Chaucer’s poems are being read alongside medieval tax records, building accounts, and animal-management ordinances to recover how the natural and urban worlds actually shaped his writing. Most ecocritical readings of Chaucer treat “Nature” as a symbol or abstraction. This project argues that Chaucer was acutely aware of the material environment—rivers, woods, building projects, livestock—and that those tangible surroundings actively shaped his poetry and his ideas about people. By combining literary analysis with archival records and material culture, the researcher aims to show that the country and city were not opposites in Chaucer’s world but deeply intertwined, messy realities. If successful, this work will not produce a practical application. It is fundamental historical and literary scholarship. It could, however, change how medievalists understand the relationship between literature and the physical environment—a shift that has already begun in fields like ecomaterialism. Deeper knowledge of how premodern people experienced and wrote about their surroundings may also inform how we think about our own entanglement with the natural and built worlds today.
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My project will represent a new approach to Chaucerian ecocriticism by entering his environments into the matrix of messy, real-world life. Ecocriticism has gained increasing importance in medieval studies, however I will also adopt postcolonial and Marxist theory alongside cultural materialism. It is only with this cross-disciplinary approach that we may view Chaucer's environments more holistically. I am inspired by Raymond Williams' The Country and the City, which questions the historic '[p]owerful hostile associations' between country and city. Rather than mourning an idealised rural past, we should rather acknowledge "country" and "city" as simultaneously very different and yet deeply intertwined. Much criticism on Chaucer's environmental writing focuses on "Nature" as a symbolic rather than a tangible entity, not least in myriad readings of the General Prologue's blurring of animal and human eroticism-summarised by Sarah Stanbury-or Hugh White's argument that nature functions as a point of comparison against which human emotions and identities are defined. I disagree with Stanbury's claim that a Chaucerian '"ethics of nature" would be unlikely to concern itself with the uses people make of the earth and its animal and botanical life'. Even if Middle English did not employ the word "nature" in the same way we do today, Chaucer was profoundly aware of the material world. Since V.A. Kolve foregrounded "narrative imagery" in 1984, criticism has been shifting to consider the impact this had upon his poetry. More recently, Kellie Robertson's Nature Speaks draws the human and animal worlds in relation to one another to illustrate their 'shared being' through the interesting angle of biological 'inclination'; though personified Nature remains at the centre of her analysis, she acknowledges Chaucer's interest in the mechanics of a world governed by the science his age propounded. Marion Turner's Chaucer: A European Life grounds his poetry in the context of everyday life, including his relationship with the river and the woods. Explicit ecocriticism includes Gillian Rudd's Greenery, which illustrates Chaucer's trees as having human-societal function while resisting 'romanticising nostalgia'. The 2013 Postmedieval special edition, 'Ecomaterialism', foregrounds the materiality and agency of the natural elements which never stop shifting. Chaucer's nature, as in real life, is protean and I view it as an active agent in Chaucer's life and poetry, one that fosters connections between humans, animals, and landscapes, shaping and being shaped. If, as David Wallace's Premodern Places argues, environments were 'both geographic sites and ideas, dreams, and feelings about places', I also argue that the environment helped shape late medieval ideas and feelings about people. My materialist focus will also contribute to a growing interest in the archive by applying both historical and literary criticism to relatively unexplored documentary material. Recent works by Euan Roger and Sebastian Sobecki-who use newly-discovered documents to redefine Chaucer's relationship with Cecily Chaumpaigne and the legal meaning of her raptus-and by Roger and Andrew Prescott show just how much we have yet to uncover, and this project may unearth new perspectives on Chaucer's life. My project will progress from London, following the Thames into the countryside, ending with the meeting of river and sea. The natural/urban overlap will remain a constant as I explore the city as the nexus of country and urban ideal, foregrounding building projects and animal management; the outer countryside as a network of communities, class struggles and sexual violence; and the port as a contact zone between 'indigenous' and 'alien' people. Chapters will begin with analysis of archival records and relevant material culture which shaped medieval subjects' perceptions of their world, before placing Chaucer's poems within these contexts and revealing his material environm
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