Living in the Future: Sovereignty and Internationalism in the Canterbury Tales by Susan Nakley

Abstract

Reviewed by: Living in the Future: Sovereignty and Internationalism in the Canterbury Tales by Susan Nakley Joseph Taylor susan nakley, Living in the Future: Sovereignty and Internationalism in the Canterbury Tales. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2017. Pp. 282. isbn: 978–0–472– 13044–3. $75. For years, scholars have debated whether the term 'nation' defines the communitas regni of medieval England. Throughout Living in the Future, Susan Nakley engages seminal arguments on medieval nationhood by Thorlac Turville-Petre (1996), Patricia Clare Ingham (2000), Glenn Burger (2003), Ardis Butterfield (2009), and the essays in Kathy Lavezzo's Imagining a Medieval English Nation (2004), among others; her study, thus, proves a helpful roadmap through three decades of criticism. But Nakley affords a compelling new intervention in this long-running conversation with her examination of the interdependence of nationalism and internationalism in the Canterbury Tales. Internationalism appears in the Tales in several forms: continental analogues and political theory intimate England's connectivity to advanced European nations and eastern kingdoms, while imagined eastern landscapes provide foreign others against which English identity is magnified (pp. 28–29). If the Canterbury Tales, on the whole, confronts conflict and communal instability, then these tensions are nullified in a sentimentalized view of England as 'home' and, further, allayed in juxtaposition with extra-national conflicts, settings, and characters whose faces (and speech) are 'other' to the English nation. Following Chapter 1, the book's introduction, Chapter 2 offers a thorough survey of thirteenth- and fourteenth-century theories of sovereignty in the work of Dante, Marsiglio of Padua, Jean of Paris, and Nicole Oresme that Chaucer arguably integrates into his own model for national sovereignty. What emerges, according to Nakley, is not the rigid state of exception propagated by the modern political theories of Carl Schmitt and Giorgio Agamben, but a flexible and negotiable national sovereignty capable of unifying this motley band of pilgrims through a sense of 'shared ownership and judgment legitimized by its own limits and its capacity for communal continuity' (p. 48). Chapter 3 finds in the General Prologue a secularizing impulse aided by the roadside sovereignty of the Host. Inflating English identity over an [Benedict] Andersonian pan-European religious affiliation, the pilgrims work through discord and difference, functioning as a nation rather than paralleling one in their mere movement en masse to Becket's shrine (p. 91). The group, then, 'derives from pre-established ethnic national characteristics like language, religion, and custom' but it continues due to 'belief in the possibilities, solidarities, and flexibilities that civic nationhood negotiates' (p. 100). Chapter 4 examines how the Knight's Tale conflates imperialism, domesticity, and exile in order to show, through Theseus' failures, the disparity between empire and the 'homely' sovereignty of the nation. In Chapter 5, Nakley illustrates how the national redemption of Anglo-Saxon England that concludes the Man of Law's Tale depends on anachronism that distorts pre-Islamic Syria and sixth-century Northumberland respectively into monsterized Muslim and pagan others. This Englishing of the insular past continues in Chapter 6, where Nakley sees Chaucer, again, deploying anachronism, placing Dantean political theory in the mouth of an old hag in Celtic Britain. The loathly lady's education of the Arthurian [End Page 117] rapist-knight clarifies the importance of the household to national sovereignty in England's future. Nakley reaches too far in claiming that the hag's case for the lower-class 'implies that England's sovereign national future belongs to commoners' (p. 199). Chaucer proves consistently wary of the noise of the commons. Chapter 7, however, locates Chaucer's conservatism towards what he viewed as subversives—that is, women in the orientalist tales of the Squire, Monk, and, again, the Man of Law. Through these narrators' pseudo-modesty topoi concerning the failure of English to describe eastern women, their tales perform the 'excommunication' of dangerous others from England's purview. These stories, then, bare their 'orientalist claws and nationalist teeth' (p. 232) in attitudes of nationalism and xenophobia that are more pronounced than critics such as Derek Pearsall or Turville-Petre have been willing to admit. Nakley's reading of nationalism in Chaucer proves refreshingly unapologetic and her attention to internationalism in...