In his Confessions, Augustine condemns “concupiscentia oculorum” (“the lust of the eyes”) as being the product of a “vana et curiosa cupiditas” (“vain and curious desire”) that distracts human beings from meditating on God and directs them to terrestrial rather than heavenly destinations. Yet in one of the most poetic passages of Book 10, he writes, “et eunt homines mirari alta montium et ingentes fluctus maris et latissimos lapsus fluminum et oceani ambitum et gyros siderum” (“people are moved to wonder by mountain peaks, by vast waves of the sea, by broad waterfalls on rivers, by the all-embracing extent of the ocean, by the revolutions of the stars”) (10.8.15). A passage on the memory's capacity to produce infinite space – Augustine sees these sites “in memoria… spatiis tam ingentibus quasi foris viderem” (“inwardly in my memory… with the same vast spaces between, as if I saw them abroad”) – takes a sharp detour as he contemplates how human beings move through and are moved by the world around them. People were and are still inspired to traverse the globe in search of its highest peaks and widest canyons, and upon arrival they are stirred by the earth's beauty, power, and grandeur. Even those most dedicated to a “life of the mind” (e.g., Augustine) find themselves drawn toward what lies beyond their books’ bindings. This suggests the impact of mobility on the human experience, underscored still further in the Confessions by the fact that venturing outside will reveal a world that is itself remarkably kinetic. The image Augustine offers is not a static artistic rendering of the natural world – a “landscape” in its original sense from the Dutch landschap – but a place in motion, where water flows and falls, the ocean embraces, and stars revolve. Despite his best efforts to turn his eyes toward God, Augustine is seduced by celestial, terrestrial, and embodied movements, both sensed and thereafter seen in memoria.

Leading up to the fourteenth century, observations like these became increasingly common as pilgrimage, commerce, warfare, and disease encouraged bodies to move through space.

In the late fourteenth century, economic forces destabilized national and regional identities defined by geographical fixity. The period is remarkable instead for the importance of movement; tumultuous sociopolitical conditions and new mobilities brought about by the rise of mercantilism challenged the idea that identity could be unambiguously expressed in space. In this chapter, I reprioritize movement by showing that Chaucer's Canterbury Tales is a register of fourteenth-century England's itinerant identity. The disorderly potential of mobility is staged in the Cook's Tale and the Canon's Yeoman's Tale. In these fictions, London and its suburbs succumb to unregulated social and spatial mobility, resulting in a fragmented and dissolute placelessness. The frame narrative then contains this potentiality, offering economics as a lens through which to understand and regulate such placelessness. In so doing, it renders itinerancy a powerful expression of spatial and social identity, which finds meaning and coherence in networks rather than stable, sealed spaces.

The disruptive potential of unregulated social and spatial mobility was felt in the late Middle Ages. As Christian Zacher notes in his monograph Curiosity and Pilgrimage (1976), motion and travel came to exemplify a wandering, errant, and unstable frame of mind for fourteenth-century moralists. As opposed to life pilgrimage – a devotional practice that entailed seeking the New Jerusalem without traversing the globe (peregrinatio in stabilitate) – place pilgrimage became an outlet for curiositas, or mental wandering. The threat of curiositas had plagued theologians and philosophers since Augustine. In Book 10 of his Confessions, Augustine admits to having committed concupiscentia oculorum (the lust of the eyes):

Chaucer's attention to structured mobilities and hybridity in the frame narrative is significant not only because it redefines the Pilgrims’ Way and the bodies that circulate on and around it, but also because it comes to bear on the interplay between tales. This dramatic and literary interplay has been well established, and nowhere is it more apparent than in Fragment One, where settings evolve from the classical past to the familiar present, genres degenerate from romance to fabliau to fragment, and sex acts multiply, culminating in the prostitution of the Cook's Tale. Noting the significance of Fragment One to the narrative game of The Canterbury Tales, Lee Patterson writes that the Knight's Tale “functions in an important sense as the other against which the project of The Canterbury Tales is ultimately defined; and it therefore appropriately begins the game of quiting that will at once include and counter it.” And Helen Cooper observes that in the interplay between the Knight, Miller, and Reeve, Chaucer “constantly adds or adapts details to bring the [tales] together,” and in so doing “ensures that the tales are read initially in a specific relation to each other.” This relational practice of quiting has generated an abundance of critical conversation, but scholarship on the subject has not yet considered how mobility affects the tellers’ rhetorical play. In this chapter, I argue that movement in the Miller's Tale and the Reeve's Tale serves to position them within a sequence of quiting that ultimately parodies the Knight's meticulous regulation of politicized mobility. The Knight celebrates the ideological and actual practice of stasis, evincing its inherent value to chivalric fiction and its material practice as an imitation of stable and eternal god(s). He consequently denigrates movement, associating it with characters he deems politically and socially inferior. Meanwhile, the Miller and Reeve challenge this disparagement of movement and instead empower mobile bodies, celebrating chaos over order, and liberty over political, social, and religious bonds.

In the Knight's Tale, the Knight constructs a narrative around a preeminently chivalric character. He introduces the Duke Theseus as “lord and governour” who was “in his tyme swich a conquerour / That gretter was ther noon under the soone” (1. 861–3).

The queering of sealed, stationary bodies that occurs as part of the quiting game in the First Fragment also manifests in individual tales on the Canterbury pilgrimage. A careful consideration of the Clerk's Tale, in particular, shows that movement authorizes female bodies who thoughtfully deploy it within the context of existing, patriarchal systems. Unlike Alison, though, whose leaky body dismantles marital, architectural, natural, and even sexual categories, Griselda stages resistance from within hegemonic structures. By expressing powerful iterations of movement from within, she reveals the instability of the status quo without having to tear doors from their hinges (à la John of the Miller's Tale), while also staging the potential for female empowerment through mobility and dispersal. In this chapter, I will begin by demonstrating that Griselda's perceived steadfastness is in fact a constant willingness to yield, resulting in a surplus of movement that, unlike the surplus of the Reeve's Tale, operates in accordance with current understandings of Christian virtue and wifely obedience. Though this surplus is frequently read as an “emptiness,” we might benefit from recognizing it instead as an “overfullness” that renders the female body enigmatic while denying the possibility of male inscription – the body is always already being inscribed. Moreover, by figuring her mobility in terms of fluidity, the Clerk evokes a liquid ecology that merges Griselda's tidal body with its physical environs to dismantle borders and boundaries. To evoke the language of contemporary social scientists, Griselda proves that “neither boundaries nor relations mark the difference between one place and another. Instead, sometimes boundaries come and go, allow leakage or disappear altogether, while relations transform themselves without fracture.” Griselda's movement has this very effect, erasing boundaries and transforming relations to reveal innovative, agentified ways of being.

Critics have repeatedly seen Griselda as lacking agency. Kathryn McKinley insists that she “has been purged of any human perplexity, anguish, or struggle which might be the indicators of an authentic subjectivity,” and in emphasizing her “stoic endurance” and “patience” critics including Marga Cottino-Jones and Alfred Kellogg suggest Griselda is only capable of deploying passive or static virtue.