1 - Economic Mobilities in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales

Summary

In the late fourteenth century, economic forces destabilized national and regional identities defined by geographical fixity. The period is remarkable instead for the importance of movement; tumultuous sociopolitical conditions and new mobilities brought about by the rise of mercantilism challenged the idea that identity could be unambiguously expressed in space. In this chapter, I reprioritize movement by showing that Chaucer's Canterbury Tales is a register of fourteenth-century England's itinerant identity. The disorderly potential of mobility is staged in the Cook's Tale and the Canon's Yeoman's Tale. In these fictions, London and its suburbs succumb to unregulated social and spatial mobility, resulting in a fragmented and dissolute placelessness. The frame narrative then contains this potentiality, offering economics as a lens through which to understand and regulate such placelessness. In so doing, it renders itinerancy a powerful expression of spatial and social identity, which finds meaning and coherence in networks rather than stable, sealed spaces.

The disruptive potential of unregulated social and spatial mobility was felt in the late Middle Ages. As Christian Zacher notes in his monograph Curiosity and Pilgrimage (1976), motion and travel came to exemplify a wandering, errant, and unstable frame of mind for fourteenth-century moralists. As opposed to life pilgrimage – a devotional practice that entailed seeking the New Jerusalem without traversing the globe (peregrinatio in stabilitate) – place pilgrimage became an outlet for curiositas, or mental wandering. The threat of curiositas had plagued theologians and philosophers since Augustine. In Book 10 of his Confessions, Augustine admits to having committed concupiscentia oculorum (the lust of the eyes):

praeter enim concupiscentiam carnis, quae inest in delectatione omnium sensuum et voluptatum, cui servientes depereunt qui longe se faciunt a te, inest animae per eosdem sensus corporis quaedam non se oblectandi in carne, sed experiendi per carnem vana et curiosa cupiditas nomine cognitionis et scientiae palliata. quae quoniam in appetitu noscendi est, oculi autem sunt ad noscendum in sensibus principes, concupiscentia oculorum eloquio divino appellata est. (10.35.54)

For besides that concupiscence of the flesh which consisteth in the delight of all senses and pleasures, wherein its slaves, who go far from Thee, waste and perish, the soul hath, through the same senses of the body, a certain vain and curious desire, veiled under the title of knowledge and learning, not of delighting in the flesh, but of making experiments through the flesh.