¡Descarga Chaucer's Poetry: Constructing Society and Morality in Late Medieval England y más Apuntes en PDF de Filología Inglesa solo en Docsity!
READING CHAUCER: LITERATURE,
HISTORY AND IDEOLOGY
LITERATURE AND HISTORY
If, as the Preface to this volume noted, to read Chaucer now is to read him, in some measure, historically, then, in practice, a wide variety of different historical approaches is available to us in order to make sense of the poet’s work. One long-established response to the General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales has been to see it as a reflection of the reality of the past so that, despite its functional nature, it is read as providing immediate evidence about English society in the fourteenth century. Chaucer’s ecclesiastical pilgrims, for instance, have been cited as showing how increasing wealth and authority had weakened the previously austere discipline of the Church and corrupted its moral values. An alternative historical approach to Chaucer, one often associated with the pioneering work of J.M. Manly but which has remained popular right down to the present day, is to see the descriptions of the Canterbury pilgrims as being based on actual people of Chaucer’s acquaintance.
More recently, however, rather than presenting the characters in the General Prologue as passive reflections of reality or as immediate expressions of fourteenth-century society, critics have generally preferred to see Chaucer’s poetry as actively working to construct a particular interpretation of society and to convince us of a specific moral outlook through its adaptation of discourses and conventions found in other late medieval texts, whether these were works of poetry or fiction, sermons, political treatises, parliamentary statutes, or administrative documents. As Paul Strohm puts it, unravelling the meaning of Chaucer’s work by acquiring an understanding of the interpretive frameworks within which late fourteenth-century people made sense of reality is just as historical an enterprise as attempting to relate his txt to actual people, events, or occasions. What, then, were the major ethical and social outlooks which were current in late fourteenth-century England, and how do they feature in its literature? How have scholars positioned Chaucer’s work in relation to them? To what extent does his work reinforce, negotiate, or challenge the
inequalities of class, estate, and gender which constituted late medieval English society?
CONFLICT.
When medieval writers sought to describe – and to justify – the existing social hierarchy, they often turned to the tripartite conception in which society was said to be made up of three main estates: those who pray (the oratores), those who fight (the bellatores), and those who work (the laboratories), with each social order being dependent upon the services provided by ninth century, it remained popular, and perhaps even enjoyed a revival, in late medieval England where it was invoked by preachers such as Chaucer’s contemporary Thomas of Wimbledon in his sermon Redde rationem villicationis tue (c. 1388). By contrast, other writers preferred to offer a much more detailed breakdown of ranks and occupations, comparing the social order to, for instance, the human body or to a beehice in order to demonstrate the need for the many different groups within the social whole to combine functional specialization with harmonious interdependence.
Yet, despite their insistence on the need for reciprocity between the different parts of society, philosophers, preachers, and political theorists were far from concluding that social relations should be in any sense egalitarian. On the contrary, just as a beehive was ruled by a king (it being unthinkable that it should be governed by a queen) or as particular parts of the body – the soul, the head, or the heart – were held to be more noble and powerful than the others, so certain members of society were seen as being entitled to enjoy more power, status, and wealth than the rest. The use of the body or the beehive as a pattern for the rightful organization of human society also expressed the broader principle, on which was backed by the authority of both ancient philosophy (whether neo-Platonic, Aristotelian, or Stoic) and Christian theology, that human society and ethics should be modelled on nature. In particular, nature itself was seen as being hierarchical in form, from angels at the top to minerals at the bottom with, in descending order, men, women, animals, and plants in-between, with the higher members of the hierarchy possessing greater powers and abilities and the lower existing for the sake of the higher. By this means, what was actually a transient and changing social order was justified as being stable and divinely ordained, and its inequalities were presented as being in the common interest of all its members. For fourteenth-century preachers such as John Bromyard and Ralph of Acton, this view of social hierarchy as according with the divine will, and with the requirements of nature, reason and virtue, was an ethical commonplace. Moreover, the belief
that society should be hierarchically structured was not simply an idea confined to learned treatises or sermons but was also a principle which was affirmed in the practices of everyday life. In parish churches, for instance, people went up to make their offerings according to their social standing, an occasion at which Chaucer’s Wife of Bath insisted on taking pride of place. Similarly, when hearing individual confessions, priests were required to ask their parishioners whether they had failed in reverence to their lords
the late fourteenth-century religious manual Of Shrifte and Penance defined as breaking God’s commandment against theft.
Those thinkers who expounded this hierarchical outlook naturally favoured a deferential acquiescence whereby people accepted the social position into which they had been born, worked hard at their calling, obeyed their superiors, and resisted the temptation to envy the prosperity of others. They therefore tended to have a low opinion of social mobility and of those who had ambitions to rise above their station. According to Thomas of Wimbledon, instead of thinking of his own personal advancement, each man should follow St Paul’s recommendation to remain in hi estate and to devote himself to the tasks to which God had called him. However, if social mobility was judged to be undesirable, then social conflict was regarded as even more of an evil. Chaucerian England was a world of profound social tensions and intensifying class wages from rising in the decades of labour shortage that followed the Black Death of 1348-9, by teh complaints made in parliament in 1377 about peasants who refused to render their customary rents and services to their lords, and by the burning of manorial court rolls and peasant demands for freedom during the Great Revolt of 1381. Confronted with this dysfunctional reality, medieval thinkers responded by emphasizing the need for unity and harmony within society. Just as Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy had taught that God had bound his creation with a chain of love which kept everything within its own proper bounds, a doctrine which was reiterated in Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale, so philosophers and theologians argued that society too should be united by the common love between its members.
Nevertheless, whilst many late medieval thinkers sought to provide what Weber called a theodicy of privilege in which the good fortune of the social elite was justified as its God-given prerogative, this did not mean that they thereby licensed those who enjoyed wealth, status and power to abuse or exploit their inferiors. On the contrary, since justice was conventionally defined in terms of each person receiving his or her rightful (if unequal) due, fourteenth century clerics, including Bromyard, Robert Mannying, Nicholas Bozon, and the author of the Memoriale presbiterorum, regularly attacked those lords whose exactions from their tenants were so excessive that they threatened the latter’s livelihood. Moreover, given that Christian theology held the things of the spirit to be superior to the material goods and rewards of this world, and given that it was the preachers’ job to attack the characteristic sins of their specific congregations, churchmen were perfectly capable of mounting bitter attacks on the
nobility (as well as on the prelates of teh church), criticizing their excessive consumption, their pride in their noble birth, their abuse of their position for personal gain, and their failure to perform their estate functions. Nevertheless, those who suffered at the hands of the rich were not expected to seek a remedy in this life but rather to await their reward – and the punishment of those who had made them suffer
hierarchical structure of society per se but rather the ethical failings of its individual members; their aim was not to provoke social change but to effect moral reformation.
LITERATURE AND SOCIETY IN FOURTEENTH-CENTURY
ENGLAND
In late medieval English, poetry and fictional narratives were major forms whereby the hierarchical social views set out by philosophers and theologians were transmitted to a wider audience. In line with the commonplace proposition of medieval literary theory that works of imaginative literature pertained to ethics, Chaucer and other contemporary poets put to work many of the ideas and stock metaphors which were current in contemporary sermons, works of philosophy and political treatises. In this respect at least, no simple distinction is possible between narrative fiction and poetry on the one hand and didactic prose and non-fiction on the other. Rather, works of imaginative literature were supposed to provide their readers not only with textual pleasure, what Chaucer’s Host refers to as their solaas and John Gower calls their lust, but also tu supply them with moral instruction. Gower’s poetry, for instance, drew on the ideas found in standard medieval works of ethics and political theory, including Pseudo-Aristotelian Secretum Scretorum, Brunetto latini’s Li livres dou tresor and Giles of Rome’s De regimine principum, to teach a conservative social lesson. Thus his Mirour de Lomme (mid- to late-1370s) condemned the high wages which employers were obliged to concede in the post-Black Death period as an offence against justice: it is a great wrong to see the upper class in the power of the peasant class. In Book I of Gower’s Vox Clamantis (early 1380s), the peasant rebels of 1381 are depicted as farmyard beasts which have risen up against their rightful masters and are nightmarishly transformed into ravening creatures which turn against humanity, their revolt being bestial, montstruous, criminal and diabolically inspired. The poet similarly attacked social ambition and mobility for being unnatural and immoral: nothing is more troublesome than a lowly person when he has risen to the top, at least when he was born a serf. Likewise, in Piers Plowman (B-text c.1380), William Langland combined allegorical poetry and alliterative verse with a rehearsal of the tripartite social theory in which the peasants were to toil willingly to support the knightly class who would, in return, defend them and the Church. His work therefore
attacked those labourers who, against the dictates of reason, demanded high wages, cursed the government for its labour legislation, and ignored the advice of the wise Cato to bear patiently the burden of poverty.
However, it was not only the lower orders whose failings were criticized in such works of imaginative literature. When poets in late fourteenth- and fifteenth-century
their day, they were often most concerned with the behaviour of those who wielded the most power in society and who, after all, often constituted the audience which they were seeking to influence through their works. Like contemporary preachers, late medieval poets thus taught that the rich and powerful should not abuse their position but rather, as Gower’s Mirour de Lomme advised, should show their gratitude to those beneath them by rewarding them justly for their work. Gower’s Confession Amantis made this point by means of a pun: ingratitude (unkindenesse) was itself unnatural (against kinde) since it was a vice hated by every living thing. Nevertheless, if the ruling elite failed to afford such respect to their inferiors their punishment would come in the next life, at the hands of God, not in this, at the hands of their victims. The political verse of the time, including On the Rebellion of Jack Strawe and On the Slaughter of Archbishop Sudbury (both written immediately after the 1381 revolt), therefore tends to presnt popular unrest from the viewpoint of its enemies. Even when they portrayed revolt as being a response to injustice, such works sought to warn their readers of the dangers that would come from provoking the folye of upheaval from below, rather than sympathizing with the actions of the rebels themselves.
Such writing formed part of the literature of complaint, wherein poets bemoaned the state of contemporary social and political life, criticizing, for instance, teh conduct of the war in France, the burden of taxation or the failings of particular groups within society. Complaint literature often took the form of estates satire, the genre from which Chaucer’s General Prologue itself is derived, in which, as in The Simonia (A and B versions c.1322-30), the different social groups are listed and their abuses are condemned. If literature pertained to ethics then what such works showed was that vice and virtue were not simply individual character traits but were instead defined in relation to a person’s specific estate or occupation. As a result, what might be permissible or even recommended for one order, including hunting for the nobles or marriage for the laity, might constitute a sin for another, for instance those who had entered religious orders. Typically, then, satirists would attack churchmen for being lustful and proud, nobles for failing to defend widows and orphans, labourers for being lazy and greedy, and wives for being disobedient, vain, and talkative. Ofthen as in the Prologue to Gower’s Confessio Amantis, these criticisms of contemporary life were made by contrasting it with some lost Golden Age when nobles had been respected, clergymen had lived lives of virtue and simplicity, and the commons had been humble and obedient. Nevertheless, while such
satires often mounted virulent attacks on the social abuses of their own day, their criticisms were not accompanied by any call for a change in the social structure. Once more, although morality was defined in social terms, i.e. in terms of whether or not one performed the duties of one’s estate, the abuses from which society was said to be suffering were seen as the expression of individual sinfulness. Accordingly, the remedy which was proposed for such abuses was not social reform but personal contrition.
be seen, in terms of Bakhtinian literary theory, as being monologic in nature. Thus, unlike dialogic works in which a genuine debate takes place between a number of different voices, they are didactic in tone so that, even when they contain conflicting opinions, they leave us in no doubt about the nature of their authors’ own views, views which are, of course, equated with the truth. The simonie, for instance, criticizes abbots and priors who, like lay lords, ride out to hunt and yet leave the poor to starve; bemoans the apathy of nobles and knights who refuse to fight to defend the Church; and criticizes merchants for trading deceitfully. The fundamental issue confronting us here is the extent to which the General Prologue of the Canterbury Tales follows the conventions of this mode of literature. Did Chaucer ultimately endorse the hierarchical social outlook which was favoured by the preachers and poets cited above, or did he go beyond it, playing with its conventions, challenging at least some of its assumptions, and exposing it as an inadequate account of the society in which he lived?
THREE READINGS OF CHAUCER: CONSERVATIVE, SCEPTICAL,
AND OPEN-ENDED
That Chaucer himself was extremely familiar with the arguments with which the social hierarchy of fourteenth-century England was conventionally legitimated is evident from the moral and social teachings set out by the Parson at the end of the Canterbury Tales. His tale, which is actually a lengthy exposition of the nature of sin and penitence based on three thirteenth-century works, Raymund of Pennaforte’s Summa de poenitentia, William Peraldus’s Summa vitiorum, and the Summa virtutum de remedus anime, explains that God has created all things withtin the cosmos in righte ordre, and order which is necessarily hierarchical in nature. Accordingly, true order within society also demands a corresponding inequality between its estates, classes, and genders. As the Parson says, reason requires that there should be degree above degree and God himself has ordeyned that som folk sholde be moore heigh in estatt and in degree, and some folk more lough. The virtue of humility thus requires us to accept gladly the decisions of our rulers and of those of a higher rank. Servants hsould not grucche or murmure prively when given a command; no one should envy the prosperity of anyone else; and wives, whilst being be respected by their husbands, should also be subject and obedient to them. All members of society should work for the common profit, with those who do not observe the rightful
hierarchical and harmonious order which God has ordained for this world being condemned to a place of torment in the next. Although lords should not take excessive amounts of rent or tallage from their tenants, all men should suffer patiently the wrongs that are done to them, so that hose who hunger and thirst in his life will have the plentee of joye in the hereafter. Can Chaucer’s own authorial voice be equated with that of his fictional Parson? In
end of the tales provide the standard by which we should judge the pilgrims who are described at their beginning?
In addressing these questions, Chaucerians have offered many different answers, far too many for them all to be rehearsed here. Howevere, three main overall approaches can be identified, even though any one of them may be adopted by scholars writing from a wide range of theoretical perspectives and deploying many different critical vocabularies. Firstly, are those critcs who regard Chaucer’s views as being essentially in accord with conventional medieval defenses of social inequality. Secondly, there are those who adopt the opposite view, discerning a more radical Chaucer, one who highlights the inadequacies of traditional social morality and who offers a challenge to official conceptions of the prevailing order. Thirdly, there are those who consider Chaucer’s work to be insome way open-ended and so allowing the members of its audience to make up their own minds about the moral questions which it raises. This classification is, inevitably, over-simplistic, not least because any individual critic may combine elements frome ach of these different outlooks but it does, nonetheless, offer a useful framework in which to place modern attempts to interpret Chaucer in relation to his historical and social context.
The first of these approaches regards Chaucer as sharing the social outlook of the Parson who, in effect, then becomes a mouthpiece for the poet’s own views. Medieval literary theory regarded the conclusion of a work as being a particularly privileged place for an author to express his own views, whatever differing opinions may have been voiced earlier in the text, and so it may be significant that the Parson tells his tale in response to the Host’s invitation for him to knytte up and make an ende of the storytelling contest. For thhose scholars and writers who adopt this reading of the Canterbury Tales as a conservative texxt, ranging form the patristic critics of the 1950s and 1960s, who saw Chaucer’s poetry as allegorically rehearsing the Augustinian doctrine of charity, to Alcuin Blamires more recently, Chaucer should be understood to be a moralizing author, one who, even when he does not tell us in a direct fashion what we should think of his pilgrims, nonetheless manages to make his own views abundantly clear.
In such readings, Chaucer’s General Prologue is seen as portraying some of the pilgrims as ideal representatives of their estate who perform their proper social functions, put the common good before their own immediate pleasure or profit, and live in harmony with their
fellows. These pilgrims therefore function as yardsticks by which the behaviour of the others may be judged, ven when they are not openly criticized. Chaucer’s Knight, for example, is not like those knights denounced by Gower who have fought for personal profit, for the love of a lady, or out of a desire for individual vainglory. Rather, he seems to have devoted his life to crusading and posseses all the virtues traditionally expected of the chivalric bellatores, including loyalty, bravery,
