Chaucer has not lacked for biographies, but Marion Turner's is of a rare ambition and competence. Its method is geographical, even topographical, approaching the poet's life by way of the extraordinarily disparate places he spent his time, both in body and in his literary imagination. The effect is to place the greatest of our medieval English poets in his proper context, that of the great medieval Europeanpoets. There is hardly a word in Chaucer's poetry that would be different had no poet before him ever written a line in English; but he is saturated in Latin, French, and Italian writers whose intellectual and lexical inspiration is manifest in his every page.
Turner has discovered new materials—not easy to do in a burnt-over scholarly terrain like Chaucer studies—and she has deployed other materials long known about for original and illuminating purpose. She does full justice to the whole life, only a part of which—and quite possibly for Chaucer not the most important part—was his life in poetry. This very substantial book is sustained by a confident erudition and a powerful and controlled narrative flow. The reader is helped along by useful maps and charts, and cheered by beautiful photographs. The bibliography is copious, certainly, but possibly eccentric and tending to the trendy. One almost gets the impression that nothing of interest was written about Chaucer before the year 2000—a suggestion I would challenge. A novice might gather that Gaston Bachelard had been a more important contributor to modern Chaucer studies than D. W. Robertson Jr., whose name appears nowhere. But all that falls within the redoubt of authorial prerogative.
How useful is the idea of “Europe” in a study of the fourteenth century? Not very, actually. In all his writings, Chaucer used the word “Europe” only twice. In both instances he was evoking the legendary geography of the world as illustrated in the medieval “T-O maps,” in which Europe is the third of the world repopulated by Noah's son Japheth.
For Chaucer, the defining element of larger human community was not geographical proximity but religious faith. His ideal knight had travelled and fought everywhere, “as well in Christendom as in Hethenesse”—the latter referring to areas now a part of geographical Europe but then outside Christendom. Chaucer's continental literary connections demonstrate his enrollment in the traditions of a Christian humanistic poetic enterprise that began well before the monastic schools of the Carolingians and the Ottonians and continued with the epic writers of the Renaissance and beyond.
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