Chaucer and Internationalism

Chaucer and Internationalism Elizabeth Salter University of York, England BOCCACCIO, in his T,attat,11, ;. Laud, Dant,, d,sccibes the special part which Dante had played in elevating the Italian vernacular to a high literary status: [W]hich vernacular he first exalted and brought into repute amongst us Italians, no otherwise than did Homer amongst the Greeks, or Virgil amongst the Latins.Before him, though it is supposed that it had already been practised some short space of years, yet was there none who ... had the feeling or the courage to make it the instrument of any matter dealt with by the rules of art....But he showed by the effectthat every lofty matter may be treated in it; and made our vernacular glorious above every other.1 Whether Chaucer knew this statement or, indeed, any of Dante's more complex pronouncements upon the nature and the potential of the vernacular for literary purposes, it can stand as an exemplary definition of the kind ofcontext in which he must have viewed the development ofhis own poetry: a context essentially European, not narrowly insular, which offered both theory and precedent for the creation of high-prestige vernacular literature, often involving curial patronage of some distinc­ tion. He certainly knew of the achievements of the French within that context; even at the beginning of his career in an aristocratic household he would have had good reason to attend to the internationally famous poetry of Machaut and his contemporaries and to understand, also, how important was the process of translation as a proof of confidence in the capacity of a language to express matters of learned as well as courtly significance. Before the great series of translations commissioned by 1 The Early Lives ofDante, trans. P. H. Wicksteed (London: 1904), p. 39. For the Italian text, see P. G. Ricci, Giovanni Boccaccio, Opere (Milano, Napoli: 1965), pp. 595-96. 71 STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER Charles V of France-the French versions of Aristotle's Ethics, Politics, and Economics; Augustine's City ofGod; John of Salisbury's Policraticus­ his father, Jean II, had ordered a translation ofLivy and ofthe Bible with its Commentaries. 2 The learned interests of the French royal house throughout the middle and the later years of the fourteenth century­ witnessed by the magnificent collection ofroyal books which became the library of the Louvre-were served by the conviction of kings and their translators that the French language was adequate to encounter the difficult content and the 'merveillous stille'3 of Latin originals. To the old question of 'why did Chaucer write in English?' we can nowadays return better answers than those traditionally based upon a fighting notion of the 'triumph' of English.Not, of course, that the fourteenth century lacked such notions: a surprisingly varied assortment of people, from the eminent friar, Robert Holcot, to anonymous ro­ mance and sacred-history writers and members ofParliament, identified the English language with an aggressive sense of English nationality, which often found expression in strong and understandably anti-French terms.The resentment clearly heard in the CursorMundi, "Selden was for ani chance/ Praised Inglis tong in France ..."4 comes out curiously in Holcot's equation of "learning French" and "learning to tell lies";5 it fosters suspicion in Parliament in the 1340's, when the Chancellor of England, Sir Robert Sadington, announced what he knew ofthe invasion plans of the French: 'Et si est il en ferme purpos a ce que nostre Seigneur le Roi et son Conseil one entendu en certeyn, a destruire la lange Engleys et de occuper la terre d'Engleterre . . . '6 Such sentiments, stimulated no doubt by propagandist needs of a moral as well as a political nature, have little to do with Chaucer's decision to deal in English.The undistinguished verse of the Cursor Mundi reminds us that most ofthe advances made during the first halfof the fourteenth century in the use of English as a literary medium are of negligible meaning as far as quality is concerned.The Auchinleck manu2 See L. Deslisle, Recherches sur la Librairie de Charles V (Amsterdam: 1967), 2 vols. 3 Deslisle, pp. 114-15. 4 Ed. R. Morris, EETS...