Chaucer and Italian Culture by Helen Fulton;

Author:Helen Fulton;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Lightning Source Inc. (Tier 3)

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THE PROPHETIC EAGLE IN ITALY, ENGLAND AND WALES: DANTE, CHAUCER AND INSULAR POLITICAL PROPHECY

Victoria Flood

This chapter considers Chaucer’s House of Fame in relation to political prophetic interests at work in Dante’s Commedia and a roughly contemporary insular tradition of politicised apocalypticism drawing on similar currents in pan-European circulation. A number of critics have argued persuasively that, in his House of Fame, Chaucer offered a pastiche of contemporary apocalyptic and visionary motifs. This has generally been understood as a jibe at the pretensions of visionary literature (including Dante’s Commedia) to a privileged form of knowledge – as Helen Cooper has put it, a sense that ‘this side of death, judgement is human, provisional, uncertain, and quite possibly wrong’.1 In this respect, the House of Fame represents one of a number of medieval texts that cultivate an association between apocalypticism, authorship and authority – however unstable this configuration is for Chaucer.2 Despite this critical interest, Chaucer’s apocalypticism has yet to be located by scholars in the broader context of what was a significant engagement with and contemporary circulation of prophetic literature. Revelatory material was by no means necessarily politically neutral during this period, and the later Middle Ages saw a flourishing of apocalyptic and imperially minded political prophecy in the medieval West, drawn on by politically engaged authors and compilers from southern Italy to Wales.3

This chapter follows a westward geo-political trajectory, taking in Italy, England and Wales, with two aims in mind: the contextualisation of what I understand to be Chaucer’s rejection of a dominant continental source tradition in pan-European transmission; and Chaucer’s insular context, in evidence in the interaction between English and Welsh prophecy, without which, as I have argued elsewhere, we cannot understand the long historical development of prophecy in medieval Britain.4 This study is therefore concerned with the porous boundaries between medieval linguistic and cultural contexts. It is conducted not with specific source analysis in mind (although on occasion source relationships are suggested), but rather with an emphasis on the broad diffusion of a common prophetic motif – the figure of the eagle, whose revelatory and imperialist potential is both invoked and denied by Chaucer – across different political and social milieux in late medieval Europe. This mode of analysis takes its cue from the recent interest in the ‘itinerary’ approach to European literatures, championed by David Wallace – the study of a theme in pan-European circulation, viewed from the vantage point of three very specific, although inter-related, geo-political contexts.5

Dante’s Joachism and Chaucer’s Eagle

Dante’s engagements with political prophecy have been understood as inspired by the prophetic exegeses of Joachim of Fiore (c.1135–1202), a Calabrian abbot and founder of the monastery of San Giovani, and the prophecies produced in imitation of him.6 A prophetic vogue beginning in southern Italy during the early thirteenth century, political Joachite texts circulated fairly rapidly across Europe. Joachite prophecy takes its impetus from a tripartite understanding of history, found in Joachim’s genuine prophetic writings, which proposed three chronological epochs, the Age of the Father (articulated

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