Risk before Risk: Actuarial Logic and Mercantile Metaphors in the Canterbury Tales

Abstract:Thinking in terms of risk means imagining the future as a set of potential outcomes and ameliorating potentially problematic ones through action in the present. Modern theorists of risk consider risk and its mitigation to be, by definition, modern, but this essay argues that the medieval period has something important to offer histories of risk, showing that actuarial attitudes (if not modern actuarial math) are present in literary accounts of social cohesion and identity, and that medieval "pre-risk" forms of actuarial thought serve as the basis of modern attitudes toward risk and its unequal social management. Focusing on specific moments in the frame narrative of the Canterbury Tales, it argues that The General Prologue initially presents the Tales as a seemingly egalitarian experiment in risk mitigation, but that closer inspection of the descriptions of the Merchant and Shipman—and later the Canon and Canon's Yeoman—reveals an inequality of access to risk-mitigation strategies that anticipates the modern inequalities of a global risk society. Even as certain dangerous behaviors (large risks taken on by the mercantile class) are seen as insurable and therefore licit, other behaviors (small-scale risks taken on by lower-class laborers) are portrayed as criminal and damaging to the common good. By approaching Chaucer's Canterbury Tales with risk and risk mitigation in mind, readers might more clearly see how the felaweshipe of the Canterbury pilgrimage, what David Wallace calls its "associational form," holds within it a fundamental disunity and distrust that seeks to manage the future through the hedging of bets in the present.