Research Catalog
Chaucerian polity : absolutist lineages and associational forms in England and Italy
- Title
- Chaucerian polity : absolutist lineages and associational forms in England and Italy / David Wallace.
- Author
- Wallace, David, 1954-
- Publication
- Stanford, Calif : Stanford University Press, 1997.
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| Status | Format | Access | Call Number | Item Location |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Text | Request in advance | PR1933.P64 W35 1997 | Off-site |
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Details
- Description
- xix, 555 pages : illustrations; 26 cm.
- Summary
- Chaucer's encounters with the great Trecento authors - Dante, Boccaccio, and Petrarch - facilitate the testing and dismantling of time-honored terms such as medieval, Renaissance, and humanism. The author argues that no magic curtain separated "medieval" London and Westminster from "Renaissance" Florence and Milan; as a result of his Italian journeys, all sites were interlinked for Chaucer as parts of a transnational nexus of capital, cultural, mercantile, and military exchange.
- In his travels, Chaucer was exposed to the Trecento's most crucial material and ideological conflict, that between a fully developed and highly inclusive associational polity (Florence) and the first, prototypically imperfect, absolutist state of modern times (Lombardy).
- The author's articulation of "Chaucerian polity" - through analyses of art, architecture, city and country, household space, guild and mercantile cultures, as well as literary texts - thus opens sightlines through the Henrician revolution to the writings of Shakespeare. In the process, this innovative study of Chaucer's poetry and prose is invigorated by an engagement with approaches gleaned from modern Marxist historiography, gender theory, and cultural studies.
- Series Statement
- Figurae
- Uniform Title
- Figurae (Stanford, Calif.)
- Subjects
- Despotism in literature
- Chaucer, Geoffrey, -1400 > Canterbury tales
- Civilization, Medieval, in literature
- Chaucer, Geoffrey, -1400 > Knowledge > Italy
- Italy > In literature
- Politics and literature > England > History
- Political poetry, English > History and criticism
- Chaucer, Geoffrey, -1400 > Political and social views
- Constitutional history, Medieval
- English poetry > Italian influences
- Bibliography (note)
- Includes bibliographical references (p. [497]-539) and index.
- Contents
- Ch. 1. Chaucer in Florence and Lombardy -- Ch. 2. The General Prologue and the Anatomy of Associational Form -- Ch. 3. "From Every Shires Ende": English Guilds and Chaucer's Compagnye -- Ch. 4. "No Felaweshipe": Thesian Polity -- Ch. 5. Powers of the Countryside -- Ch. 6. Absent City -- Ch. 7. "Deyntee to Chaffare": Men of Law, Merchants, and the Constance Story -- Ch. 8. Household Rhetoric: Violence and Eloquence in the Tale of Melibee -- Ch. 9. After Eloquence: Chaucer in the House of Apollo -- Ch. 10. "Whan She Translated Was": Humanism, Tyranny, and the Petrarchan Academy -- Ch. 11. All That Fall: Chaucer's Monk and "Every Myghty Man" -- Ch. 12. "If That Thou Live": Legends and Lives of Good Women.
- ISBN
- 0804727244 (cloth : alk. paper)
- LCCN
- 96021911
- OCLC
- 34767477
- ocm34767477
- Owning Institutions
- Columbia University Libraries