Will the real Chaucer please stand up?

Forget his bumbling persona – the father of English poetry was a smooth cosmopolitan, discovers Tim Smith-Laing

It is pleasing to think that if Geoffrey Chaucer were transported to Southwark today, he would not be completely bewildered. Despite all the changes in the 600-odd years since his pilgrims supposedly set out from the Tabard Inn, April is still April. Just as at the opening of The Canterbury Tales, “shoures soote” still rain down to pierce “the droghte of March”, and “engendered is the flour” on the fruit trees scattered through Bermondsey’s estates. Folk do not much “longen […] to goon on pilgrimages” these days, but one look at the blossom and the pigeons puffed up for courtship would tell a resurrected Chaucer that spring has sprung.

What he would make of the rest of 21st-century Southwark is anyone’s guess, but to judge by the shrewd observer and cosmopolitan operator of Marion Turner’s Chaucer: A European Life, it would not take him long to acclimatise. Unlike many of his contemporaries, Chaucer’s life is relatively amply documented.

The son of a prominent merchant and vintner, he was born in around 1340 into the heart of London mercantile society – a place where merchants from across Europe lived and traded.

Multitalented, a polyglot and perhaps something of a social climber, Chaucer became, inter alia, a household servant to the most powerful noble of the realm, a soldier and prisoner of war, a diplomat, a customs controller, clerk of the King’s works, and a member of parliament. Somewhere he found time to craft in the still infant medium of vernacular English a poetic oeuvre that made him the idol of succeeding

generations of English poets.

Posthumously he became, in his successor John Lydgate’s phrase, the “lodesterre” of the English tongue. After his death in 1400 he was buried in what Turner calls the “relatively insignificant” environs of St Benet’s Chapel, before being relocated in the mid-16th century to become the “founder member of Poets’ Corner”.

Whatever he was like in person, he must have been a million miles away from the ingenuous disclaimer of The Canterbury Tales, “My wit is short, ye may wel understonde”. What exactly he was like is another matter. There are, of course, no shortage of biographies available, from Derek Pearsall’s The Life of Geoffrey Chaucer (1994), the standard critical life, to more popular affairs such as Peter Ackroyd’s Chaucer (2005). Despite the wealth of material, biographers have struggled to pin down the man himself, who, between the impersonal documents and the personal poems, remains elusive.

Turner is aware of the challenge, and sets out her stall swiftly. Stating her belief that Chaucer’s “emotional life […] is beyond the biographer’s reach”, she disclaims any attempt to reconstruct the person, and opts, via daunting amounts of original research and scholarly legwork, for the more complex and satisfying task of interrogating how it is that personhood emerges from its place in the world. Or, to put it another way, since “The arrangement of space participates in the very construction of identity”, looking at the historically shifting arrangements of everything from our living rooms to our conceptual maps of the world will tell us much about what it has meant to be a person at different points in history.

If this sounds technical, that’s because it is. Turner, a medievalist at Oxford, is writing predominantly for fellow specialists, and assumes a certain fluency with the technical vocabulary of critical theory and a wide awareness of medieval literature across the Continent. In practical terms, though, the use of space as a controlling idea works with admirable clarity.

Recounting Chaucer’s life through close examinations of its various “spaces and places”, from concrete environments like

“Vintry Ward”, “the counting house” or “South of the Thames” to more abstract spaces like “the great household”, “Parliament”, and even “the Milky Way”, makes for a hugely illuminating book.

This is one of those studies that academics like to call

“magisterial”, but non-specialists will find much to enjoy here too. Turner’s writing is never less than perspicacious, and often slyly humorous – one chapter takes as its epigraph the sterling advice to medieval servants to “[P]ut not youre handes in youre hosen youre codware for to clawe”.

What A European Life does particularly well is to situate Chaucer in the largeness and complexity of his world. Far from being insular, 14th-century England was embedded in “a global economy on a vast scale”, with all the diplomatic entanglements that necessarily accompanied it. Ships arrived every day with, “Wine from Gascony […] skins, furs, and leather from Spain; fish, timbers, beeswax, grain, iron, zinc, and copper from German and Baltic lands”, along with spices, and silks, sugar, and fruits from as far away as China.

On his many diplomatic missions Chaucer himself travelled through a dynamically networked continent in which small kingdoms like Navarre and Hainaut, and city states like Genoa and Florence, were engaged in continuous cultural and economic exchange. Chaucer, a merchant’s son engaged in high-level diplomacy for much of his life, closely associated with the internationally powerful house of Lancaster, saw and understood far more of this than one would ever guess from his bumbling narratorial personae.

There are, too, illuminating readings of Chaucer’s poems in relation to their various “spaces” – from the use of walled gardens and cages in Troilus and Criseyde (a poem whose plot development is reliant on the dynamics of exposure and enclosure) to the meaning of thresholds and peripheries in The Canterbury Tales (a sequence that sets out but never reaches its destination).

CHAUCER: A EUROPEAN LIFE

‘Put not youre handes in youre hosen youre codware for to clawe,’ advises Chaucer

Perhaps above all, though, Turner illuminates and unpacks the curious paradox at the centre of Chaucer’s work: that it was both highly original and, at least in the modern sense of the term, not original at all. Hailed by his French contemporary Deschamps as above all a “Grant translateur”, Chaucer derived almost everything he wrote, in one manner or another, from his European fellows: Jean de Meun, Guillaume de Machaut, Dante, Petrarch and Boccaccio.