Following Chaucer: Offices of the Active Life by Lynn Staley (review)

Lynn Staley’s densely argued and erudite new book Following Chaucer derives its subtitle from De officiis (On Obligations) by the Roman philosopher Marcus Tullius Cicero (106–43 bce). De officiis was an enormously influential work of moral philosophy for early Christian writers such as Ambrose, Jerome, and Augustine. The Carolingian Renaissance laid the groundwork for its even greater popularity in the High Middle Ages. For twelfth-century Christian writers and thinkers, the study of ethics became a central concern in a society that witnessed the growing divergence between the ideals of Christianity and its increasingly corrupt reality. Ethical texts such as Cicero’s were increasingly incorporated into the curriculum of the seven liberal arts in the cathedral schools.

But the high point of the influence of De officiis is the Italian Renaissance of the fourteenth century. The early humanists, most notably Petrarch (1304–74), attempted to synthesize Stoic ethics with Christian teaching, as exemplified by his Secretum (1342–43), a dialogue between Augustine and himself. Professor Staley seeks to delineate a similar synthesis in Chaucer’s work in which the Ciceronian concept of “office” or public obligations (officium) is linked not to the health of the Roman republic, which was ironically about to collapse as Cicero was writing, but to the active life of a late medieval Christian. Following Cicero’s own tripartite structure in De officiis, Staley identifies and explores three categories—the royal woman, the poet, and the merchant—all of which can be explained in terms of Chaucer’s own complex self-fashioning as a wealthy merchant’s son and public official devoted to writing poetry, who also looked for patronage from a highly educated queen at the cosmopolitan court of Richard II.

The first chapter, then, is devoted to Richard II’s first wife, Anne of Bohemia, daughter of the Holy Roman Emperor and king of Bohemia, Charles IV of Luxembourg. The choice of Anne as a leading exponent of the Ciceronian active life makes sense not simply because Anne was a queen and therefore a public figure with related duties and obligations, but because she embodied for Chaucer the early humanism of her father’s court in Prague. Petrarch had looked to Anne’s father, Emperor Charles, as the potential savior and unifier of a hopelessly fragmented and warring Italy, and corresponded with him in the familial terms that became increasingly common during the Renaissance. Poet and emperor met in Mantua and Prague, where Petrarch was received and feted as a hero. Petrarch also penned an encomium to Charles’s third wife, Anne of Schweidnitz, in which he praised her in glowing language as the future mother of an emperor (Wenceslas IV). Chaucer’s fascination with Queen Anne, witnessed by the multiple compliments and allusions to her in his work, can be understood in terms of the English poet’s own self-identity as a humanist writer in the mold of Petrarch and Boccaccio. Insofar as Chaucer’s Anne is judicious, balanced, and temperate, acting as a restraining influence on her wayward husband, she is also an exemplar of the Ciceronian ideal of public obligation.

The second chapter (“Chaucer and the Trinity”) addresses the moral obligations of the poet in society. Involving an intricate and richly argued interpretation of the doctrine of the Trinity as “a social document, a means of establishing the boundary lines for the community of the faithful” (57), Staley sees The Second Nun’s Prologue “as a means of defining himself as a writer” (59). Setting up The Second Nun’s Tale in dialogue with Langland’s Piers Plowman as well as Chaucer’s other work, she shows that the poet’s use of the Trinity becomes a means to understand individual office within the active life. For Staley, this integration of the poetic self within a framework of common good is no longer possible at the Tudor courts, “whose poets’ expression...