Ye been to me right welcome, hartely!

Introducing the Chaucer Reading Challenge

Chaucer the dog is very pleased that I’m teaching Chaucer the poet this spring.

This is how the course description runs in my graduate Chaucer course:

Surveying the long history of Chaucerian criticism and scholarship can be a confusing and occasionally surreal experience. You find yourself asking exasperated questions: is Chaucer a misogynist or a proto-feminist? is he a Lollard or an orthodox Christian? is he a reactionary conservative or a radical?

In this course we are going to revel in that state of unknowing and accept that this elusiveness is part of what makes Chaucer's poetry endlessly fascinating and worthy of many lifetimes of study. Chaucer's poetry challenges us to put aside our egos and to try on a range of radically various and contradictory perspectives. He challenges us to imagine human discourse as endlessly dialogic, even as he accepts as the ultimate truth a God that lies beyond the realm of human discourse. In other words, Chaucer's apparent ambiguity does not imply a categorical rejection of truth itself. It does suggest, on the other hand, that truth lies in the very struggle to find it in the complexities of the world. And Chaucer engages with this struggle through poetry and narrative rather than through a systematic attempt to resolve what is, in this world at least, not resolvable.

And in this struggle lies the central contradiction in these texts: that Chaucer is at the same time the most welcoming and the most unknowable of poets. His personable narrative voice and his self-deprecating poetic personality seem so simple, and yet they mask dazzling complexity, poetic subtlety, and political ambivalence. As much as we feel that we may know Chaucer, and as much as we may desire to know him, we never really will.

So, then, how do we study him? How do we read him? The best place to begin is with the aesthetic experience. This is why I will ask you to read aloud this semester. It's not just a pedantic exercise. Rather, it's because I think it's vital that you have the music of Chaucer's verse in your ears. Poetry, after all, is art, and you must experience it as art first, rather than as a puzzle to be solved. Once we begin to feel comfortable with the language and the verse, then we can begin to dig a little deeper.

This semester I’m inviting you, as a PCF reader, to join us in our little Chaucerian pilgrimage, as we wrestle with the poetic dream visions, The Canterbury Tales, and Troilus and Criseyde. Obviously, you won’t be able to join us in the classroom itself, but each week, I will be publishing commentaries on these major works as we go through them, and you will have a forum to discuss them in the comments. Furthermore, my graduate students will be launching their own Chaucerian Substacks, and as part of their work for the course, they will be publishing scholarly guides to some of the major texts.

I’m sure that you have some questions, and I will try to anticipate some of them now:

Which edition should I use?

For the course, we will be using The Norton Chaucer, pictured above. I like it for students because it is well glossed, and so it helps those who are unfamiliar with Middle English. However, feel free to use any Middle English edition that you may have; just be aware that there may be some textual variation because of the problems with editing Chaucer. (Much more about this in a later post.)

Should I use a translation? If so, which one?

I recommend getting stuck in with a well-glossed version of the Middle English text rather than depending on a translation. That said, sometimes it is useful to have translations handy in order to puzzle over particularly difficult lines. I don’t love any of them, but Burton Raffel’s and Nevill Coghill’s are both fine. There are free interlinear translations of most (though not all) of the major texts at Harvard’s Chaucer website.

What is the schedule?

I will be posting the full schedule early next week, but for the moment, you should know, in case you want to get started, that our first two texts will be The Book of the Duchess and The General Prologue to The Canterbury Tales, in that order.

What will be included in the posts?

Each week, I will publish a commentary on the assigned text, along with some general background information and sometimes some recommended secondary reading. I will also encourage discussion of the text in the comments. Each week will also include a piece of medieval music to accompany your reading and some discussion of it.

What extras will be included for premium subscribers?

Each week, I will also publish a shorter piece, usually on something more specific or strange about the text, for premium subscribers. These posts will often include audio of me reading a part of the text aloud. Sometimes these posts will delve a little deeper into Middle English poetics or medieval philosophy. If you followed along with the Tolkien Challenge last year, then you will have the idea.

That’s it for the moment. I hope that you will join in! If you have other questions, please leave them in the comments.

Thanks for reading, from my fancy internet scriptorium to yours.

Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash