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INTRODUCTION: MYTHICAL CHAUCER

A roly‐poly, slightly chubby poet gets up early in the morning to go and pick daisies, or falls asleep while reading a book and dreams about gardens, forests, birds and beautiful women. He makes a pilgrimage to Canterbury with a bunch of rogues and sinners he describes in affectionate and loving terms. He narrates and translates other people’s stories, but he is a wildly original poet, and more or less single‐handedly invents the English language. He is knowing and cynical about human failure, but also childishly enthusiastic about all forms of human endeavor. His poetry is outrageously bawdy and full of fart jokes and he is a profoundly pious religious thinker, while also being guilty of anti‐Semitism. His poetry is utterly imbued with medieval culture, but he is also way ahead of his time in his anticipation of our own concerns. His poetry is some of the greatest in the English language, but is also too difficult to read. Chaucer himself is wise and cynical, but his achievement was limited by medieval ignorance and superstition, just as his sympathetic respect for women was restricted by patriarchal ideologies. He is praised as a genius in his own time and has variously been celebrated as a satirist, a reformer, a lyricist, a pre‐Shakespearean lover of bawdy, a sentimentalist, a religious apologist, a humanist, a feminist, a post‐modernist and a queer theorist.

And so it goes. Chaucer’s long reception history is a contradictory mess of changing opinions and ideas about the character of the medieval poet, the nature of his poetic achievement and the interpretation of his poetry. These aspects of his history are so interwoven it can be quite difficult to untangle critical readings of his works from ideas about the medieval poet himself. And nor are these debates confined to the past alone.

All the volumes in this series bring literary history, reception and cultural studies into conversation. They acknowledge that we necessarily approach the writing of well‐known authors with expectations heavily mediated by earlier readers and shaped by a range of expectations that may be based only loosely on historical fact. These expectations shape our choice of which poems to read, how we edit and teach them and, in the case of Chaucer, what we think about the Middle Ages and the meaning of that past for contemporary culture.

In the case of our 30 Great Myths About Chaucer, we are also contending with the extremely complex phenomenon of medievalism. That is, in addition to the myths about Chaucer that emanate mostly from the world of literature, there are many associated “myths” about the Middle Ages that color and inflect the reception of Chaucer. Many of these myths implicitly posit the idea that medieval people and culture were somehow discontinuous with the modern present; as if they inhabited a different world from the social and cultural forms that produced the realist novel, for example, or the poetry of the romantic movement. The medieval past has been profoundly shaped – in both the scholarly and the popular imagination – as an era substantially different from modernity in areas of religious, artistic and political practice and knowledge, to say nothing of social forms, health sciences, costume, dress and the like. A separate volume, entitled something like “30 Great Myths about the Middle Ages,” would be easy to write. No, medieval people did not think the earth was flat; no, women did not wear chastity belts; and no, medieval intellectual life was not stifled by superstition or religious repression.¹

One of the dominant features of much study in the field of medievalism is the pleasant pastime of “correcting” these and other mistakes, or anachronisms in the popular representation of the Middle Ages in fiction and film. We have written elsewhere about the nature of this pleasure, and its implications for both the professional and the amateur study of the medieval past.² In the case of literary history, however, and the reception of a poet like Chaucer, the situation is a little more complex. We can certainly appeal to the “facts,” as we know them from the surviving, albeit partial, records of his life and employment, but we are often talking about the interpretation of literary works where of course, we are on much more shaky ground.

We will find with many of these “myths” that they arise from tiny suggestions in the poems or in the life‐records, hints that have generated beliefs and assumptions that have then shaped the traditions of critical interpretation. It is a pattern that is very familiar from the archives of medievalism.

As with other books in this series, “myth” here does not mean (as it often does) a widely shared, structurally enabling fiction that subtends every aspect of modern life. Rather, it conveys a more localized conception (or misconception) about an author or group of authors. Some of these myths are more deeply held familiar ideas about Chaucer and his works than others; and some have larger grains of truth to them than others. Nearly all, however, are the products of the long history of reading Chaucer’s works for over six hundred years and the intertwined history of biography, criticism and popular culture. Many of our chapters consider the relationship between what we know about Chaucer from external records and what he appears to tell us in his fictions. These stories embrace a range of genres and styles, and in the Canterbury Tales at least, they are voiced by a range of distinctive narrators such as the Pardoner, the Wife of Bath and the Prioress. Such is Chaucer’s mastery of the middle style, in the fearful, lovelorn narrators of The Book of the Duchess and The Parlement of Foules, or the nostalgic romantic with an interest in philosophy in Troilus and Criseyde and the more personal poems addressed to his friends, that it is hard not to compile a relatively coherent composite picture of Chaucerian voice and attitudes. But the external “life‐records” tell us a different story again: these are records of payments, permissions to travel, notices of court cases, grants of clothing and annuities to himself and his family. We need to emphasize that there is no written, textual or documentary allusion to Chaucer as a poet, outside his own writings, from his own lifetime. The witnesses to his life and influence as a writer are entirely posthumous.

This poses a distinctive problem for any biographer of Chaucer. They must all negotiate this gap between the lively personalities and narrative voices that populate Chaucer’s fictions and the “real” or “concrete” evidence found in the surviving documents. Many of our “myths” find their origins in these gaps, and the desire to make satisfying imaginative links between Chaucer’s fictions and what we can piece together of his life. For example, in a number of Chaucer’s early poems, the narrator constructs the persona of a young man who is unlucky or unsuccessful in the art of love, or who is suffering an unrequited love. Fueled by the desire to fill in the historical gaps and to tie this narrative voice to the biographical record, early historical critics went to work to discover the identity of Chaucer’s early love, though without ever resolving the issue (see Myth 3).

The biographical tradition of Chaucer studies dates back to the sixteenth‐century editions of his works, many of which included biographical speculation and narrative along with genealogical and heraldic tables affirming Chaucer’s place in the history of medieval English culture. John Urry also included a biography in his edition of 1721, but the first biography to appear independently of an edition of Chaucer’s poetry was that of William Godwin in 1804. In the twentieth century, John Gardner, Donald Howard and Derek Pearsall all wrote scholarly biographies, and in the early twenty‐first century, Richard West and Peter Ackroyd’s biographies reached a more popular audience. There has also been a recent flurry of biographical activity. In 2014, Paul Strohm published a focused account of one important year in Chaucer’s life: Chaucer’s Tale: 1386 and the Road to Canterbury (2014); and just before this book went to press, Marion Turner’s Chaucer: A European Life appeared to great acclaim. Another study, from Ardis Butterfield, provisionally titled Chaucer: A London Life, is forthcoming. In this book we draw on this biographical tradition, but we also go back to many of the primary source materials, as well as attempting to keep track of some of the recent developments in a range of discursive fields.

Contemporary Chaucerian studies continues to scrutinize the past reception of the medieval poet, and is particularly interested in the way the scribes of his manuscripts and the editors of the early printed texts mediate his works for us in influential ways. Equally, modern criticism is keen to re‐examine the political, social, linguistic and literary contexts in which Chaucer lived and worked; as well as bringing insights and critiques from other fields such as gender studies, queer studies, environmental studies, animal studies and cognitive literary studies. In this book we also engage with some of the striking or influential representations of Chaucer and his characters in the fictions of medievalism, as this has become one of the most popular sites in which people encounter Chaucer today.

Many lovers and teachers of Chaucer are currently grappling with sterner voices and critiques that challenge his central and foundational position in the canons and syllabi of literary criticism. These voices are sometimes raised in defense of less familiar, marginalized writers; but are also sometimes raised in more direct critique of Chaucer’s poetry and the ideas and ideologies it appears to promote. Increasingly, Chaucer has come to stand for a celebration of “canonical” literature that for many is outdated. These traditions are no longer universally admired or taught; and some commentators feel that writers such as Chaucer dominate the field at the expense of other voices and other perspectives. Ideological and political critiques of his texts abound as critics and lovers of Chaucer struggle with the apparent anti‐Semitism of the Prioress’s Tale (see Myth 15), for example, or read about Cecily Champaigne’s abandonment of “raptus” charges against him in the context of the apparent “revenge rape” of the Miller’s wife and daughter in the Reeve’s Tale (see Myth 11).

We acknowledge that, in the contemporary moment, Chaucer is not always a beloved poet, not even among medievalists. But it is fascinating to see how quickly this “lack of universal love” has given rise to what might be the thirty‐first great myth: “Chaucer is no longer relevant.” For some, it is easy to dismiss him as a relic, an antiquated vestige of a bygone era whose mores are as outdated as his language. Nevertheless, we would like to affirm, despite these challenges to Chaucer’s centrality and privileged position as a representative voice, that we have taken great pleasure in this opportunity for re‐reading and re‐visiting his works: for us, they continue to produce a potent cocktail of pleasure, danger and difficulty that provokes powerful questions about literature, its uses and its pleasures. The history of myths about Chaucer is in many ways the history of our long‐standing collective love affair with this most engaging and seductive medieval poet. It is a continuous, unbroken history and its importance is signaled both by the multitude of manuscripts and printed editions containing the poet’s works as well as by six hundred years of popular interest. We hope you enjoy working through these long traditions with us.

Notes

1 1 See, for example, the reflective analysis on the myth of the chastity belt by Albrecht Classen , The Medieval Chastity Belt: A Myth‐Making Process (New York: Palgrave, 2007); and the many angry responses by medievalists to Stephen Greenblatt’s critique of medieval culture in The Swerve: How the World Became Modern (New York: W.W. Norton, 2011); for example, Jim Hinch, “Why Stephen Greenblatt Is Wrong—And Why It Matters,” Los Angeles Review of Books, 1 December 2012, https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/why‐stephen‐greenblatt‐is‐wrong‐and‐why‐it‐matters/#!, accessed 22 December 2018.

2 2 Thomas A. Prendergast and Stephanie Trigg , Affective Medievalism: Love, Abjection and Discontent (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2018).