Toward Premodern Globalism: Oceanic Exemplarity in Chaucer's Man of Law's Tale

Abstract

This essay reads Chaucer's Man of Law's Tale—a retelling of the popular Constance exemplum—as a case study for thinking about a global Middle Ages. The tale's globalism emerges most pointedly in its depiction of the ocean and, more surprisingly, in Constance's pale face during her trial for a murder she did not commit. By reading these unlikely images together, this essay argues that both operate as oceanic sites of exemplary justice and that the Man of Law frames the Constance story as a call for global justice outside the reach of territorial law. Chaucer imagines a legality that works like exemplarity, conceptualizing witness testimony in particular as a fluid narrative form that can accommodate the needs and expectations of various audiences, cultures, and temporalities. (JKT)

The Global World in the Pre-Modern Era: Lessons from the Past for Our Future With a Focus on the Early Modern Novel Fortunatus (1509)

“…40 In the future, we will probably have the opportunity to understand much more deeply how world literature came about and how it reflected the ongoing globalization processes in pragmatic terms, and this certainly much earlier than in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, which many scholars still assume to be the starting point of this phenomenon. 41 Jamie K. Taylor now deserves credit for her effort to situate Chaucer's "Man of Law's Tale" within a global context, 42 but much more important would be the fact that already throughout the Middle Ages texts, art works, and ideas moved globally, though we have difficulties until today to trace those movements more precisely. 43 The vast world of translations, both of medical and philosophical texts, and of literary narratives, connecting Indian, Persian, Arabic, Hebrew, Latin, and then many European literatures with each other.…”