MILITARY REVOLUTION

In the last decades of the fifth century B.C. and the first decades of the fourth, the army of the Roman res publica could lay claim to the unenviable title “least efficient military establishment” of any major state in the Mediterranean world. Despite advantages conferred by population and location, Rome had trouble controlling the other states of the Latin plain and was locked in a struggle with the much smaller city of Veii to its north. In the course of the fifth century, it managed to add only about 200 square kilometers of land to the territory that it controlled. By 290, it was the dominant state in peninsular Italy, and its army was the most effective military force in the Mediterranean world.

The transition of the Roman army from ineptitude to lethal efficiency was the result of one of the most significant military revolutions in European history. A military revolution is defined by the transformation of a state's military and civilian administration to enable a high degree of coordination between the two.I Such structural change is often accompanied by significant developments in military equipment and doctrine that make the revolutionary state superior, for some period of time, to its rivals. Changes of this sort took place in fourth-century Rome, and the Roman military revolution was so profound that it shaped the course of the history of the Mediterranean, Europe, and the Near East for six centuries.

The historical period covered by the Roman Republic is a long one, comprising almost five hundred years of varied political, military, and cultural change. The central aspect of the Republic was Rome's rise from a small city, virtually indistinguishable from others in central Italy, to a metropolis, the capital of an extensive Mediterranean empire. These centuries produced the classic republican political system, marked by its culture of spectacle and performance. They also witnessed the ultimate disintegration of this system under the relentless pressure of internal dissention and the boundless ambitions of its leading politicians.

It was the Roman Republic that created the characteristic Greco- Roman culture, the result of a melding of Greek influences and native Italian and Roman traditions, which would be spread by the Romans throughout the Mediterranean world. This culture of fusion, a hallmark of the republican ethos, can be traced in literature, art, architecture, law, rhetoric, philosophy, and everyday life. Latin literature in all genres of prose and verse also emerged during the time of Rome's imperial expansion. Above all, the vast changes between the early fifth century and the mid first century B.C. are reflected in the growth and adornment of the city of Rome itself. By the time of Augustus (the first emperor), the city numbered over a million inhabitants, a population that would not be matched until London reached such a size in the late eighteenth century.

The wars between Rome and Carthage, the Punic Wars, were arguably the most critical Rome ever fought. Before the first, Rome was a purely Italian power and its forces had never operated outside peninsular Italy; by the end of the last, its armies had fought in Sicily, Africa, Albania, France, Spain, Greece, and Turkey, and it had acquired its first provinces in Sicily, Sardinia, Spain, and Africa and now dominated the Mediterranean world. After Hannibal's brief appearance before Rome in 211 (all dates are B.C. unless otherwise noted), it was to be over 600 years before a foreign enemy next appeared at Rome's gates.

The first war (264—241) was mainly fought in and around Sicily, apart from one or two Carthaginian raids on the Italian coast and a brief and disastrous Roman invasion of Africa in 256/5. It ended with the defeat of a Carthaginian fleet bringing supplies to the city's beleaguered army in Sicily. By the terms of the peace, Carthage was obliged to pay a huge indemnity and to withdraw its forces from Sicily and the islands between Sicily and Africa. Three years later, Rome used the opportunity of Carthage's involvement in a savage war with its mercenary army to increase the indemnity and seize Sardinia.

In medieval culture an accepted hierarchy of discourses set moral teaching above narrative yet established strong expectations that the two would be connected. Stories were necessary to illustrate general truths and make them memorable, while, in an age suspicious of the dangers of fiction, the claim to teach was necessary as justification for story-telling. The two most obvious forms the link could take are named in this essay's title. The exemplum has been defined as 'a short narrative used to illustrate or confirm a general statement'. Exempla or 'ensamples' usually purport to be stories that are or could be true and thus to offer evidence in support of doctrine, while 'A fable (fabula) is something which neither happened nor could happen'. Fables - invented fictions or pagan myths - were often seen as allegories, requiring interpretation to uncover a truth hidden beneath the surface. Boccaccio defines 'fabula' as 'a form of discourse, which, under guise of invention, illustrates or proves an idea; and, as its superficial aspect is removed, the meaning of the author is clear'. From early times, classical mythology had been so interpreted: Jupiter was taken to represent some aspect of the Christian God, or, as Boccaccio, following earlier commentators, explains, Mercury's visit to rebuke Aeneas means that Aeneas was roused by 'remorse, or the reproof of some outspoken friend'.

Any description of Chaucer's style is complicated by the two distinct and conflicting meanings the term 'style' now has. The first of these is a product of Romanticism and can be described as the belief that word forms and grammars are aspects of human character. Where 'the attunement of the soul' is thought to 'exer[t] a particular influence upon the language', as Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767-1835) believed, languages will seem to differ from one another in the very same ways, and in the very forms, as people differ. When developed as a method of literary analysis, as it was by philologists such as Leo Spitzer (1887-1960), this view can also discover the 'soul of the artist' in the smallest linguistic detail (the habitual use of a conjunction, for example). Although we do not understand ourselves to be thinking along these lines now, we still employ this theory every time we say that a line of poetry, or a particular turn of phrase, is 'Chaucerian'. For the subtle but sure consequence of assuming that language and 'the artist' are equivalent is the belief that a writer's work is as cohesive as personhood (its parts are so integral that they form an indivisible whole) and just as distinctive (entirely unlike the work of any other person). In the case of Chaucer, such 'style' is the 'peculiar complexity' which sets his writing apart as if it were itself an individual. It is 'the meanings and values that make him Chaucer'.

Chaucer and Malory are the only Middle English writers whose literary afterlife has been pretty well continuous from the fifteenth to the twenty-first centuries. Study of Chaucer in particular reveals the pressures and contours of Middle English studies with especial clarity. Many recent studies have focussed on aspects of Chaucer's reception, especially in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and the present chapter is devoted to that same period. It will in part confirm the conclusions of previous work, in part challenge them. In particular, I challenge the notion that Chaucer's fifteenth-century followers were inertly unresponsive to the possibilities opened up by Chaucer's oeuvre. Indeed, it is precisely the need to isolate Chaucer's genius that produces a dismissive account of Chaucer's fifteenth-century followers; that need began in earnest in the sixteenth century.

A complete conspectus of the way in which Chaucer’s works were revised and remade would need to cover the following areas: the changing nature of the texts in which his works were presented; the way in which he was cited in broadly ‘literary’ texts; the way in which his name was deployed in political and religious controversy. I give examples of each of these areas, but a complete conspectus would occupy a large book. Instead, I propose an argument designed to account for the structure of Chaucer’s reception between 1400 and 1550 (the date of the third edition of William Thynne’s Workes of Geffray Chaucer).

At a crucial moment in Book ii of Troilus and Criseyde, Criseyde is left alone to reflect on Pandarus's astonishing revelation that Troilus is dying with love for her. And as chance would have it, at this very moment Troilus rides past her window.

Social structure

Ideas of medieval social organization have much to contribute to the study of Chaucer. Socially and politically inflected topics are manifest within his writings, and socially grounded issues of literary taste and reception are thematically important as well. But, looking beyond particular matters of content, generally held notions about the structure of society also exert a tacit but persistent influence on the structure of his literary works.

Medieval social descriptions are very conscious of degree, and tend to emphasize the relatively small number of people at the top of the social hierarchy. The thirteenth-century legal commentator Bracton is representative when he divides society into those high in the ecclesiastical hierarchy (the pope, archbishops, bishops, and lesser prelates), those high in the civil hierarchy (emperors, kings, dukes, counts, barons, magnates, and knights), and those remaining (a general category of 'freepersons and bondpersons' or liberi et villani).

Like much of Chaucer's oeuvre, Chaucer's Legend of Good Women cannot be certainly dated and survives only in an incomplete form. Both factors bear on the larger issues of the poem's interpretation.

Certain references in the text provide evidence for the date of the poem's composition. The chief of these is in the F version of the Prologue to the Legend, where the narrator/poet is directed by the God of Love: 'whan this book ys maad, yive it the quene, / On my byhalf, at Eltham or at Sheene' (F 496-7). Since Eltham and Sheen were actual royal palaces, the 'quene' can only be Anne of Bohemia, wife of Richard II. Anne died in 1394 and the palace at Sheen was then destroyed. In the unique G version of the Prologue, these lines are omitted. The general scholarly assumption has been that g is the later of the two versions, and postdates Anne's death. The most obvious alternative to explain the omission of any mention of Anne in the G version is to assume it predates Richard's marriage to her in 1382. This is not impossible, but since the work involves an experiment with a related series of short narratives, it is tempting to suppose it is close in chronological sequence to the Canterbury Tales, which seems largely to date from the second half of the 1380s. The question, like so much else in Chaucerian chronology, remains unresolvable in any final way.

It is not easy for English speakers now to believe that their language can ever have been reduced to humble stammerings by another vernacular. A complacent assumption of linguistic superiority was never felt by the English in the Middle Ages: that privilege belonged to those who wrote and spoke in Latin and French. We can come nearer to imagining this linguistic climate if we compare the relation of modern French to English and American, or of modern Swiss-German to German and French, or of Marathi to Hindi and English. All of these are subtly different situations, but in each, certain languages are perceived as dominant, and this provides a cultural model that is at once a source of aspiration and of complex feelings of insecurity. I think something like this is part of what provokes the frequent comments in Chaucer's poetry about the inadequacy of his English. Here is one example, from the Book of the Duchess:

Bibliography

The first six items in section 1.1, listed in chronological order, are comprehensive surveys of Chaucer criticism up to 1996; for works published after that date, the annual bibliographies published in the journals listed in section 1.2 should be consulted. Studies in the Age of Chaucer and the Year's Work in English Studies are particularly useful because the items listed are annotated.

Selected bibliographies follow in alphabetical order. The annotated Chaucer Bibliography by Leyerle and Quick contains about 1,200 items, and that by Allen and Fisher contains 924 items. The other volumes in this section belong to the Chaucer Bibliographies series; they will facilitate access to the prodigious amount of Chaucer criticism produced in this century.

A Chaucer MetaPage designed to provide access to Chaucer studies on the worldwide web can be reached at http://www.unc.edu/depts/chaucer/.

Chaucer at Ground Zero

This essay was begun on the day that the last load of debris was removed from the site of the World Trade Center disaster of September 11, 2001. My desk at New York University is about a mile from Ground Zero, as the site became known. I easily could have attended the ceremony that day marking the end of recovery and clean-up, but I did not go to that vast literal and metaphorical pit. In fact I would not revisit it, lest I never return from all that loss. Instead, I wrote about the Middle Ages.

If I attempted - however unintentionally - to regain via the medieval a measure of wholeness, safety, and grounding lost in the trauma of September 11, it certainly wasn't the first time the past era has been invoked to perform such a recovery. Indeed, it has been recently argued that British historians in the 1950s undertook 'an obsessive search for the archival identity of Robin Hood' upon 'the loss of the raj'. Not long after that postcolonial grieving, a leading American Chaucerian hoped that 'the recognition of valid realities established by earlier generations' might provide protection against another gaping hole, what he called 'that rancid solipsistic pit' of modernity. In these scholarly instances the medieval, and particularly Chaucer, was used in a process of mourning, or rather, if we accept Freud's distinctions, in a melancholic refusal of loss, the putative modern-day loss of good love, revealed truth, and fullness of being.

Especially in its first three books, Troilus and Criseyde is a wonderfully textured poem: places, talk, people, are rendered with a mastery of nuance, a love of the suggestive detail, unexampled in earlier English literature. Nor is the art of the Troilus only an art of detail, of charming cornices and misericord carvings: Troilus and Criseyde has a large, clear architectural plan; it is a structure of emphatic bilateral symmetry. It is also a work which knows, and makes sure the reader knows, that it has important thematic concerns: fortune and the good things of this world; human love; fidelity. The Troilus, in short, has the elements of a well-made work of serious literature. But perhaps the most subtle of the things which make it not merely a worthy but a truly great poem, a poem both exhilarating and disturbing, is the way these elements are combined with and related to one another. Texture does not merely echo, enhance, unproblematically enrich the meaning suggested by thematic statements and by structure. Almost the reverse proves to be the case; particularly as we read the second half of Chaucer's poem, our response to texture interferes with our 'proper' response to bilateral symmetry and to theme - particularly the theme of fidelity. As we move toward the conclusion of the work, trouthe has become both truly admirable - almost what Arveragus calls it in the Franklin's Tale, 'the hyeste thyng that man may kepe' (1479) - and also something we covertly dislike and are ashamed of ourselves for disliking. In the present essay I shall be discussing some of the salient features of narrative technique in the Troilus and also trying to show some of the ways in which texture, theme, and structure are related.

Comedy of one kind or another is present in a large number of the Canterbury Tales, and pervasive in the links between tales, but we are concerned here with those tales where the narrative structure and expectations are those of comedy as a specific genre. There are six such tales, those of the Miller, Reeve, Shipman, Merchant, Friar, and Summoner, and a seventh, that of the Cook, which is left unfinished but which was certainly going to belong to the genre. The fact that we know this, from only fifty-eight lines, is an indication of the general firmness of the initial structure of expectation of Chaucerian comedy, the codifiability of the preliminary ground-rules, whatever strain or defiance those rules may be subjected to in Chaucer's subsequent development of the story. Anticipatory indications of the nature of a particular tale are often given by what we know or suspect of the character of the pilgrim who tells it, and the comic or satirically abusive prologues to five of these tales are important in creating expectation; but even without such clues we should know, from elements built into the narrative structure, the rules of the narrative game we were being invited to play.

Viewed from continental European perspectives, Chaucer's England and its poetry appear both eccentric and retarded. Its eccentricity is geographical: from classical times onward, the British Isles had been mapped as the last stop before ultima Thule and the end of the world. In Boccaccio's Decameron ii, 3, England is regarded as more exotic and fantastical than Barbary (the north African coast, just two hundred miles from Sicily): a place where a savvy young Tuscan might be seduced by an abbot (a princess in disguise), mortgage barons' castles and become Earl of Cornwall. The vernaculars of these distant islands were thus seen as eccentric and of scant literary consequence: the French chronicler Froissart, who spent the years 1361-7 in England, apparently never troubled to learn English, getting by in the European lingua franca (French). Over two centuries earlier, Chrétien de Troyes had written the great romances foundational to the values of chivalry celebrated by Froissart in his Chronicles; around 1275, the Roman de la Rose was approaching completion. Inspired in part by Italian receptions of the Rose, Dante composed not only the greatest European poem of all - his Commedia - but also a series of works to guide its future reception and interpretation. Petrarch, while championing Latin rather than Italian, nonetheless assembled a collection of Italian lyrics - the Canzoniere - that English poets would not fully fathom until the early sixteenth century. Boccaccio's greatest legacy to English literature, his framed collection of tales, was also not absorbed until the sixteenth century (when it eased the path to Shakespeare). Chaucer, however, made early and precocious use of Boccaccio and was ultimately inspired to fashion a framed collection of his own.

'Th'ende is every tales strengthe . . .' as Pandarus tells Criseyde, and the Canterbury Tales as a whole and in many of its parts - as well as some of Chaucer's other works - suggest both the significance and also the challenge and strain that Chaucer found in inventing an appropriate close to the structures that he had created in his poems. This essay outlines Chaucer's characteristic uses of such literary structures, and the particular place of an ending as the 'strengthe' in the distinctive forms of artistic wholeness that Chaucer's poetic structures represent. It is not only in Chaucer's many poems that are not brought to a close - the House of Fame, the Anelida, the Legend of Good Women, the Cook's Tale, the Squire's Tale - but also in those works where Chaucer does provide a conclusion, such as the ending of the Troilus or the ending of the whole Canterbury Tales with the Parson's Tale, that the poet's sense of the ending as a difficult and special part of the 'strengthe' of a literary structure is felt.