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This chapter turns to another pair struggling with the Problem of Paganism: William Langland and Geoffrey Chaucer. For Langland, the Problem is an issue addressed directly, with the focus on the salvation of virtuous pagans. But, despite the explicit doctrinal discussion, Langland is not simply doing the same thing in vernacular verse as the university theologians: the complex form of his poem makes the positions he takes less clearly defined, but allows him to adumbrate daring ideas outside the range of the scholastic discussions. By contrast, Chaucer avoids the theological problems almost entirely; more perhaps than any other medieval writer, he explores the Problem of Paganism by imagining himself within a pagan world, whilst aware, as his readers too would be, that there is an external Christian perspective on it, which is only partly accessible from his viewpoint on the inside.

Andrew Lynch recuperates an overlooked aspect of Chaucerian reception in the nineteenth century: Chaucer’s Catholicism. By the nineteenth century, to be Catholic meant to be un-English, even unpatriotic. Lynch reviews the different strategies employed by literary critics to dilute the idea of Chaucer as a Catholic believer. Chaucer’s Catholicism was subjected to processes of infantilisation in order to promote his status as the father of English poetry.

Stephen Knight offers an array of new material from nineteenth-century media (newspapers and magazines) made accessible by the digitisation of archival records. Knight showcases extraordinary examples of extra-canonical Chaucer reception that highlight the emerging literary proclivities of the reading public, and the interest of nineteenth-century editors in re-presenting Chaucer’s works to larger audiences and targeting specific groups: women, children, the well-read. These newly available sources open up avenues for further enquiry into the roots of modern medievalism.

This chapter examines the literature associated with the medieval antifraternal tradition, a corpus of texts supposedly inspired by the Parisian theologian William of St Amour (d. c.1273) and united in its call to eradicate the mendicant orders. By looking at both doctrinal and literary texts composed during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, it demonstrates that few authors actually adhered to William’s ecclesiology, rendering his magnum opus something of a false start. While theologians mostly shied away from rejecting the orthodoxy of religious mendicancy, authors of poetry and prose fiction appropriated themes and ideas from William’s works in ways far removed from his reactionary writings. Thus, insofar as there was a medieval literary antifraternal tradition, it is comprised predominantly of theological treatises that criticized but did not abhor the friars and works belonging to the polyvalent realm of estates satire.

This chapter argues that humanism affected English literature long before 1500, and contrasts the common claims that it did not. It briefly considers various definitions of the word humanism and their connection with periodization, which it criticizes. It argues that we should consider humanism as a form of reading, which would allow us to keep in mind the unpredictability of the reading process and thus of humanism. For a case-study, the chapter considers, through marginalia and page-layout, the reading and reception of Boece by Geoffrey Chaucer and of the translation of Boethius and Vegetius by John Walton. This case-study reveals the variety of methods of vernacular humanist reading and the difference between humanist reading and earlier vernacular scholarship.

From the earliest manuscript images through to cinematic depictions, Chaucer’s ‘persone’, that is his face and body, has been a key focus in the pursuit of transhistorical intimacy with the author. Chaucer’s physical self has been portrayed repeatedly across subsequent centuries in an array of media. Drawing upon the hermeneutic concept of Einfühlung (‘feeling into’) to examine the long ‘empathetic afterlife’ enjoyed by Chaucer’s ‘persone’, D’Arcens explores what Chaucer’s face and body have come to mean to post-medieval audiences; she traces how these differences intersect with the constantly changing nature of Chaucer’s legacy, especially as he and his work have been deemed to reflect national literary and comic traditions.

This chapter shows how Geoffrey Chaucer's relationship to literary tradition can be explored through his study, translation, and adaptation of one Italian poem—Giovanni Boccaccio's Il Filostrato. Chaucer used Boccaccio's youthful experiment Il Filostrato (1335) to create Troilus and Criseyde (1385), an enduring masterpiece and unquestionably his greatest completed work. Here, the chapter examines twelve aspects of Il Filostrato which prompt Chaucer at times to straightforward imitation, at times to considerable amplification of an idea, and at times to a corrective reaction. It shows how many of these aspects—which represent Chaucer in different ways learning from and being stimulated by Boccaccio—also came to seem like key characteristics of Chaucer's mature work. After all, Chaucer became the poet he was partly through intense reflection on Boccaccio's ideas and techniques.

Since long before the English Augustan era, it had been a commonplace that English literature began in the age of Geoffrey Chaucer, either through his offices or, more rarely, through those of his contemporary, John Gower. Indeed, it was not unusual for Chaucer to be seen as the sole literary figure of consequence before the 16th century. The most common conceit expressing Chaucer's priority in the literary tradition was that of his being the ‘father’ of English poetry. Another prevalent metaphor for Chaucer's initiation of the vernacular tradition, however, was that of his being a rising sun or new-breaking morn. This chapter considers the hunt for a pre-Chaucerian origin to English literature, an origin that would satisfy the question of at what point, and in connection with which writers, English literature actually began. It discusses the so-called battle of the books, especially as it addressed the status of the vernacular literary canon in comparison with the classical one.

The idea of social (im)possibility is at the heart of Geoffrey Chaucer's poem Canterbury Tales and the guild returns of 1388-1389 in London, texts that take the nature of associational form as a key concept. Concern about social conflict, social antagonism, and nonconformity is insistently evident in all of these texts. Examining the Canterbury Tales alongside far less well-known contemporary texts illuminates some of the concepts and language deployed in the poem and helps to reconstruct the textual world in which it was written. Both kinds of groups — the Canterbury compaignye and the guilds — were concerned to maintain an idea of themselves as coherent, an idea that reveals its inadequacy in its very inception. This chapter examines urban associational form and considers the language of fellowship and company, comparing the London and Lynn guild returns with the Canterbury Tales.

This book has tried to explore some of the ways in which social antagonism was articulated and addressed in Geoffrey Chaucer's textual environment. It appears that producers of texts in late 14th-century London were profoundly concerned with problems of civic dissent and social division. The explosiveness of the climate in which Chaucer lived and wrote is dramatically exemplified in the example of John Constantyn, a cordwainer in the city of London whose hard fate bears witness to the heightened atmosphere of anxiety about rebellion, gossip, and faction in the 1380s. Chaucer's writings suggest that discursive turbulence cannot be tamed, that voices of aggression and dissent will make themselves heard, that societies will repeat the self-destructive behaviour of their predecessors, that people will betray each other, and that social groups will always fragment.

This book is about discourse and the textual environment of London in the 1380s and 1390s: it is about the language of betrayal, surveillance, slander, treason, rebellion, flawed idealism, and corrupted compaignyes. Texts produced in and around late 14th-century London are everywhere informed by discourses of conflict and social antagonism. The book is interested in the ways that discourses function in different kinds of texts produced at the same time and in exploring how various texts engage with concepts of social fragmentation and breakdown. Geoffrey Chaucer's writings are a lynchpin of this book not because of their canonical status but because these texts are especially concerned with conflict and are unusually open about the impossibility of social amelioration. Thus, while examining discursive representations of social conflict in texts of the late 14th century, this book shows that pessimism about social possibility is everywhere apparent in Chaucer's texts: his writings are dependent on a heart of darkness at their very core.

The ideological concept of civic progress, manifested in the Janus-like image of New Troy, was a potent sociopolitical tool in late 14th-century London. This chapter examines the ways in which civic idealism functions in texts produced in London in the last two decades of the 14th century, and in the ways in which different texts deal with the problem of civic antagonism while deploying the idea of Troynovaunt. The ideas of civic idealism and their inevitable breakdown are considered by analysing the ideology of New Troy and the depiction of the fragmentation of this idealised city in the poetry of John Gower, Geoffrey Chaucer, Richard Maidstone, and the author of St. Erkenwald. One area of interest is the slippage between the concepts of treason and of peace-making.

Thomas A. Prendergast re-examines the fifteenth-century ‘Beryn’ manuscript, one of numerous continuations of and additions to the Canterbury Tales. Prendergast’s foremost concern is to identify the logic guiding the Beryn-scribe’s addition of this text to the Tales. He argues that the scribe was compelled by an irresistible desire to complete the text of the Canterbury Tales, thus attributing agency to the text itself.

London texts of the 1380s betray an insistent anxiety about the power and effects of linguistic conflict. Statutes, proclamations, petitions, and poetry dwell on slander, careless talk, spying eavesdroppers, and verbal sparring. This chapter examines the Mercers' Petition, Geoffrey Chaucer's poem House of Fame, and some proclamations made in 1380s London. It focuses on the idea of surveillance and on attempts to control what can be said, and discusses the way that violence was played out through language in the 1380s. The chapter also considers the extent to which discourse can rebel against political control. The Mercers' Petition and the House of Fame are both concerned with social antagonism and problems: surveillance, tyranny, the need for private space, and conflict between different points of view are key issues in both texts. However, Chaucer's poem is more open than a document like the petition could be about revealing both the inevitability of tyrannical rulers, and the perennial nature of social conflict, subversive behaviour, and antagonistic voices.