Sovereignty Matters: Anachronism, Chaucer’s Britain, and England’s Future’s Past

Abstract

Sovereignty Matters: Anachronism, Chaucer’s Britain, and England’s Future’s Past Susan Nakley Chaucer consistently approaches the matter of English nationhood through questions of sovereignty. “Sovereignty” is a notoriously tricky term. While this article aims to make sense of the tensions through which Chaucer defines it, I also recognize that some complications are indelible. Nevertheless, I have a working definition: “sovereignty” in the Canterbury Tales generally describes the legitimate power that governs a hierarchical relationship, and it indicates shared ownership and judgment. Although Chaucer uses the terms soveraynetee and nacioun sparingly—soveraynetee five times in all of the Canterbury Tales, and nacioun just four times—the contexts are telling. Nacioun appears twice in the Man of Law’s Tale and once in the Wife of Bath’s Tale; soveraynetee appears once in the Wife of Bath’s Prologue and once in her tale. Taken together, these tales represent Chaucer’s treatment of the matter of Britain. Considered in terms of the traditional Ellesmere order, these matter-of-Britain romances respond to the Fragment I fabliaux, which trace a well-known trajectory of decline while illustrating the kinds of small-scale crises that threaten national institutions. In the fabliaux we find clerks and a parson who are more interested in extramarital sex than in Christian morality, a miller who would rather steal wheat than sell his services, and a wife who is all too ready to sell her services. Thus, the first fragment exposes a contemporary English nation characterized by pathological transgressions of the order that Church, law, and marriage impose. Both the Man of Law and the Wife of Bath respond with stories that recall how sovereignty saved sixth-century Britain from similar depredations. Sovereignty appears not simply as the absolute power of an absolute monarch, but also as a particular form of government capable of redeeming communities [End Page 368] bound by shared law, language, and religious identity. Meanwhile, the nation emerges as that particular form of political and cultural community defined by such sovereignty. In this article I argue that the Man of Law’s Tale uses the British past to address two sets of contemporary national concerns: anxieties about the future of English institutions in crisis, and questions about England’s place in the world (given its insular pagan history, similarly limited vernacular language, and claimed continental inheritances). The Man of Law renders the British past capable of producing an English future by citing an episode of crisis and redemption that signals contemporary redemptive potential. He ultimately presents an historical case for national sovereignty as the antidote to the problems plaguing England, its language, and its institutions of marriage, Church, and law. Chaucer clarifies the significance of nationhood and sovereignty by putting these notoriously elusive concepts into relation with each other. I preface my reading of the Man of Law’s Tale with a survey of sovereignty’s significance elsewhere in the Canterbury Tales, and particularly in the Parson’s Tale because that is where Chaucer defines sovereignty most straightforwardly. After considering Chaucer’s general understanding of sovereignty, I will argue that the Man of Law’s Tale imagines English “national sovereignty” through anachronism and internationalism. Both the Man of Law and the Wife of Bath present sovereignty as a talismanic agent that redeems England’s failing political and cultural institutions, yet neither pilgrim offers this key to redemption without also querying the viability of sovereignty as a political plan. English images of sovereignty come into focus only after the tale-tellers excuse violence and invoke the help of internationally influential texts not yet written. Chaucer imagines a sixth-century Britain situated in a world whose political and cultural contours have already been shaped by the seventh-century Quran (in the Man of Law’s Tale) and Dante’s fourteenth-century Commedia and Convivio (in the Wife of Bath’s Tale). These works shape the sovereign structures that redeem the English nation, implying that the only power that might possibly redeem England from its institutional and moral decadence—and ensure its continuity—is the power of a British past that could not possibly have happened. In this light, the Man of Law’s Tale reads as...

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