Chaucer and Italian Culture

Helen Fulton

• Publisher: University of Wales Press
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781786836786
• eBook ISBN: 9781786836809
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Medieval & Early Modern Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Chaucerian scholarship has long been intrigued by the nature and consequences of Chaucer's exposure to Italian culture during his professional visits to Italy in the 1370s. In this volume, leading scholars take a new and more holistic view of Chaucer's engagement with Italian cultural practice, moving beyond the traditional 'sources and analogues' approach to reveal the varied strands of Italian literature, art, politics and intellectual life that permeate Chaucer's work. Each chapter examines from different angles links between Chaucerian texts and Italian intellectual models, including poetics, chorography, visual art, classicism, diplomacy and prophecy. Echoes of Petrarch, Dante and Boccaccio reverberate throughout the book, across a rich and diverse landscape of Italian cultural legacies. Together, the chapters cover a wide range of theory and reference, while sharing a united understanding of the rich impact of Italian culture on Chaucer's narrative art.

1

CHAUCERIAN DIPLOMACY

William T. Rossiter

What was Chaucer doing in Italy, really? We are of course familiar with the narratives attendant upon Chaucer’s Italian missions of 1372/3 and 1378. The superlative studies by Piero Boitani, David Wallace, Warren Ginsberg and K. P. Clarke, to name but a few, have informed us of the kinds of Italy Chaucer encountered on these occasions – both familiar and alien, a kind of cultural uncanny – and the key points of social, political, material and textual interaction.¹

Yet despite the differences underpinning these narratives, criticism tends to adhere, understandably, to two central positions: (i) it emphasises Chaucer’s uniqueness in being an English poet in trecento Italy absorbing the works of the tre corone, and in consequence his uniqueness qua poet, and (ii) it prioritises Chaucer above the mechanisms and objectives that sent him to Italy in the first place, and the offices and roles he held as determined by those mechanisms.² In relation to the first point, it would be wilfully obtuse to deny the singularity of Chaucer’s individual Italian experience. The fact remains that his contemporaries and successors did not visit Milan or Florence, as far as we know. They did not engage critically with Dante, Petrarch and Boccaccio, and how the latter two read the former’s work, and each other’s, as Chaucer did; not Gower, not Clanvowe, not Hoccleve, not Lydgate.³ Chaucer’s response to the trecento, and his fifteenth-century successors’ responses to his response, is ground that has been and continues to be covered, and as such I would not wish to go over it again here, not least of all because of the work of colleagues included in the present volume, who address these issues far more expertly than myself. Rather, I wish in this brief discussion to depersonalise Chaucer’s experience slightly by means of the second point, and in doing so suggest a line of inquiry that might enable a different way of reading how Chaucer’s successors and imitators responded to his Italian itinerary.

Chaucer was twice sent to Italy as a member of a diplomatic mission. In this he was not unique. He was part of a transnational network of ambassadors, secretaries, nuncii, procurators, esquires, envoys, heralds, merchants and more generally what Filippo de Vivo has termed ‘professionals of intelligence’.⁴ Yet if a royal servant being sent abroad in service of the crown was not unique, the mission of 1372 was nevertheless novel, the remit of the envoys was exceptional (albeit not unprecedented), and the specific moment in diplomatic history was significant. Chaucer as a poet-clerk being commissioned on the king’s business was part of a new understanding of diplomacy as being, on the one hand, a means of reinforcing the ius gentium of a pre-nationstate European Christendom through treaties and trade agreements, and on the other, a significant cultural event, both in terms of revelation and production.⁵ The purpose of an embassy, in other words, was not only so that trained professionals could ratify agreements and memoranda of understanding, but also to perform the magnificence and sophistication of the host culture, and for the visiting diplomats to acknowledge those qualities and respond in such a way as to confirm their own culture’s reciprocal refinement, a refinement which made sensible and apt the relationship that was being facilitated by the secretaries, lawyers and clerics on each side.⁶ Diplomacy was gradually taking on a new texture. It had always been textual, of course, but the kind of text that it constituted – if we are thinking of texts as predicated upon and partaking of a given delimited semiotics – was changing and expanding, and our critical view of it as medievalists must do the same.

This new conception of the cultural event as being a significant and ritualised constituent of embassy had developed in Italy around the mid-fourteenth century.⁷ And whilst European poets had been employed prior to this period in the office of ambassador avant la lettre – Jean de Meun, Guillaume de Machaut or Dante, for example – they were employed not because they were poets, but because they were clerics and notaries. When Petrarch was sent as diplomatic orator by the Visconti of Milan to intervene in the Venetian–Genoese war in 1354, something different was taking place.⁸ Petrarch, unlike his predecessor Dante, was no politician or civic elder. He was sent to Venice to deliver an oration in the classical manner to the ducal council, whereby his humanist credentials and faith in rhetorical suasion would move his audience to virtue, appealing to Petrarch’s wider ideal of a unified Italy free from division and foreign mercenaries, and the Augustinian principle that peace is the telos of all wars.⁹ Whether his intervention actually achieved anything politically is entirely beside the point – the lawyers and notaries still worked away in the private chambers of power.¹⁰ As a public event, a performance of representation orchestrated by the Visconti, however, it was hugely significant. The diplomat Giannozzo Manetti addressed his oration to an audience of hundreds in the Venetian council chamber in 1448 when seeking military support against Milan, so the poet laureate delivering an oration on behalf of the rulers of Milan to the Venetian Council was no small affair.¹¹ It was a display of cultural cachet by the Scourge of Lombardy and God of delight, Bernabò Visconti – he had the premier intellectual of the day in his service – and it was also a performance of Visconti’s disingenuous claim to be a peace-broker acting on behalf of the greater good.¹² Even though Petrarch believed in that greater good, the Visconti interest in resolving the war was not free from self-interest. Importantly, it marked the onset of the humanist ambassador, whereby the rhetorical performance became part of the language of diplomatic ceremony.

Indeed, it was Petrarch’s eight-year service in the pay of the despotic rulers of Milan (1353-–61), sworn enemies of republican Florence, which led to his being rebuked by Boccaccio:

You also bring up that I wasted a good part of my time in the service of princes. So that you may not err in this, here is the truth: I was with the princes in name, but in fact the princes were with me; I never attended their councils, and very seldom their banquets. I would never approve any conditions that would distract me even for a short while from my freedom and from my studies.¹³

Petrarch proceeds to detail ‘the seven months I lost in the service of princes’, including how ‘once I was sent to Venice to negotiate the reestablishment of peace between that city and Genoa’.¹⁴ Petrarch had obliquely lined up this theme at the outset of the letter when, commenting on Boccaccio’s poverty, he provides a parable of ‘someone rich in virtues [who] had perchance entered the service of a particular prince who treated him harshly and avariciously’, but then does not return to Boccaccio’s claims over serving the Visconti until near the end of the letter.¹⁵ Bookending the letter in this way confirms that refuting the charge of his services to tyranny constitutes its primary matter, as the important matter is supposed to be placed at the beginning and end according to the ars epistolandi.¹⁶ Indeed, as a riposte to charges that he has wasted time, and in response to Boccaccio’s request that owing to age he should now lay down his pen and enjoy repose, Petrarch adds that ‘the next letter to you will be a sign of how far I am from counsels of idleness’.¹⁷ Petrarch’s response is important not only for what he considers the good of learning and the good of diplomatic exchange, but for how this response determines our understanding of Petrarch’s Latin adaptation of the final tale in Boccaccio’s Decameron, and more importantly for how it initiates the representation of humanist diplomacy in late medieval literature and the wider cultural imaginary.

This brings me to the core of the present chapter, and why it is necessary to consider Chaucer’s Italian missions in the context of the changing diplomatic texture discussed above. I am not suggesting that we should understand Chaucer’s experience as constituting the first English attempts to emulate the Italianate form of cultural diplomacy that had been instituted two decades earlier – it may well have been, but framing Chaucer as the English Petrarch is not an immediate concern – rather I am arguing that Chaucer is the first English poet to represent the new diplomatic moment and its practices and make them part of the cultural legacy he bequeathed to his readers and poetic successors. It is, for Chaucer, a moment of evaluative representation which he came to understand through his own experience, through his reading of Petrarch’s response to Boccaccio as informed by that experience, and by his own response to Boccaccio. So rather than approaching Chaucer’s diplomatic expertise as a means to an end – expediting his entire Italian experience, providing him with relazioni or ‘tydynges’, or even with Italian manuscripts – I am viewing it as an end in itself, which nevertheless reveals itself in his Italian-inflected works. The experience of diplomacy provided a new perspective upon forms of representation and authority, inviting its own representation. Diplomacy serves as a metaphor for mediated authority, being one of the core principles of late medieval textuality.¹⁸ I am thus using Chaucer as a case study in order to propose a direction that might be taken in late medieval literary studies that will provide a necessary augmentation of the diplomatic turn in early modern studies.

The diplomatic turn has been in process for some time now. It has proved enormously effective in excavating the cultural capital of diplomatic exchange between sovereignties, the diverse registers and languages of diplomatic exchange (including the non-verbal), and the various ways in which early modern authors created what Timothy Hampton terms Fictions of Embassy.¹⁹ However, that turn is still dependent upon what James Simpson termed ‘the disabling logic of periodization’, and is informed by Garrett Mattingly’s still influential 1955 study Renaissance Diplomacy, even when refuting or rejecting it.²⁰ Mattingly claimed that the new diplomacy was dependent on two key coordinates: the nation-state and the resident embassy.²¹ He posited the Peace of Lodi of 1454 as being the watershed moment, entered into with ‘the purpose of stabilizing the status quo and guaranteeing existing Italian powers against aggression from within or without the peninsula’.²² Mattingly set the new developments in Italian statecraft against a monolithic medieval conception of Christendom:

From the point of view of diplomacy the chief difference was that the West, in 1400, still thought of itself as one society. Christendom was torn by the gravest internal conflicts … But Latin Christendom still knew itself to be one … Our modern notion of an international society composed of a heterogeneous collection of fictitious entities called states, all supposed to be equal, sovereign and completely independent, would have shocked the idealism and common sense of the fifteenth century. Such a society would have seemed to philosophers a repulsive anarchy …²³

There have been many holes picked in Mattingly’s arguments, but overall the emphasis upon a shift from medieval to Renaissance diplomacy, defining the one against the other, has been maintained, with the corollary that it was early modern authors who were the first to incorporate diplomatic representation in their works. As Hampton notes, ‘with the rise of new diplomatic practices [during the fifteenth, sixteenth and seventeenth centuries] a new figure made an appearance on the stage of European literature – that of the ambassador.’²⁴ I am in complete agreement with Hampton’s argument that literary texts provide a means of interrogating the languages of diplomacy, and concomitantly that the changes in diplomatic texture can be traced in the development of literary history, but I would push the dateline for the stage debut of the fictional ambassador back into the fourteenth century, and in doing so refute the familiar periodisation underpinning Mattingly’s argument.²⁵

There are, of course, dissenting voices within the early modern camp, such as Isabella Lazzarini and John Watkins. Indeed, Watkins argues that the ‘emergence of the resident embassy as the primary locus of diplomatic exchanges occupies a position in Mattingly’s thought analogous to the emergence of the individual in Burckhardt’s’, and that this commitment to crude periodisation – which ignores the way in which the concept of medieval Christendom that Mattingly is describing is itself the discursive product and tool of a particular historical moment, an imagined ideal like Petrarch’s Italia, born of the fear of Ottoman expansionism – needs to be overturned.²⁶ This is now happening, and a more precise diplomatic history is emerging as a result. However, the bias is still towards the early modern as the privileged site of cultural value, at least in literary studies. Building on Watkins’s call to arms, and aligning it with Lazzarini’s retrodatazione of substantial changes in diplomatic history which can be traced to c.1350, I am proposing the potential benefits of a diplomatic turn in late medieval literary studies, using Chaucer as the first example of a poet who represented the figure of the ambassador and cognate roles in a number of his works, although this is in no way to propose the limitation of the diplomatic turn to Chaucer and Chaucer studies.²⁷ Chaucer’s case is interesting and useful in that he was a poet-diplomat who was engaging, in the Clerk’s Tale at least, with another poet-diplomat who was also implicated in the shifting texture of diplomatic history. Indeed Petrarch headed the Venetian embassy of 1354. He was not just the cultural attaché.

As Lazzarini notes, ‘from the second half of the fourteenth century almost every autonomou...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• The Contributors
• Introduction: Chaucer Imagines Italy
• 1. Chaucerian Diplomacy
• 2. The Haunting of Geoffrey Chaucer: Dante, Boccaccio and the Ghostly Poetics of the Trecento
• 3. Chorography and Topography: Italian Models and Chaucerian Strategies
• 4. Vision and Touch in Dante and Chaucer
• 5. The Aesthetics of ‘Wawes Grene’: Planets, Painting and Politics in Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale
• 6. The Prophetic Eagle in Italy, England and Wales: Dante, Chaucer and Insular Political Prophecy
• 7. ‘Trophee’ and Triumph in the Monk’s Tale
• 8. From Imitation to Invention: Chaucer’s Journey from The House of Fame to the Nun’s Priest’s Tale
• Notes
• Bibliography