Living in the Future: Sovereignty and Internationalism in the Canterbury Tales by Susan Nakley (review)

Living in the Future constitutes an interesting and intelligent contribution to the longstanding debates about medieval concepts of the nation, about medieval nationhood, about medieval group identities, and about “Englishness” in the Middle Ages. Its specific focus is on The Canterbury Tales and the way it imagines the nation in relation to such concepts as “internationalism,” “sovereignty,” and “domesticity.” As Nakley herself persuasively states in a passage specifically referring to the General Prologue that may well, however, stand for the book’s perspective on the Tales as a whole: “[T]he text puts both a historical England and a more ideal Englishness into conversation with internationalism, emphasizing diversity and calling Englishness into question through its very performance” (p. 103).

The book begins with an Introduction dedicated to a critical history of how Chaucerians have understood Chaucer and his approaches to the abovementioned issues. The second chapter, entitled “Sovereignty Limited,” sketches late medieval theories of sovereignty and nationhood within the political contexts of their times—as developed by Dante, Marsilius of Padua, William of Ockham, John of Paris, and Nicole Oresme—paying special attention to the role of the vernacular within these theories. Chapter 3 discusses questions of “belief” and “nation” in the context of the General Prologue and with a particular emphasis on the frame narrative. Chapter 4 is concerned with the Knight’s Tale and especially with the fashion in which the tale negotiates questions of empire versus nation as refracted through the relations between home and exile. Chapters 5 and 6 scrutinize the issue of sovereignty as one of temporalities and anachronism but also in terms of the household through readings of the Man of Law’s and the Wife of Bath’s tales, respectively. Chapter 7 is interested in women and the vernacular, with a special focus on the Squire’s Tale, and the Epilogue takes the Franklin’s Tale as a point of departure for providing a concise overview of the book’s central arguments.

Living in the Future is an ambitious book that seeks to reconceptualize as many facets of The Canterbury Tales as possible through the joint prisms of sovereignty and nation(hood). Nakley is well read in Chaucer criticism and displays a lively interest in theory, ranging from authorities such as Carl Schmitt and Giorgio Agamben to Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, from Benedict Anderson to Homi Bhabha and Édouard Glissant. Moreover, Nakley frequently displays a talent for elegant close readings as well as an acute sense of telling detail, both of which are perhaps most impressively displayed in her detailed explication of the General Prologue and the way it shows, through minimal yet significant tidbits of information, where the pilgrims come from and how some of them are already associated with one another even before they embark on the pilgrimage and are absorbed into the larger group of the pilgrim community on the road to Canterbury.

Given the enormous scope of the issues this study raises and the inevitable complications that must result from any attempt to bring into dialogue the wide range of daunting concepts and problems Nakley addresses, it comes as no surprise that this investigation into nationhood and sovereignty in The Canterbury Tales generates manifold points for discussion at all levels, not least the conceptual, methodological, and theoretical ones but also on the level of her readings of individual tales and passages. While these points for discussion do by no means call into question the overall achievement of Living in the Future, they do show the degree to which Chaucerians will (have to) continue to wrestle with the big issues of The Canterbury Tales.

One of the book’s most intriguing issues is already to be encountered in its first pages and concerns the use of certain terms and concepts. Do the words “nationalism” and “internationalism” really form a straightforward pair of opposites, and is it...