COLLOQUIA MEDIEVALIA Rome and London in Chaucer and LanglandC. David Benson
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Abstract:Cities had a special place in medieval life and for Middle English poets two of the most important were familiar London and distant, both in time and space, Rome. This paper explores the way two late fourteenth-century London-based poets, Geoffrey Chaucer and William Langland, understood and used each of these cities. That Chaucer and Langland approached London and Rome differently will come as no surprise; more unexpected is the ways they differ. The scolding Langland turns out to be more optimistic about each city than the genial Chaucer. Despite Chaucer’s seeming urbanity, Langland is more engaged with urban life. Chaucer’s London, a city in which he lived and worked for much of his life, barely appears directly in his work and then in two incomplete tales, the fragmentary Cook’s Tale and the second part of the Canon’s Yeoman’s Tale, which both show only a lowly slice of the city. Unlike Dante and Boccaccio Chaucer is not really interested in a serious analysis of the political and economic life of his native city. Instead of these public concerns, this “unsocial” Chaucer is free to create the radical individuality of characters, such as Perkyn Reveler in the Cook’s Tale, who represent the transgressive literary energies that drive the Canterbury Tales. Langland was probably not a native Londoner, but Piers Plowman not only contains more topographical details about the city than the Canterbury Tales, but also, despite its explicit religious concerns, a more comprehensive examination of its political and commercial life. We expect a visionary moralist like Langland to be more critical of London society than Chaucer, and he is, but, paradoxically, his poem also imagines the possibility of achieving eternal salvation on the mean streets of London through the very economic activity whose dangers he elsewhere details. Although he tells more stories about Rome than about London, he has no more interest in a comprehensive description of its governance and is even more negative about the city. Ignoring traditional political readings, he tells the stories of Lucrece and Virginia as harrowing personal tragedies rather than sacrifices that lead to social reform. His ancient Rome is a place where men behave badly toward good women. Chaucer’s Christian Rome in the Man of Law’s Tale is hardly more appealing: it uses its power brutally and sacrifices women, in this case the emperor’s daughter Constance, to imperial ambition. St. Cecile’s story in the Second’s Nun’s Tale provides the detailed topographical depiction of Rome in Chaucer’s works, but it also makes a devastating case against imperial pagan Rome. Cecile shows that its power is worthless as she scorns the pagan city and all its works. In an act of radical individuality, as extreme if very different from Perkyn Reveler’s, she must abandon Rome, like other women, but willingly for a better place, the true eternal city. Unlike Chaucer, Langland has almost no interest in classical culture,
including Rome, and again and again in Piers Plowman he urges that we
seek salvation by doing well in our daily lives rather than by pilgrimages
to holy places in Rome. Nevertheless, he tells a remarkable story of two
Roman noblemen: the emperor Trajan, who is rescued from hell centuries
after his death by the prayer of Pope Gregory the Great, who feels compassion
when reading about the nobility of this pagan’s acts. In contrast
to the violent conflict of pagan and Christian in the story of St. Cecile,
Langland’s Gregory shows a Christian who generously reaches across
the centuries to affirm the value of a non-believer. Langland’s
Rome is a city where goodness and even salvation are possible for Christian
and pagan alike, not through power, institutions, or holy places, but
by urban living in truth. |