Pilgrim’s progress
CLARE EGAN enjoys a stylishly written book that illuminates the literal and imaginative routes trodden by Chaucer
From the 13th-century Hereford Mappa Mundi (featured on the cover of Chaucer: A European Life), to
digital maps on smartphones, humans have a long history of orientating themselves in the world through spatial representations. Geoffrey Chaucer, best known for his vivid fictional group of tale-telling pilgrims in
The Canterbury Tales, persistently used places, spaces and journeys to investigate what it meant to be a person in the medieval world. Marion Turner’s exciting new biography explores in breathtaking detail the spaces and places that shaped the imaginative world of this great Anglo-European poet.
Chaucer: A European Life recreates 14th-century Europe’s rapidly developing trade networks, newly minted monetary economies, plagues, political uprisings and military confrontations. The book captures a new sense of the poet embedded in his world. Turner guides us from Chaucer’s beginnings as the son of a London wine merchant to his service in great households and on military and diplomatic expeditions across Europe. The book travels through the wool-trade counting house, troubled parliaments and along the south bank of the Thames, before pausing at the walls of Westminster Abbey.
One moment we are carried to the literary realm of the astral plane, as Turner examines Chaucer’s dream visions, including The House of Fame, where the sleeper’s room transforms into a glass temple. The next, we are brought back down to an intimate, street-level perspective. Here, we glimpse the Tabard Inn in Southwark, the real departure point of Chaucer’s fictional pilgrimage.
From gardens and forests to towers, houses and cages, from rural communities to cities and royal courts, Turner shows us how the places of Chaucer’s life and poetry plumb the depths of what it means to be human.
Scholars and readers have recognised the importance of space in Chaucer’s work before, but few have interrogated it in such an expansive way; it is new to see Chaucer’s literary spaces connected to his real world places so expertly. In its mix of real world and abstract spaces, the book is freed from chronology to interweave historical insight with literary analysis. By spatially conceptualising this wealth of information, Turner reveals that “like the river [Thames] itself, Chaucer’s life was always changing, and always the same”.
This momentous biography gives readers a new perspective on the personal authorial journey that culminated in The Canterbury Tales. Turner has produced a stylishly written and carefully crafted book, at times humorous and always lucid, lively and engaging. It presents Chaucer not as a self-consciously monumental “Author with a capital A”, but as an artisan who fashions a multitude of possible pathways for his readers. Instead of telling his readers which road to take in a network of potential journeys to moral meaning, Turner insists, Chaucer “waits and looks both ways”.
Chaucer persistently used places, spaces and journeys to investigate what it meant to be a person in the medieval world
In similar fashion, Turner’s book illuminates the literal and imaginative routes trodden by the poet; she invites us to discover the man and his work in light of a new journey through 14th-century Europe. More than that, though, we come to realise that places and spaces from the past to the present have always shaped our sense of self.