Chaucer Geoffrey - Chaucers dead body: from corpse to corpus

The Flesh, like the repressed, will not long allow itself to remain insilence.

Thomas Laqueur

This project began with a question that I was never able to answer. While searching through Caroline Spurgeons Chaucer Criticism and Allusion for early modern references to Chaucers Complaint to His Purse, I noticed that, at least three times between 1566 and 1577, debtors were ordered to tender money at the tombe of Jeffrey Chawcer. Haselwood had admitted that he had not looked very hard for an answer, so I thought that a bit of work would unearth, if not the rationale for the connection between money and burial place, then an acknowledgement of the practice that might explain why Chaucers tomb was linked with fiscal obligation.

Above all I hoped that a bit of research might turn up historical connections between the location of the body of the poet and the transcendent body of money, connections which would advance some interesting theoretical paradigms about corporeal death, poetic life, and exchange value. In other words (to invert Paul Strohms argument about counterfeiting), I thought that the ineffable aura of the deceased might have been seen to legitimate, vitalize, or sacralize the locus at which an exchange of hitherto dead metal was carried out.

More promising was the meaning of the word itself. Literally, of course, to translate means to carry across to pass over, in other words, some threshold. But far from offering any closure to the question of money and the tomb, these connections seemed to suggest that questions of reputation, value, and authenticity (was the body actually translated?) were ultimately wrapped up in the larger idea of the auratic qualities of Chaucers corpse.

Nowhere did the sacral qualities of the body of the poet become more clear than in the nineteenth century. As I looked to see if anyone had responded to Haselwoods query about the connection of tomb and money (no one had), I discovered that Haselwoods interest marked the beginning of a larger cultural phenomenon of corporeal concern in the nineteenth century. In the same year that Haselwood had published his question in the Gentlemans Magazine (1823), Edward Brayley published a detailed description of Chaucers tomb in his magisterial The History and Antiquities of the Abbey Church of St. Peter,Westminster. Indeed, the year before (in the same magazine in which Haselwood published his inquiry), an anonymous visitor to the Abbey had complained about the decayed state of Chaucers tomb. Yet these brief descriptions of the tomb were only the prelude to a virtual explosion of interest in the tomb in the middle of the century. Like the conscious ignorance of the tomb in the sixteenth century, this sudden interest was puzzling. The tomb was decaying, it is true, but this concern seemed, if anything, belated, for there were, as early as the seventeenth century, comments about the decomposition of the tomb.

I was, at this point, a long way from my original question and even further from an answer. The vocabulary with which I began my searchbody, death, corpus, moneyseemed less a product of one localized sixteenth-century event and more of an ongoing historical obsession with the Chaucerian body and its

The consequence of this disappearance or dissolution of the body is, as N.Katherine Hayles has argued, the advance of a kind of totalizing hermeneutical paradigm that threatens to overrun historical specificities. As she puts it, ecstatic pronouncements that the bodys materiality is secondary to the logical or semiotic structures it encodes, suggest not so much that the body has disappeared but that a certain kind of subjectivity has emerged. In many ways, a cybernetic posthumanism or theoretical framework which empties the body of locality and specificity actually continues the liberal tradition rather than disrupts it.

How to combat this universalizing tendency? Oddly enough it is the death of the body which has already made this reemergence of the body possible. What I mean to suggest here is that the metaphorical death of the idea of the body (the disembodiment which has occasioned both Hayless and Bynums work) has led to a recent scholarly preoccupation with the dead body. I focus on this preternatural leftover in this book, for it is within the context of a vitalized corporeal presence that Chaucerians have carried out what we would call the work of hermeneutics for at least five hundred years. To ignore the way that Chaucer spoke to earlier critics, is to elide part of the history of the recuperation of Chaucer and to miss the ways that the specificities of body, death, and representation come together.