Domesticating Amazons in The Knight’s Tale

Domesticating Amazons in The Knight’s Tale Keiko Hamaguchi Tosa Women’s Junior College As his portrait in the General Prologue (I.43–78) indicates,1 the Knight joins the Crusades in Alexandria (Egypt), Prussia, Lithuania, Russia, Algeciras (Granada), Belmarin (Morocco), Ayash (Antioch), Antalya (Southern Anatolia), and Tlemcen (Northwest Algeria). Despite the propaganda of each Crusade being a holy war against infidels, their contradictory landscape of greed, treachery, and disorder had already been revealed by the time that the Knight is reported to have taken part. Many of Chaucer’s contemporaries had grave doubts about such undertakings. Guillaume de Machaut regarded the Alexandrian Crusade —where in 1365 crusaders led by Peter of Cyprus plundered and massacred inhabitants and abandoned the land a week after the conquest —as ‘‘an infamous display of treachery.’’ Thomas Walsingham and the chronicler John of Posilge viewed the 1390s Lithuanian Crusade as a cruel and savage war. Chaucer’s friend Sir John Clanvowe, who joined Louis of Bourbon’s Crusade against the Moors of Tunis in 1390 and died near Constantinople on a pilgrimage, criticized the disastrous war and censured his class of knights.2 I would like to thank Susan Tennant, Chauncey Wood, Isamu Saito, Larry Scanlon, and Frank Grady for helpful comments on earlier versions of this essay. 1 All citations of Chaucer’s work are from The Riverside Chaucer, ed. Larry D. Benson, 3rd ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987). Line numbers are cited parenthetically in the text. 2 Regarding the late medieval Crusades generally, see Joshua Prawer, The Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem: European Colonialism in the Middle Ages (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson , 1972); James M. Powell, ed., Muslims Under Latin Rule, 1100–1300 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990); James Muldoon, Popes, Lawyers, and Infidels (Philadelphia : University of Pennsylvania Press, 1979); Christopher Tyerman, England and the Crusades, 1095–1588 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988); Terry Jones, Chaucer ’s Knight: The Portrait of a Medieval Mercenary (London: Methuen, 1980); Jean Froissart , Chronicles, trans. Geoffrey Brereton (1968; repr. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1978); PAGE 331 331 .......................... 10906$ CH10 11-01-10 13:59:00 PS STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER Such campaigns represent more than just aristocratic military adventurism , however. As Joshua Prawer writes, ‘‘In point of time, the Crusades are the opening chapter of European expansion and foreshadow all later colonial movements.’’3 Chaucer’s Knight, as a crusader, has been involved in uneasy colonial and postcolonial missions of the late Middle Ages to domesticate his Others.4 In this essay, based on postcolonial Steven Runciman, A History of the Crusades: The Kingdom of Acre and the Later Crusades, vol. 3 (1951; repr. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). On the Knight as a crusader or mercenary, see Jones, Chaucer’s Knight; Maurice Keen, ‘‘Chaucer’s Knight, the English Aristocracy, and the Crusade,’’ in English Court Culture in the Later Middle Ages, ed. V. J. Scattergood and J. W. Sherbone (London: Duckworth, 1983), pp. 45–61; and Robert Pratt, ‘‘Was Chaucer’s Knight Really a Mercenary?’’ ChR 22 (1987): 8–27. One example of pro-crusade propaganda is Phillippe de Mézières, Letter to King Richard II: A Plea Made in 1395 for Peace between England and France, trans. G. W. Coopland (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1975). For Machaut, see Jones, Chaucer’s Knight, p. 46. On Alexandria, see Jones, Chaucer’s Knight, p. 2, and Runciman, A History of the Crusades, p. 446. (For the view of the siege of Alexandria as a success, see Muriel Bowden , A Commentary on the General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales [1948; repr. London: Macmillan, 1969], pp. 58–63.) For Walsingham and John of Posilge, see Tyerman, England and the Crusades, p. 262, and Jones, Chaucer’s Knight, p. 51. For Clanvowe, see The Works of John Clanvowe, ed. V. J. Scattergood (1965; repr. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1975), p. 69. 3 Prawer, The Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem, p. 469. For colonization in the Middle Ages, see also Patricia C. Ingham, ‘‘Marking Time: Branwen, Daughter of Llyr, and the Colonial Refrain,’’ in The Postcolonial Middle Ages, ed. Jerome Cohen (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2001), p. 175. For religious conversion in medieval colonialism/postcolonialism, see Varieties of...