CHAUCER, GEOFFREY

Greatest English poet of the Middle Ages; b. London, c. 1340–45; d. there, Oct. 25, 1400. From surviving official records, Chaucer would appear to have been a moderately successful public servant. He was bourgeois by birth, the descendant of a prosperous family long associated with London and the wine trade. The first records (1357) place him as a member of the household of Elizabeth, Countess of Ulster and wife of Lionel, third son of the reigning king, Edward III. Chaucer's father, John Chaucer, had already made a beginning in service to the crown, and the presence in a noble household of the son of a well–to–do bourgeois was not unusual during that period.

Life. The exact nature of Chaucer's early schooling is uncertain, but another form of his education is not. He accompanied the expedition to France in 1359, probably as a member of the company of Lionel, and was captured and ransomed. He probably rejoined the army and was present at the Peace of Brétigny (1360). The timing of Chaucer's military service is important, because the campaign

of 1359 marked the turning point in English arms for his century. After the stunning defeats of Crécy (1346) and Poitiers (1356), French military policy consisted almost solely in refusal to give battle. The result was a devastated French countryside and a devastated English army. Little in what Chaucer had seen of war inclined him toward the profession of arms.

From 1360, when Chaucer is recorded as still in the service of Ulster, to 1366, when he received a safe–conduct for travel in Navarre—a document difficult to dissociate from the Black Prince's campaign of the following year—Chaucer's life is a blank. With the Book of the Duchess, however, Chaucer emerges as an accomplished and confident poet, well read in the polite French literature of the day. Since the most persuasive evidence one has from this period is precisely this poetic ability, the rather slightly founded theory that Chaucer was a favorite of Alice Perrers is not without some probability. Patronesses were not sparing in their demands for poetic tribute, and the court of Edward would have afforded the kind of reading with which Chaucer shows himself familiar. The composition of the numerous amatory lays he dimly remembers in the Retraction could most easily be assigned to this period. In addition there is the important evidence of the annuity of 20 marks granted Chaucer in 1367, by Edward III. Since the annuity specifically connects him with the household of Edward, rather than with that of Lionel, the theory of pragmatic poetical devotion to the highly pragmatic Alice seems not impossible.

Marriage. An advantageous marriage seems to have been one of the perquisites of an esquire attached to the court, and Chaucer's career in this respect parallels that of other esquires of the court. In 1366 or before, Chaucer married Philippa Roet, daughter of Sir Payne Roet, who had come to England with her younger sister Katherine in the entourage of Philippa of Hainault at the time of the latter's marriage to Edward III. If Chaucer's marriage is to be regarded as one of love, it conformed to the adage: it was not smooth. Chaucer's bride Philippa retained her position of attendant (domicella ) upon Queen Philippa, just as her sister Katherine, who had from a very early age been attached to Blanche of Lancaster, retained her position in the Lancastrian household after her marriage to the short–lived Sir Hugh Swynford. In 1372, some three years after the death of the Queen (1369), Philippa joined her sister Katherine in the Lancastrian household, where Katherine's position was undoubtedly strengthened by the death, in the same year, of the Duchess Blanche, wife of John of Gaunt. It is certain that after the death of Blanche, Katherine Swynford was the acknowledged mistress of John of Gaunt, but at what point she became his mistress is uncertain. In any case, Philippa's attachment was to the Lancastrian household and Chaucer's to the king's. Because of this mutual and conflicting complex of loyalties and duties, it is likely that it was not until 1374, with Chaucer's appointment as Comptroller of Customs that Philippa and Geoffrey were able to set up something approaching a normal household. Even so connubial life must have been difficult, for Philippa did not abandon her connections with Lancaster, and-Chaucer's diplomatic services were becoming increasingly in demand. Hence, perhaps, a certain absence of domesticity in Chaucer's self–portraits.

Italy and Humanism. The date of outstanding importance in Chaucer's intellectual life is 1372. Although it is possible that Chaucer could have gotten to Italy as early as 1368 or 1370, it is unquestionable that in 1372 he was appointed to a commission to treat with the Genoese regarding the establishment of a commercial center in an English port. Chaucer not only reached Genoa, but spent some time in Florence, almost certainly as negotiator for a much–needed loan to England. The mission is important in showing the trust that Chaucer enjoyed, but its real significance lies in the fact that from this journey dates Chaucer's knowledge of dante, boccaccio, and petrarch, and of Italian humanism in general. A second mission in 1378 must have deepened their impression on him.

The Public Servant. With rare exceptions, the remaining records reveal the vicissitudes of a public servant who wished to be a poet. In 1372 Philippa received a life pension of £10 from John of Gaunt, and in 1374 Chaucer received a like pension, but in terms indicating that it was Philippa's services, rather than his own, for which he was being rewarded. Chaucer's financial situation further improved in 1374, when he obtained the positions of Comptroller of Customs on wool and of the Petty Customs on wine, and on other merchandise in the Port of London. The difficulty was, however, that the duties of the Comptroller involved an independent audit of the Collectors' accounts, and therefore had to be kept in Chaucer's own hand. The position was lucrative, but hardly a sinecure. In addition, Chaucer was engaged in two diplomatic missions in 1377 and 1378: the first probably concerning a projected French marriage for Richard II; the second, in regard to an attempt to gain military aid in Italy. However beneficial these activities may have been to Chaucer the man of affairs, they left little time for Chaucer the poet. In 1385 he successfully petitioned for leave to exercise his office through a permanent deputy. To what extent political factors affected his decision is uncertain. Henceforth, he resided in Kent.

One would wish that this well–timed withdrawal had led to a prolonged period of literary productivity, but absolute detachment from the world of affairs did not come easily to Chaucer. From 1385 to 1389 he was a Justice of the Peace in Kent, and in 1386, Member of Parliament for Kent. In 1387, Philippa died, with the consequent loss to Chaucer of her royal and Lancastrian annuities. The extent to which Chaucer's finances were actually affected by this event is problematical, but it is clear that during this period he was involved in numerous law suits, mostly for debt, and that in 1388 he assigned both his exchequer annuities, probably for a cash sum. Public office seems again to have become a necessity. In 1389, he was appointed Clerk of the Works, a position he held until 1391. Possibly he resigned this demanding and hazardous task in favor of a less demanding one as subforester of the King's Park in North Petherton, Somersetshire, but the date of this latter appointment is highly uncertain. Further favors were forthcoming from Richard, but the poet seems nevertheless to have remained in difficult financial circumstances. The deposition of Richard II in 1399 could have been disastrous, entailing as it would the loss of these favors, but Richard's successor was Henry IV, son of John of Gaunt, who had both family and personal reasons for assisting Chaucer. Henry's actions were generous, and in 1399 Chaucer was able to take a lease on a house in the garden of St. Mary's Chapel, Westminster Abbey. The action seems singularly appropriate: Chaucer's withdrawal from the world shows an awareness of

mortality characteristically medieval, while the length of the lease (53 years) suggests a characteristically Chaucerian optimism. Whatever kind of work he intended to write in his last years, the uninterrupted time to create, which throughout his life he had so earnestly sought, had finally come. Some 10 months later, he died.

Works. At the center of any consideration of Chaucer's works is the date 1372. Previous to his first Italian journey, Chaucer's sources had been French. After his return, it is obvious that he became an avid reader of Italian literature, especially of Boccaccio. Hence, he has in the past been said to have had a French, an Italian, and curiously enough, from the point of view of sources, an English (Canterbury Tales ) period. More recently, influences have remained the basis for establishing Chaucer's periods of composition, but judgments as to maturity or lack of maturity of a poem have been allowed a greater scope. However, it is questionable whether the term "influence" is with Chaucer not more confusing

than useful. For example, Chaucer may be said to have devoured Boccaccio's romances and meditated upon the philosophy of Boethius. In the Knight's Tale, the latter is imposed upon the former. Both are influences, but hardly of the same sort. Thus it has seemed preferable to abandon the conception of "influence" as an organizing principle and to consider the various periods of Chaucer's works in terms of those activities or attitudes that were sufficiently dominant during the various periods of his life to make division meaningful.

Court Poems (1361?–80). As noted above, Chaucer's earliest works were probably court poems of a rather simple variety. Although the invariable principles of court poetry were well established, what is interesting about Chaucer is a certain artistic waywardness. It was acceptable, if not obligatory, to translate the conventionalized process of enamorment in the first part of the Roman de la Rose, but the sexual naturalism of the second part, no matter how Christian and philosophic, was not acceptable to the court for which Chaucer wrote. It is known from the "Prologue" to the Legend of Good Women that Chaucer translated the objectionable second part, but of the acceptable first part no mention is here made. So well known were the allegorical personages of the Garden of Love in the Roman de la Rose that Chaucer could not have avoided making their acquaintance; yet he could, and did, avoid taking them seriously. The most one can say is that a part of a Middle English translation may be attributed to him (cf. Roman de la Rose with Chaucer's "Romaunt of the Rose" in Works ).

When the Black Death of 1369 took from England one of its most beloved women, the Duchess Blanche of Lancaster, Chaucer seems to have been urged or commissioned to write an elegy, presumably as a consolation directed to her husband, John of Gaunt. This elegy, The Book of the Duchess, is a literary masterpiece, the finest of all his early poems. Blanche stands out as if alive in all her native beauty, goodness, and intelligence. Yet the poem bestowed upon its creator no immediate rewards—probably because its success depended upon the highly daring and unconventional device of introducing humor into an elegy. It is Chaucer's first–known use of the "persona," or mask, and in the Book of the Duchess its function is central; for it is the bemused stupidity of the persona–Chaucer that evokes from the Black Knight the lyrical praise of his departed lady, Blanche. But the stupidity of the oaf is humorous, and unconventional in an elegy. Almost as unconventional is the failure to present a vision of the subject of the elegy among the joys of heaven. In a complex way, which accepted the convention of the mistress as well as that of the wife, John of Gaunt was highly conventional, and Chaucer must have known it. Yet he refused to sacrifice his own personal vision of the earthly Blanche to a conventionally pious one.

The same is true of the incomplete House of Fame. It seems inescapable that the court poet was expected to prepare a romantic poem culminating in the announcement of a forthcoming wedding of no small consequence. But the poem prepared is pure parody—parody of Dante; parody of a second persona–Chaucer, the overfed and underrewarded servant of Venus; parody even of the set beginning of the metrical romance. Yet in the wildness and unevenness of the parody, as in the portrait of Geoffrey seeking to overcome the fatigue of the day in order to read yet another book, one senses not so much comedy, as a strongly implied appeal for relief from his customs duties, and for the opportunity to acquire the learning he considers necessary to the kind of poetry he wishes to write.

Philosophic Period (1380–85). Throughout his life Chaucer was never without an interest in ideas. In this brief period, however, one would judge that much of the reading he had been seeking to do had in fact been accomplished. The Parlement of Foules is an occasional poem (perhaps for St. Valentine's Day), cast in the familiar form of the love–debate. However, its questioning of the function of love in the universe, and its debating of the values of the various forms of love by a wide range of social classes, seem to indicate a philosophical interest both in an abstract concept and in its operation throughout society. Chaucer's most explicit philosophical venture, however, is his Herculean struggle to translate Boethius's De consolatione philosophiae. It must be kept in mind that the nonexistence of a philosophical vocabulary in English inevitably forced Chaucer into a heavily circumlocutional style, but, with the aid of a massive use of explanatory phrases, Chaucer, who left so much unfinished, indomitably struggled through. One may presume that the labor could not have been as painful as it would appear, for it is the Boethian view of the world that dominates Troilus and Criseyde, the most ambitious poem Chaucer ever completed. This story of a noble Trojan prince who finds his goddess in the beautiful and gentle Criseyde, who loves her with a love in which sheer adoration exceeds passion, yet is betrayed by her and gives his life for the loss of his love, has a magnitude and artistic perfection Chaucer never attained before or after. Yet it has a fault. It has to be read by human beings. The human being likes to believe in love, himself falls in love with the exquisite Criseyde, forgets the opening statement that flatly states Criseyde's ultimate falseness, and himself experiences the anguish of Troilus over an event he, as reader, has foreknown since the poem began. Nor can he, like Matthew Arnold in "Dover Beach," take refuge from the treacherous world in human love. It is precisely because Criseyde's love is human that it fails. Only God's love will betray no one.

At the end of the poem, Chaucer calls Troilus and Criseyde his "tragedye" (ed. Robinson, V, 1786). It is a ruthlessly logical working–out of the Boethian–Christian view of the nature of the world, and of the nature of the human soul. Chaucer has expressed the view with a completeness that leaves very little further to be said: its precision is almost too absolute. When Chaucer begs of God strength to create an undefined "comedye" (V, 1788), there is more than a suggestion that a kindlier, more complex, more expansive treatment of the phenomenon of human nature is forthcoming.

Canterbury Tales. "Chaucer," says Dryden, "must have been a man of a most wonderful comprehensive nature, because, as it has been truly observed of him, he has taken in the compass of his Canterbury Tales … the whole English nation, in his age. Not a single character has escaped him. All his pilgrims are severally distinguished from each other" (Spurgeon, 1.278). Dryden's statement is important not only because it emphasizes the comprehensiveness of Chaucer's art, but because, by the phrase "severally distinguished," he points to Chaucer's method of imparting particularity to generality, a literary method perhaps drawn from the substance and accident of medieval philosophy. Thus the Miller and Reeve share the common acquisitive instincts of their class, but their physical and temperamental attributes are exact opposites. The comprehensiveness of class coverage was not an idea entirely new with Chaucer, but the matching of tale to teller, apparent as early as the first two tales of the Pilgrimage, was new, and remains sufficiently new to cause difficulties even for present–day readers.

The question inevitably arises: Why should a respected author like Chaucer include such "low" tales as those of the Reeve and the Miller? The answer would appear to be relatively simple. If Chaucer was to achieve the comprehensiveness for which he has been consistently praised, he had to include uncultured as well as cultured classes, and with them, the tales they might naturally be expected to tell. The Miller, drunk before the pilgrimage even begins, is not a likely narrator for a saint's legend. Furthermore, it cannot be overemphasized that in including such tales, Chaucer, dependent upon court favor, is activated by no profit motive. On the contrary, he knows the risk he is running, as is apparent from his remarks preceding these tales [I(A) 725; 3170]. For the court poet, profit lay in the forms of literature known to be in favor at court—romances, chronicles, moralities—certainly not the "vileinie" of the classes living close to the land. Characteristically, Chaucer took the chance of court disapproval, and in the high comedy of his so–called "low" tales, he demonstrates an artistic skill and, more important, an artistic conscience unequalled in his time.

Artistic Devices. Numerous devices are used in the Canterbury Tales. Two have already been mentioned—the breadth of class and attitude included, and the imposing of individual characteristics and attitudes upon those of the class. The latter technique at its best creates the illusion of immediate experience; the former—together with Chaucer's almost complete suppression of references to the events of his age—tends to remove the pilgrims from time and to make of them universal figures. A further device, related to both of the above, is that of the "persona" or mask. Behind his chosen mask—in the Canterbury Tales that of the ingenuous bourgeois—Chaucer withdraws from the stage and leaves it open for the dramatic interplay of the pilgrims. It is one of the major contributions of modern criticism to have made a sharp distinction between this Pilgrim Chaucer, as much an artistic creation as any of his characters, and Chaucer, man and poet. The most extensive opportunity for failure to observe this distinction is offered by the Prioress's Tale. Even so reputable a historian as Cecil Roth believes that anti–Semitism had penetrated the soul of "gentle Geoffrey Chaucer," apparently because the Prioress's Tale, which he considers simply an imitation of the Hugh of Lincoln legend, is included in the Canterbury Tales [History of the Jews in England (3d ed. Oxford 1964) 57,89].

However, it is not Chaucer, nor even the fictive Pilgrim Chaucer, who tells the tale. It is the Prioress. Like Browning's monk in the Soliloquy in a Spanish Cloister —with whose attitudes Browning himself seems customarily not to have been identified—the Prioress is an artistic creation, and it is her own attitudes and her own personality she is exposing. It is essential to observe that the Prioress's personality is plastic; she conveys no sense of the energy and vocation of the otherwise colorless Second Nun. It may be presumed that the Prioress was the younger daughter of a well–to–do bourgeois family, where one imitated both the manners and the customs of the nobility. One of the latter was to attempt the provision of adequate land and dower for elder children, and positions of distinction in the Church for younger. The Prioress has dutifully imitated polite manners, and this imitation she has brought with her into the cloister; but once inside the cloister, she has adopted the ideal of the cloister—the ideal of virginity, and its conception of virginity as involving participation in the Incarnation. Thus, she thinks of Christ as the infant Christ, and of Mary as mother [VII(B²) 467]. In her tale, the principal figure is a "litel clergeon" who goes to a "litel scole" where he reads a "litel boke" (453, 495, 516). Furthermore, the "cursednesse" of the Jews when finally defined is that of Herod—the attempted murderer of Christ, and the actual murderer of the Holy Innocents, with which latter the "litel clergeon" is, in the Prioress's mind, associated (574, 566). It is important to realize that the Prioress has never seen a Jew—they were expelled from England in 1290—and that the death of "yonge" Hugh of Lincoln, mentioned as a recent outrage (686), happened about a century and a half earlier.

Nevertheless, the Prioress is persuaded that the Jews are bad people and should therefore be executed like other bad people. Her description of the execution of the Jews, horrible though it is, actually contains only the rudest elemental basics—which anyone could have heard or read—of the fine and much appreciated art of execution. It is just as unlikely that the Prioress ever saw an actual execution as that she ever saw a Jew. One has no real basis for assuming that she would have felt less pain over the tearing apart of a human being than over the sufferings of a mouse. She simply loves what, in her position, it is conventional to love, and hates what it is conventional to hate—without any knowledge of either. What is really important is that her hate as well as her love are deferentially accepted by the Pilgrims. The Prioress's Tale is prophetic, in that it deals with an aspect of the problem of evil that mankind has met again and again, and is still far from solving. Chaucer, who broke his self–imposed silence on contemporary happenings to permit the Nun's Priest's satirical allusion to the mass murder of the Flemings [VII(B²) 3397], is not a likely supporter of genocide, no matter how conventional.

Philosophy of the Tales. The preceding section has dealt with some of Chaucer's literary techniques and some of the misunderstandings to which they have given rise. At least one major question concerning the Canterbury Tales remains: Did Chaucer in his "comedye" have in mind any philosophical conception such as that which informed his "tragedye," Troilus and Criseyde? Or was he content simply to present a great panorama of human personalities and attitudes? The answer to this question is made difficult by the simple fact that Chaucer, at the time of his death, left the Canterbury Tales in a very incomplete state, so incomplete that even the order of the tales has furnished material for extensive controversy. Thus it has become customary, as in the present article, to cite the order of the generally authoritative Ellesmere Manuscript as I, II, III, etc; to include parenthetically (A, B¹, B², etc.) the order long ago created by the Chaucer Society to render consistent the geographical references in the Tales; and to return to the Ellesmere MS for line references. However neither order is devoid of objections, and much recent work has been devoted to establishing a definitive order (see Manly, Dempster, Pratt).

The General Prologue, however, is highly finished and might be expected to give some indication of the presence or absence of some unifying conception. At first glance, the pilgrims of the Prologue appear to be a highly world–oriented group—prosperous, concerned with the pleasures and profits of life. Furthermore, the company is dominated by the Host of the Tabard, Harry Bailly, whose plan, accepted by the pilgrims, would place the emphasis of the pilgrimage on the pleasure of exchanging stories and would make the climactic event not the arrival at Canterbury, but the return to London and the festive dinner at the Tabard. Yet among the worldly pilgrims there is a distinctly different group: the Knight, the Plowman, and the Parson. Rather interestingly, they represent the old feudal economy—the Knight, who protects Church and people; the Plowman, who provides material food; the Parson, who provides spiritual food. These three are old also in a deeper sense. None of them is materially motivated; each performs his feudal duty as a duty owed in a universe of which God is the author. It is evident that Chaucer intends to give this group positions of the highest dignity in the order of Tales. Although the Plowman's Tale is never told, the first of the tales is the Knight's, and the last, which is explicitly stated as knitting up the whole matter of the pilgrimage, is the Parson's.

Paradoxically, it is equally evident that the old are presented as pale and shadowy, while the new are burgeoning with color and energy. It is here that the extraordinary aptness of the pilgrimage fiction becomes evident. In its origin, the pilgrimage had been an act of piety carried out under great hardship and danger; by Chaucer's day, it had become generally, though not necessarily, more pleasurable than devotional. These two attitudes toward the pilgrimage correspond very closely with the attitudes of the worldly and unworldly pilgrims toward life. The central problem posed by Chaucer in the Canterbury Tales may possibly be stated thus: Is life in fact the traditional Christian pilgrimage through trial and temptation toward a future eternal city (Heb 11.13; 13.14); or is it a forward movement toward a new and better earthly city, a simple historical change in which an old set of values inevitably yields to a new? Or finally—an idea dear to the 14th–century humanist—are the temporal and eternal worlds not really antithetical, but in fact complementary, the logical movement from a lesser good to a greater good?

The "Marriage Group." If this problem is ever argued out, it is in the so–called "Marriage Group," comprising fragments III(D), IV(E), and V(F). The device of argumentation used in the Group is, of course, not new. It is a dramatic device used constantly; but only in the Marriage Group is the argument so carefully structured and the subject so consistently adhered to. The first speaker is Alice of Bath, Chaucer's greatest, because most lovingly wrought, personality. As she reveals herself, the Alice of the General Prologue, with her well–rewarded profession of wool weaving in a prosperous wool country, disappears: Alice is first and foremost a professional wife, the respectability of whose profession has been called into question. Alice's career has embraced five husbands, and she is seeking to continue that career with a sixth. However, someone has recently intimated to her that, according to authoritative scriptural (Jn 2.1) interpretation, her profession of multiple wifehood could be construed as a considerably less respectable one—and a sixth husband (Jn 4.18) as particularly compromising (Sources and Analogues 209).

Alice's counterarguments are revealing. To "auctorite," or "gloss," as she prefers to call it [III(D) 26, 119], Alice opposes the "express word" of Scripture (27, 61). Alice finds the gentle text "increase and multiply" (Gn1.28) literally comprehensible, and she intimates that a careful literal reading of Christ's remarks about the Samaritan woman's five husbands would remove any opprobrium from her own career (19–20). Alice thus purports to discard the ancient allegorical in favor of the modern literal. However, she is more than slightly self–contradictory. She not only comically misreads on the literal level—as, for instance, that St. Paul (1 Cor 7.4) explicitly confers upon her the power to govern her husbands—but her completely perverted interpretation of 1 Cor 7.7 indicates that she not only does not reject the old allegorical and authoritarian, but seeks to place it on her own side in a fashion so ruthless as again to be comic. In accord with her position as practicing wife of Bath, her Prologue is a tale of the practical values of dominating husbands; but the tale itself is not one of experience. It is Arthurian, drawn, one is led to suppose, from the Arthurian lore surrounding Bath, where Arthur won perhaps his most famous victory.

The tale Alice tells is strikingly different from the Prologue in several respects. For one, although the tale accords superficially with Alice's customary theme of practicality and female dominance, there is none of the preoccupation with sex made so explicit in the Prologue, and the Hag, whose transformation into youth and beauty is the central event of Alice's story, lives happily ever after with a single husband. Finally, the Hag's discourse shows an awareness of the conflict of grace and sin (1173–76) that is quite surprising—until one recalls that, in her Prologue, Alice's lyrical praise of past sexual delight is accompanied by her outcry: "Alas! Alas! that evere love was sinne!" (614). Alice, like Bath, is an uneasy compound of new and old, and perhaps this is why Chaucer becomes progressively more deeply interested in her.

Though Alice has, almost unconsciously, revealed a sort of indefeasible Christian heritage, every pronouncement she has made concerning the inevitability of female dominance is heresy. The reader expects these pronouncements to be answered, but instead is carried away by two masterpieces of invective, the tales of the Friar and Summoner, in which each reveals the corrupt practices of the other. By the time the Clerk of Oxford has been called upon, the reader has rather forgotten Alice, but it is clear that the Clerk of Oxford has not. What the story of the Clerk does is to set up against the husband–crushing Alice the portrait of the humble, patient, loving Griselda, the medieval ideal of womanhood, whose perfection is reflected in her horror at remaining anything but a "widwe clene" (836). Before Alice can retort, the tale of the Merchant and the incomplete tale of the Squire intervene, widening the subject of the debate from marriage to love—the first questioning whether love is not in fact simply lust, and the second questioning (though fragmentarily presented) whether the ideal relationship is not courtly love. The Franklin's Tale, which concludes the Group, seems at first glance a model of balance among the positions presented. It is old in that it insists on the basic rightness of the marriage relationship. It is new in that love, which marital constraint can never drive from Griselda, the Clerk's medieval ideal, is presented as something that vanishes at constraint—a "thing as any spirit free." Love within marriage is indeed dependent upon the virtue of patience, as the Clerk has maintained, but it is neither the patience demanded by Alice of her husbands, nor that demanded by the Clerk of the ideal wife—it is a mutual patience demanded as much of the husband as of the wife. The husband is to retain his realm of sovereignty in the world of affairs, but to the woman is accorded sovereignty in the realm of love.

Old and new seem neatly balanced in the Prologue, but what upsets the balance is the view of the nature of man expressed in the Tale. Medieval theology regarded human nature as corrupted by the Fall, and the manifestation of its flawed state as a certain likeness to him whose lies caused the Fall (Jn 7.44). Truth is an attribute of God; lying, a characteristic of man (Rom 3.4). In grace lay the only means to truth. Yet in the Franklin's Tale every man keeps to truth, and woman also—though the scene is pagan Brittany to which grace has yet to come. As in traditional Christian symbolism, woman (Emotion) needs the control of man (Reason), but in the Tale both man and woman are essentially good. If mankind is essentially good, then the ideal of the Knight and the raw energy of Alice of Bath have something in common. They are not really antithetical, but complementary. As humanity and its ideals progress, a progressively better world becomes possible. This is the highest point of Chaucer's humanism.

Religious Contrition (1399–1400). Chaucer's last works, the Parson's Prologue and Tale and the Retraction, are probably best understood in terms of the medieval attitude toward the activities proper to the ages of men. Traditionally, as the early years of one's life were devoted to action, the later and final were devoted to meditation and prayer. This was not only a theory but a practice. For those whose life had been letters itself, declining years posed a particular problem. Why had they not applied their talent to glorifying God, rather than to attracting the praises of men? Both Boccaccio and Petrarch had religious experiences that profoundly affected the nature of their last works. In England, the strictures of St. Paul on any form of writing not conducive to moral instruction had great currency, especially as stated in the opening of Rom 15.4: "All that is written is written for our instruction." One may find this passage cited in any number of explicitly devotional works, or even attached to works of doubtful moral content, such as Caxton's pious prologue to the Morte Darthur. The prevalence of Rom 15.4 is apparent also in the Canterbury Tales. When the Nun's Priest suddenly senses that pure comedy does not befit his calling and urges his listeners to seize the miniscule morality of his great satire, it is this same admonition of St. Paul that he quotes [VII(B²) 3441].

Chaucer too knew the passage and its meaning. In his Retraction, he states that his intention is in accord with St. Paul: "Al that is writen is writen for our doctrine" [X(I) 1083]. The grand comedy of his life is past, and he is eager to have his readers note his moral works but is unable to enumerate as many as he would wish. He therefore strives to add to the list of devotional works he has already composed or translated a relatively new type of religious work that was becoming very popular at the end of the 14th century. This was a kind of handbook containing an exposition at greater or lesser length of various matters of doctrine. Originally, these manuscripts had been written in Latin and were designed for use by the parish priest. Later they began to be written in English or translated into English, in part to aid the parish priest's Latin, but principally to meet the demand for works of piety and meditation that was rising within a society that was becoming increasingly literate.

Although Chaucer's Parson's Tale was almost certainly translated from Latin tractates designed for use within the Church, there can be little doubt that Chaucer intended it for the same audience as that of the rest of the Tales. He earnestly wished it to circulate with the other Canterbury Tales and to offset the effects he feared of some tales, as Boccaccio feared the effects of the Decameron. The Parson's Tale itself represents an apparently hasty and awkward attempt to incorporate an extensive treatise on the Seven Deadly Sins into a rather small one on penitence. However artistically inept it may be, the Parson's Tale does communicate, and what it communicates is Chaucer's uncompromising acceptance of medieval Christian doctrine. Heaven is worth striving for, as Chaucer is striving to complete the number of works he believes his calling as poet demands of him. Human nature is worth very little striving for. It is "roten and corrupt" (461). Salvation is not to be found in faith in humanity, any more than in poetic excellence. Art in and for itself has no standing. It is a talent in the scriptural sense (Mt 25.14), and Chaucer at the end of his life is much concerned with the use he has made of it.

Character and Accomplishment. Chaucer has traversed the whole span of human experience, and he ends as human as he began. One meets him first in the Book of the Duchess as a rebel against conventional religiosity; next as the philosopher–artist, inquiring in the Parlement, positive in Troilus, tentative again in the great debate of the Canterbury Tales, but strongly inclined toward a humanistic view of man and his relation to eternity; finally, like Petrarch and Boccaccio, ending his life very unsure of man and the world he inhabits, and very sure of the traditional religious beliefs of his age and the ages before him. Chaucer's powers of observation have never failed to be observed, nor the artistic mastery that transformed observation into character, and character into drama. However, it is perhaps not simply the great art he strove for and attained, but the passion for ideas—the ceaseless striving for a comprehension of the relationship of man to man and man to God—that enabled him to endow his characters and particularly the Canterbury pilgrims with so great a range of attitude that they seem humanity itself. It is true that humanity never changes, but neither does the search for ideas. Perhaps it is in this sense that one may understand Blake's marvelously simple statement: "Every age is a Canterbury Pilgrimage."

Bibliography: Editions. Complete Works, ed. w. w. skeat, 6v. and suppl. (Oxford 1894–1900); ed. f. n. robinson (2d ed. Boston 1957); Poetry, ed. e. t. donaldson (New York 1957); Major Poetry, ed. a. c. baugh (New York 1963); Text of the Canterbury Tales, ed. j. m. manly and e. rickert, 8 v. (Chicago 1940); Canterbury Tales, ed. r. d. french (New York 1948); Book of Troilus and Criseyde, ed. r. k. root (Princeton 1926). Criticism. g. l. kittredge, Chaucer and His Poetry (Cambridge, Mass. 1915). n. coghill, The Poet Chaucer (New York 1949). j. s. tatlock, Mind and Art of Chaucer (Syracuse 1950). d. bethurum, ed., Critical Approaches to Medieval Literature (New York 1960). r. schoeck and j. taylor, eds., Chaucer Criticism, 2 v. (Notre Dame 1960–61). w. w. lawrence, Chaucer and the Canterbury Tales (New York 1950). e. t. donaldson, essays in d. bethurum and r. schoeck, op. cit. w. f. bryan and g. dempster, eds., Sources and Analogues of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales (Chicago 1941). g. dempster, "Manly's Conception of the Early History of the Canterbury Tales," Publications of the Modern Language Association 61 (Baltimore 1946) 379–415. r. a. pratt, "Order of the Canterbury Tales," Publications of the Modern Language Association 66 (Baltimore 1951) 1147–67. r. k. gordon, Story of Troilus (London 1934). a. denomy, "Two Moralities of Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde," Transactions of the Royal Society of Canada, ser. 3,v.44.2 (1950) 35–46. r. a. pratt, "Note on Chaucer's Lollius," Modern Language Notes 65 (1950) 183–187. Literary and other relationships. c. s. lewis, The Allegory of Love: A Study in Medieval Tradition (Oxford 1936). w. a. pantin, The English Church in the Fourteenth Century (Cambridge, Eng. 1955). w. farnham, Medieval Heritage of Elizabethan Tragedy (Berkeley 1936; repr. Oxford 1956). c. f. spurgeon, Five Hundred Years of Criticism and Allusion, 3 v. (Cambridge, Eng. 1925). c. muscatine, Chaucer and the French Tradition (Berkeley 1957). r. d. french, Chaucer Handbook (2d ed. New York 1947). r. s. loomis, A Mirror of Chaucer's World (Princeton 1965). m. m. crow and c. c. olson, Chaucer: Life–Records (Oxford 1966).

[a. l. kellogg]