Critical Survey

This article will attempt to take stock of what we know about Chaucer’s earliest audiences, that is, about uses of and references to his work made during his lifetime. Relevant new research on manuscript use and ownership has been included in the case of Thomas Hoccleve and the scrivener Thomas Spencer. In addition to various named addressees of Chaucer’s works – Peter Bukton, Henry Scogan and Philip de la Vache – this brief survey lists contemporary references to Chaucer and his works in the poetry of John Gower, Eustache Deschamps, John Clanvowe and Thomas Usk.

Chaucer uses the full vocabulary for chance and mischance available to him in Middle English, and he deploys that wide vocabulary with a full awareness of its possibilities for subtle differentiations of meaning. This article is especially concerned with his use of privatives, negative prefixes, for these words, and the different senses they carry. In both positive and negative form, they recurrently work to inflect his larger concerns with Fortune (usually personified as an agent) and the mutability of the world.

This article looks again at the figure of the Pardoner in the Canterbury Tales and reconsiders the possibility that ‘he’ is a woman passing as a man. The importance of such a reading is revealed by exploring the anxieties this raises over the relationship between outward appearance and inner substance or reality, and demonstrating parallels with medieval anxieties over the authenticity of relics and the validity of religious speech acts, including those involved in the transubstantiation of the elements of the Eucharist.

Chaucer’s ‘The Man of Law’s Tale’ is mostly about Custance’s wanderings to Rome’s far east, then to the far west, then back again. The narrator’s Ptolemaic universe was thought to have a still centre, but neither this specific tale nor the Tales as a whole seems reducible to a single interpretive order. Too many thematic and tonal threads pull in too many directions, as if this tale’s cosmos presumes some medieval anticipation of the current, highly speculative ‘String Theory’ which admits the possibility of a multiverse in which numerous concurrent realities (of reader-responses) can coexist. The question remains whether so many divergent interpretive threads can be spliced together into one ‘Theory of Everything’.

This article examines Chaucer’s use of headless lines and initial inversion in both his short-line verse and his long-line verse, and compares Chaucer’s use of these metrical licences with that of earlier and later English poets. It shows that in Chaucer’s short-line verse headless lines are much more common than is initial inversion, while the exact opposite is true for Chaucer’s iambic pentameter. Analysing the contexts in which these metrical licences occur, I argue that Chaucer (and his predecessors) used them very deliberately, not only for emphasis and rhetorical effect but also to clarify narrative and syntactical organization. Of particular interest is the use of these devices in the context of non-indicative moods, lists and catalogues, direct speeches and changes of addressee, transitions between narrative sections, and enjambement.

The contention of this article is that Chaucer is expecting, indeed exploiting, the gap between the reception of a poem when it is heard socially and its afterlife as a text, when it is a different thing altogether. I also argue that a poem’s form is itself a way of communicating ideas. The discussion focuses on Parlement of Foulys, but the conclusions may be more widely applicable.