Backman Clifford R. The Worlds of Medieval Europe

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404 THE LATE MIDDLE AGES

stamp on the universe. He was the touchstone, the foundational point, the last

voice. He chose who was in paradise, in purgatory, and in everlasting torment. He

decided that a middle-class Florentine girl could guide humanity to heaven and

into God’s own presence. The Church blanched at his hubris but recognized that

an indomitable spirit had been born.

Geoffrey Chaucer, by contrast, seemed to embrace everything without classifying

it, to celebrate everyone without judging them. A generous spirit suffuses all his

work, even when he is at his most sarcastic and critical. He was born in the early

1340s (the exact date is unknown) in London, the son of a wine merchant with

close commercial links with France. Chaucer grew up speaking French and En-

glish, and he attended a local school in London where he began to study Latin

literature (especially Ovid and Virgil, his two greatest loves) and science, in which

he kept an amateur’s interest all his life. In 1357 he entered court life as a page to

the countess of Ulster, the daughter-in-law of King Edward III. He served with

the English army in 1359–1360 during one of its raids into France, early in the

Hundred Years War (1337–1453), and was quickly captured. The fact that Edward

III personally paid Chaucer’s ransom suggests that he was already attracting at-

tention as a person of considerable talent. He served thereafter on a number of

diplomatic missions on the Continent. In 1366 he married Philippa de Roet, the

daughter of a French knight of Hainault; since Philippa was a lady-in-waiting to

the queen of England (also named Philippa), Chaucer became even more promi-

nent as a courtier. He quickly became a favorite aide to John of Gaunt, the duke

of Lancaster, as well. Except for a few periods when, given the political upheavals

within England after Edward III’s death in 1377, he was brieﬂy out of favor, Chau-

cer remained a leading courtier and civic ofﬁcial in London for the rest of his life,

and he served on roughly a half-dozen international diplomatic and commercial

missions. He died on 25 October 1400 in a house he had leased in the garden of

Westminster Abbey and was buried in what came to be known as Poets’ Corner.

Apart from some short verses, his ﬁrst signiﬁcant poetic works were a trans-

lation of the Romance of the Rose (or at least part of it) and a long verse eulogy

for John of Gaunt’s dead ﬁrst wife called The Book of the Duchess. For a ﬁrst creative

effort The Book of the Duchess, which Chaucer probably wrote sometime around

1370, shows remarkable talent. He uses a ﬁctional ﬁrst-person narrator, a favorite

device throughout his career, one that allows him not only to tell a tale but, by

refracting the tale through the peculiarities of the narrator’s personality, to add

layers of irony and touching but often hilarious modulations of tone and detail.

The Book of the Duchess begins with the narrator’s account of his own suffering:

He has endured inconquerable insomnia for no less than eight years because of

the pain he still feels from a lost love affair. One day, while reading Ovid, he learns

of the existence of Morpheus, the ancient god of sleep, to whom he decides to

pray for relief. A deep sleep immediately follows, in which the narrator has a

dream that comprises the rest of the poem. In the dream the narrator has joined

a hunt in the countryside, and while riding through the woods he encounters a

black-clad knight who is weeping in grief. The narrator asks the knight the reason

for his sorrow, and the knight tells of his own lost love, the Lady White (symbol-

ically, the duchess of Lancaster whom Chaucer is eulogizing). The knight, in being

drawn from his solitary grief by the narrator’s tactful and gentle questioning,

achieves a kind of cathartic release: He still mourns his loss but comes to feel

grateful for having had the lady’s love in the ﬁrst place. Observing simply that

“By God, hyt ys routhe!” [“By God, it’s a pity”], the narrator leaves the knight

SIGNS OF A NEW ERA 405

and awakens from his dream, presumably ready now to move on in life without

the weight of his own crippling woe.

Other works followed in a steady stream: a translation of Boethius’ Consolation

of Philosophy, a curious fragment called The House of Fame (which Chaucer may

have intended as a lampoon of Dante’s Comedy), a love allegory called The Parlia-

ment of Fowls, and a love tragedy called Troilus and Criseyde, which Chaucer

adapted from a long poem by Boccaccio, in which the hero Troilus is loved but

ultimately betrayed by the unfaithful Criseyde, who is herself the victim of polit-

ical and familial manipulations. He also wrote several other lesser works.

Greatest of all his works is The Canterbury Tales, which he began to work on

in 1387. The grand “General Prologue” describes the scene: Twenty-nine pilgrims

meet in an inn in Southwark to begin a pilgrimage to Becket’s tomb in Canterbury.

Their host, named Harry Bailly, proposes that they entertain themselves along the

way by telling four stories each—two on the way there, and two on the journey

back.

Telling so many tales from some many narrative points of view is a tech-

nique that Chaucer learned from Giovanni Boccaccio, with whose works Chaucer

became acquainted during his diplomatic errands on the Continent. Boccaccio’s

best-known work was The Decameron, a loosely connected set of one hundred short

stories told by a party of ten narrators (one apiece per day over a period of ten

days) who have temporarily ﬂed the city of Florence because of plague. This tech-

nique accorded perfectly with Chaucer’s gifts for narrative energy and character-

ization, subtle irony and broad comedy. The whole work begins with a passage

that has become famous:

Whan that April with his shoures sote

䊳

sweet showers

The droghte

䊳

of Marche hath perced to the rote,

䊳

drought / root

And bathed every veyne

䊳

in swich licour,

䊳

vein / such moisture

Of which vertu

䊳

engendred is the ﬂour;

䊳

By virtue of which / ﬂower

Whan Zephirus

䊳

eek with his swete breeth the west wind

Inspired

䊳

hath in every holt

䊳

and heeth

䊳

Breathed into / wood / heath

The tendre croppes,

䊳

and the yonge sonne sprouts

Hath in the Ram his halfe cours y-ronne;

䊳

run

And smale fowles

䊳

maken melodye, birds

That slepen al the night with open ye

䊳

— eyes

So priketh hen Nature in hir corages

䊳

— Nature so spurs them in their hearts

Than longen

䊳

folk to goon

䊳

on pilgrimages, long / go on

And palmeres

䊳

for to seken straunge strondes,

䊳

foreigners / shores

To ferne halwes,

䊳

, couthe

䊳

in sondry londes;

䊳

far-off shires / known / lands

And specially, from every shires ende

Of Engelond to Caunterbury they wende,

䊳

make their way

The holy blisful martir for to seke,

䊳

seek

That hem

䊳

hath holpen,

䊳

whan that they were seke.

䊳

them / helped / sick

(The language is difﬁcult to newcomers, but exposure seems worthwhile just once.

The trick is to read it aloud, phonetically. The marginal notes should help.)

Chaucer himself intrudes upon the narrative several times, complicating the

interpretation of the stories wonderfully; by himself reacting to the personal quirks

6. If this was actually Chaucer’s full plan, there would have been 118 tales in the poem—a stupen-

dously long work, since each tale was provided with a prologue of its own (some of which were even

longer than the tales they prefaced); as it happened, Chaucer lived to complete only twenty-four pro-

logues and tales.

406 THE LATE MIDDLE AGES

of the characters who have themselves just told and reacted to their tales—not to

mention the fact that the other characters also respond to the tales as they are

told—he creates a constantly shifting kaleidoscope of interpretational levels. As a

result, a tale that may appear at ﬁrst to be crude slapstick comedy (the Miller’s

Tale, for example, appears on one level to be merely an elaborate fart joke) emerges

at second glance as a piece of clever literary satire (the Miller’s Tale is also a send-

up of tales of chivalric jousts and knightly exploits to win the love of a lady), and

at a third glance to be a deep lament for the capacity of human beings to deceive

themselves (the Miller’s Tale also sympathetically portrays characters who believe

they are in control of their lives even as they meet inexorable fates and receive

ﬁtting punishments: images of Noah and the Flood abound here).

History textbooks commonly praise The Canterbury Tales for presenting a “pan-

oramic view of medieval society,” or some such thing. There is some truth to such

a view, but by itself it says too little. Chaucer is doing more here than trying to

provide a cross section of medieval life, just as Dante is trying to do much more

than provide a narrative architecture to orthodox Catholic eschatology. Chaucer’s

world is one not only of shifting and contrasting viewpoints, but one in which as

far as human understanding is concerned there is nothing but shifting and con-

trasting viewpoints. The world shimmers with uncertainty and the impossibility

of complete knowledge. Chaucer loves the world, its people, and their lives with

tremendous passion, but he has no great conﬁdence in our ability to make total

sense of any of it. Personal experience seems to be all that we have, he says, and

Truth—with a capital T—is always beyond our reach. This does not mean that life

is without its joys. The world teems with the stuff of happiness, if only we know

where to look for it. But laughter, love, humor, and impatience with cant—not

pious conventionality and naive intellectualism—are our best ways of ﬁnding it.

One of Chaucer’s greatest characters, the bawdy and outrageous Alisoun or

“The Wife of Bath,” in the prologue to whose tale she describes her ﬁve marriages

and the delight she took (or, with typical Chaucerian irony, claims to have taken)

in the merriment, sex, food, and wine that ﬁlled them all, offers the closest thing

there is to a summation of Chaucer’s view of life:

But Lord Crist! whan that it remembreth me

䊳

I think

Upon my yowthe,

䊳

and on my jolitee,

䊳

youth / joyfulness

It tikleth

䊳

me aboute myn herte rote.

䊳

tickles / my heart’s root

Unto this day it dooth myn herte bote

䊳

good

That I have had my world as in my tyme.

But age, allas! that al wol evenyme,

䊳

poisons everything

Hath me biraft

䊳

my beautee and my pith.

䊳

bereft of / vigor

Lat go, farewel! the devel go therwith!

The ﬂour is gone, ther is namore to telle:

The bren,

䊳

as I best can, now moste

䊳

I selle; bran / must

But yet to be right mery wol I fonde.

䊳

will I try

Like Dante, Chaucer is a medieval writer but one who is more remarkable for the

ways in which he stands in contrast to, and perhaps in open deﬁance of, medieval

certainties. The Divine Comedy represents a supreme effort to impose unity and

order on the cosmos, but in its very insistence on this theme it belies the awareness

that that unity is no longer there. The Canterbury Tales, assuming that what we

have of it is representative of Chaucer’s overall intentions for the work, surrenders

even the attempt to assert unity and order, and it dares us to recognize that human

life is an utterly unpredictable pilgrimage toward a goal that we, like Chaucer

SIGNS OF A NEW ERA 407

himself as well as his characters, may never live to reach. In light of such an

awareness, a recognition of an unravelled world, Dante responds by willing an

order of his own making upon the universe, whereas Chaucer reacts by celebrat-

ing, laughing at, bemoaning, and wondering at the individuals caught on the road

to nowhere. But in the cosmos of both writers it is the experience of the individual

that matters, that represents the only sure anchor in a world of unstoppable

change.

HRISTINE DE

IZAN

Christine de Pizan (1364–1430) was Europe’s ﬁrst professional woman of letters,

a talented individualist who supported herself entirely by her pen. She was Italian,

born in Venice to an astrologer in service to the Republic, but at the age of ﬁve

Christine followed her father to Paris after he was hired as scientiﬁc advisor to

the court of King Charles V (1364–1380), and she spent the rest of her life in France.

She was raised at court and given a solid education in languages and literature;

growing up as a commoner (albeit a privileged one) amid aristocratic trappings,

Christine combined the hard-working professionalism of the urban classes with

the idealism of noble culture. Her lively demeanor and royal connections made

her an attractive ﬁgure; she was courted by numerous suitors and at the age of

fourteen was married to a nobleman from Picardy. Three children came in quick

succession, and Christine might very well have ended up living a comfortable, if

unremarkable, life as a patronness of a minor aristocratic court. But her husband

died unexpectedly and left her with three children and an elderly mother to sup-

port, and little money to do it with. She was twenty-ﬁve. It seems that she began

to write out of private need, an attempt to express her personal grief and fear; but

she soon discovered that she had a talent for both verse and prose, and when

friends urged her to publish her writings she found an admirer in Louis, the duke

of Orle´ans (the brother of King Charles VI) who became her patron. Thus began

a thirty-year career as a professional writer. She became famous after taking part

in a literary debate over the popular Romance of the Rose, whose depiction of

women she dismissed angrily as shallow and misogynistic. From that point on she

never looked back—even though she later lamented, in The Book of Changing For-

tune (1403), that economic necessity had forced her “to become a man” who la-

bored daily for survival—and poured out many volumes of prose and verse. The

date of Christine’s death is unknown, but probably occurred shortly after she

completed her last known work, a poem called The Song of Joan of Arc, which

appeared in late 1429.

Christine wrote in many genres: prose biographies, verse fables, essays, polit-

ical commentaries, romantic ballads, short stories, courtly romances, literary sat-

ires, and moral treatises. Her works, like those of many proliﬁc authors, are uneven

in quality but all were popular in their time. No doubt one reason for that was

her defense of French cultural and social superiority. Christine wrote during the

darkest years of the Hundred Years War, when France suffered defeat after hu-

miliating defeat at the hands of the English, and much of the power of her writing

derives from her sense of moral urgency: The beauties and delights of life are to

be celebrated but ought not to distract us from understanding that life is serious

business. Whether urging the people on to repulse the English invaders and restore

French greatness (in works like On the Body Politic [1407], Of Arms and Chivalry

[1407], and The Book of Peace [1410], skewering the fanatical esthetes of chivalric

408 THE LATE MIDDLE AGES

lore who love the idea of love more than the reality of ﬂesh-and-blood women (in

works like Letter to the God of Love [1399]), or praising the self-sacriﬁcing zeal of

Joan of Arc, Christine constantly insists on the value of the real, the here and now,

the individuals present in our lives, the immediacy of emotion. The pain of her

private losses never left her, and all her works carry the message that the time to

be earnest is now because one can never tell when, given the world’s unpredict-

ability, our happiness will be snatched away from us.

The French defeat at Agincourt in 1415 broke her spirit, and she retired to a

convent at Poissy, the birthplace of France’s national hero Louis IX. She continued

to write, although less proliﬁcally than before. Two heartrending works came ﬁrst:

On the Prison of Human Life (1416–1417), which bewailed the sufferings that so

often characterize womens’ lives in an unfair world, and The Hours of Contemplating

Our Lady (1425), which Christine wrote to express her grief over the death of her

son. Her last work was the rousing Song of Joan of Arc, which united her concerns

for French society, the unfairness with which the world treats women, and the

tragedy of frustrated love and idealism. Today her upbeat poetic satires and chi-

valric romances are more frequently read than her somber meditations—and they

deserve to be read—but the focus on the upbeat can give a false impression of

why she was so popular in her own time. Christine had the courage to describe

the brutal disappointments of life in unsparing terms and to insist that the only

way to combat them was with honest emotion and honest relationships between

people. And she insisted, almost relentlessly, that women deserve to be taken

seriously. Social niceties and romantic fantasies are fun and should be enjoyed,

but they should never blind us into thinking that they truthfully depict the reality

of our solid and difﬁcult humanity or the true meaning of life. If Christine’s world

is a harder and more difﬁcult place that the romantic fairylands of many medieval

romances, it has the beneﬁt of being real and displaying the courage to demand

being taken for what it is.

Christine de Pizan, like the other writers in this chapter, pointed the way to

a new era dawning. Her impatience with cant, her insistence on the signiﬁcance

of the individual, her conviction that life’s real value can only be understood in

terms of human relationships, her effort to overthrow earlier assumptions about

the place of women in society—whether as individuals or as a group—and to

demand a reordering of our values, and her philosophical pessimism all mark her

as a ﬁgure of the Renaissance. Her writings are frequently dour and dismaying,

and will disappoint readers looking for lighthearted charm. She craved order and

stability above all and was deeply depressed by the rapid erosion of those qualities

all around her. Her work represents an urgent call for the people of France to

return to (a rather conservative) political idealism, social order, emotional ear-

nestness, and all that she regarded as the best in human nature. She certainly

retained many medieval attributes—not least her political conservatism—but she

had far more in common with those who came after her than before.

UGGESTED

EADING

Texts

Alighieri, Dante. The Banquet.

———. Complete Works.

———. The Divine Comedy.

SIGNS OF A NEW ERA 409

———. The New Life.

Chaucer, Geoffrey. The Canterbury Tales.

———. Complete Works.

———. Troilus and Criseyde.

Marsilius of Padua. The Defender of Peace.

Pizan, Christine de. The Book of the Duke of True Lovers.

———. The Book of Peace.

———. The Path of Long Study.

———. The Treasure of the City of Ladies.

William of Ockham. Philosophical Writings.

Source Anthologies

Blumenthal-Kosinski, Renate. The Selected Writings of Christine de Pizan: New Translations and Crit-

icism (1997).

Bosley, Richard N., and Martin Tweedale. Basic Issues in Medieval Philosophy: Selected Readings

Presenting the Interactive Discourses among the Major Figures (1997).

The Portable Chaucer.

The Portable Dante.

Studies

Aers, David. Chaucer, Langland, and the Creative Imagination (1980).

Bisson, Lillian M. Chaucer and the Late Medieval World (2000).

Brown-Grant, Rosalind. Christine de Pizan and the Moral Defence of Women: Reading Beyond Gender

(2000).

Condren, Edward I. Chaucer and the Energy of Creation: The Design and the Organization of the

Canterbury Tales (1999).

Gewirth, Alan. Marsilius of Padua: The Defender of Peace (1979).

Goddu, Andre´. The Physics of William of Ockham (1984).

Jones, Terry. Chaucer’s Knight: The Portrait of a Medieval Mercenary (1980).

Kolve, V. A. Chaucer and the Imagery of Narrative: The First Five Canterbury Tales (1984).

Leff, Gordon. The Dissolution of the Medieval Outlook: An Essay on Intellectual and Spiritual Change

in the Fourteenth Century (1976).

———. William of Ockham: The Metamorphosis of Scholastic Discourse (1975).

McGrade, Arthur S. The Political Thought of William of Ockham: Personal and Institutional Principles

(1974).

Pearsall, Derek. The Life of Geoffrey Chaucer (1992).

Richards, J. E. Reinterpreting Christine de Pizan (1991).

Willard, Charity C. Christine de Pizan: Her Life and Works (1984).

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Part One

PART FOUR

8 8

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413

CHAPTER 19

LOSINGS

he late medieval world responded in a variety of ways to the crises it faced;

not all ways were successful, nor were they all admirable, but it was clear

that signiﬁcant adaptations had to be made if Europe was to recover from the

blows it had received. To many, Europe had in fact entered a new age. William of

Ockham had rejected outright the quintessentially medieval belief in the ability of

reason to decode the grand structure of God’s ordered cosmos; in fact, he had

attacked the very notion of order and insisted that only the hard, isolated, partic-

ular speciﬁc had any absolute meaning. Marsilius of Padua had argued passion-

ately for the subjection of the Church to the secular state and for the political

devolution of Europe itself. Dante and Chaucer had depicted worlds in which

traditional structures of political and spiritual authority have failed; but whereas

Dante resupplied a sense of order by imposing his own will on the universe,

Chaucer chose to revel in the world’s utter changeability, its wild variety and

unpredictability. Christine de Pizan had a clear-eyed view of the latent harmful-

ness of medieval romance yet could not help but lament the passing of the world

that had created it. Other ﬁgures also presaged an era of new values and attitudes.

Jean Froissart (d. 1410) wrote his immense Chronicles of France and England (the

standard edition today ﬁlls ﬁfteen volumes) to eulogize the passing of aristocratic,

idealistic, chivalric Europe and the rise of mass, mob-based, popular culture. The

poet and early humanist Petrarca (1304–1374) decried the “barbarian” culture of

the Middle Ages and looked forward to the start of a new era of enlightened

thinking set free from the shackles of hidebound customs. Cries rose from Ger-

many for the restoration of earlier certainties; one of the most passionate and

comprehensive is an anonymous text from 1437:

Almighty God and Father, Creator of Heaven and Earth, grant us the strength,

grace, and wisdom to reattain the [former] ordering in our spiritual and sec-

ular lives....Allsense of obedience is dead, justice lies wounded, and nothing

at all is now in its proper place—and that is why God has so justly withdrawn

His grace from us....Nothing can go well for very long when there is no

proper ordering of Man’s spiritual and earthly lives....Thelordemperor can

no longer maintain his rightful station, which is continually diminished by

the Electors [of the Diet] and other princes, with the result that our empire is

sick, weak, and wounded....

There are numerous guilds in our ﬁne imperial cities, but they have become

too powerful and admission into them must be bought at a high price; more-

over, they pass laws among themselves—something that used to be the per-

ogative of the cities. In fact in many cities they directly appoint the town

council and determine how many guild-members shall serve on it....

Another ill besetting our cities and countryside is the fact that individuals