Paul Strohm

Paul Strohm reminds us in this book that the Canterbury Tales is almost the very first medieval writing to truly include members of several "estates" (social classes), from the Knight, who is a member of the gentry, down to the Ploughman and the other "churls." Much of the power of the tales (and the Tales) comes from this very mixture of classes. Some of its contents are very modern, as in the feminism of the Wife of Bath or the blatant sexual interests of the Miller; sometimes it offers something so medieval as to be almost unreadable, as in the anti-Semitism of the Prioress.

Chaucer's Tale is an equally curious mixture of gold and lead, without even the excuse of being intended for medieval tastes.

The gold is the brilliant description of life in fourteenth century England, and the political environment in which Chaucer found himself. I have read a lot of fourteenth century history, and I don't think any book has conveyed the feeling of it as well. There are a few places where Strohm seems a little too sure of himself -- for instance, he is convinced that Chaucer's long-time residence above Aldgate was a miserable hole in the wall (literally), while others are convinced it was a comfortable, desirable home. Who is right? I would guess the latter, but I don't know; I do know that Strohm should have mentioned that there is disagreement.

The one real problem, though, is the portrayal of Chaucer. In particular, Strohm's contention that, until 1386, Chaucer had been basically a private poet, writing only for himself and some sort of inner circle, which is why his poetry never seems to be mentioned in all our "Life-records."

I just don't buy it. By that time, Guillaume de Machaut had called Chaucer a great translator, and John Gower was talking about Chaucer's poetry. Later, lesser writers like Lydgate and Hoccleve were growing up with his poetry. But the kicker is Chaucer's first long work, The Book of the Duchess. There is near-universal agreement (including by Strohm) that this is about Blanche of Lancaster, the first wife of John of Gaunt. Why would Chaucer have written such a book, were it not for presentation to Gaunt? (Since Blanche was dead by then; it is, in large part, an exploration of how Gaunt reacted to her death.) Chaucer was a public poet; it's just that our records are about his work as a civil servant and ambassador, in which his poetry is not relevant.

Also, I think Strohm is missing the clues in Chaucer's portrayal of himself. Yes, Chaucer the Pilgrim, and the narrator of the House of Fame, and all the others, are caricature, but they are caricature based on the real Chaucer -- as bookish as a medieval man could be, private, not a great success with women (Strohm himself suggests that he and his wife Philippa mostly lived apart), a bit bumbling in manner. Throw in a fact that Strohm doesn't use: of Chaucer's six longest works, three (The House of Fame, The Legend of Good Women, and The Canterbury Tales) are unfinished. These hints add up to a clear personality, and it's not the personality Strohm describes. It's a man who was an intellectual genius, but not a good manager; a man who knew almost everything it was possible to know in medieval England (remember, apart from his poetry, he wrote the first English-language scientific textbook, the Treatise on the Astrolabe!, and he knew at least four languages) -- but who wasn't good at planning. For this reason, I don't think, e.g., that Chaucer in his work at the wool custom went along with the infamous Nicholas Bembre; I think he just couldn't push back -- and didn't try.

Many of the conclusions in this book are dependent on Chaucer's psychology, and I just don't think that Strohm has that right. So I am forced to strenuously disagree with him on those matters. But he certainly makes an interesting case. I don't think this should be anyone's first reading about Chaucer, because of that psychological error, but this is clearly a must-read for anyone truly interested in the life of the man who brought iambic pentameter into English, the first great author Britain ever produced, the greatest poet ever to write in English.… (more)

This book markets itself as an exploration of 1386 being Chaucer’s year of doom. As it turns out this is short section of literary criticism at the end where Strohm argues that Chaucer was lonely without his poetry group so he invented a group of pilgrims who listened to each other’s poetry. Fine.

The rest of the book is far more interesting. Strohm’s procedure is as follows. He takes what we know of Chaucer from the documentary evidence and fleshes it out, giving us a snapshot history of the late 14th Century. This history informs our knowledge of Chaucer and there’s thus a nice feedback loop. So we have a picture drawn for us of the court of John of Gaunt, one of conditions in London and Chaucer’s digs, and the English wool trade. Particularly interesting were the digs and, strangely, the wool trade, which Strohm presents as a hive of scum and villainy.

Strohm is at pains to stress a sort of low-status Chaucer living in poor housing in a filthy city. I’ll accept that London was filthy, but otherwise I think we need a reality check. His father may have been ‘in trade’, but in comparison to the poor shack-dwellings sods whose job it was to collect faecal matter he was living it large in his stone tower. I wonder if Strohm is attempting to create a vulnerable Chaucer we can identify with. Still, you don’t need to agree with everything to learn something from it.

The first edition is particularly nice. Paper cover covered boards blind-stamped with the author’s initials. Quarter bound in cloth with gilt lettering on the spine. The dust jacket is platicky on the inside and pithy on the outside. A bit like an inside-out satsuma.… (more)

My graduate work at Baylor mainly focused on the High Middle Ages and the Renaissance. So, anytime an interesting book about either appears, I can’t help myself in returning to those wonderful days of grad school. Paul Strohm has written a detailed and interesting look at London inhabited by Geoffrey Chaucer in the late 14th century. Chaucer’s Tale: 1386 and the Road to Canterbury sheds some light on the gaps in Chaucer’s life story.

Paul Strohm has been the J.R.R. Tolkien Professor of English at Oxford University and Garbedian Professor of the Humanities at Columbia University. He has written several books on the period and he divides his time between New York, and Oxford, England.

While there are large gaps in the details of Chaucer’s life, Strohm has painted the background of the city in which Chaucer lived, worked, and died. Chaucer held several important positions as a trusted member of the extended family of King Edward III. One post had him as a collector of revenue for the crucial wool market. A large portion of the crown’s treasury came from this market. The market was also riddled with corruption, theft, and palace intrigues. Chaucer nimbly skated in an out of the danger surrounding him. Strohm doesn’t know exactly how, but he surmises Chaucer looked the other way, and most likely did not participate in the corruption. Strohm writes of Geoffrey’s patron, John of Gaunt, son of Edward III: “He was embroiled in the murky circumstances surrounding the slaying of the insurrectionary leader Wat Tyler at the peak of the Peasant’s Revolt in 1381 and earned a knighthood as a reward. His no-holds-barred contests with mayoral adversary John Northhampton culminated in factional violence, Northhampton’s imprisonment, and an urban climate so poisoned by partisan rancor that as late as 1391 city authorities issued an ordinance ‘forbidding any one whatsoever to express opinions about Nicholas Bembre or John Northhampton, former mayors of the city, nor show any sign as to which of the two parties they favored’” (111). Sounds a little familiar.

I particularly liked the descriptions of the city, some of which amazed me at the level of filth, garbage, and waste poured into the Thames and other cities. The description of Chaucer’s tiny residence at “Aldgate, the eastern most and busiest of the city’s seven gates. There, literally under his feet, passed royal and religious processions, spectacles of public humiliation, expelled convicts and sanctuary seekers, provisioners and trash haulers with iron-wheeled carts and vans drovers, water and wood sellers, traders with Baltic and northern European luxuries, runaway serfs, Essex rebels flowing in on their way to burn Gaunt’s Savoy Palace in 1381 and all the rest of a busy city’s shifting populace … Surely no residence more fitting could be imagined for a poet whose subject was soon to become, as Dryden put it, ‘God’s plenty’” (49).

The longest and most detailed of Paul Strohm’s chapters involved the wool market. I guess he felt it necessary to provide an enormous amount of detail – bordering on tedium. After a while, I had lost track of the tangled corruption going on, and I skimmed a few pages. However, Chaucer’s Tale: 1386 and the Road to Canterbury proved overall as and excellent addition to my library on the middle ages. 4-1/2 stars

--Jim, 5/11/16… (more)