English 115b:

The Canterbury TalesNicholas Watson, BC 221(nwatson@fas.harvard.edu)

Teaching Fellow: Helen Cushman(helencushman@fas.harvard.edu)

April is the cruelest month breeding Whan that Aprille with his shoures swooteLilacs out of the dead land, mixing The drought of Merch hath perced to the roote,Memory and desire, stirring And bathed every veine in swiche licoureDull roots with spring rain. Of whiche vertu engendred is the floure…” (T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land) (Geoffrey Chaucer, The General Prologue)

Geoffrey Chaucer (“Ellesmere” Chaucer)

The Nun’s Priest

Gode daye. Myne name is Nycolaus, sonne of Watte. Ich am the clerke and maistre of thys course, The Tales of Caunterbury, y-write by myne prive frende Geffrey Chaucere. He is botte lately y-laide in his grave. God have mercy on his soule!

O Geffrey dere, allas, in dede, how wille thine soule don before the Juggement Sete of the Almighty Gode! For in thine poeme, Geffrey, hast thou y-write manye a foule songe and leccherous laye, sowninge more to worldly vanitee than to morale vertue and to goodnesse.

Trewe it is, as thou hast y-write in thine endinge Retracciouns, thowe also hast endited legendes of seintes and tales of moralitee and devocioun, alle y-mingled amonges lying fables and matere grosse and lowe, of fartyng, of swyving, of blasphemy, ywis!

The Prioress

A straunge poeme, a derke conceite indeede! The saintes in Paradise, y-wis, wolle scracche theire heades to see thee there amonges hem alle. Flightes of aungelles singe the to thine reste!

Myne felawe in thys course here, and maistresse of oure secciouns, is Helene y-hight Cushmonne. Manye a longe yere Helene laboureth in owre Graduate Programme to knawe the wayes of the Medievale Force and bicomme a doctoure of philosophie. She hath ane kinde herte and a kene witte. Stande uppe and take a bowe, Helene!

Robin the Miller

As for yowe – but methinkes I moste nowe laye downe mine kinde tongue, this Englisshe I speke of faire kinge Richardes tyme and lerne the custoumes of this new tyme and regioune, this place Harvarde, this londe the Yow Es of Aye, America hight.

My speche then I chaunge. Pardoune myne accente. Did any of you get any of that? 

Hengwrt Chaucer (manuscript of Canterbury Tales from c. 1400): General Prologue

To read deeply and begin to understand one of the great masterpieces of English literature.

To learn to think like Chaucer: through story and about story with the intense engagement and passionate detachment this involves.

In the process, to grasp Chaucer’s demanding and strange and influential notion of art.

To learn to read, aloud, Middle English, the earliest easily comprehensible version of our language.

To learn something of how literature, thought and society, worked during the late fourteenth century.

What You Will Learn

The Merchant

Learn to read Middle English.

Read the poem.

Attend class and section and contribute to both.

Write two papers (or equivalent).

Become an expert on one of the Tales: study it deeply, read about it, present on it.

Try to get at least one Middle English word, probably “swyve,” into circulation around the Yard. (LARGE Prize for getting it into the Crimson.)

What You Have To Do

The Friar

Hold sessions in office hours to teach you quickly to read Chaucer aloud and help you puzzle out the spellings etc.

Help those of you who wish to take part in a reading of one of the Tales

Take you to the Houghton Library to look at medieval manuscript books and early editions of Chaucer

Give you extensive help with your research on the Tale you choose, and with presenting it and turning your work into a research paper

All the usual stuff

What We Will Do

The Second Nun

METRO Middle English Teaching Resources Online

Where to go for all your Middle English needs

The Geoffrey Chaucer Page (Chaucer at Harvard)

Professor Larry Benson's center for the study of Chaucer, especially The Canterbury Tales.  Feel free to make use of the "interlinear translations" at first

The Middle English Compendium online (dictionary etc.)

Also: books on reserve; contact with a research librarian; the website Inter Libros for more advanced work in medieval studies

Resources to Help You Do It

The Physician

What is art for? Is art – especially the verbal art of narrative, or “fiction,” necessarily a positive force, or can it also be negative, corrupting, immoral?   

Plato, after all, claimed that poets are liars and would have excluded them from his Republic.

Mind you, Plato also, after all, conveyed his philosophy in the form of fictional dialogues, showing that fiction is, among other things, a way of exploring truths.

Even that contradiction, though, suggests that these question should not lightly be dismissed.

Argument

The Wife of Bath

Why do these questions arise? In the case of literary art, “rhetoric” is

part of the answer to this question, “fiction” another.

Rhetoric is the art of persuasion as distinct from the art of argument. Argument seeks to convince us through reason. Rhetoric seems to move us through patterns of language, images, thoughts, irrespective of rational considerations.

Fiction is like rhetoric: it patterns human lives; it presents not what is but what might be; it organizes reality for ends of its own, whatever they may be.

Argument

The Pardoner

We are all used to being acted upon by fiction: novels, film, TV, advertising.

We are all also used to the idea that art is good: it represents creativity, fulfillment; aesthetic pleasure; a space for critique of human institutions and of reality itself.

Besides, fiction has a powerful advantage over other modes of exploring truths: its level of connectedness to our feelings and to the representation of human lives.

This connectedness is one reason the truths of fiction are so often so rich.

None of this means, however, that we should take fiction and what it does for/to us for granted.

Argument

The Manciple

Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales are an exploration of the workings of fiction – and of the verbal arts in general – that refuses to make assumptions about what fiction is and whether we can feel good about it.

The poem both asserts the distinctiveness of fiction – literature is not like other kinds of writing, nor life itself – and its intimate connectedness – literature is bound up with who we are, with how we interact.

In the process, the poem ultimately places itself under judgment: it admits the possibility that it may be dangerous, its role in human culture questionable.

But it also asserts its right to exist.

Argument

The Summoner

The Tales involve a double structure of tellers and listeners: there are two tellers, Chaucer and his pilgrims, and two audiences, the pilgrims and us, the readers.

Consequences: 1) One fictional level, the pilgrimage, comes to

correspond to “reality.” Here we see the connections between stories and those who tell them and the effects of story-telling worked out in a number of ways.

2) This means that we cannot get away with thinking of fictions without also thinking about their effects.

3) But it also partly removes us from those effects. It produces “structural irony” or “ironic distance.”

How Chaucer Experiments with Fictions

Levels of Fiction and Reality1) The tale (itself often a retelling of a known

tale and often in relationship to other tales)2) The teller (a “Canterbury Pilgrim”)3) The “inscribed” audience (the pilgrims in

general; the Host in particular; sometimes specific pilgrims)

4) The scribe who inscribes them (Chaucer the pilgrim)

5) The author of the poem (Chaucer the author)6) The poem’s reader (us; also, in a real sense,

God) (Result: a great echo-chamber of possibility)

How Chaucer Experiments with Fictions: Structural Irony

The Ellesmere Chaucer (in the Huntington in San Marino, CA): Miller’s Tale