance, which is the currency of exchange in a shifting world.
Eustache Deschamps, Le miroir de mariage, ed. Gaston Reynaud, in Oeuvres complètes de Eustache Deschamps, ed. Le Marquis de Queux de Saint-Hilaire, SAFT, 11 vols. (Paris: Firmin Didot, 1878–1903), 9: 11.
Bartlett Jere Whiting, Proverbs, Sentences, and Proverbial Phrases, from English Writings Mainly Before 1500 (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1968), S185; cf. Merchant’s Tale IV.1314–15 and Parson’s Tale X.1068. The Riverside Chaucer, p. 965, suggests that Chaucer adds the phrase ‘on the wal.’
Biblia sacra iuxta Vulgatam versionem, ed. Robert Weber, 2 vols. (Stuttgart: Württembergische Bibelanstalt, 1975), 1: 724–5.
For discussion of Chaucer’s economic themes, see Eugene Vance, ‘Chaucer’s House of Fame and the Poetics of Inflation,’ Boundary 2 7 (1979): 17–37.
Thompson, Chaucer, Boccaccio and the Debate of Love, pp. 208–9, discusses the outcome of Panfilo’s tale as a form of domestic sentimentality in which the priest and Monna Belcolore continue their liaison after reaching accommodation over the earlier transactions. For Chaucer’s suspension of moral judgment, see Murray Copland, ’The Shipman’s Tale: Chaucer and Boccaccio,’ Medium Ævum 35 (1966): 11–28
and V.J. Scattergood, ‘The Originality of the Shipman’s Tale,’ Chaucer Review 11 (1976–77): 210–31.
Paul Strohm, ’ “Lad with revel to Newegate”: Chaucerian Narrative and Historical Meta-Narrative,’ in Art and Context in Late Medieval English Narrative: Essays in Honor of Robert Worth Frank, Jr., ed. Robert R. Edwards (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1994 ), pp. 163–76.
See Alastair J. Minnis, ‘Chaucer’s Pardoner and the “Office of Preacher,”’ in Intellectuals and Writers in Fourteenth-Century Europe, ed. Piero Boitani and Anna Torti, J.A.W. Bennett Symposium (Tübingen: Narr; Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1986), pp. 88–119, on theological debates over preaching.
Robert S. Sturges, Chaucer’s Pardoner and Gender Theory: Bodies of Discourse (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000), pp. 102–5, argues that the Pardoner emphasizes the materiality of the rioters’ language.
Augustine, Sermo 265B, in Sancti Augustini Sermones post Maurinos reperti, ed. G. Morin, Miscellanea Agostiniana: testi e studi, 2 vols. (Rome: Tipografia poliglotta vaticana, 1930–31 ), p. 415
Jerome, Commentarii in prophetas minores: In Osee [3.13], ed. M. Adriaen, 2 vols., CCSL 76–76A (Turnholt: Brepols, 1969–70), p. 148–50
Leo the Great, Tract 59, in Tractatus septem et nonaginta, ed. A. Chavasse, 2 vols., CCSL 138–138A (Turnholt: Brepols, 1973 ), 2: 360
Gregory the Great, Moralia in lob [12.11], ed. M. Adriaen, 3 vols. CCSL 143143A-B (Turnholt: Brepols, 1979–81), 2: 673.
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© 2002 Robert R. Edwards
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Edwards, R.R. (2002). The ‘Cherles Tale’ and Chaucerian Modernity. In: Chaucer and Boccaccio. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403907240_5
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