Life and Writings of Geoffrey Chaucer.pdf

The Life and Writings

Geoffrey Chaucer

Professor Seth Lerer

T HE T EACHING C OMPANY ®

1999 The Teaching Company Limited Partnership

Seth Lerer, Ph.D.

Stanford University

Seth Lerer is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Stanford University, where he currently serves as

Chairman of the Department of Comparative Literature. He holds degrees from Wesleyan University (B.A. 1976),

Oxford University (B.A. 1978), and the University of Chicago (Ph.D. 1981), and he taught at Princeton University

from 1981 until 1990, when he moved to Stanford. He has published six books, including Chaucer and His Readers

(Princeton University Press, 1993; paperback 1996) and Courtly Letters in the Age of Henry VIII (Cambridge

University Press, 1997), and he is the author of more than forty scholarly articles and reviews.

Professor Lerer has received many awards for his scholarship and teaching, including fellowships from the National

Endowment for the Humanities and the Guggenheim Foundation, the Beatrice White Prize of the English

Association of Great Britain (for Chaucer and His Readers ), and the Hoagland Prize for undergraduate teaching at

Stanford.

Table of Contents

The Life and Writings of Geoffrey Chaucer

Professor Biography ............................................................................................i

Foreword ........... .................................................................................................1

Lecture One Introduction to Chaucer’s Life and World...............................2

Lecture Two The Scope of Chaucer’s Work ................................................ 5

Lecture Three Chaucer’s Language.................................................................7

Lecture Four Chaucerian Themes and Terms..............................................10

Lecture Five Troilus and Criseyde : Love and Philosophy..........................12

Lecture Six Troilus and Criseyde : History and Fiction.............................14

Lecture Seven The Canterbury Tales : The General Prologue .......................16

Lecture Eight The Canterbury Tales : First Fragment...................................19

Lecture Nine The Wife of Bath ...................................................................21

Lecture Ten The Pardoner..........................................................................23

Lecture Eleven “God’s Plenty”: The Variety of The Canterbury Tales .........25

Lecture Twelve Chaucer’s Living Influence....................................................27

Timeline ............. ...............................................................................................30

Glossary ............. ...............................................................................................32

Biographical Notes ............................................................................................33

Bibliography ...... ...............................................................................................34

The Life and Writings of Geoffrey Chaucer

Scope:

This lecture series examines the life and work of the English poet Geoffrey Chaucer (c.1340–1400) in order to

understand the richness and depth of his poetry, its ways of representing medieval life and culture, and its impact on

later writers and on English literary history as a whole. Chaucer is a great poet of human expression and social

relationships, and the theme of this course is how Chaucer understands the social function of poetry: that is, how

poetry brings people together into communities of readers and listeners. Chaucer wrote in virtually all the forms of

literature available to him: classical epic, domestic farce, ribald comedy, saint’s life, beast fable, romance adventure,

personal lyric, devotional prayer, and philosophical and religious prose. He also wrote in Middle English, the

language of England spoken and written from about the middle of the eleventh century to the end of the fifteenth.

Chaucer not only appropriated the resources of his language, he changed them. His impact on the history of the

English language, therefore, is also significant, and this course will spend some time on just how Chaucer affected

the literary forms of English.

After an introductory set of lectures on Chaucer’s life, the range of his work, and the language in which he wrote

(Lectures One through Three), the course examines his major themes by looking closely at a set of exemplary

poems. First, we look at two short lyrics to establish Chaucer’s basic intellectual and literary vocabulary (Lecture

Four). Then, two lectures introduce the student to his Troilus and Criseyde , a great long poem of classical subject

matter and deep philosophical themes. In this poem, Chaucer speculates on the nature of language change, the

passage of history, and the role of the writer in society, as well as telling a compelling story of love and honor,

betrayal and desire, friendship and political connivance (Lectures Five and Six).

The following five lectures (Seven through Eleven) engage us with the Canterbury Tales , an encyclopedic poem of

social relationships and personal drama. We look at the order and form of the General Prologue that introduces the

poem (Lecture Seven), the First Fragment or set of tales that defines the work’s structure (Lecture Eight), and two

remarkable literary creations that challenge both the medieval and the modern reader: the Wife of Bath and the

Pardoner (Lectures Nine and Ten). The penultimate lecture of the course (Lecture Eleven) reviews the enormous

range of the Canterbury Tales as an invitation to the student to read widely and personally in Chaucer, and the final

lecture (Lecture Twelve) outlines Chaucer’s impact over the six hundred years of literary history since his death.

This course of lectures is both an introduction and an invitation: an introduction to the writings of a poet long

known as the “father” of English poetry, and an invitation to the modern reader to find ways of enjoying, valuing,

and responding to a poetry as vivid now as it was six centuries ago.

Lecture One

Introduction to Chaucer’s Life and World

Scope: This introductory lecture places Chaucer’s work and life in the contexts of medieval English literature and

social history. It also calls attention to some key problems that attend to our reading of Chaucer’s poetry:

for example, the nature of scribal culture, the features of his language, the structures of his narratives, and

the patterns of literary and historical allusion that we need to recover. Finally, this lecture looks forward to

the overall approach of the course, focusing largely on Chaucer’s major long poem , The Canterbury Tales ,

and to the poet’s later impact on English literature and literary history. From the time of his earliest readers

on, Chaucer has been thought of as the “father of English poetry” and, in the words of the sixteenth-

century poet Edmund Spenser, “the well of English undefiled.” John Dryden announced: “here is God’s

plenty.” This course of lectures seeks to understand, ultimately, how and why we think of Chaucer in these

ways and why we still continue to read and value his poetry today.

Outline

I. The nature and purpose of this course.

A. Our goal is to appreciate Chaucer’s poetry in its range and power.

1. We need to understand the ways in which Chaucer uses inherited medieval literary forms, but also

how he transforms them into personal expressions.

2. And we need to understand how Chaucer views the nature of authorshipin particular, the problems

of being an author in the vernacular language (English) at a time in history when the ideals of

authorship and the codes of literary value were still largely defined in terms of Latin reading, writing,

and study.

B. We also need to understand how Chaucer is a social poetthat is, Chaucer is a poet that does not simply

describe society or social groups as he sees them, but encodes in his work a controlling idea of the social

community.

C. Chaucer’s poetry is about many things, but it is always concerned with the uses and abuses of literature in

maintaining social relationships.

II. Chaucer’s life: a brief overview.

A. Chaucer was probably born in about the year 1340; he died in 1400.

B. During his life, Chaucer was first and foremost a public servant.

1. He held a variety of positions in the English royal court.

2. At various times in his life, he was an ambassador on foreign missions, a Member of Parliament, and

Clerk of the King’s Works, among other things.

3. There are many records of payments to Chaucer in medieval English documents for his royal service.

4. But there are absolutely no records of Chaucer as a poet: that is, we have no external historical

evidence for Chaucer’s work as a poet.

5. What we do have are a collection of manuscripts (but not signatures), all of which were appearing c.

1415–1420, after Chaucer’s death, which identify him as the author of a body of literary works.

6. There are about eighty surviving manuscripts of The Canterbury Tales , which is a mark of the

importance of Chaucer’s poetry, since making a manuscript copy was a laborious process.

C. Thus, more than simply seeing Chaucer’s life as marginal to his work, or more than simply understanding

Chaucer as a public servant who wrote poetry in his spare time, we need to understand an important theme

for his work:

1. The relationship between public service and the private imagination is not just a problem for

Chaucer’s own life, but a theme of his writings.

2. Throughout Chaucer’s poetry, the tensions between the public and the private, the political and the

literary, the experiential and the imaginary, are the key problems for the characters who tell his tales

and the characters who act within them.

D. In charting Chaucer’s life, too, we need to see him as a European, as well as an English poet.

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