Book excerpt: David Wallace's study of Chaucer's poetry and prose is invigorated by an engagement with approaches gleaned from modern Marxist historiography, gender theory, and cultural studies. He provides a new articulation of Chaucerian polity through analyses of art, architecture, city and country, household space, guild and mercantile cultures, as well as literary texts. He argues that The Canterbury Tales reveal the influence of Chaucer's Italian journeys and exposure to the great Trecento authors - Dante, Boccaccio, and Petrarch - and the Trecento's most crucial material and ideological conflict, that between the associational polity of Florence and the prototype absolutist state of Lombardy. In drawing these parallels, David Wallace challenges conventional divisions between the medieval and the Renaissance.