“Elvyssh by His Contenaunce”

"Elvyssh by His Contenaunce" Beryl Rowland York University, Toronto On,ofth, fou,aims ofth, Chaum Society formed ill 1867 by E J. Furnivall was to discover "many hitherto unknown facts about Chaucer's life and family." By 1900, with the publication of the last volume of the Life-Records, the society claimed to have published "every document relat­ ing to Chaucer, forming the only authentic basis for his biography." By that time Chaucer's biography had already been attempted by Walter W Skeat, who made use ofpart ofthis material, supplemented mainly by data from public records and by an occasional reference to H. T. Riley's Memorials and Sir Nicholas Harris Nicolas's "Life of Chaucer," in the Aldine Edition of Chaucer's poetry (1845). Skeat'sbiography, beginning with Chaucer's sup­ posedNorfolkancestry and ending withcommentsbyHoccleveand others, amounted to sixty-one pages. We may question Skeat's confident assertion that the tales of the Miller, the Reeve, the Friar, the Shipman, and the Merchant and The Wzfe ofBath '.r Prologue must have been written after 1387 because their coarseness was due to Chaucer's loss of a wife, but in general he was conscientious in bringing forward many details that still form the nucleus of any Chaucer biography. Here I want to consider whether, given theadvantage ofthe largeamount of published research on all aspects of medieval life, the splendid Life­ Records edited by Martin Crow and Clair Olson that appeared in 1966, and the additional facts unearthed by independent scholars before and since, our picture ofthe living Chaucer is as rounded as might be expected some ninety yearslater. For it would now seem that fear offailure, in view ofthe unlikelihood ofdredging up new facts, or a complexity ofcircumstances to which I shall refer later, is deterring many scholars from making any further overt explorations-and this at a time when principles of reconstruction, such as those observed by Carlo Ginzburg in his examination ofan equally enigmatic figure, the sixteenth-century Italian miller Menocchio, might well prove useful. For example, ofthe forty-four essays published in Studies in the Age ofChaucer between 1979 and 1985, only five have to do with 3 FIFTH INTERNATIONAL CONGRESS historical or sociological material. Of the others, five are basically con­ cerned with manuscripts, three with a history of Chaucer criticism, nine with cultural background and sources, nine with the application of literary theories and techniques, four with the audience, five with Chaucer's at­ titude or intention, and the remainder partly or exclusively with works by Chaucer's contemporaries and successors. The five essays to which I refer consist of an account of the mercantile system that explains the Merchant's currency transactions; a description of the practices of the lower courts of the archdeacon as they would have been familiar to Chaucer's audience; conjectures about the Summoner's reference to Sittingbourne; a sketch of architecturalfeatures in the French Palais deJustice built in Paris on the Ile de la Cite, 1301-13, that may have been imitated and exaggerated in The House ofFame; and a convincing proposal that the celebrated Gaston III, count of Foix, was the model for Phoebus Apollo in The Manciple's Tale. Yet these writers and, indeed, almost every contributor to Studies in the Age ofChaucer show an interest in what might be called Chaucer's "men­ tality," a slippery term that I am using in a sense somewhat different from that of Marc Bloch, Lucien Febvre, George Duby, Robert Mandrou, and others to indicate a mind that is unique, highly original, yet influenced by the complex contemporary culture. The word is not wholly satisfactory since, asJacquesle Goffpoints out, itsconnotationsin English are different from those in French and Italian. The Mentality ofApes, for example, occurs as a translation of Intelligenzprufungen. "Personality," a word used in a Chaucer title in 1968, is unsuitable because in its popular sense it includes the external self and suggests the total impression received by others. Essentially, as I am using the word, "mentality" emphasizes the ability of the individual mind to go beyond conditioned ideologies in the realization of its own genius and to use the resultant tension itself as a creative force. Despite deviation...