Аннотация:David Wallace finds Chaucer engaged in surprising ideological areas.Wallace's ac- count of Chaucer's polity challenges conventionally evaluative periodisations as well as offering a radically new configuration of Chaucer's involvement with discourses that are generally associated with the Italian Renaissance.Chaucer's reworking of those discourses suggests the ideal of a generously inclusive associational polity in comparison with which the subsequent Renaissance must appear as a dark age of autocratic absolutism.Wallace approaches Chaucer's poetry through a rich blend of Marxist historiography, cultural materialism, and gender studies.The Chaucer who emerges from Wallace's study found in the polanty of Milan and Florence (represented largely by Petrarch and Boccaccio) a textual and cultural focus for his own location in English culture and politics.Chaucer had a mercantile back-
