Books and Booklessness in Chaucer’s England

Most of Chaucer’s contemporaries never owned a book. How do we reconcile this fact with the everyday bookishness of Chaucer’s writings? This chapter describes the intersection, in Chaucer’s time, of the traditional oral and written dissemination of ideas, and new book technologies such as paper and cursive scripts. It identifies Chaucer with an emerging class of secular household and urban clerks who made their living by reading and writing. Together with the medieval religious, these men formed a small but significant network in medieval England for the production and circulation of a large number of texts, in all kinds of book and non-book formats. The chapter covers Chaucer’s own dealings with books at key moments in Chaucer’s career, from the literacy he must have acquired as a child in a merchant-class household in London to the transmission of his literary works within his coterie, and then, via professional book producers, to a wider group of readers, including modern ones.

Chaucer and Contemporary Courts of Law and Politics

Appreciating the significance of courts in Chaucer’s day requires understanding the connections among noble households, courts of law, and the practices of social interaction and play in late medieval culture. This chapter briefly summarizes important aspects of medieval court cultures. It summarizes Chaucer’s biographical history of legal and court connections. It explains the connections between legal courts and the social environments of noble households, and their relation to political events such as the Uprising of 1381. With specific reference to several stories and tales (The Summoner’s Tale, The Friar’s Tale, and the Second Nun’s Tale), this chapter explains how the worlds of aristocratic courtliness and the growing legal consciousness of late medieval England are examined and often criticized by Chaucer’s narratives. Chaucer’s life and work were richly informed by court contexts and understanding them helps the modern reader to better appreciate the direct impact that court cultures had on his literary practice.

Chaucer’s Travels for the Court

Chaucer travelled extensively in Britain and abroad as a representative of the court. His reading and cosmopolitan life in London meant that mainland Europe was a vivid part of Chaucer’s cultural awareness even before his visits there. There are records of fourteen trips overseas of varying duration and level of importance. Most were to Flanders and France but others were to Spain and Italy. Their purposes included war, marriage negotiations and financial transactions. Chaucer was at best an ancillary but his travelling companions and contacts included the kind of people who formed the audience for his poetry. He appears to have narrowly missed meeting other writers such as Machaut, Deschamps, Petrarch, and Boccaccio. Nevertheless Chaucer’s visits to Italy in the 1370s coincide with the onset of his interest in Italian literature.

Medicine and Science in Chaucer’s Day

Henry Daniel was an older contemporary of Chaucer, who lived, for at least part of his life, in or near London. He was a pioneer in medieval English science, who completed two large works in English: an exhaustive treatise on uroscopy and a very large herbal-cum-medical encyclopaedia. He put together and created a medical and scientific vocabulary in English, and wrote the first serious scientific textbook in the vernacular. His contribution to learning and medical history has been unaccountably neglected; and his contributions to our knowledge of Chaucer’s language and society have been largely ignored.

Challenging the Patronage Paradigm

This chapter revisits the portrayal of poet-prince relations in late-medieval francophone literature to expose writers’ use of these accounts to critique nobility’s role in literary production. A consideration of select texts from Guillaume de Machaut, Eustache Deschamps and Jean Froissart will show that literary portrayals of the poet-prince relationship frequently served to challenge patrons’ authority over literary production, criticize the failure of nobility to recognize the power of poetry, and acknowledge the increasing presence of a dynamic literary network that stretched beyond the prince’s reach. Far from serving as mouthpieces to the prince, these writers used the patronage paradigm to assert, often at the prince’s expense, the inestimable value of poetry and the wisdom of writers.

Chaucer’s Petrarch

While Geoffrey Chaucer’s reception of Petrarch was limited in terms of direct textual contact, his absorption of Petrarch’s reputation—his fama—was more extensive, indeed thematic. As the chief contemporary giver and claimer of fame, Petrarch stoked Chaucer’s desire to be more than a mere courtly maker. Petrarch’s influence reaches the Monk’s Tale mediated by works of both Boccaccio and Dante, an entanglement of the three crowns of Florence characteristic of Chaucer’s use of them. Troilus and Criseyde, Chaucer’s amplification of Boccaccio’s Filostrato, includes passages derived from Petrarchan lyric that make of Troilus perhaps the first ‘Petrarchan’, lover in European heroic narrative. With the Clerk’s Tale, Boccaccio’s final novella emerges in an English vernacular that distances it from the high Latin style of Petrarch’s source epistle, but that seconds Petrarch in erasing Boccaccio as the tale’s origin—while praising Petrarch with language borrowed in part from Dante.

Introduction

This Handbook produces a stereoscopic view of Chaucer’s works. Juxtaposing chapters by Middle English scholars with chapters by specialists in other fields – Latin and vernacular literature, philosophy, theology, and history of science – it offers a new perspective that uses the works of Chaucer to look out upon the wider world. Clusters of essays that place Chaucer’s works in “the Mediterranean Frame” and “the European Frame” are bracketed by groupings on “Biography and Circumstances of Daily Life” and “The Chaucerian Afterlife,” while a cluster on “Christian Doctrine and Religious Heterodoxy” foregrounds the role of confessional identities in the emergence of Middle English literary authority. The Handbook’s scope addresses the claim of universality that is often implicit in the study of Chaucer’s works. Chapters on anti-Judaism in the Canterbury Tales and on Hebrew literature reveal what has been suppressed or elided in the construction of English literary history, while studying the Arabic sources and analogues of the frame tale tradition reveals the patterns of circulation that lie behind the early modern emergence of national literatures. Chapters on French, Italian, and Latin literature address the linguistic context of late fourteenth-century Europe, while chapters on philosophy, history of science, and theology spur on new areas of development within Chaucer studies. Pushing at the disciplinary boundaries of Chaucer Studies, this Handbook maps out how we might develop our field with greater awareness of the interconnected world of the fourteenth century, and the increasingly interconnected – and divided – world we inhabit today.

Lydgate’s Chaucer

This chapter explores the ways in which the fifteenth-century poet John Lydgate read and used Chaucer’s writing. Lydgate was crucial to the construction of Chaucer’s reputation, but the terms of Lydgate’s praise are ambiguous. This chapter explores three specific moments and different modes of Lydgatian emulation: in ‘The Mumming at Bishopswood’; the Prologue to The Siege of Thebes; and in poems written for and about Thomas and Alice Chaucer (Geoffrey Chaucer’s son and grand-daughter). I show how closely Lydgate worked with Chaucer’s work, but I also argue that Lydgate’s formal and lexical emulation of Chaucer does not equate to uncritical borrowing: Lydgate repeatedly finds new ways in which to imagine, and reshape, Chaucer’s poetic oeuvre.

The Hazards of Narration

This chapter surveys framed narratives known in the late medieval Mediterranean, with an emphasis on tales in Arabic and Italian that share in common a short list of narrative devices: the movement of character-narrators through space in order to flee danger; the measuring out of story-telling through a determined number of days (or years); storytelling as a strategy to save a populace at risk. Some of these works—the Seven Sages of Rome, the Thousand and One Nights, Bosone da Gubbio’s Avventuroso Siciliano, Boccaccio’s Decameron, Giovanni Sercambi’s Novelliere, and Giovanni Fiorentino’s Pecorone—were translated into and known in multiple languages between Central Asia and western Europe. All left traces of themselves in late medieval Italy, in the form of manuscripts or cognate tales in other collections. Thus they provide a literary context for Chaucer’s narrative decisions and achievements.

‘O Hebraic People!’

When Chaucer wrote his anti-Judaic Prioress’s Tale, there had been no Jews in England for roughly a century. Nevertheless, the loss of the small but vital twelfth and thirteenth-century Jewish community—and with it Hebrew as a literary language—has implications for Chaucer’s place in a polyglot England. This chapter concerns the Anglo-Hebrew grammarian and poet Berekhiah ha-Nakdan, who composed, among other works, a translation of Adelard of Bath’s Natural Questions and a collection of beast fables, translated from Latin and French sources. The Fox Fables, a Hebrew text from the Angevin cultural moment of the twelfth century, touches on many of the themes of language, literary transmission, and social injustice that later interested Chaucer.