Continental England: Form, Translation, and Chaucer in the Hundred Years’ War

Abstract

Elizaveta Strakhov's fascinating and compelling book establishes her as one of the most interesting and important voices emerging in a new generation of Chaucer scholars. At the same time, although Chaucer appears in the subtitle of the book, Continental England in fact makes an argument for decentering Chaucer, as it interrogates the categories of author, nation, and language (p. 14).The category at the center of this book is undoubtedly form. The formes fixes—the ballade, rondeau, virelay, chant royal, lay, and complainte—have long been at the heart of discussions of later medieval French poetry, but have been far less central to scholarly work on medieval English verse. Critics remain less interested in what are generically called Chaucer's “shorter poems” than they are in his narrative poetry. Yet, as Strakhov points out, earlier generations of readers encountered Chaucerian material skewed towards his ballades and other Francophone texts, and influential readers such as Lydgate emphasized Chaucer's “compleyntis, baladis, roundelis, virelaies” as the culmination of his poetic activity (p. 213).In exploring what happens to the formes fixes as they move between languages, Strakhov develops a nuanced argument about translation and identity. As she discusses, Chaucer composed the majority of his short-form lyrics in English rhyme and stanza forms that he had himself developed, but when he translated a French cycle, to produce his Complaint of Venus, he replicated the French rhyme and stanza form. Similarly, when Charles d'Orleans translated his own French formes fixes cycle into English, he precisely reproduced the French formal features such as stanzaic length and rhyme scheme, but when he composed English formes fixes he used established English rhyme and stanza forms (pp. 3–4). While the formes fixes are in some ways a unifying, recognizable mode of writing, they are also regionally inflected.Strakhov's argument throughout Continental England is underpinned by a particular understanding of translation as reparative rather than antagonistic. The “displacement” model of translation, identified by Rita Copeland as the foundational idea of translation activity for the Latin West, enabled an agonistic relationship between source and translation, a relationship of competition and supremacy. However, Copeland also identifies a second model of translation deriving from patristic authors, particularly Jerome. This reconstitutive model is interested in preservation and accretion rather than displacement and expulsion. Strakhov's contention is that writers such as Chaucer practice a secular version of this patristic model of translation, whereby cross-regional Francophone culture is preserved through textual synergies and exchanges, even as the Hundred Years’ War plods or rages in the background. Strakhov terms this kind of work “reparative translation” (p. 9) and this concept infuses and energizes Continental England.The book is written with clarity and elegance throughout, and is tightly textually focused and analytical. It is generally organized chronologically. The first three chapters focus on the long fourteenth century, encompassing authors including Vitry, Campion, Froissart, de la Mote, and Deschamps as well as the already-mentioned Chaucer and Charles d'Orleans. There are many new insights here. For instance, Strakhov's analysis of Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania MS Codex 902 (previously known as French 15), shifts the grounds of debate by moving away from discussions about Chaucer's possible authorship of the “Ch” lyrics. Instead of focusing on arguments about “was he, wasn't he the author,” Strakhov asks different questions of the manuscript, suggesting that the taxonomic principle is not authorship but chronology, tied to the development of lyric form, tracking changes in the formes fixes. In the subsequent chapter, Strakhov analyzes pastourelles by Froissart, Deschamps, and an anonymous poet, concluding that these politicized poems are particularly focused on region and the local—another important node in her overall questioning of the category of nation.The latter part of the book moves further into the fifteenth century, exploring texts written, collected, and commented on by Hoccleve, Lydgate, (late) Gower, Shirley, and Ashby. Hoccleve and Gower appear in a new context, in Strakhov's careful demonstration of the way that both turned to formes fixes at the end of their writing lives. A new Hoccleve emerges if we see him as an “English Francophone poet” (p. 152) as Strakhov suggests we should. The idea that after 1422, when the “double monarchy” of England and France commenced, poets such as Hoccleve saw England not as an English realm decisively separated from and superior to France, but as an Anglo-French and Continental space, is an important reconceptualization of the cultural relationship between and across changing borders. Ultimately, Strakhov argues that England's national literature was defined by an openness to other literatures and languages, by an outward facingness that subsequent “triumph of English” narratives have failed to understand (p. 214).Continental England is a book in conversation with others. Chaucer critics have long recognized the importance of locating his writings in broad European contexts, and many of us still value older critical works such as Muscatine's Chaucer and the French Tradition (1957). The last twenty-five years have seen an upsurge in work about the Europeanness of late medieval literature, and of Chaucer's writings in particular, including David Wallace's Chaucerian Polity: Absolutist Lineages and Associational Forms in England and Italy (1997), Ardis Butterfield's The Familiar Enemy: Chaucer, Language, and Nation in the Hundred Years’ War (2009), my own Chaucer: A European Life (2019), Kara Gaston's Reading Chaucer in Time: Literary Formation in England and Italy (2020), and Philip Knox's The Romance of the Rose and the Making of Fourteenth-Century English Literature (2022). Other books, notably Joanna Bellis's The Hundred Years’ War in Literature 1337–1600 (2016) have focused our attention on the relationship between that conflict and literary texts. Numerous recent books and essays, particularly in the wake of a broader reorientation in Literary Studies, engage form in historically attuned ways—for instance, work by Chris Cannon (2007), Ingrid Nelson (2017), and Arthur Bahr (2013), as well as Jessica Rosenfeld and Tom Prendergast's edited collection (2018).Several of Strakhov's chapter titles implicitly call our attention to work that inspired her: “Why Formes Fixes Lyric?” echoes and engages Jonathan Culler's “Why Lyric?” (2008) and Ardis Butterfield's “Why Medieval Lyric?” (2015); “The Monolingualism of the Other: Deschamps's Ballade to Chaucer and Chaucer's Prologue to the Legend of Good Women” calls to mind both Jacques Derrida's Le monolinguisme de l'autre (Monolingualism of the Other, 1996) and Butterfield's discussion of Le monolinguisme de l'autre in “The Monolingual Turn,” a section of chapter 8 of The Familiar Enemy; and “A Dual Language Policy for Lancastrian England: John Gower's Trentham Manuscript and Thomas Hoccleve's Huntington Holographs” overtly questions John H. Fisher's article “A Language Policy for Lancastrian England” (PMLA 107 [1992]).Continental England thus positions itself as a book in productive conversation with the field as a whole. This methodological foregrounding of accumulation and accretion, discussion and debate, collaboration and contestation, is appropriate for a book that itself argues that medieval texts, languages, forms, nations, and authors are relational and intertwined, involved in a back-and-forth that challenges preconceptions about chauvinism. Continental England ultimately claims that “Literature rebinds what war and conflict tear apart” (p. 225). Critics will be divided about that message, but it certainly provides a thought-provoking—indeed provocative—intervention into debates about translation, cultural exchange, and how literature functions in society.