“When a Stranger Sojourns With You in Your Land”: Loving the Refugee as Neighbor in the Canterbury Tales and Refugee Tales

Abstract

ABSTRACT Inspired by Chaucer’s frame tale narrative, the recent volumes entitled Refugee Tales narrate the perilous journeys of modern-day displaced and stateless persons seeking asylum in the UK. This article examines the Refugee Tales’ goal to create a “spectacle of welcome” through the lens of the biblical injunction to “love thy neighbor” and the related Levitical command that, “when a stranger sojourns with you in your land, you shall not do him wrong” (Leviticus 19:33–4). As a third-term in the sovereign formula of “friend/enemy,” the refugee threatens to uncouple power from the very criteria on which it depends: history, territory, bare life. And these concerns are arguably as important in the late-fourteenth century as in our own global political age. Does Chaucer think of the refugees he witnessed in his own life? Considering, then, the neighborly relations of literary texts — relations that are contiguous rather than genealogical — this article seeks Chaucer’s own refugee stories by delving into the narrative chasms of the Knight’s Tales’ absent narratives, the residue of Boccaccio’s Il Teseida, and the critically-contentious backstory to the Knight as storyteller.