Chaucerian Polity: Absolutist Lineages and Associational Forms in England and Italy

by David John Wallace

David Wallace's study of Chaucer's poetry and prose is invigorated by an engagement with approaches gleaned from modern Marxist historiography, gender theory, and cultural studies. He provides a new articulation of Chaucerian polity through analyses of art, architecture, city and country, household space, guild and mercantile cultures, as well as literary texts. He argues that The Canterbury Tales reveal the influence of Chaucer's Italian journeys and exposure to the great Trecento authors - Dante, Boccaccio, and Petrarch - and the Trecento's most crucial material and ideological conflict, that between the associational polity of Florence and the prototype absolutist state of Lombardy. In drawing these parallels, David Wallace challenges conventional divisions between the medieval and the Renaissance.

Genres: Medieval

578 pages, Paperback

First published February 1, 1997

About the author

David Wallace studied at York and Cambridge. Currently Judith Rodin Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania, he has held visiting positions at Jerusalem, Melbourne, London, and Princeton. He has served as President of the New Chaucer Society, is currently Second Vice President of the Medieval Academy of America, and has made a series of documentaries for BBC Radio 3. He most recently published Europe: A Literary History, 1348-1418 (2016) and Strong Women (2012), both with OUP.