Cosmopolitan Chaucer, or, The Uses of Local Culture

Even if we were not holding our Sixteenth Biennial Congress in Wales, I would have begun with the ending of Culhwch and Olwen, when Ysbaddaden finally concedes to Culhwch but reminds him that he would not have succeeded without the help of many others. If I named everyone to whom I owe a debt for my term of office, I would end up reciting a list only slightly shorter than those in Culhwch and Olwen.¹ Since the founding of the New Chaucer Society, the Presidential Address has migrated in form and location: in some of the early congresses, something of an after-dinner speech; in some others, an example of the influential scholarship of our past presidents. More recently, in addresses by David Wallace and Paul Strohm, the address has become something like a keynote, pointing us toward emerging new formations. In some others, such as that of Mary Carruthers, the address has warned us about impending institutional issues concerning our place in the humanities.² Since the early 1990s, the last panel has traditionally responded to the Congress and its papers as a summary session. Fortune has placed my own address at the very end of the Congress, offering an opportunity to do a few of these things myself, but I have modified the format by asking some of the newer voices among us to respond to what I will say, and to offer a few words from their perspective about the challenges we might face and the dialogues we might enter over the next few years.³

For the past fifteen years or so, debates on political and social policy have revolved around concepts of cosmopolitanism.⁴ Can one be a citizen of the world, and, if so, how does one discharge or enact such a position? Initially, the cosmopolitan was presented as an alternative to a rising tide of communitarianism, but it soon grew in many contradictory directions, as did the communitarianism it sought to replace, the latter with its freight of nostalgia, patriotism, and isolationism. Cosmopolitanism has its own contradictions, including an uncertainty about interdiction and intervention, a conflict between relativism and universalism and a dawning recognition that cosmopolitanism for many populations is not so much a choice as a condition brought about by trauma and dislocation. A few years ago, amid debates on issues involving citizenship and immigration, Derek Pearsall spoke about the brutal xenophobia of Chaucer’s London and the apparent acquiescence of the poet in that xenophobia, resulting in one of the factors that allowed the “nationalization” of Chaucer’s poetry as a symbol of Englishness by British criticism.⁵ He contrasted that with how Chaucer was understood by nineteenth-century readers in the United States, who ignored the possibility of a closed community based on English tradition and emphasized a sense of identity in the General Prologue that reflected Walt Whitman’s invitation for everyone to share democratic, and hence, American values. At present, American, and perhaps also British readers, might have reason to be more pessimistic in their readings. The cosmopolitan ideals of universal human rights have been invoked as a rationale for chaotic and selective military interventions, while the exercise of those ideals at home has been increasingly narrowed.⁶

The ideological origins of cosmopolitanism lie with Kant, and the revival of interest in Kantian ideas in 1980s Paris almost certainly resulted from the exhaustion of the Cold War and its politics, as French intellectuals moved back to basics. The roots of cosmopolitan theory have also been traced back to the Middle Ages, to Marsilius of Padua and to Dante’s De Monarchia, to the Peace of God, and perhaps even to the inclusion of non-Latin intellectuals in the governance of the late Roman Empire. Whatever the validity of these medieval sources, I want to argue that it would help us and help the many thinkers worrying about these issues to bring them to bear on what we do. My theme for today is the tension between local and cosmopolitan cultures in Chaucer, how this tension has been reflected in Chaucer...