David Wallace. Chaucerian Polity: Absolutist Lineages and Associational Forms in England and Italy.

Cox, Catherine S.

David Wallace. Chaucerian Polity: Absolutist Lineages and Associational Forms in England and Italy. Stanford: UP, 1997. Pp. xix + 555.

In this engaging and substantial study, Wallace sets out to explore various Italian and English cultural events and their impact upon contemporary literary figures, most significantly Chaucer and the great Italian Trecento authors. Bringing considerable erudition to his analyses of literary works, Wallace situates the literary texts in relation to the interlinked sites of "medieval" London and "Renaissance" Florence, testing the validity of such terminology and suggesting that literary critics should instead "suspend belief in cultural partitions" (7). Wallace's core argument is that Chaucer understood the works of Dante, Boccaccio, Petrarch, and others within contexts of political conflict and ideological warfare, most significantly that of Florence, whose committee rule was an associational form, and Lombardy, whose Visconti leadership constituted an absolutist lineage. The literary argument that Wallace makes about Chaucer is thus twofold: Chaucer can be profitably read in relation to his Italian predecessors, and, in turn, the study of Chaucer can provide significant resources and points of departure for the exploration of his predecessors in light of the political contexts of England and Italy.

The first three chapters take up the concern of associational forms (that is, the collective bodies through which individuals experienced themselves as political subjects, for example, parties, guilds, fraternities, households), situated in relation to Chaucer's Florentine and Lombard visits of 1373 and 1378, respectively. Rejecting the simplistic, and widespread, belief that Chaucer's reaction to Italy was that of a bedazzled tourist, Wallace finds instead that Chaucer's appreciation for Italian culture was that of a seasoned diplomat; his visits to Florence and Lombardy exposed him not only to the most crucial conflict of the Italian Trecento, between republican libertas and dynastic despotism, but also to the literary authors exemplifying the cities and their forms of polity. Visits to Florence, and then to Milan and Pavia, exposed Chaucer to the writings of Boccaccio and Petrarch in conjunction with other forms of cultural production both popular and devotional. Chaucer, Wallace argues, encountered the Italian texts within the context of this Florentine-Lombard struggle, and hence his own understanding and appreciation of the texts themselves were informed by the political situations that helped shape them.

After situating Chaucer within these Italian political contexts, Wallace considers the significance of Chaucer's Italian encounters to his literary enterprise, with particular emphasis upon the compagnye of the General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales. Beginning with an exposition on the associational forms of compagnye (or felaweshipe), Wallace argues that the General Prologue provides the first instance of Chaucer's authorial signature, the "sixth of six" topos--"Ther was also a REVE, and a MILLERE, / A SOMNOUR, and a PARDONER also, / A MAUNCIPLE, and myself--ther were namo" (1.542-44)--and that this signature is articulated with both artistic confidence and personal anxiety about the complex division of labor in English society. Guild culture and female slavery in Florence had already shown Chaucer how women, "commodified as voiceless figures within a new symbolic order" (19), posed the threat of coming to recognize their own symbolic significance, which in turn prompted misogynistic complaints from Boccaccio, Wallace finds. Chaucer was thus compelled to assess gender in relation to speech and power in his own work, drawing off Boccaccio's literary expressions of gender politics. Wallace asserts that English guilds help account for some of the more salient differences between Chaucer's compagnye and Boccaccio's brigata, in particular their respective attitudes toward collective behavior. For while the two framed collections, Canterbury Tales and Decameron, share an apparent commitment to the exploration of associational forms, Chaucer favors the more inclusive social groupings illustrated in the General Prologue than the young aristocrats and social hierarchy of Boccaccio's Decameron.

Several chapters continue with analyses of the Canterbury Tales and its compagnye. Since Chaucer includes various subgroups as well as unassimilable individuals, Wallace, making clear that it should not be construed as an idealized associational form, explores the extent to which associational polity is refigured and foregrounded in specific tales. In the Knight's Tale, Chaucer stages an act of political rupture: the unraveling of associational forms under Thesian polity. Characterized by Theseus's resistance to political felaweshipe coupled with the absence of wifely counsel, the Knight's Tale demonstrates how the presence or absence of wifely counsel and women's eloquence is connected to larger issues of power and rule. Chaucer's cutting of Boccaccio's Teseida, too, emphasizes the significance of Thesian polity, for while Chaucer retained most of the business and political issues, he rejected many of the Teseida's concerns with social and sexual relationships. Wallace maintains that gender politics in the Canterbury Tales, a recurring concern for both him and Chaucer, can help us explore aspects of statecraft that are problematic or contradictory, especially if gender theory is employed as a means of approaching medieval people as political subjects.

Wallace then travels informally along a trajectory that moves from associational to absolutist forms. The economic and social powers of the countryside are acknowledged in the Miller's Tale, as John leaves Oxford for Oseney and Nicholas is punished with an instrument of the countryside, the "kultour." The Reeve's Tale exhibits a more violent opposition between city and countryside (resolving its conflicts in the workplace and bedroom), which Wallace compares to the Decameron's "most graphic and egregious example of the city screwing the countryside" (134), that of Pietro and Ganni told at the end of the Ninth Day. From there Wallace considers the linguistic details of the Friar's and Summoner's Tales, especially in relation to Dante's Guido of Inferno 27 and to what Wallace characterizes as the deficient language of the religious institutions that they expose. An extensive discussion of the London of Chaucer's Cook frames an analysis of drynkyng and its attendant issues of social integration and individual rebellion, including the confrontation with the Manciple, whose Tale is critiqued in connection with Dante's and Boccaccio's source texts. From there Wallace offers a consideration of the interconnected activities of merchants and lawyers in relation to the Man of Law and his Tale. He notes that Chaucer's second Canterbury Tales authorial signature is articulated, in the Man of Law's Introduction, so as to associate vernacular authorship with the texts and procedures of law, an association Wallace develops in conjunction with the Melibee and the Griselda stories of Boccaccio and Chaucer. An exploration of the household rhetoric of violence in the Melibee story offers a brilliant and perspicacious look at the narrative location of a violent man's physical presence (compared to the similar situation of the Manciple's Tale). Wallace notes that the Melibee story's original author, Albertano, was a Lombard and that for Chaucer Lombardy represents a "spatial metaphor for the tyrannical cast of mind" (213), as exemplified in the Clerk's Tale, the Merchant's Tale, and the Legend of Good Women.

The last two formal chapters take up the argument that Boccaccio and Petrarch, advancing two distinct political agendas, represent two types of humanism that correspond to, respectively, the Monk's Tale (De casibus) and The Legend of Good Women. Here Wallace argues that the Monk's Tale affirms the Boccaccian paradigm, and that the Monk therefore disappoints owing to the repetitive and unstimulating nature of his solitary sequence and the personal boredom it reflects, arguably like that of Boccaccio's own state of literary acedia. The Legend follows instead the Italian humanists' paradigm of classical lives. While inspired by Boccaccio's De mulieribus claris, Chaucer's Legend significantly includes a woman, Alceste, in the business of public life and, as such, prompts comparisons with a Petrarchan model, De laudibus feminarum. This short treatise dedicated to the empress Anne of Bohemia, Wallace argues, precipitates the rewriting of the F Prologue into the G version, which follows the precedent of Petrarchan humanism and rejects the vernacular poetics of Dante and Boccaccio. The book's formal chapters conclude with a reiteration of Wallace's "sixth of six" thesis apropos of the Wife of Bath's quest for husband number six, which, Wallace asserts, is to be satisfied by Chaucer himself--"Welcome the sixte, whan that evere he shal" (3.45)--and with the assertion that "Chaucer's dedication to wifely eloquence is a singular historical phenomenon" (377) that Chaucer calls to our attention by way of the "sixth of six" topos.

A brief concluding chapter offers further possibilities about the intriguing relationship of Shakespeare's works to Chaucer's and his Italian influences, which underscore both the magnitude of Wallace's accomplishment as well as the further work to be pursued along the lines that he has so effectively and innovatively opened up. His analyses of literary texts in conjunction with cultural and historical concerns are exemplary throughout, lucid and persuasive, and substantial notes and documentation--over one hundred pages of reference matter--attest to the scope and breadth of learning that informs the discussion. Wallace's work informs, delights and provokes and should appeal to scholars, teachers, and students of medieval and early modern English and Italian literature and culture.

Catherine S. Cox, University of Pittsburgh at Johnstown