Studies in the Age of Chaucer

REVIEWS F. R. P. AKEHURST and STEPHANIE CAIN VAN D'ELDEN, eds. The Stranger in Medieval Society. Medieval Cultures, vol. 12. Minneapo­ lis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997. Pp. xii, 149. $44.95 cloth, $17.95 paper. This slim but engaging volume of essays is a selection of papers deliv­ ered at the University of Minnesota Center for Medieval Studies' 1994 conference on "The Stranger in Medieval Society. " The book's title is rather broader than its actual scope. Readers searching for essays on the "marginal" or the "alienated" will not find them here; the collection's conception of "the stranger" limits itself to "those persons who have their own community and culture, and who come into a new environ­ ment. They are within the law, they tend not to be parasites, and they may be very beneficial in their new milieu" (p. vii). A search for essays about the earlier centuries of the medieval period will prove futile as well; the work included here deals exclusively with topics drawn from the twelfth to fifteenth centuries. And although the collection's authors hail from the fields of both history and literature, the majority of the essays concern themselves with notions of the stranger in late medieval French, German, and English literature. The first three essays employ historical approaches. Kathryn Reyer­ son's "The Merchants of the Mediterranean: Merchants as Strangers" is a careful examination of the problems met by western European mer­ chants in their attempts to develop markets in Muslim areas ofthe Med­ iterranean basin, and the strategies employed by these merchants to "[acquire} sufficient cultural baggage and language skills to gain the subtlety ofapproach necessary to do business on a high level." The focus on merchants-as-strangers continues in William Phillips's "Voluntary Strangers: European Merchants and Missionaries in Asia during the Late Middle Ages." Phillips discusses the opportunities opened to Western traders and missionaries-including Marco Polo-by the Pax Mongolica of the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries. Again, Phillips focuses on how their success in opening markets depended upon losing "their status as complete strangers and assimilating to some degree into their host country" (p. 21). As he points out, this was not easily done, espe315 STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER cially given a sometimes insuperable language barrier.William Jordan's "Home Again: The Jews in the Kingdom of France, 1315-1322" exam­ ines the status of medieval Jews as strangers.Set in the context of Louis X's 1315 "trial" readmission of the French Jews after their expulsion from France by this father in 1306, Jordan's essay shows how, even though this should have been a "homecoming of sorts," the returning Jews were perceived as strangers: "They were aliens in law.They were sojourners ...owing to the impermanence of their expected residence. They were enemies because of their economic role in the years 13151322 " (p.28).Such perceptions led to much persecution of the Jewish settlers and the eventual failure of King Louis's experiment. The selections that will be of most interest to Chaucerians are Derek Pearsall's "Strangers in Late-Fourteenth-Century London" and Susan Crane's "Knights in Disguise: Identity and Incognito in Fourteenth­ Century Chivalry. " In his essay, Pearsall discusses how late-fourteenth­ century Londoners used the word "straunge" and what its connotations and associations were.Citing examples drawn mostly from Chaucer and Langland, Pearsall demonstrates that the word designated not only people from other countries but also those "not of one's own social group," and "not one of the family" (p.47).These meanings were de­ ployed to differentiate "native" Londoners from recent provincial trans­ plants as well as the foreign merchants and workers who inhabited the city.According to Pearsall, such usage reflects a "verbal architecture of xenophobia" (p.48) that finds its ultimate expression in the Londoner's slaughter of Flemish cloth workers during the 1381 revolt. Citing Chaucer's "brutally trivializing reference" to the event in The Nun's Priest's Tale, Pearsall suggests that Chaucer "allows his poetry to here become associated with an unthinking dehumanization of a whole group of 'straungers' " (p.59).Crane's essay examines the ubiquitous phenome­ non...