Loci of Solitude: The Idea of "Pryvetee" in Chaucer

Abstract

Few studies of solitude in the Middle Ages have been able to transcend the influence of Jacob Burckhardt's The Civilization of Renaissance in Italy, in spite of the fact that it does not tackle the issue of solitude but rather that of the rise of individualism in the renaissance. In this paper, while not questioning the central debate of Burckhardt's thesis, I wish to examine the idea of privacy as it arises in the work of Chaucer. My paper places particular emphasis on loci of solitude concerning Criseyde and Nicholas in order to argue that, as I see it, a distinctive bourgeois ideology of privacy emerged in later medieval England. By looking at what Chaucer specifically says about his characters' environment, their physical surroundings, their behavioral patterns, and their social interactions in The Miller's Tale and Troilus and Criseyde, I hope to show that in Chaucer's work collective privacy did exist, but we can detect signs of personal privacy within the collective privacy. I am particularly interested in cases where Chaucer's idea of privacy refers not merely to loci of solitude or places of ”pryvetee” (say, bedchambers, gardens, or one's cold grave) but the activity of being alone, with private thought, or to access of solitude, a kind of privacy of the psyche. Such an enquiry of the idea of ”pryvetee” in the late medieval time strives to open a new way to appraise the modernity of Chaucer's poetry.