Chaucer and Everyday Death: The Clerk’s Tale, Burial, and the Subject of Poverty

Chaucer and Everyday Death: The Clerk’s Tale, Burial, and the Subject of Poverty Kathy Lavezzo University of Iowa In the prologue to his version of the Griselda story, Chaucer’s Clerk distinguishes Petrarch for his literary achievements only to render the ‘‘lauriat poete’’ just another mortal: ‘‘But Deeth, that wol nat suffre us dwellen heer, . . . hath slayne’’ Petarch, ‘‘and alle shul we dye’’ (CIP 31, 36–38).1 By dint of a universal mortality that nullifies all distinctions between persons, the singularly accomplished Petrarch becomes one of ‘‘us’’; the man whose ‘‘rethorike sweete’’ glorified Italy ‘‘is now deed’’ as we all will be (lines 33, 29). Not only does the Clerk foreground the idea of a leveling death in his Prologue, but he also underscores that notion when he, following Petrarch, has the Italian people of Saluzzo tell their Marquis Walter that ‘‘deeth manaceth every age, and smyt / In ech estaat’’ (ClT 122–23). With the Clerk’s emphasis on death as the supreme leveler, Chaucer points to one of the most common conceptions of mortality in the Middle Ages. Along with other ideas of death (in which, for example, it is a thief that strikes suddenly, or a shadow that always trails man) the notion of a universal death was a late-medieval commonplace that appeared in everything from funerary inscriptions, homiletic statements, and elegies to poems such as Piers Plowman, whose twenty-second passus describes Death overcoming ‘‘Kynges and kny9tes kayseres and popes; / Lered ne lewed he let no Versions of this essay were delivered to audiences at Florida State University, Georgetown University, and the University of Iowa; many thanks belong to the remarks of these auditors, in particular David Hamilton and Patrizia Palombo. I am also grateful to Louise Fradenburg and Harry Stecopoulos, who read earlier drafts of the essay. I would also like to thank my anonymous readers at SAC for their helpful comments. 1 All quotations are from Larry D. Benson, gen. ed., The Riverside Chaucer, 3d ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987), with line references in parentheses. 255 STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER man stonde.’’2 Most importantly, perhaps, the medieval image of a leveling death emerged in the representation in sculpture, the visual arts and literature of the Dance of Death, in which a homogenous group of rotting and sexless corpses summon a heterogeneous gathering of people of all ages, genders, and ranks to join them in their morbid dance.3 While it spoke to the demise awaiting all medieval persons, the rhetoric of death-as-leveler also performed other social functions. Among them was the promotion of what E. P. Thompson calls the ‘‘Christianity of the Rulers,’’ the appropriation, that is, of religious feeling to solicit consent to secular and spiritual authorities.4 As David Wallace points out, Boccaccio offers us a medieval theorization of this repressive use of Christianity in his political tract Trattatello in laude di Dante, when he writes of princes who ‘‘began to stoke up religious sentiment and to use the resultant faith to frighten their subjects, and to secure by oaths the obedience of those that they would not have been able to constrain by force.’’5 Boccaccio refers specifically to tyrants’ efforts to liken themselves (with the help of poets) to God.6 In the more insidious case of the great leveler, however, the powerful manage their subjects by promising them a more egalitarian existence in the afterlife.7 Given the emphasis 2 William Langland, Piers Plowman: An Edition of the C-Text, ed. Derek Pearsall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978). p. 366. 3 The danse macabre most famously (and probably first) appeared in a mural at the cemetery and charnel of the Innocents in Paris. John Lydgate translated into English a poem inscribed on a wall at the Innocents representing the dance; see Eleanor Prescott Hammond, English Verse between Chaucer and Surrey (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1927), pp. 124–42. Two extant examples of the danse macabre in England are murals in Hexham Priory in Northumberland and in the Parish church of Newark on Trent. 4 E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (New...