Occasionally a scholarly work appears that both synthesizes the best of previous scholarship and also brings a truly new perspective to its subject. Marion Turner's Chaucer: A European Life is such a book, and is a must read for scholars of Chaucer, humanism, and late medieval culture. While biography by its nature follows the chronology of the subject's life, Turner has taken the innovative approach of focusing on space, not time, as the governing principle of her book. Through impressive analysis of primary sources she re-creates both the physical and imagined spaces that Chaucer inhabited over the course of his lifetime, and uses these spaces as lenses through which to understand better Chaucer's literary works: “I am interested in how Chaucer's habits of mind, conditioned by the world in which he lived, are expressed in his writing” (366). Part 1 (“Becoming”) explores “Vintry Ward, London,” the “Great Household” of Elizabeth de Burgh, “Reims and Calais,” “Hainault and Navarre,” “Lancaster,” and “Genoa and Florence,” chronicling the space-time of young Geoffrey Chaucer. In part 2 (“Being”) the focus is more frequently on imagined spaces, as mature Chaucer spends his years in the “Counting House,” while imagining the “Cage,” the “Milky Way,” the “Tower,” “Troy,” “Parliament,” “Empire,” and the “Garden.” Part 3, “Approaching Canterbury,” on the last few years of Chaucer's life, takes the reader to “South of the Thames,” the “Inn,” “Peripheries,” “What Lies Beneath,” “Threshold,” “Westminster Abbey,” and Chaucer's “Tomb.”
Turner's focus on Chaucerian spaces allows her to give an almost encyclopedic account of Chaucer's complete corpus, addressing the most common topics of literary studies (her chapters stand strongly on their own, and could profitably be assigned in a university course). It is always tempting to read one's own values into the works of a beloved author, to make Chaucer an egalitarian humanist, a defender of women's dignity, a “protodemocratic” writer (405), and Turner argues that Chaucer's poetry displays all of these stances. Significantly, however, she supports her reading of Chaucer's literary imagination through magisterial contextual analysis and philological acumen. Her painstaking attention to documentary evidence solidifies the claim, for example, that Chaucer's most constant loyalty throughout his life was to John of Gaunt specifically and the house of Lancaster generally, a position that did not, however, impede his various court employments under Richard II (in contrast to Strohm's reading, which she puts in productive dialogue with hers). Throughout, Turner is quite careful about the degree of certainty with which she can predicate statements about Chaucer's life and thought, only occasionally speaking with a bit too much certainty. Statements like “he must have felt unmoored” (485) are rare outliers in this precise biography.
Turning from the sentence of the book to its solaas (cf. The Canterbury Tales, 1 [A] 798), Turner's prose is simply a joy to read: she blends immense erudition and careful logic with beautiful turns of phrase. While focused on Chaucer throughout, she is not above a proud aside about her own home county (Northumberland) or making what I am convinced is a Monty Python reference on page 417. Her writing reminds me of that of Helen Cooper, one of the foremost Chaucerian scholars of our age, whose laudatory blurb graces the back cover.
Written and published in the midst of a resurgence of nationalism across the globe, of which Brexit is a single example, Chaucer: A European Life is an utterly timely book. Much of Chaucer's reception history was national in nature, figuring Chaucer as a proto-Protestant court poet who was the father of English literature. Turner's work serves as a corrective to this history: “In death, Chaucer came to represent Englishness, patriarchy, authority. . . . In life, Chaucer did not represent the canon; he certainly wasn't a figure of Englishness; nor was he monumental or grandiose” (508). Turner recovers the human and humane Geoffrey Chaucer, a man whose identity was fundamentally international and European. Turner's groundbreaking work has done justice to Chaucer, and her accomplishment should solidify her place within the Chaucerian house of fame.
