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Undergrad Wednesdays – Medieval Summoners and Modern Business Ethics

[This post was written in the spring 2018 semester for Karrie Fuller's course on Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. It responds to the prompt posted here.]

The Summoner in “The Friar’s Tale” in Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales is an example of a religious figure who abuses his power and leads a secretly sinful life. The Summoner ultimately makes a deal with the devil that ends with his descent into hell. The point of the tale is to paint summoners in an unflattering light and reveal their hypocrisy. Summoners wouldn’t have been very popular figures in the Middle Ages due to the fact that they got people in trouble for committing sins. This tale has multiple implications for the modern day, especially as it relates to modern day business ethics.

In the illustration of a summoner below, from the illustrations in the Ellesmere manuscript, the summoner looks shifty, slightly hunched and carrying a coin purse that hints at his greed. Even his horse looks sinister, seeming almost cat-like in its posture and holding its head low instead of proudly. This illustration very much aligns with the behavior of the Summoner in The Friar’s Tale.

The tale itself describes how the Summoner uses spies saying, “as any hauk to lure in Engelond,/ That told hym al the secree that they knewe./ For hire aqueyntance was nat come of/ newe./ They weren hise approwours prively (lines 1340-1343),/” which means that the Summoner uses these spies to gather information on citizens. The tale then describes how he uses these secrets to blackmail these people saying, “He took hymself a greet profit therby./… He koude somne on peyne of Cristes curs./ And they were glade for to fille his purs (line 1344, lines 1347-1348).” This line describes how the Summoner uses these secrets, not to promote good and lessen sin, as you would think would be the role of a religious figure, but to “fille his purs” and profit at the expense of others. A lesson in business ethics that can be taken from this moment in the tale is the performance of immoral acts under the guise of morality. The company Healthgen grappled with this issue as one of its senior managers, Filip Kowalski, made a donation to a client’s private foundation. The question surrounding this transaction was whether it was charity or bribery. The description of the case on Harvard Business School’s publishing website states, “After a natural disaster, Healthgen- at the request of the director- donated products to help during the crises. After Healthgen wins an important contract, the media alleges that the donation was made to secure support of the regional health director. Were the efforts to boost company sales and support public health a donation or a bribe?” Although Healthgen probably had better and less damaging intentions than the Summoner in the tale, the Summoner was using his religious duty as a means to gather money by blackmailing and spying, doing “good works” by catching sinners through nefarious means. Healthgen was donating to charity while simultaneously gaining unfair advantages on competition. Therefore, The Friar’s Tale is relevant to today in that it has lessons wrapped into it, such as associating with reputable institutions and not having ulterior motives when doing good works, a subject similar to the one Zach Prephan deals with in his discussion of the Pardoner and  modern day Wall Street.

Later in the tale, after the Summoner enters into a business deal with the devil, he is eventually taken straight to Hell. The devil states, “Thy body and this panne been myne by right./ Thou shalt with me to Helle yet tonyght,/…And with that word this foule feend hym hente./ Body and soule he with the devel wente (lines 1635-1636, lines 1639-1641).” Here, although the devil only laid claim to the Summoner’s body, the Summoner also gave his soul to Hell by participating in immoral acts. This warning not to participate in unethical business transactions with unethical parties has contemporary relevance. The business Chiquita Brands learned this when they paid off terrorists to protect employees in Colombia. A description of the case on Harvard Business School’s Publishing website states, “The Justice Department began an investigation, focusing on the role and conduct of Chiquita and some of its officers in this criminal activity. Subsequently, Chiquita entered into a plea agreement that gave them the dubious distinction of being the first major U.S. company ever convicted of dealing with terrorists, and resulted in a fine of US $25 million and other penalties.” Although this case was complicated as it was dealing with the safety of its employees in a foreign and politically turbulent zone, Chiquita still suffered damage from its association with “devils,” or immoral individuals.

The Summoner in The Friar’s Tale is ultimately a warning against living a monetarily motivated life at any cost, which will inevitably lead to sin, poor decisions, and a downfall. The Summoner’s immoral business practices led to an unfortunate fate, much like many businesses today that suffer for their poor ethical decisions. Ultimately, The Friar’s Tale is a commentary on the hypocritical life of the Summoner and is meant to expose what is believed to be the nature of summoners in general.

Molly Murphy
University of Notre Dame

Works Cited

Chaucer, Geoffrey. The Canterbury Tales . Edited by Robert Boenig and Andrew Taylor, second ed., Broadview Editions, 2012. 

Soltes, Eugene, and Brian Tilley. “Charity or Bribery.” Harvard Business School Publishing, Harvard Business School, 13 Dec. 2017, cb.hbsp.harvard.edu/cbmp/product/118052-PDF-ENG.

“The Summoner on Horseback.” Alamy, 1343, Lebrecht Music and Arts Photo Library, http://www.alamy.com/stock-photo-geoffrey-chaucer-s-canterbury-tales-the-summoner-on-horseback-english-83358508.html.

Teagarden, Mary B., and Andreas Schotter. “Blood Bananas: Chiquita in Colombia.” Harvard Business School Publishing, Harvard Business School, 11 Nov. 2010, Chiquita

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Undergrad Wednesdays – How the Wife of Bath Gone Girl’d Us

[This post was written in the spring 2018 semester for Karrie Fuller's course on Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. It responds to the prompt posted here.]

Geoffrey Chaucer’s Wife of Bath is a potential medieval husband’s worst nightmare: this Canterbury Tales pilgrim is bawdy, aggressively forward with her sexuality, power-hungry, and perhaps most offensively of all, average looking, at best. So terrifying are her confessions of sexual manipulation, that the Pardoner even interupts her Prologue with claims that he is now questioning his own impending marriage: “I was about to wed a wife, alas! / Why should I pay so dearly for it with my flesh?” (166–67, my translation). The Wife of Bath appears to be perpetuating negative portrayals of women; at the same time, she also appears to be satirizing men’s fears and anxieties about their wives and, by extension, all of womankind. Her extremely colorful (read: dirty and borderline-absurdist) humor could render her possibly anti-feminist tendencies to be ironic, along with her ability to engage with clerical knowledge, refusal to conform to restrictive expectations of women’s sexuality, and, ultimately, her ability to gain sovereignty, have been cited by many scholars to argue that the Wife of Bath is a proto-feminist. And certainly, there is ample evidence to suggest that she is—see, for instance, Jessica Ping’s “Big Reputation,” which argues for reading the Wife of Bath as a Taylor Swift–type, who is herself an extremely problematic figure for many modern feminists.

Regardless, for many modern readers, it can be difficult to fully distinguish these subversions of feminine expectations from a reading that understands her as a woman who fulfills all of the medieval man’s worst fears about women. Many readers are caught in a web of interpretations: is the Wife of Bath proto-feminist for wanting control in her marriages? Pseudofeminist for being promiscuous and having five husbands? Or, ironically pseudofeminist to the point of coming back around to feminist? The lack of clarity surrounding whether the Wife of Bath is normative or revolutionary makes it an extremely relevant text for contemporary fourth-wave feminism, which has seen young women, in particular, re-embrace typically “feminine” things that had previously been cast aside in a revolt against feminine expectations.

The character Amy Dunne—of the novel and film Gone Girl—also presents a complicated tension between perpetuation and deconstruction of feminist and anti-feminist tropes. Granted, Amy’s subversion of feminine tropes are far bloodier and terrifying than the Wife of Bath’s, but the plurality of possible readings are the same. Amy herself deconstructs the idea of the “Cool Girl”—the idealized woman she tried so hard to be—in a now-infamous monologue that appears in both the novel and the film:

Being the Cool Girl means I am a hot, brilliant, funny woman who adores football, poker, dirty jokes, and burping, who plays video games, drinks cheap beer, loves threesomes and anal sex, and jams hot dogs and hamburgers into her mouth like she’s hosting the world’s biggest culinary gang bang while somehow maintaining a size 2, because Cool Girls are above all hot. (Flynn 222)

Amy, by casting off her “Cool Girl” veneer, becomes a far darker version of the Wife of Bath: she, too, seeks to sexually manipulate the men in her life—via false rape accusations and pregnancies—and commandeer total power by fulfilling every anxiety, every fear that the contemporary man has about women. Chaucer’s medieval everyman fears their wife siphoning their money; Flynn’s contemporary everyman fears “crazy bitches” who ruin their lives with statistically improbable rape accusations and have complete financial power over them because they’ve been emasculated by their inability to be the breadwinner. Gone Girl’s author, Gillian Flynn, has been accused of misogyny because of her portrayal of Amy’s evilness: she lies about being raped on multiple occasions, goes to unbelievable lengths to manipulate the men in her life, and makes the typical “femme fatale” seem lighthearted and playful. Frankly, Amy’s a “psychotic bitch,” but does that make her antifeminist? Or is allowing a feminine character to revel in simply being a “psychotic bitch” without a necessarily political agenda feminist in its own right?

Both Gone Girl and The Wife of Bath’s Prologue are successful in how they tease out complicated questions of femininity and its place in society. What are the boundaries between a good woman, a good feminist, and a good character? These are the questions that force the reader to reconsider their own expectations for and conceptions of gender, which can create a feminist narrative, even if the characters end up not being so. Whether or not a character is feminist might even be an arbitrary question; while much of the discourse surrounding Amy Dunne is centered on feminism, this video from Vanity Fair analyzes her character from a psychological standpoint, with no mention of whether she’s “feminist” or not.

Regardless of Chaucer’s intention when crafting the Wife of Bath’s character as well as his other female characters, a clever modern reader can see she is an embodiment of the most stereotypical fears of men (see Tess Kaiser’s “Chaucer’s Envoy, Gone Girl, and Pseudo-Feminsim” to explore the question of feminism and pseudo-feminism in The Clerk’s Tale]. In her Prologue, the wife of Bath says “I had [my husbands] wholly in my hand / and since they had given me all their land, / Why should I take heed to please them, / Unless it were for my profit and pleasure?” (Chaucer 211–14, my translation). The Wife of Bath, claiming to use her husbands for their assets and control them with sex, plays off the same core of insecurity that Amy does: sexuality and power dynamics within marriage. The manifestations are different, but there is still some universal commentary about the nature of men—and, almost necessarily, the nature of women—that’s being made by how they toy with and fuel those fears.

Above all, the Wife of Bath and Amy are threatening because they are coded as typically masculine: they’re strong, and complicated, and clever, and crave power. Whether it’s feminist to defy gender norms or anti-feminist to suggest that the only strong woman is a masculine woman is precisely Flynn’s point; whatever Chaucer’s intention was, a modern reading of a medieval character is clearly inspirational to imagined gender relations. The strength of The Wife of Bath’s Tale and Gone Girl is that neither of them are clear-cut; the reader is forced to confront their own opinions about gender.

Megan Valley
University of Notre Dame

Works Cited

Chaucer, Geoffrey. The Canterbury Tales. Edited by Robert Boenig and Andrew Taylor, 2nd ed., Broadview editions, 2012.

Flynn, Gillian. Gone Girl. New York, Broadway Books, 2012.

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Medieval Chicago–In Gothic City: The Old Water Tower and Pumping Station, Part 1

Chicago’s Old Water Tower, completed in 1869. This remnant of Old Chicago survived the Great Chicago Fire of 1871 unlike the majority of its neighbors. It is the second oldest water tower in the US. Photo by Karrie Fuller, copyright reserved.

When I walked by this building on my way to Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art this past July, one of my five-year-old twins asked, “Mama, is that a castle?” Could there be clearer evidence that this building looks medieval?

But, why? It seems odd for such an ornate, crenellated structure to sit amidst a conglomeration of Chicago skyrises and modern store fronts along the Magnificent Mile. It almost doesn’t fit this urban landscape. Almost.

It might seem even weirder to learn that this miniature, limestone “castle” is a 19th-century water tower, a building intended for practical, mechanical use in an industrial age, rather than for fortification and housing for the aristocracy. The tower contains a water pump originally constructed to draw water out of Lake Michigan and provide some much-needed clean water to the city. Its function is decidedly not medieval. So, then, why does it look like a castle? Because it is part of the Gothic Revival movement, which many of the period’s great thinkers, writers, and artists imported to the States from across the Atlantic. The tower’s architect, William W. Boyington, designed this building and its neighboring pumping station, built in a matching style, with medieval architecture in mind. He might even have drawn inspiration from a specific medieval building: the Cloth Merchant’s Hall of Bruges in Belgium (known as the Belfry), illustrated, as chicagoarchitecture.org suggests, in nineteenth-century architectural writings. If true, then a perhaps unexpected turn of events brought the medieval cloth trade, with its rich and complex history, face to face with 19th-century industrial innovation several thousand miles away and many centuries in the future. Such are the vagaries of history.

Cloth Merchant’s Hall of Bruges in Belgium: The Belfry attached to the cloth hall was built in 1240 and rebuilt in 1280 after a huge fire. It has been variously expanded, destroyed, and rebuilt over the centuries since its original construction.This medieval building served many functions, including housing the cloth merchants during the heyday of the Flemish cloth trade—using local and imported wool that was often imported from England. Photo: Wolfgang Staudt via Wikimedia Commons.
From the Statement of Significance on the Nomination form in the National Register of Historic Places Inventory: “The Water Tower and Pumping Station serve as an architectural link with Chicago’s pre-fire history in the central area of the city. [...] Although not an architectural tour de force, the buildings are typical of the aesthetic of the 19th century, that a building should be both utilitarian and architecturally pleasing...”

But, what does it mean for this building to be part of the Gothic Revival movement, and what exactly is medieval about this 19th-century period of architecture? The term “gothic” is itself a problematic, but fascinating one. Used by art historians and in pop culture, the word, capacious in its ever-shifting connotations, receives no less than six definitions, most of which break down into multiple sub-definitions, in the Oxford English Dictionary. Its range of positive and negative meanings include everything from references to the Goths (the original people and their language, not the modern teenager), an adjectival denotation for the “barbarous” or “uncouth,” and a style of medieval architecture from the 12th to 16th centuries, all the way to the resurgence of this medieval style during the Revival. Its meanings diverge even further when considering the word’s use in various disciplines: paleographers, for instance, study gothic manuscripts and bookhands, while literary critics will more likely associate the gothic with particular settings and horror genres. In America, variations of gothic buildings became so engrained in the culture that some features even made their mark on humble houses and farm buildings, spreading through rural territories and becoming iconically embraced in the famous Grant Wood painting, “American Gothic,” a mainstay and personal favorite of mine on display at Chicago’s Art Institute (notice the pointed-arch window in the “Carpenter Gothic” house behind them). The term’s ties to the Middle Ages, therefore, can be either strictly or loosely construed as genuinely medieval, or a form of medievalism.

Grant Wood, American Gothic. Photo courtesy of Google Art Project.

As an architectural style, the gothic building has been variously understood as barbaric and ugly, or beautiful and natural at different points in the word’s history. And, as Matthew Reeve reminds us, the word gothic was coined after the Middle Ages “to articulate a perceived aesthetic, intellectual, and artistic chasm between the period in which the word is employed and the medieval past. In this sense Gothic is less suggestive of the nature of the Middle Ages itself than it is of the culture’s perceived temporal and ideological distance from it” (233). Perceptions of this style have therefore shifted periodically according to the changing political, social, and cultural climates of successive generations. However, the 19th century played a major role in the formation of this word’s current and generally more positive definition, and Boyington’s work represents a part of Chicago’s efforts to participate in this widespread architectural tradition. Whereas the 18th-century Romantic era solidified Gothic architecture’s reputation as evoking “mysticism and sublimity,” 19th-century perceptions of this style introduce further associations with “national identity” and “a structurally rational approach to design” (Murphy 92). In this case, Boyington’s position so late in the Gothic Revival might indicate that for him, the Gothic style was as much about beauty and emotion as it was about rationality and functionality, a feat of scientific engineering in which appearance and use value both become valued players.

The Water Tower with Pumping Station across the street. Photo by Karrie Fuller, copyright reserved.

Still, as an artifact of 19th-century medievalism, the water tower makes no attempt at genuine authenticity. Its miniature size, pristine facade, and local building materials distinguish it less as an inadequate imitation than as something altogether new. It draws on the medieval past in a way that enables the architect to preserve a carefully chosen European heritage as part of the young nation’s own identity, while at the same time speaking to a new place in a new historical moment. The very nature of this form of creativity, transforming the past into a reinvented present, makes this “Gothic City” the perfect backdrop for countless other creative projects, including the inspiration Chicago often provides for the look and feel of none other than “Gotham City” itself.

Stay tuned for Part 2, forthcoming during the 
spring 2019 semester...

Karrie Fuller, PhD
University of Notre Dame

Online Resources:

“Boyington, William W.,” Ryerson and Burnham Archives: Archival Image Collection, TheArt Institute of Chicago, accessed on November 1, 2018, http://digital-libraries.saic.edu/cdm/search/collection/mqc/searchterm/Boyington,%20William%20W./mode/exact.

Gale, Neil. “The History of the Chicago Water Tower,” The Digital Research Library of Illinois History Journal, published on December 3, 2016, https://drloihjournal.blogspot.com/2016/12/chicago-water-tower-history.html.

“Illinois SP Chicago Avenue Water Tower and Pumping Station,” National Register of Historic Places, National Archives Catalog, National Park Service, accessed on October 19, 2018, https://catalog.archives.gov/id/28892376.

Leroux, Charles. “The Chicago Water Tower,” Chicago Tribune, published on December 18, 2007, http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/politics/chi-chicagodays-watertower-story-story.html.

“Throwback Thursday: Chicago Water Tower Edition,” Chicago Architecture, Artefaqs Corporation, published on March 5, 2015, https://www.chicagoarchitecture.org/2015/03/05/throwback-thursday-chicago-water-tower-edition/.

Works Cited & Further Reading

Blackman, Joni Hirsch. This Used to Be Chicago. St. Louis, MO: Reedy Press, 2017.

Carbutt, John. Biographical Sketches of the Leading Men of Chicago, 215-22 . Chicago: Wilson & St. Clair, 1868. [Written in a dated style, this book is florid, grandiose, and male-centric, but contains some useful information about Boyington nevertheless.]

Draper, Peter. “Islam and the West: The Early Use of the Pointed Arch Revisited.” Architectural History48 (2005): 1-20.

Frankl, Paul. Gothic Architecture. Revised by Paul Crossley. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1962, 2000.

Grodecki, Louis. Gothic Architecture. New York: Electa/Rizzoli, 1978.

Murphy, Kevin D. and Lisa Reilly. “Gothic.” In Medievalism: Key Critical Terms, 87-96. New York: Boydell and Brewer, 2014.

Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “Gothic,” accessed September 20, 2018, http://www.oed.com.proxy.library.nd.edu/view/Entry/80225?redirectedFrom=gothic#eid.

Reeve, Matthew M. “Gothic.” Studies in Iconography33 (2012): 233-246.

Schulz, Frank, and Kevin Harrington. Chicago’s Famous Buildings. 5thed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003.

Ziolkowski, Jan M. The Juggler of Notre Dame and the Medievalizing of Modernity. Vol.3: The Making of the American Middle Ages. Cambridge: Open Book Publishers, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0146.