Chaucerian Polity: Absolutist Lineages and Associational Forms in England and Italy (review)

328 Reviews Wallace, David, Chaucerian Polity: Absolutist Lineages and Associational Forms in England and Italy (Figurae: Reading Medieval Culture). Stanford, Stanford University Press, 1997; cloth, pp. xix, 555; 11 b / w illustrations; R.R.P. A U S $ 90.00. [Distributed in Australia by Cambridge University Press.] It is a pity that the title of this book is so forbidding and what on earth is an 'associational form'?—because this is one of the most profound and imaginative contributions to medieval studies, in particular to the study of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, to have appeared in some time. In his long and detailed argument— there are over one hundred pages of footnotes alone—David Wallace attempts a new contextualisation of Chaucer and his work: within European history from the fourteenth to the sixteenth centuries; within those aged and tendentious categories of 'medieval' and 'Renaissance'; and within the contemporary literatures of England and Italy. In writing this book, Wallace writes against the dominant discourse of 'new historicism', which, especially in English Renaissance studies, has pushed into the background what used to be called 'comparative literature' and, somewhat paradoxically, problematised and rendered unfashionable literary and historical studies of a diachronic nature. The dichotomy implicit in the sub-title is between political and social systems that favour despotism and those that favour democracy. There are several major axes in Wallace's analysis: the Canterbury Tales in comparison with the Decameron and the work of Petrarch (Wallace has published extensively on Boccaccio in the past); Burckhardt's dubious paradigm of 'communal' middle ages and 'individualist' Renaissance in comparison with Durkheim's solidarity organique, a functional associative polity based upon differentiated social elements, in the light of the rich (although very Reviews 329 different) history of English and Italian guilds; and, underlying everything, the social and cultural differences between the Florentine republic of the early fourteenth century, linked with Boccaccio, and the despotism of the Visconti in Lombardy from the late fourteenth century, which finds its cultural and artistic conelative in the work of Petrarch. In the course of his analysis, Wallace reverses many cherished category judgements, particularly those which emanate from the Burckhardtian view of the Renaissance. Petrarch becomes almost the Rasputin of Wallace's narrative: snobbish, misogynist, narrow-minded, the slave to a cult of the 'great man'. Whereas Lombardy is for Burckhardt the cradle of the European nation state and the modern ruler, for Chaucer it is a spatial metaphor for the tyrannical cast of mind. Wallace reminds us that both tales of Fragment 4 (Clerk's Tale and Merchant's Tale) are set in Lombardy. In contrast to the incipient absolutism of Renaissance Europe and its local variant in the reign of Richard II, Wallace opposes a culture of 'compagnyes', 'felaweshipes' and brigate of myriad forms. The writing of the Decameron took place during a period of intense commitment to the Florentine body politic and reflects in the brigata the process of formation of cell-like groups untroubled by traditional hierarchies of age, sex and class. Similarly, when Chaucer arrived in Milan in 1378 on government business, he was able to witness the absolute power of the Visconti at its apogee, but his o w n life—born into the merchant class of London, subsequently public servant and M.R, ultimately brother-in-law of John of Gaunt—is rather a testimony to the movement between social groups. The plainest historical manifestation of this urge towards combination and democratic heterogeneity is the guild, trade and parish, long-lasting or ephemeral, proliferating throughout Europe in the period 1000-1300, and still of vital 330 Reviews significance in the late fourteenth century. The banding together of the pilgrims in the General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales is just such a formation of a 'company', illustrating its culture of group solidarity and self-governance across class and gender divisions, with its host attempting to pair pilgrims and structure their responsibilities like a marshal, and it coincides with 'a m o m e n t of unprecedented self-consciousness and self-scrutiny for associational forms in England' (p. 83). But the company is by its nature protean and dynamic, a place of tensions and ambiguities...