All Shall Be Well: My Mum, Chaucer and Julian

Chaucer: A European Life

Marion Turner

Princeton University Press, 2019

Marion Turner gives no indication, in this magisterial life of the poet Chaucer, of wanting to comment on current political events in the UK. Intentional or not the subtitle firmly locates Chaucer as a well-travelled, well-connected European. Far from being an island on the edge of a continent Chaucer’s England is fully integrated into European life. From the very start Turner locates her story in places, beginning with a robbery in London that reveals the international nature of trade that would have been well known to her subject. A book of places, this is a more complex telling of Chaucer’s life than simply a chronological account. Woven between the places, occurring in them, the political machinations of Chaucer’s age are skilfully recounted. It is hard not to wonder if parliaments of our own time will gain their own names. Will there be, or are we already living through another ‘merciless parliament’, a ‘bad’ or a ‘good’ parliament, is there a ‘wretched parliament’ to come or might we even be allowed a ‘wonderful parliament’?

In the places she describes so colourfully Turner also locates the books which are at the heart of her own. Not just Chaucer’s, (and she suggests some datings rather different to those proposed by previous scholars) but the books which Chaucer read and which fed his own work. For this bibliophile one of the most tantalising details is her account of Chaucer’s visit to the library of the tyrannical Visconti family in Lombardy in 1373. The details of Turner’s account are worth quoting at length:

“We have an inventory of the library at Pavia, made in 1426. Undoubtedly, many of the books there entered the library after Chaucer’s 1378 visit. However, critics have noted the extraordinary number of source texts used by Chaucer that are also present in this inventory—many of which were not available in England. The overwhelming likelihood is that Chaucer did indeed get hold of material here. His poetry in the 1380s demonstrates, in particular, extensive knowledge of Boccaccio’s poetry at a time when no one else in England seems to have had such knowledge. In Pavia, he could have found Boccaccio’s Filostrato, Amorosa Visione, Decameron, De Genealogia Deorum Gentilium, De Claris Mulieribus, De Casibus Virorum Illustrium, and De Montibus. The 1426 inventory details many other books by various authors that Chaucer certainly read: Virgil, Ovid, St Jerome, Macrobius, St Augustine, Boethius, Dante, Petrarch—although he would have had many other opportunities to read the classical and late antique texts. There were a large number of French translations of Latin texts here too, including multiple French translations of Boethius. If he did indeed read books from the Visconti libraries, how did this work? His status as deputy on a mission from the king of England would make it easy for him to gain favour and gifts from the Visconti. When they sent messengers to Richard II at the end of the year, Richard presented the envoys with the generous gift of 200 marks in gold and two silver-gilt cups. This kind of largesse was the norm. Moreover, the Visconti, somewhat surprisingly, were notoriously generous with their books: always happy to lend them out and to allow others to make copies, a practice that was ‘altogether exceptional.’ In Pavia, there were numerous willing scribes available at the university and at the scriptorium attached to San Pietro in Ciel D’Oro, a famous church very close to the fortress. So Chaucer may well have not only read new texts here but also acquired copies to take back home with him. He got copies of the Teseida and the Filostrato from somewhere, and this is by far the most likely place. William Coleman has demonstrated the similarities between a particular copy of the Teseida described in the inventory (item 881) and the text that Chaucer knew: the parts that are missing from this copy match the parts that Chaucer did not have available. Chaucer very likely gained the cultural knowledge that was to transform his literary practice under the auspices of the most ruthless and feared tyrants of his time.

Throughout her account literary influence is an important theme. Harold Bloom would be proud of her! How did this mercantile public servant of middle rank come to be the foremost poet of the English language in his time? Who were the poets that influenced him? How did he create a new form in English poetry? Turner ably suggests answers to all these and more questions.

For me there are two reasons for interest in Chaucer. Like many of my generation I studied the General Prologue at O’level. I still have enormously fond memories of those English lessons at Denefield Comprehensive in Reading as we tried our Middle English pronunciation. “Whan that Aprille …” still takes me back to the intensity of adolescence and the total joy of the sound of this magnificent poetry.

The second reason for my interest is Julian of Norwich. Julian and Chaucer are almost exact contemporaries. Both probably born just before, or at the middle of the fourteenth century, Chaucer dying in the autumn of the first year of the fifteenth, Julian possibly living longer. Exact contemporaries and both pioneers of written English. Julian’s the first book we have written in English by a woman. Chaucer, although we have other books and poems written by men, a true pioneer of English poetry. I find this chronological equality pleasing, even if it took until the twentieth century for Julian’s importance to be widely recognised.

Simon Parke, Anglican priest, spiritual writer, guide and retreat giver has recently written a remarkable imagined life of Julian. Whether or not he is correct in the details he constructs it is a compelling read. I reviewed it on this blog here. I was interested, in reading Turner, to see how plausible Parke’s account seemed alongside a real fourteenth century life, and was pleased that reading Turner did not make me doubt Parke at all.

It is always fascinating to see how cultural currents travel so that similar ideas, techniques and concepts arise in different places at the same time. Julian and Chaucer choosing to write in English, the former of the inner pilgrimage the latter of the outer. Neither of them hiding from the realities of human nature, Julian’s sinne, and Chaucer’s tales of ribaldry and unfaithfulness. Yet both ultimately describing human beings with loving attention and faithfulness. Both somehow incomplete; Chaucer’s pilgrims never actually making it to Canterbury and Julian describing the journey of the soul that cannot be complete in this life. Both illustrating somehow that incompleteness is our lot. This would match well Julian’s possible knowledge of Augustine and Chaucer’s knowledge (as a translator) of Boethius.

My ‘reading’ of Turner has in fact been a listening, to Turner herself reading the book on Audible books. Being read to is an exquisite pleasure that comforts the soul. No actor-narrator ever brings the same sense of immediacy to a book that the author brings. I have had a lot of time to listen as I have been doing even more driving than usual with my mum in a hospice in Leeds. The comfort in reading Chaucer and Julian at this time is greater than that though. In between chapters of her book I have inflicted on myself news of our own wretched politics. Chaucer lived through times as tumultuous as ours, and survived, to die, at peace, at Westminster Abbey and granted the favour of a burial close by St Benedict’s Chapel. Ordinary lives, birth and dying, and in between them loving, continue. Julian too is a comfort. Her “all shall be well” is not an Anne of Green Gables’ fable; it is the all shall be well of a woman who has known deep suffering. Who has no doubt of the sinfulness of the world.

To be with my mum in these days, which pray God in His mercy will end soon, has been the most extraordinary blessing. To pray the Rosary and celebrate the Eucharist at her side every day. To be together as a family. To see her look at the picture we have put up of my brother David who died as a five year old and hear her say “I’ll be with him soon.”. To hear her say as I pray the creed at the beginning of the Rosary “I believe”, and feel her squeeze my hand.

Julian and Chaucer, those contemporaries who almost certainly never met, whose lives were so different, both teach us that:

“If there is anywhere on earth a lover of God who is always kept safe, I know nothing of it, for it was not shown to me. But this was shown: that in falling and rising again we are always kept in that same precious love.”