What Chaucer Made Possible

The idea

Chaucer is the medieval writer the exam is most likely to test, and this unit has followed him from his language to his last words. After the Norman Conquest of ten sixty-six, French ruled court and law, and English returned slowly, restored to the law courts in thirteen sixty-two. Chaucer, about thirteen forty to fourteen hundred, a courtier and civil servant patronized by John of Gaunt, chose to write in that English, and the anchor counts the choice as part of his importance. His Middle English is readable with a gloss, and its spelling dates a passage at once. The Parliament of Fowls is a dream vision of birds debating love by class. The Canterbury Tales is a frame tale of pilgrims at the Tabard in Southwark, twenty-nine of them riding to Canterbury, and its frame matters as much as its stories. The General Prologue opens in April and sketches the three estates in portraits whose details condemn what the narrator praises: the Prioress's brooch, the Monk's hunting, the Pardoner's pigs' bones. The tales answer one another: the Miller's bawdy fabliau repays the Knight's courtly romance, the Wife of Bath argues experience against authority and tells of a knight who learns that women desire sovereignty, the Franklin imagines a marriage without mastery and asks which character was most generous, and the Pardoner preaches against the greed he practises. Chaucer's couplets became the heroic couplet of later poets, his rhyme royal carried Troilus and Criseyde, and his Retraction comes after the reader has read everything it apologizes for. Read a Chaucer passage for the estate, the details and the narrator's praise, and the satire appears in the gap between them.