Chaucer's Knight and the Making of Europe

Over the past week, for an independent project, I have been reading Robert Bartlett's The Making of Europe: Conquest, Colonization, and Cultural Change, 950-1350. Besides its formidable merits on its own terms, this book bears directly on some of the issues surrounding Chaucer's Knight, in both his tale and his portrait in the "General Prologue." Bartlett debunks, in detail and at length, any image one might have of medieval Europe as static, stunted, or stratified, focusing instead on the tremendous energy and expansionism of the period. Western Europeans of the Latin Christian persuasion, in this telling, were on the move in every direction and at all levels of society, through aristocratic conquest, widespread peasant settlement (mainly in free villages - that is, not as serfs) in frontier areas, the growth and spread of merchant communities and trading networks, and religious and cultural diffusion. These trends brought vast areas of religious, linguistic, or cultural alterity - the Celtic fringe of the British Isles, Muslim Spain, much of the Mediterranean, and especially the Slavic, Hungarian, and Baltic regions of eastern Europe - into the fold of Latin Christendom. In so doing, Bartlett argues, medieval Europeans also molded themselves into a more homogeneous entity, as the processes of conquest and expansion and their attendant ideologies reduced regional and cultural particularities within the core areas of the Latin West. Between expansion abroad and cultural/ideological unification at home, "Europe" came into being as a distinct identity during the High Middle Ages.

Although The Canterbury Tales falls outside of the period Bartlett demarcates for his argument, I think some of the forces and processes he describes leave their marks in Chaucer's text. That tremendous upsurge and overflow of vernal, erotic, spiritual and physical energy in the opening lines, for example, that sets flowers growing, breezes blowing, birds...doing their thing, and pilgrims crossing borders and oceans, seems to capture something of the dynamism that Bartlett describes: "Everywhere in Europe in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries trees were being felled, roots laboriously grubbed out, ditches delved to drain waterlogged land. Recruiting agents travelled in the overpopulated parts of Europe collecting emigrants; wagons full of anxious new settlers creaked their way across the continent; busy ports sent off ships full of colonists to alien and distant destinations; bands of knights hacked out new lordships" (2). But Bartlett's argument is more specifically relevant to the Knight, who has participated in exactly the kind of expansionary and colonizing warfare Bartlett sets at the center of medieval history, on many of the same embattled and heterogeneous European frontiers: Prussia, Lithuania, and Russia (eastern Europe); Granada and Algeciras (Muslim Spain); and various warfronts throughout the Mediterranean ("GP" 51-60). (Curiously absent is the zone of expansionary activity closest to home for the Knight and Chaucer, the Celtic crescent.) The Knight has spent his life at the spearhead of an expanding Europe.

The Knight's background and war record bring a huge geographical and cultural expanse into the "tyme and space" (35) of late-14th century England and of the text of The Canterbury Tales. Chaucer's stylistically uniform and continuous narrative absorbs the mention of these different and diverse regions just as Chaucer's culture, that of the Latin Christian West, absorbed (some of) the regions themselves. As Bartlett suggests, the process of absorption also leads to the creation of a uniformity out of this difference and diversity. Over the next two or three pilgrim portraits following that of the Knight, his far-flung geographical horizons became increasingly constricted and the different gives way to the same. The Squire has fought his campaigns not in distant and exotic realms but in the immediate proximity of England: "Flaundres,...Artoys, and Pycardie" (86). For the Prioress, even France is beyond the pale: "Frenssh of Parys was to hire unknowe" (126). Judging by this much of the "General Prologue," Chaucer's poetry would seem to have exemplified, in miniature, Bartlett's "making of Europe," reducing a wide range of regions and identities to unity and uniformity. 

This unity and uniformity (and the provinciality of the Prioress) do not endure throughout the GP, however. Diversity reappears with the range of authorities and traditions (Greek, Arab, and contemporary European) drawn upon by the Physician (429-434), while the geographical horizons of the text expand again in the portraits of the Shipman ("from Hulle to Cartage," 404) and especially (interestingly) the extraordinarily well-traveled Wife of Bath (463-466). Returning to the Knight, though, we can detect destabilizing undercurrents that complicate any sense of a solidifying uniform identity even in this portrait of the agent of European expansion and homogenization. The Knight has served "as wel in cristendom as in hethenesse" (49). Bartlett discusses the creation and "enormous increase in the use of" the term "Christendom," in "a territorial, rather than an abstract, sense" (252), but the effect of Chaucer's mention of Christendom here is to blur the distinction between it and "hethenesse"; the Knight has served in both. In bridging the divide between the two identities, he collapses it, and we learn that he has even fought for non-Christian rulers and causes: "This ilke worthy knyght hadde been also / Somtyme with the lord of Palatye / Agayn another hethen in Turkye" (64-66). In other words, the Knight's career, even as it appears to exemplify the expansion and unification of a singular Western Christian identity, also demonstrates the underlying disorder, the confusion of categories and collapsing of structures, that pervades Chaucer's poem, again from its opening lines.

Finally, these same issues - the tension between an expanding, singular, totalizing order and the particularities that complicate and destabilize it - carry over from the Knight's portrait into his tale. Here, Theseus is the expansionary agent of conquest and colonization, who follows his victory over and incorporation of an alien periphery, "Scithia" (867) and its Amazons, with an attempt to reduce internal difference and enforce political uniformity within Greece, his takeover of Thebes. These parallel acts of external expansion and internal homogenization, however, unleash forces of instability, differentiation, and confusion. The love triangle that forms between the external and internal colonized (Emelye, Arcite, and Palamon) destroys the structure of knightly loyalty between Arcite and Palamon, precipitates social disorder as aristocrats become manual laborers (who then become aristocrats again), and creates crises of identity similar to the Knight's own blurring of "cristendom" and "hethenesse," as Arcite becomes unrecognizable to himself and others. Theseus, like the Knight himself, may be forging a common "European" identity through expansion and homogenization, but in both the General Prologue and the Knight's Tale, that common identity diffuses and destabilizes itself even as it is being forged.