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PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS The New Chaucer Society Twelfth International Congress July 14–17, 2000 University of London ................. 8972$$ PRT1 11-01-10 12:19:05 PS ................. 8972$$ PRT1 11-01-10 12:19:05 PS The Presidential Address Rememorative Reconstruction Paul Strohm University of Oxford Ihave lately been noticing conversations and essays in which fellow litterati describe themselves as ‘‘historians’’—a tendency presumably not much encouraged by actual practitioners of that specialized and exacting discipline. Let us admit that this self-description represents something of an aggrandizement. In fact, let us be really honest and admit that, except for a few invited guests, we are not really historians at all. But let us also think more affirmatively about the aspirational character of what is being said here. To call oneself a historian is a way of saying: I care about the past—I desire, or traffic in, knowledge of the past. It is a way of aligning oneself with the thin and thinning ranks of those in this presentist era who care about the past at all. As David Wallace has recently and forcefully reminded us, the disciplinary struggles that matter are not just between advocates of particular historical periods such as medieval and Renaissance, or between different philosophies and methodologies of history, but ‘‘increasingly those between the culture of the historical present and any place and moment in the past.’’1 When a literary person frames assertions around phrases like ‘‘as a historian ’’ or ‘‘we historians,’’ he or she may be exhibiting a bit of, let’s face it, presumption, but is still standing with the past, staking a claim for the importance of the past. Our commitment to the past obviously has something to do with our choice of Chaucer’s ‘‘place’’—London—for this congress. And here in London evidences of the past constantly present themselves. Just to think, for example, about spatial relations: you can still walk down a 1 David Wallace, Chaucerian Polity: Absolutist Lineages and Associational Forms in England and Italy (Palo Alto, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1997), p. xiv. 3 ................. 8972$$ $CH1 11-01-10 12:19:31 PS STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER little piece of Friday Street, as Chaucer did that day when he saw the Grosvenor arms, and it even has a street sign. Less visible, but still creating their own fields of tacit force, are traditional ward and parish boundaries. St. Paul’s isn’t the medieval Paul’s and the Guildhall isn’t the fourteenth-century Guildhall and St. Lawrence’s Jewry had been rebuilt and is no longer in a Jewry—but these building are all sited more or less as they were, and, if I have John Schofield right, the crypt and porch of St. Paul’s still include some of the old stones. Decide on Monday to walk from the Senate House to Westminster, and you will see why Hoccleve wanted to take that boat! Street names, setbacks, durations , distances, Thames tides—delicate but still legible traces of what once was still surround us here. The fact remains, though, that many different kinds of pasts surround us, and many of them are false lures. An early issue of the Chaucer Newsletter contains an essay by an American scholar whose curiosity was agitated by the Hainault stop on the Central Line (sorry—as it turned out, nothing to do with Philippa). And I was spuriously incited upon my first visit to England by all those Green Men on pub signs, who turn out of course to be Victorian in origin—historical, still, but less grist for our mill. Other remainders, though, are as real as they can be. Westminster Hall is there—we will walk past it on the way to Chaucer’s (bogus) tomb—and it is the same Westminster Hall, the redesign of which partially occurred during Chaucer’s tenure as Clerk of Works. And what is our relation to all this past—to all these varied evidential pasts—to be? Certainly, as surely as we are offered different kinds of pasts, we are offered different ways of caring about the past. One way, the modernist-rationalist way, assures its own coherence by insisting...
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