Chaucer’s Secular Marvels and the Medieval Economy of Wonder

Chaucer’s Secular Marvels and the Medieval Economy of Wonder Scott Lightsey Georgia State University I. Mirabilia and Wonder In the opening section of his Squire’s Tale, Chaucer depicts an encounter between the people of Cambyuskan’s court and the marvelous brass horse delivered into the midst of their revels. Admiring the steed’s appearance , the members of this fantastic Eastern court wonder how it moves, tempering admiration of the brazen beast with inquiry: ‘‘But everemoore hir mooste wonder was / How that it koude gon, and was of bras; / It was a fairye, as the peple semed’’ (SqT 199–201).1 In this passage Chaucer merges the awe inspired by the literary mirabilia of romance with curiosity about the mechanical marvels that were a part of late medieval court life. The text not only confronts the reader with a romance marvel but depicts this supposedly supernatural motif as an object of rational inquiry. Chaucer often appears to invite readers to experience marvels as products of human artifice rather than as supernatural phenomena. The presence of these demystified marvels mitigates the admiratio—the awe of the supernatural—of romance wonder in stories such as the Squire’s and Franklin’s Tales, substituting technical curiosity for the awe of the rare and supernatural registered in his sources. The courtiers’ ensuing inquiries are characterized by reference to traditional authorities, but just as often traditional authorities are rejected in favor of reasoning from natural science and skeptical theology . I will also suggest that they reflect the cultural presence of mechanical mirabilia, the fashionable man-made marvels of courtly 1 All references to Chaucer’s works are from Larry D. Benson, gen. ed., The Riverside Chaucer, 3d ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin 1987). Subsequent citations are made parenthetically in the text. 289 ................. 8972$$ CH10 11-01-10 12:21:27 PS STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER entertainment. Rather than simply passing on the traditional supernatural properties of marvels in sources such as The Squire’s Tale’s brazen horse from Meliacı́n and the magic mirror from the Virgilian marvels, or The Franklin’s Tale’s illusion from Decameron 10.5, Chaucer rendered them as adjuncts to courtly play. His interpretation was supplemented by contemporary natural philosophy, skeptical theology, and elements of mechanicalia perhaps garnered from events I will note among his domestic appointments and experiences in the courts of Europe. Marvelous entertainments blend the physical realities of court life with romance fictions.2 The fact that literature could be brought to life as an engineered artistic expression reinforcing aristocratic ideals suggests that such phenomenologized mirabilia may have had a reciprocal effect on subsequent literary representations of marvels. In a culture that had for centuries admired marvels for their supernatural qualities, Chaucer’s poetry demonstrated that the exercise of reason was crucial to the psychology of wonder that accompanies the experience of marvels. Chaucer thus amplifies the traditional modes of evoking romance wonder by guiding the reader’s curiosity, representing mirabilia at arm’s length, and rendering the experience of wonder unrealizable except through the mental processes of inquiry. His representations of mechanistic , commodified, and man-made mirabilia helped to promote this new perspective within the romance genre. Since the thirteenth century, the courtly contexts of mirabilia had reinforced aristocratic ideals through the psychology of wonder associated with the rare materials and the hidden functional properties of the marvel at hand. As Daston and Park observe, ‘‘Romances served, among other things, to foster and implant aristocratic and courtly ideals and behavior. Marvels, the aristocracy of phenomena, played a fundamental part in this project through the reciprocal relationship between those experiencing the marvel and the genre elements from which marvels were engineered by artists.’’3 This social function of mirabilia gradually acquired a new dimension through the self-conscious representation of these technologized marvels by authors like Chaucer and Mandeville, who began to subject these traditionally unexamined romance motifs to inquiry within genre writing.4 2 Laura L. Hines, Chaucer’s Gardens and the Language of Convention (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1997), pp. 23–28. 3 Lorraine Daston and Katharine Park, Wonders and the Order of Nature, 1150–1750 (New York: Zone Books, 1998...