sometimes raised in defense of less familiar, marginalized writers; but are also sometimes raised in more direct critique of Chaucer’s poetry and the ideas and ideologies it appears to promote. Increasingly, Chaucer has come to stand for a celebration of “canonical” literature that for many is outdated. These traditions are no longer universally admired or taught; and some commentators feel that writers such as Chaucer dominate the field at the expense of other voices and other perspectives. Ideological and political critiques of his texts abound as critics and lovers of Chaucer struggle with the apparent anti‐Semitism of the Prioress’s Tale (see Myth 15), for example, or read about Cecily Champaigne’s abandonment of “raptus” charges against him in the context of the apparent “revenge rape” of the Miller’s wife and daughter in the Reeve’s Tale (see Myth 11).
We acknowledge that, in the contemporary moment, Chaucer is not always a beloved poet, not even among medievalists. But it is fascinating to see how quickly this “lack of universal love” has given rise to what might be the thirty‐first great myth: “Chaucer is no longer relevant.” For some, it is easy to dismiss him as a relic, an antiquated vestige of a bygone era whose mores are as outdated as his language. Nevertheless, we would like to affirm, despite these challenges to Chaucer’s centrality and privileged position as a representative voice, that we have taken great pleasure in this opportunity for re‐reading and re‐visiting his works: for us, they continue to produce a potent cocktail of pleasure, danger and difficulty that provokes powerful questions about literature, its uses and its pleasures. The history of myths about Chaucer is in many ways the history of our long‐standing collective love affair with this most engaging and seductive medieval poet. It is a continuous, unbroken history and its importance is signaled both by the multitude of manuscripts and printed editions containing the poet’s works as well as by six hundred years of popular interest. We hope you enjoy working through these long traditions with us.
Notes
1 1 See, for example, the reflective analysis on the myth of the chastity belt by Albrecht Classen , The Medieval Chastity Belt: A Myth‐Making Process (New York: Palgrave, 2007); and the many angry responses by medievalists to Stephen Greenblatt’s critique of medieval culture in The Swerve: How the World Became Modern (New York: W.W. Norton, 2011); for example, Jim Hinch, “Why Stephen Greenblatt Is Wrong—And Why It Matters,” Los Angeles Review of Books, 1 December 2012, https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/why‐stephen‐greenblatt‐is‐wrong‐and‐why‐it‐matters/#!, accessed 22 December 2018.
2 2 Thomas A. Prendergast and Stephanie Trigg , Affective Medievalism: Love, Abjection and Discontent (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2018).
Myth 1
CHAUCER IS THE FATHER OF ENGLISH LITERATURE
Chaucer is regularly named as the father of English poetry, the father of English literature, the father of English literary history,1 the father of the English language, even the father of England itself.2 This first “myth,” with all these associations, is probably the most foundational one for this book, as it sits behind many of the conceptions and emotional investments readers have in the familiar figure of Geoffrey Chaucer. It is also the myth that exemplifies the ways in which this concept in literary history is both instructive and yet also potentially confusing. The idea of fatherhood over a literary tradition is a powerful metaphor that is intimately tied up with ideas of nationalism, masculinity and poetic influence, but we can fruitfully unpack its significance and its history. We may also observe that this kind of praise can be a mixed blessing in the changing fashions of literary study.
It was Chaucer’s immediate successor Thomas Hoccleve who first wrote about Chaucer as a father figure. In several stanzas of his Regiment of Princes, written in 1412, just twelve years after Chaucer’s death, Hoccleve laments the death of his “maister deere and fadir reverent.”3 He praises Chaucer as “universel fadir in science” (“science” is best glossed as knowledge, or wisdom),4 and twice calls him his “worthy maistir,”5 suggesting a close link between fatherhood and authority. Hoccleve also describes Chaucer as “The firste fyndere of our faire langage.”6 This is a tricky phrase to analyze, as “fyndere” in Middle English can mean “poet” as much as “discoverer” and “first” can mean “pre‐eminent” as well as “first.” But the praise is unequivocal: Hoccleve compares Chaucer to Aristotle in philosophy, to Cicero in rhetoric and to Virgil in poetry.
Other writers who did not know Chaucer personally were quick to take up this description of Chaucer as father and laureate poet, moving on from the elegiac mode that dominated Chaucerian reception in the first decades after his death in 1400. Indeed, during the fifteenth century, much writing in English was “Chaucerian” in style and voice, leading to considerable uncertainty – or perhaps we should say fluidity – about the authorship of many texts that appear in the early printed “Works” collected under the name of Geoffrey Chaucer. For many of these editions, the commercial incentive of adding works “never before printed” was an invitation to include poems by Lydgate, Usk and other writers under the “Chaucerian” banner.
By the late sixteenth century, however, Chaucer was already being seen as a figure from a distant or “antique” past. For example, in his Faerie Queene (1596), Edmund Spenser addressed him in old‐fashioned terms as “Dan Chaucer, well of English undefyled” – that is, as the source of pure English – and worthy of being listed on “Fame’s eternall beadroll.”7 In his Shepheardes Calendar (1579) and the Faerie Queene, Spenser combined neo‐classical genres (eclogues and epic) with medievalist diction to pay homage to Chaucer. At the same time, Thomas Speght was presenting Chaucer in his editions as an “ancient and learned poet” whose work needed the full apparatus of scholarly introduction, commentary and glosses to be intelligible to modern readers.
It is important to recognize, too, that Chaucer was not always singled out as the only father figure from the medieval period. For example, Richard Baker wrote, in 1643, “The next place after these, is justly due to Geoffry Chaucer, and John Gower, two famous Poets in this time, and the Fathers of English Poets in all the times after.”8
By far the most influential naming of Chaucer as a father, however, appears in John Dryden’s Preface to Fables Ancient and Modern (1700). This was a collection of Dryden’s own translations of Chaucer, Boccaccio, Homer, Virgil, Ovid and others, prefaced with a long essay in which he describes Chaucer as “the Father of English Poetry.” Yet Dryden acknowledges the imperfections of Chaucer’s poetry: “Chaucer, I confess, is a rough diamond, and must be polished ere he shine.”9 Dryden also pairs this statement about Chaucer’s paternity with the admission that he lived “in the Infancy of our Poetry” and that “We must be Children before we grow Men.”10 We will return
