Chaucerian Polity: Absolutist Lineages and Associational Forms in England and Italy by David Wallace (review)

REVIEWS terdependence of popular devotion and official promotion in e�en the most highly politicized canonization processes. By the fifteenth century a majority of modern saints venerated in even the larger urban centres of Europe by the most well established religious orders had not been canonized, so expensive and unpromising had the process become. Al­ though Vauchez interprets this as a failure on the Church's part to recon­ cile the official, the local, and the popular, even these local cults could only work ifthe laity as well as the bishop and his minions wanted them to work. Further research on individual local cults by scholars such as Aviad Kleinberg has somewhat complicated this picture, and its overly generalized definition of the "popular." However, like Eamon Duffy's work on late-medieval English devotion, Vauchez's study stands as a challenge to the binaries that literary scholars (including myself) have sometimes assumed in analyzing medieval religious culture, and makes provocative reading for this reason alone. NICHOLAS WATSON University of Western Ontario DAVID WALLACE. Chaztcerian Polity: Absolutist Lineages and Associational Forms in England and Italy. Figurae: Reading Medieval Culture se­ ries. Stanford, Conn.: Stanford University Press, 1997. Pp. xix, 555. $55.00. At the turn ofthe present decade, a number ofinfluential Chaucer stud­ ies, appearing in quick succession, wrought important changes in the way Americans, at least, understand and teach the poet. Carolyn Din­ shaw's Chaucer's Sexual Poetic (1989), Paul Strohm's Social Chaucer (1989), H. Marshall Leicester Jr.'s The Disenchanted Self (1990), and Lee Pat­ terson's Chaucer and the Subject ofHistory (1991) brought gender and psy­ choanalytic theory, deconstruction, and Ricardian social, political, eco­ nomic, and institutional history to bear on the Chaucerian corpus in deeply enlightening (and to some, deeply unsettling) ways. David Wallace's Chaucerian Polity now takes its place in this elite group ofChaucerian blockbusters. Its major contribution is to contextu­ alize Chaucer doubly as a political poet: more immediately in the con­ text ofRicardian England, but (and this is Wallace's special claim to our 397 STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER attention and gratitude) more broadly within the orbit ofthe politics of trecento northern Italy, and thus of the Italian humanism (not just the poetic production) of Petrarch and Boccaccio, which reflects the con­ frontations and crises at the center of trecento political theory and practice. Wallace starts from the major political fact oftrecento Italian politics: the struggle for mastery of northern Italy between Florence and Milan, a struggle with profound implications for the subsequent history of western Europe."Florence typically celebrated its own sense ofrepubli­ can libertas by developing ...an associational ideology, suggesting that all inhabitants of the city-state share equal footing on a lateral plane. " By contrast, for "northern Italian despotisms ofthe late Trecento[,} [t}he chiefideological vector ...is vertical, one-way, and downward descend­ ing," and "generates ideological forms that, like their associational coun­ terparts, are reproduced at both local and national levels" (p.2). In other words, the political struggle conditions the perspectives of the first generation ofhumanist writers and specifically provides the ba­ sic contrast between Petrarch, whose writings reflect his association with the Visconti and other despotic signori, and Boccaccio, who worked and wrote for a Florentine commune governed, between 1343 and 1378, by an often uneasy coalition of disparate economic and social groups. Chaucer, both by his firsthand observation of Florence (1373) and Lombardy (1378), and by his reading of Petrarch and Boccaccio, under­ stood the issues at stake in the struggle between the two types of polity. In addition, "Chaucer's experience in seeking to establish and stabilize a distinctive poetics" is complicated by the "complex and conflicted" nature of "his own political positioning ...at the intersection of royal, magnate, and mercantile worlds," and his exposure to "a dizzying suc­ cession of polities, from the broadest-based associational model (peasant uprising) to the narrowest form ofhierarchy (the tyranny of Richard II). " Accordingly, "he functions within both associational and hierarchic forms; in responding to the exceptional complexity of fourteenth­ century English polity he is at once the poet ofFlorence and Lombardy" (p.64), engaged in "testing ... the structures (substructures and anti­ structures) of...