In Flaundres

The Biennial Chaucer Lecture In Flaundres David Wallace Vniversity ofPennsylvania for Miri Rubin Social anxiety ...is just maladjustment to change.But who has anticipated, or adjusted to, the scale of change in Southern California over the last fifteen years? ...the urban galaxy domi­ nated by Los Angeles is the fastest growing metropolis in the ad­ vanced industrial world. Mike Davis, City ofQuartz T,space of Chaucec studies is still p,eeminently England: ostensibly fourteenth-century England, but often the England of those Victorian founding fathers honored by one ofour sessions. 1 The time of Chaucer studies has been closely complicit with that of regnal history; recent interest in the Lancastrians may confirm the habit of situating Chaucer along the timeline of emergent English nationalism. But This text represents "In Flaundres," a talk given at the Huntington Library on 27 July 1996. Some substantiating details, sacrificed to the fifty-minute format, have been re­ stored. I have reprieved one paragraph (cut for the talk) on Sir Thopas as a Flemish tap­ estry; I have added one crucial sentence on the discovery of Flanders, as recorded by Bavaria Herald, as "dat woeste land" ("the waste land"). 1 "Foundational Moments: England"; Derek Brewer, presiding, with Sigmund Eisner, Charlotte Brewer, and Steve Ellis. Ellis, in his unpublished paper "Chaucer's England, England's Chaucer," discusses fascinating and egregious Victorian attempts to endow Chaucer with essential Englishness. F. D. Maurice, for example, wrote in 1866 that Chaucer "has been called a Wycliffite. He is not that. He is simply an Englishman. He hates friars, because they are not English and not manly. He loves the poor parson, because he is English and manly" (qtd. in Ellis, p. 2). 63 STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER fourteenth-century Chaucer is not, in these senses, a poet of England: his native ground-the place where he spent most of his time-is not "England," but rather the eastern quadrant of a terrirory immediately abutting continental Europe. In strict political terms, this territory ex­ tended into the continental landmass, after 1347, with Edward Ill's col­ onizing ofCalais; Flanders was hence to be seen as a border country.2 In simple economic terms,hence in the practice ofeveryday life-the myr­ iad exchanges of language, manufacturing, foodstuffs, tydinges, and merchandise-England and Flanders had long been interdependent.3 It would be difficult to isolate a discourse ofEngland in Chaucer, but there is a discourse ofFlanders� As a discourse, this bears some relation to a territory called Flanders, has consequences for those tagged as Flemish, but speaks most eloquently of the anxieties and desires of its English authors. "Flaundres" plays in Chaucer like certain names that reverber­ ate through our own cultures: Belfast and East LA; Brixton, Brooklyn, and Berkeley-we may never have been to these places, but we know 2 I follow May McKisack in speaking of colonization: ". . . on 4 August 1347," McKisack writes, Edward III "entered the town and proceeded to evacuate almost all the inhabitants, in order ro people it with English colonists whose descendants were to hold it for another two hundred years"; The Fourteenth Century, 1307-1399 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1959), p. 137. 3 It is important ro note that exchanges between England and the Low Countries in­ cluded both luxury items and the staples of everyday life. "Londoners," Vanessa Harding writes, "drank Dutch beer and perhaps some Rhenish wine, and ate imported apples, pears, onion, and garlic"; "Cross-Channel Trade and Cultural Contacts: London and the Low Countries in the Later Fourteenth Century," in Caroline Barron and Nigel Saul, eds., Englandandthe LliW Countries in the Late Middle Ages (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1995), p. 163. On the extraordinary mixing of Middle Dutch and Middle English terms that occurs in select fifteenth-century business documents, see Laura Wright, "Trade between England and the Low Countries: Evidence from Hisrorical Linguistics," in ibid, pp. 169-79. Dutch terms for activities associated with beer-brewing and boatbuilding proved especially influential. 4 Citation of "Flaundres" in Chaucer hence works in ways comparable to the nam­ ing of "Lombardy." "Lumbardye" evokes both the historical terrirory ruled by northern Italian despots, or tyrants-an imaginative terrain explored...