Research Seminar: Chaucer, Ibn Khaldun and the Worthiness of Pedro I of Castile

In her recent biography of Chaucer – Chaucer: A European Life (Princeton University Press, 2019) – Marion Turner brings to life a period of his travels that have received less attention in scholarship: his time in Iberia. In 1366, Chaucer travelled to Navarre on a diplomatic mission to dissuade a number of English and Gascon knights in their fight against Pedro I of Castile, who was embroiled in a civil war with his brother, Enrique. His connections to his contemporary Iberia continued back in England; his wife, Philippa worked as lady-in-waiting to Constanza, Pedro’s eldest daughter and wife of his patron, John of Gaunt, which provided him with the opportunity to become familiar with the Castilian court, culturally and politically. Chaucer’s impression of Pedro appears in the Monk’s Modern Instances, where he is deemed ‘worthy’ (Canterbury Tales: Monk’s Tale l. 2375): a Middle English portrait that has since been vital to critical scholarly examinations of this fourteenth-century King of Castile and Leon.

This paper aims to place Chaucer’s ‘worthy’ Pedro in connection not only to England and Castile, but to the last-remaining stronghold of al-Andalus, Nasrid Granada and the Islamic maghreb (North Africa). Three years prior to Chaucer’s safe passage into the Iberian Peninsula, Ibn Khaldun, the philosopher and jurist from the maghreb, was invited to Pedro’s court and allegedly asked to remain indefinitely by the ruler himself. It was a court that contained the Jewish physician and astrologer, Ibn Zarzar, and that commissioned mudéjar style architecture, such as the Alcázar of Seville. I explore Chaucer’s brief, yet prominent, description of Pedro I in the Monk’s Tale in light of Ibn Khaldun’s biography, Arabic-Islamic culture and learning, and fourteenth-century geopolitics. I argue that Pedro I can be read not only as emblematic of the diplomatic and political ties between England and Iberia – also entangled and connected to Islamic North Africa - but also as a conduit for exploring a more complex understanding and image of Islam that Chaucer may have witnessed.

Dr Shazia Jagot is Lecturer in Medieval and Global Literature in the Department of English and Related Languages at the University of York. Prior to coming to York in 2019, she worked at the University of Surrey and did postdoctoral studies in Odense, Denmark. During her PhD at the University of Leicester, Dr Jagot held a Junior Research Fellowship in Amman, Jordan. Dr Jagot’s research is on the connections between English and Islamic literary cultures. She is currently working on a book on Arabic learning in Chaucer.