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he ambit of Chaucer’s works ranges from england to Africa, from the “errtik sterres” wandering the firmament to the literal bowels of hell. Yet the island from which he writes is a strangely diminished geography. This essay examines Chaucer not as an english poet, not as an international man of letters, but as a writer within a polyglot,culturally restless archipelago.Chaucer’s attenuated britain reveals an essential component of his englishness: participation in a long tradition of passing over in silence the vitality and contemporary diversity of the isles, imagining that the only modernity britain can possess is singular and english.1 dipesh Chakrabarty has written of the need to provincialize europe,to break it into “different europes,”allowing history to admit “contradictory, plural, and heterogeneous struggles whose outcomes are never predictable, even retrospectively.”2 Medievalists have in fact long been laboring at such epistemological dismantling. Robert bartlett details how peoples undertook to europeanize themselves,a fraught process of internal harmonization essential to imagining transnational community.3 Post-Conquest england was long absorbed in a similarly difficult process of selfcolonization , Anglicizing its inhabitants to effect an insular unity.4 R. R. davies has emphasized the high price paid for this emergent englishness by the “Celtic Fringe” that such circumscription produced. The Scots, Irish, and Welsh found themselves denigrated as barbarians so that england as a single kingdom could pass itself off as an entity coterminous with the whole of britain. The transformation of a boisterously multicultural archipelago into an “exclusive orbit of power” dominated by one of its four constituent countries was well advanced long before Chaucer’s birth.5 Yet the marginalization of britain’s nonanglophone peoples and the promulgation of london’s dialect and metropolitan culture over regional differences were ongoing throughout the fourteenth British Chaucer Jeffrey Jerome Cohen t 25 century.Though the Canterbury pilgrims arrive in Southwark from various provinces , they speak the vernacular of the nearby city.6 Characters who in life would have been bilingual utter no French. london saturates The Canterbury Tales, serving as the work’s unacknowledged structuring principle.7 Chaucer spent many of his adult years living in an apartment built into one of the city’s medieval gates. beneath his dwelling at Aldgate passed diverse peoples. With a population approaching 50,000,fourteenth-century london was a multilingual and culturally intermixed space. Chaucer’s family home in the vintry Ward was close enough to the Thames to behold ships sailing between london and Scandinavia, Iberia, the Mediterranean. His london was a place of great intellectual and artistic achievement , of violence, intolerance, and sheer possibility. early in his life Chaucer was attached to the household of lionel, second in line for the english crown. While the prince was young, a marriage had been arranged with the lone heiress of William, earl of ulster, ensuring that at his majority half of Ireland would come under lionel’s dominion. In 1366 he presided over a parliament at Kilkenny that attempted to establish an AngloIrish apartheid system in england’s western colonial frontier. Statutes forbade the english from absorbing indigenous language, customs, and dress, upon penalty of immediate dispossession.8 davies aptly writes of these decrees and of similar laws addressed to Wales: “When national customs become the subject of legislative enactments, we begin to realize what an important place they occupied in the framework of race relations in the past as well as the present. In the eyes of medieval englishmen the customs and habits of the Welshmen . . . marked them as a different race.”9 Yet no matter their aspirations,such “legislative enactments”never obtained much success. The Statutes of Kilkenny failed to enact the keen separations they envisioned.A dispirited lionel abandoned Ireland for other campaigns. even if he never crossed the Severn, Chaucer moved within courtly circles where the Irish and the Welsh were denigrated peoples, sometimes even a different species. He knew of england’s Hibernian entanglements from london events as well. A formal submission of Irish chiefs to Richard II was staged just as the poet was most intensely engaged in his Canterbury Tales project in the mid-1390s, a submission that did little to ameliorate the violence in that country. Chaucer would also have been well aware of the military history of england in Wales,where native resistance flared regularly long after the country’s conquest came to its official close. He would have been frequently reminded of the fluctuating alliances that english nobles forged with...

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