Recently a review of a new biography of Chaucer made me laugh. The book in question, Marion Turner’s Chaucer: A European Life, is unusual in that it places Chaucer in a European context that emphasizes his links to Latin, French and Italian writers. I wonder how today’s Brexiteers would feel about the most quintessentially English of poet’s debts to, and links with, the likes of those foreigners Ovid and Virgil; Boethius and Petrarch; Dante, Boccaccio and Froissart.
But that is not what tickled me. I know such reviews are not usually the height of hilarity, especially when said review is entitled “Chaucer’s Divine Seriousness”, but John V Fleming’s piece on the First Things website made be giggle because of the breezy and irreverent tone of some of the writing, utterly at odds with the title of the piece. For example, in his treatment of the Summoner’s Tale, Fleming refers to the Friar’s thirst for the money as “the unfeigned solicitation of … spondulicks,” while his hypocrisy is termed “theological flatulence”. Great stuff.
Elsewhere, Chaucer himself is dubbed “Jolly Geoff,” although in this case Fleming uses the moniker somewhat disapprovingly since it conforms to the reductive modern view of his poetry as primarily saucy, ribald, even verging on the bawdy seaside postcards of Donald McGill. But here is where I think Fleming, emeritus Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Princeton, may have missed a trick. By his own admission, Fleming’s undergraduates have trouble with Chaucer (and Shakespeare and, like many of us I imagine, any other work not written in modern English), not least because many words of Middle English are still used today but with different meanings (chivalrie, trouthe, honour, fredom and curteisie are Fleming’s examples).
Given that learning is more effective when it’s fun, I would argue that using Chaucer’s schoolboy-ish humour — with its many references to farts and secretive sex — as the entry point into the foreign language of Middle English and the foreign world of fourteenth-century England would be the perfect gateway to the more esoteric discussions of church behaviour, divine and secular love, chivalry versus feudalism, the role of the author and the authority of texts, and the construction and role of gender which represent the real gems in The Canterbury Tales and Chaucer’s other works.
That said, Fleming correctly asserts that “[m]ost medieval poetry is determinedly oral; Chaucer’s verse cries out to be read aloud,” and as such it would be great fun to see Chaucer as the forebearer of today’s performance poets, such as John Cooper Clarke, Pam Ayres, Benjamin Zephaniah and John Hegley. The classic combination of Chaucer and modern, however, has to be Bill Bailey’s excellent Pubbe Gagge which perfectly captures both the lyric style and tongue-in-cheek lewdness in three minutes of pure brilliance. So while at a hefty 624 pages and $40, Turner’s highly praised book is obviously not going to be on many academic reading lists, it does ask relevant questions of Chaucer’s place in English literature as well as of the modern, somewhat fractured English psyche in these times of anti-Europeanism.
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