Premodern Places: Calais to Surinam, Chaucer to Aphra Behn

by David John Wallace

This book recovers places appearing in the mental mapping of medieval and Renaissance writers, from Chaucer to Aphra Behn.

354 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2004

About the author

David Wallace studied at York and Cambridge. Currently Judith Rodin Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania, he has held visiting positions at Jerusalem, Melbourne, London, and Princeton. He has served as President of the New Chaucer Society, is currently Second Vice President of the Medieval Academy of America, and has made a series of documentaries for BBC Radio 3. He most recently published Europe: A Literary History, 1348-1418 (2016) and Strong Women (2012), both with OUP.

Reviews

[Bryn Hammond]

... I came to consult the chapter on Chaucer's encounter with Genoa's slave trade in Tartars; but the rest goes high on my To Be Read. Simply amazing -- striding across disciplines, in fluent language. It seems to have as one of its themes the lesser-known premodern slave trafficking that flourished alongside, in conjunction with, humanism and classicism. True that I've found hard to research the Genoese case; he explains that it's been swept under the carpet; they had a bad rep in their time, and historians of the Renaissance haven't wanted to know them.

Also, he says things like this:

Literature is, after all, the truest history: whereas historians synthesize data to bring us accounts of past places in their own present voices, literary scholars are able (from time to time) to fall silent, bringing us texts from the past in the past’s own idiom.

[Baklavahalva · Rating 4 out of 5]

I don't ever put the books I read for (or to inspire me to write more of) my D-- here, but I had to make an exception for this work of Wallace's. Packed to the gills with historical detail, infused through and through with postcolonial theory, moving between several European languages and a creole, glimmering occasionally with an intimate insight, *Premodern Places* reads like a novel. I'd recommend it to any layperson who asks me What It is We Actually Do. Sure, it's not without problems, but I wasn't able to put it down. It even has pictures. Wallace shows quite well that we shouldn't divide medieval from what came afterwards. He can make an argument in one paragraph. And he'll convince you that Flanders is important for the Canterbury Tales.

[Jeffrey · Rating 5 out of 5]

Just reread this one in its entirety. Why don't more people cite this book? A genre-bending multitemporal densely occupied tour of premodern places. Well written ... and if not as self-conscious as I would have liked, still a book that experiments and invents.