In Boccaccio, Chaucer, and Stories for an Uncertain World, Robert W. Hanning offers a “new comparative reading” rather than a sources-and-analogues approach, locating the Decameron and the Canterbury Tales within distinct “uncertain worlds.” The social microcosms represented by the fictive frameworks of Boccaccio's brigata and Chaucer's felaweshipe contain within them diverse, and often opposing, opinions which reflect the fraught and uncertain macrocosms of fourteenth-century Florence and London, and resist providing an absolute or constant meaning for the reader.
Hanning's first chapter, “Mapping the Uncertain World,” introduces his theoretical framework and terminology, most significantly a concept he terms “pragmatic prudence”: a late medieval reformulation of the classical principle of “practical wisdom” (9). In brief, pragmatic prudence is defined by deliberation, even in the face of uncertainty, leading to appropriate and timely action to obtain agency, based on an individual's recollection of their past. Hanning proposes that what drives the deliberation of characters in the Decameron and the Canterbury Tales is “what will work well,” regardless of morality or virtue (17). It is in this amoral pragmatic prudence that Hanning finds “the major link” between the two collections (17, emphasis in original).
In chapter 2, “Fortuna, Fama, and the Challenge to Agency,” Hanning characterizes “the uncertain world” through the goddesses Fortuna and Fama, the former embodying “deliberative uncertainty” and the latter “forensic uncertainty” (96). Hanning discusses Decameron 2.4, showing through Landolfo's tribulations and eventual good fortune that a lack of certain knowledge leads to an equal likelihood of good and bad choices. Hanning's skillful analysis of fortuna and agency in The Knight's Tale is a particular highlight of the book. Relating to fama, Hanning discusses Decameron 3.8, and The Man of Law's Tale. Hanning's definitions of fortuna and fama might have been enriched by an acknowledgment of their multivalent significance for Boccaccio and Chaucer (both are themes of great import in Boethius's Consolation of Philosophy, the Tales of the Monk and Clerk, The House of Fame, Boccaccio's De casibus, and Petrarch's stoic Griselda and De remediis utriusque fortune), and further reference to some of the seminal scholarship on fortuna and fama in literary thought—for example, Piero Boitani's Chaucer and the Imaginary World of Fame (1984).
Chapter 3, “Can You Trust the Sign?”, connects “the uncertain world” with the unstable and ambiguous field of signification, which encompasses language, gestures, clothing, personal artifacts, and more. Hanning powerfully conveys the destabilizing reverberations created by the appropriation of the king's bachetta (rod) in Decameron 3.2 and by the movable crib in The Reeve's Tale. In chapter 4, “The Uncertainty of Intention,” Hanning considers the social tensions related to the practice of confession in medieval society, and the theological concern of ambiguous intention. He explores these ideas in Decameron 3.3 and 8.7—persuasively demonstrating the ubiquity of expressions of deliberation and obscured intention—and in the figure of the Wife of Bath. Hanning interrogates the intention behind Alisoun's quasi-confessional tale, proposing that the choice to frame her life as a tale is made in pursuit of agency over her own fama. Alisoun provokes and enrages her male audience by playing with misogynistic discourses and embracing her agency as a purveyor of tales and gossip (fama).
Hanning's final chapter shows how the imposition of power structures, such as patriarchy, create uncertainty and limit agency, demonstrated by the tragically futile prudence and eloquence of Ghismonda in Decameron 4.1. The discussion of The Merchant's Tale that follows is thoughtful and unflinching. The second part of the chapter conveys the power of inventive eloquence against misfortune in Decameron 2.7, and the distinct responses of the men in The Miller's Tale to “the power of desire” (295). A conclusion to the book, in which both collections—which are discussed individually throughout—were put into dialogue with each other would have complemented this comparative study.
For literary scholars, Boccaccio, Chaucer, and Stories for an Uncertain World provides an engaging, witty, and useful contribution to the field by illustrating the shared concern of deliberative agency in these most celebrated tale collections. Hanning's framework also paves the way for further scholarship on uncertainty and deliberation in other of Boccaccio's and Chaucer's works, such as the Filostrato and Troilus (Criseyde and Pandarus are exemplary cases of pragmatic prudence).
