Robyn, the Miller, drunk and pale, interrupts the Host in Pilate’s booming voice and the social order of the Tales.

The Millere, that for dronken was al pale,
So that unnethe upon his hors he sat,
He nolde avalen neither hood ne hat,
Ne abyde no man for his curteisie,
But in Pilates voys he gan to crie,
And swoor, “By armes, and by blood and bones,
I kan a noble tale for the nones,
With which I wol now quite the Knyghtes tale…”
What sholde I moore seye, but this Millere
He nolde his wordes for no man forbere,
But tolde his cherles tale in his manere. (MP 3120-7; 3167-9)

The Miller, pale and drunk,
Sat with great difficulty on his horse.
He would not humble himself to wear a hood or hat,
Nor abide anyone for courtesy,
But in Pilate’s voice he began to cry,
And swore, “By arms, and by blood and bones,
I can tell a noble tale for the people,
With which I will now repay the Knight’s Tale…”
What should I more say, but this Miller
He would not change for any man,
But told his churl’s tale in his manner.

We are taken away from the high form Chaucer had honed earlier in his career and thrown into a bawdy story laced with linguistic subversion (Chaucer’s specialty) along with farts and the kissing of exposed, hairy rear-areas—an insult, even in the fourteenth-century! Surely not the type of story the Knight, or the party, was expecting to hear after such a noble tale, but one that perhaps does not surprise a modern reader well-acquainted with drunken companions and their humor, especially those at otherwise dignified events such as weddings—think of all of the drunken speeches! There’s no doubt that Robyn’s drunken story is far more articulate and legible than those.

When people tell me they find Chaucer boring and antiquated, I know they have not read this tale. Or that they have fallen victim to encountering a censored, abridged version of it, likely in grade school. Because Chaucer has captured the very timeless nature of humanity’s love for uncomfortable, low-brow humor here. If you’ve been around them, you know that babies are almost immediately ready to giggle about poop as soon as they learn to laugh. Unlike chivalry, one need not learn the rules; they come naturally! Chaucer teases this conclusion with his manifold analogies to animals and nature for the Miller himself in his portrait, for John the carpenter, and for Alisoun his wife. Both the Miller and John are described as burly men, and the former who tells the tale of the latter, has already been characterized as “…a stout carl for the nones; / ful byg he was of brawn, and eek of bones”(545-6). If you need someone to help you lift or move, call a carpenter!

No matter how ubiquitous this sort of behavior and humor, the Miller’s language may be seen as offensive to those who cultivated finer tastes as Chaucer’s Narrator points out. He disclaims again that this is one of those stories he warned you about from the start:

For Goddes love, demeth nat that I seye
Of yvel entente, but for I moot reherce
Hir talles alle, be they bettre or werse,
Or elles fallsen som of my mateere.
And therefore, whoso list it nat yheere,
Turne over the leaf and chese another tale…
Blameth nat me if that ye chese amys.
The Millere is a cherl; ye knowe wel this.
So was the Reve eek and othere mo,
And harlotrie they tolden bothe two.
Avyseth yow, and put me out of blame;
And eek men shal nat maken ernest of game. (MP 3172-7; 3181-6)

For God’s love, judge not what I say
Of evil intent, but because I must tell
Their tales all, be they good or bad,
Or else make some of my matter false.
And therefore, whoever desires to not hear it,
Turn over the page and choose another tale…
Do not blame me if you choose unwisely.
The Miller is a churl; you know this well.
So was the Reeve also and more,
And dirty stories they both told.
Think about this and put me out of blame;
And also men should not take a joke seriously.

Of course, such a warning can be read as ironic; it may make a reader even more interested! Its promise of revulsion a key element in its allure. And, if medieval scribes and artists can teach us anything about the Middle Ages, it is that there were perhaps many—unlike Absolon!—who did not shy away from distasteful bodily images, odors, and jokes. They perhaps were even less squeamish than us. For reference, see the scribal marginal image below… Thanks to the Monty Python creators for bringing that particular brand of marginal humor, in the form of butt trumpets!, into the modern day.

The Miller himself also disclaims his drunken status and tells his fellow pilgrims not to take him seriously if (more like when!) he says something wrong, or offensive. He’s reflective, despite his state. He explains he knows he is drunk by the way his voice sounds, so he asks them to blame it on “the ale of Southwerk” (MP 3140).

Sources and Analogues

With this tale, we get an introduction to the theme that takes over the collection— quiting and, in the rest of this fragment, sexual quiting. Now subverted from the Host’s original meaning for the Monk to “match” the Knight’s Tale to the Miller’s baser retaliate, which the Reeve and Cook run with.1 We also get a different and dirtier love triangle (square?) here than the Knight’s courtly, chaste one—if you remember, there’s no sex in the Knight’s Tale, just courtly longing. Even Absolon gets more action than Arcite or Palamon did. And this inversion will be the catalyst to the darker version of sex enacted in the Reeve’s really uncomfortable next tale, which is foreshadowed when the Reeve (who was once a carpenter) interjects himself in the Miller’s Prologue to reject the topic of the story Robyn has proposed—that of “…a legende and a lyf / Bothe of a carpenter and of his wyf, / How that clerk hath set the wrightes cappe” (MP 3142-4).

Robyn explains that Oswald shouldn’t be angry with his tale as not all wives are bad, and he himself will not believe that he is a cuckold. He further warns him (a version of which Nicholas parrots in his tale) that “an housbonde shal nat been inquisitiyf / Of Goddes pryvetee, nor of his wyf” (3163-4). Oswald is not appeased and goes on to tell a tale about a Miller who gets cuckolded in an even more abhorrent and violent way. And that will not be the last time this topic is explored in the collection. The Miller’s Tale is not only an affront to carpenters but also to clerks and to the Knight and to the noble company. But it’s only Oswald who openly reacts negatively. Many read and teach the Miller’s tale as a direct response to the Knight’s.2 Do you agree?

There are many double-entendres in the Miller’s Tale, and literary scholars have labeled it in the spirit of the French fabliaux or the Italian novellieri, though there is no definitive source. The closest source, or analogue, has been argued to be an anonymous fourteenth-century Middle Dutch tale Heile van Beersele.3 Clearly, low-brow stories were told and laughed at over ale by learned folk as much as those that were high-brow, maybe even more so. And, it’s worth noting that despite its lewd moments, there’s not just solas here but sentence.

Jealousy and Quiting

We turn from the Knight’s Tale’s classical pagan setting to a fourteenth-century Christian dwelling “at Oxenford” run by an old, buff, and rich, “sely” carpenter John, his too-young-and-beautiful-for-him wife Alisoun, her lover, one of John’s lodgers, the “hende” clerk Nicholas, and the suitor-dandy-parish clerk and part-time barber-surgeon Absolon.

John is described as jealous: “Jalous he was, and held hire nary in cage” (3224). He takes on the stereotypical old, jealous husband with a young wife cuckold character, a type we meet often in the Tales and in medieval literature. Jealousy is not a virtue. John Gower, Chaucer’s contemporary and likely friend, in his Confessio Amantis (The Lover’s Confession) explains well the link between a lover’s jealousy and avarice— a deadly sin—and predicts the unhappy end for our carpenter:

Jealousy is a sickness, a “fievere,”

Which caused is of fantasie,
Makth the Jelous in fieble plit
To lese of love his appetit
Thurgh feigned enformacion
Of his ymaginacion. (CA 5.590-4)4

…is caused by fantasy,
Makes the jealous in a feeble nature
To lose the love because of his desire
Through false information
of his own imagination.

Gower, in his collection, uses an exemplum from Ovid regarding the love triangle of the classical gods to teach more on this topic—that of the story of Mars, Venus, and Vulcan. Two classical gods we meet in the Knight’s Tale, though in a different context. In this scenario, John would be Vulcan, Alisoun Venus, and Nicholas Mars. In the end, it is Vulcan who is punished, much like John, not the adulterers. And Genius, the confessor in that text, explains to Amans, the penitent lover, “that sithe a god thereof was schamed, /Wel scholde an erthli man be blamed / To take upon him such a vice” (5.723-5).

John’s fate at the end of the tale shows that Robyn’s tale can be read as a similar exemplum, a warning against jealous lovers that should be heeded. After all, the readers are warned by Robyn in his prologue that husbands should not inquire after God’s or his wife’s secrets (3164). John is too jealous and too curious for his own good, and he is punished, much as Vulcan is, for his jealousy and for also letting his imagination run wild (to use the modern day idiom) and believe Nicholas’s dramatic tale of God sending yet another Noachian flood. However, if there’s anyone I feel sorry for when reading this tale, it is John. The violence of his fall (pun-intended), his broken arm, and his dismissal from his community all feel much too harsh a punishment for being jealous and naive. Chaucer inserts more pathos into his exemplum than does Gower in his Ovidian one. John, we are told repeatedly, really loves Alisoun despite his jealous nature. Perhaps this arguably unjustified punishment and treatment of the carpenter is what really sets off Oswald.

But Chaucer’s Miller’s Tale has yet another player, Absolon, though his part in the love drama is in his own imagination.

Much like Palamon and Arcite, Nicholas and Absolon share not only their profession but also their love for the same lady. They also both enjoy finer smelling things and both are effeminate. And Chaucer clearly delights in describing them.

Nicholas keeps his room full of sweet smelling herbs that he perfumes himself with: “Ful fetisly ydight with herbs swoote; / And he hymself as sweete as is the roote /
Of lycorys or any cetewale” (MT 3205-7).

Similarly, the parish clerk, Absolon “cheweth greyn and lycorys, / To smellen sweete” (MT 3690-1). The medieval version of the modern-day mint!

Where they differ is how they woo her and what they know of sex. The former has closer proximity and is far more aggressive and learned than the latter who is quite prude. Nicholas grabs Alisoun by her crotch without her consent to woo her rather than going about it the courtly way and singing to her, though we are told that he also loves to sing, owns a musical instrument, and knows courtly manners.

He is also repeatedly described as “hende Nicolas.” As many critics have pointed out, “hende” is one of those polysemous words Chaucer loves. Here it can denote close proximity, craftiness, nobility, and of God (Middle English Dictionary). And Nicholas, it seems, can choose when he puts on each definition; he is, as Shakespeare would put it, quite the successful dissembler, even though Absolon is the clerk who enjoys playing Herod in the medieval theatre. Nicholas knows all about “deerne love” and “solas” and is sly and discreet (MT 3200-1).

Absolon is a delightfully comedic character who we are told “…was somdeel squaymous / of fartyng, and of speche daungerous” (MT 3337-8). Unlike John, I find it hard not to laugh at him and his antics. Out of the three lover-men, he also is the least harmed—kissing his lover’s hairy, nether region is not as violent as a broken arm or branded behind in my opinion! But, of course, for someone who is squeamish of farting, it may have been as bad.

Alisoun, whose body is described “as any wezele…gent and smal” appears to come out the least scathed (MT 3234). Though she’s committed a deadly sin herself—adultery—she is not punished, much like Venus in Gower’s tale. The community instead turns on her husband and deems him mad. They all laugh at him, as we find most of the other pilgrims do.

The folk gan laughed at his fantasye;
Into the roof they kiken and they cape,
And turned al his harm unto a jape.
For what so that this carpenter answerde,
It was for noght; no man his reson herde.
With othes grete he was so sworn adoun
That he was holde wood in al the toun.
For every clerk anonright heeld with oother.
They seyde, “The man is wood, my leeve brother”;
And every wight gan laughen at this stryf.
Thus swyved was this carpenteris wyf,
For al his kepyng and his jalousye,
And Absolon hath kist hir nether ye,
And Nicholas is scalded in the towte.
This tale is doon, and God save al the rowte! (MT 3840-54)

The people began laughing at his imagination;
Into the roof they peered and gaped,
And turned all of his harm into a joke.
For whatever this carpenter explained,
It was for nothing; nobody heard his reason.
He was overcome by oaths
That he was mad in the town.
For every clerk immediately agreed with another.
They said, “The man is mad, my dear brother”;
And every person began laughing at his strife.
Thus screwed was this carpenter’s wife,
For all John’s guarding and jealousy,
And Absolon has kissed her nether eye,
And Nicholas is scalded in the butt.
This tale is done, and God save all the company!

What do you make of this ending? Notice that Alisoun’s name is not given in Robyn’s pithy summary—she is the carpenter’s wife—though the other male character’s names are. What sort of game is this?

Do you find it as uncomfortable an end as me? Or, are you laughing along with the other pilgrims? Do you think the Reeve is right to take so much offense, or did he take the joke too seriously? Chaucer’s narrator did say not to make “ernest of game” (3186). Let’s see what happens when one does in Oswald’s next tale.

Next Up: The Reeve’s Prologue and Tale

It is an honor to have Dr. Jessica Hines—brilliant Chaucerian, author of many esteemed articles (both scholarly, in Exemplaria and the Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, and popular, such as in The Conversation and The Ploughshares Blog) and a forthcoming book this year on Chaucerian pity: Forms of Suffering: Ethics, Aesthetics, and Chaucerian Pity with Cornell University Press—here to delight with us about Chaucer’s Book of the Duchess and Middle English!

Not only is Jessica a brilliant medievalist and teacher, she is my dear friend and a member of a writing group I’ve been a part of since graduate school. She is someone I continue to learn so much from. I’m thrilled to share her expertise with you here. Without further ado…!

Dr. Jessica Hines! I’m so excited to have you here delighting with us about all things Middle English. Before we turn to the passage in Middle English you chose to delight in with us today, which I am very excited to have you in particular talk to us about!, I wanted to ask you the question I ask of every guest: What is your Middle English origin story? Why and when did you enter into this alien language and time period initially?

It’s one of those things that you always get asked any time you work on Middle English: how did you get into, as you put it, this alien topic of study? It’s not expected. And, I will go ahead and say that I wasn’t looking for it.

Who does?

I mean, right? Who does? I guess there are probably people who do, but not if you’re a kid from Appalachia. For me, though I wasn’t looking for it, the thing that grabbed me was a class on non-Chaucerian medieval literature, which is funny in retrospect because a lot of what I do now is Chaucer. It was a class that started with Old English and then worked its way forward and ended with drama. Along the way, we touched on what are now my favorite pieces of medieval literature—we read Julian of Norwich, we read Pearl, and we read some really wonderful medieval lyrics. I think the thing that really captured me— that made it stand out from other classes that I was in as a part of my English degree—was the language itself. In particular, the ways that Middle English authors play around with language. And play is really the important thing for me. The sort of experiments in figurative language, imaginative play in narrative, the ways that English in this early form can be manipulated and changed in rhyme. When you are looking at the fourteenth century, this is a time period when English authors really push English to its limits: they are asking what a distinctly English rhyme scheme would sound like. What kind of rhyme schemes do we want to develop? In what ways do we want to cultivate a particularly English literary practice? So you see them doing things with the English language that you only see today in the most experimental of contemporary writers. There’s a reason why writers, like this really wonderful poet Jos Charles, reach back to Middle English to think with and think about what new things we can do with English because it was a really experimental time.

And for me, there was a real pleasure in that. In getting to hear the ways in which English could be manipulated. We will see it in the poem that we will discuss today The Book of the Duchess. You can also see it in the really wonderful and rich metaphor and allegories of Pearl and Julian of Norwich’s Shewings. But even more than the pleasure of that one of the things I found/find really rich about studying medieval literature and Middle English was learning to see that that sort of language play and formal experimentation can have powerful social and theological implications. I remember one of the first metaphors that really made me aware of that in medieval literature was in Julian of Norwich’s Shewings. She has this really wonderful description of the world being held in Christ’s hands in a form the size of a hazelnut. So what does it mean to have the whole world condensed into something that can be held in the hands of God? But also what does it mean for it to be like a hazelnut? And Julian is full of these things. She has these wonderful descriptions of God—such as of Jesus as a loving mother. She deliberately plays with gender binaries and resists gendering God in very masculine ways. And for me, this was a way of thinking about language, about thinking about stories about who God is, and about thinking how the world itself works that I had never encountered before. And even just being exposed to these new forms of language made me really critically rethink how imaginative and experimental play with literature—whether its rhyme, figurative language, allegory—how it could in fact push people—push me—to think differently about how the world works, about how the world is organized. So, it’s a mix of pleasure and sort of political engagement that got me into Middle English.

That’s really beautiful and not an expected answer about how people may think one enters into the study of Middle English. That’s wonderful. It’s also something I share with you—I, too, really enjoy the experimental nature of the language and also how it can, especially as it’s at a distance any way, force us to rethink what we think we know so well today. How old were you when you took that class? Were you an undergraduate?

Yes—an undergraduate class. My junior year of college, so twenty. You know, it coincided with a lot of things—the formation of a political consciousness, a rise in interest in creative writing, and a time when I was negotiating coming out as queer. So all of these things went together. And we don’t think of medieval literature or Middle English as actually being very helpful through any of these things, let alone something like coming out. But actually, I think it can be. It makes you think really differently about language—about how you describe yourself and the world around you—precisely because it is alien like you said.

Yes—it helps you expand what you know and what you are. There’s so much to unlock— to be able to see what’s possible in thought and the articulation of thought. That’s profound and has given me a lot to think about.

You’re already gesturing to it, because everyone should engage in these questions, but why do you think that people today should go back and read this literature and engage in this time period? I think you’ve already answered this, but what does it have to offer us?

Maybe a little more concisely: The thing that it has to offer us is that it is really easy to think that the way we speak and think now is the way that all people speak and think and the way all people have always spoken and thought. But engaging with medieval literature shows us that even within a Western European tradition, people have thought and spoken and experimented and have been playful with language. For example, I was teaching the Lais of Marie de France, so not Middle English but Anglo Norman, and we were getting to the wonderful lai of Guigemar. We were talking about the stag-hind that pierces Guigemar. You don’t need to know much but that this stag-hind exists. It’s this really mysterious figure: a white deer with mixed sex characteristics who curses the titular character. It’s a female deer that has antlers. In talking about it with my students, they are wondering what is Marie doing? Does she not understand a female deer does not have antlers? No, she knows. In fact, in Marie this deer, who we might now call something like a sex or gender queer deer, is not treated as an aberration or something shameful. Rather, Marie uses the stag-hind's arrival in the narrative to signal that the titutal character is entering a time in his life where he needs to take on a quest. The work of that quest will require, as the rest of the lai shows, his own desires, embodiment, and the world around him. And when we let ourselves see that medieval literature is doing this all the time—it’s inviting its readers to see these jarring and unexpected moments in language—that’s a prod not only for the medieval readers of the past but for us now to think, are there other ways that I could be looking at the world around me? What other language might I use to talk about the world?

Something you said made me wonder: what does it mean to be uncomfortable? Why are we uncomfortable with the unknown or the different? We will talk more about this with the Book of the Duchess, too. But as everything gets more automated, I think I say this every time, it gets even harder to stay in moments of discomfort. So though it’s a state we want to oppose, we must stay in it, especially if we want to appreciate this literature and see all the richness in it and what is in the world.

I agree totally. I think that’s a nice way of putting it. And there’s so much in our culture that sets us up to be comfortable. And comfortable is really loaded. Comfort is not necessarily pleasurable. It’s not necessarily playful. It’s not necessarily exciting. It’s comfort. When you try to just be comfortable and resist being uncomfortable, you lose so much, as I think you are suggesting. The only thing I’d add, though I think it is implicit, is that you lose the really powerful capacity to be experimental and to be delighted and to find pleasure in things. If you were a kid and ever played a game, you can’t get through a game without some discomfort.

Oh yeah—I have a toddler, and he is uncomfortable all the time. But we teach children to get out of their comfort zone. And medieval literature teaches us that, too. So read Middle English!

Yes, read Middle English, there’s no better way to be uncomfortable!

Join us in our discomfort. With all that in mind, what are we delighting in today?

We are delighting in one of my favorite Chaucer poems, and one of my favorite poems in general, Chaucer’s Book of the Duchess.

A favorite of mine, too. One of his earliest long poems, right?

Yes—certainly his earliest extant, so the earliest surviving long-form poem. There may be works that are earlier, so famously his “ABC,” a Marian devotional lyric, maybe his translation of the Romance of the Rose, and he tells us he was writing in French and translating before. But this is his first major work in English that we date to probably not long after 1368. And we know the date because it is very likely—scholars debate this but not very hard, though a few are insistent— it was probably related to the death of a very prominent woman, Blanche the Duchess of Lancaster who died in 1368.

And an “ABC” was thought to be for her, as well, right?

Yes, commissioned by her is one theory, which I find relatively convincing. Chaucer had connections to Blanche and to Blanche’s husband John of Gaunt.

My son was born on John of Gaunt’s birthday! And, quasi-related, if you want a good fictional representation of the relationship between Chaucer, Blanche, and Gaunt, check out Katherine by Anya Seton. So delightful! Chaucer is utterly devoted to Blanche in it.

I need to read that one! And, I don’t know how you would read this poem and think that the Narrator himself is not also in mourning.

Agreed! This is such a passionate poem. What lines of the poem are you focusing on, and is there anything else we need to know before we jump in?

A couple of things to know is that this was almost certainly written to commemorate or maybe to offer consolation to the grieving John of Gaunt after the death of Blanche, Duchess of Lancaster, due to the plague in 1368. It’s a very weird poem structurally. Formally, we begin with this narrator. Well, Jessica, how would you describe him?

I love him! He’s so relatable. I mean, who has not been able to sleep at one point in their life and experienced how devastating that condition is? Chaucer’s narrators are always delightful. They are funny. And this one is, especially. Book of the Duchess is a really serious poem, though, of course, about consolation. And it’s really interesting you chose this one, because Grace, my first Delighting With! guest, chose Pearl. And these poems are both about loss. That poem’s narrator is also funny at times, though arguably not intentionally. But you get a different flavor of a grief poem here with Chaucer and one that is certainly more booky. His narrator is, for sure. Would you say that’s fair?

I would say that’s fair and that he is very deliberately booky. He is often responding quite directly to French writers— Guillaume de Machaut is perhaps the most important for this text. But he has a lot of allusions to the Romance of the Rose, another really important French poem. The Aeneid. Whole chunks that are lifted out of Ovid. So it’s very booky. And the narrator is funny and relatable, so I agree totally. I think he’s supposed to be very relatable to us. Critics, as in English literary critics, are often like the narrator is so bumbling. But that’s because we are all bumbling readers.

I mean how could you not be bumbling if you have insomnia?!

Eight years insomnia! And it is really hard to respond to grief. So this narrator has not slept in eight years and read this really upsetting poem about grief. About a wife who is mourning the loss of her husband. She receives this miraculous dream where it’s revealed to her that—in fact, through a zombie version of her husband— that he has died.

Morpheus finds her husband, puts on his skin, and goes to her!

It’s bizarre.

Once learning he has died, she experiences a sort of painful relief in learning the truth and dies shortly thereafter. And our Narrator tells us this is the saddest thing, the most pitiful thing I’ve ever read, but he gets some comfort and falls asleep. He finally is able to sleep and then he encounters the next thing that is the most pity and sorrowful thing he’s ever heard. It’s the Black Knight who is speaking the saddest song he’s ever heard.

Without music!

Exactly—alone. Our narrator, like a little creep and like all of us, thinks, I am going to stay and hear. He listens to the Black Knight’s lament and what he hears is that he is grieving terribly. What the Narrator doesn’t understand, but what is obvious to readers, is that the Black Knight’s love has died. He’s quite clear about that. Our little Narrator doesn’t know it, and he speaks to the Black Knight. So the bit I’ve chosen is from one of their first conversations (lines 574-97).

It is an extract from the first major conversation between the Black Knight and our little hapless Narrator. The Narrator is really interested—and we see this again and again—he really wants to console our grieving Black Knight. But from the beginning, the Black Knight is clear that is not what he is interested in, and he is skeptical that can happen. That is what really interests me about this section of the text.

But whooso wol assay hymselve
Whether his hert kan have pitee
Of any sorwe, lat hym see me.
Y wrecche, that deth hath mad al naked
Of al the blysse that ever was maked,
Y worthe worste of alle wyghtes,
That hate my dayes and my nyghtes!
My lyf, my lustes, be me loothe,
For al welfare and I be wroothe.
The pure deth ys so ful my foo
That I wolde deye, hyt wolde not soo;
For whan I folwe hyt, hit wol flee;
I wolde have hym, hyt nyl nat me.
This ys my peyne wythoute red,
Alway deynge and be not ded,
That Cesiphus, that lyeth in helle,
May not of more sorwe telle.
And whoso wiste al, by my trouthe,
My sorwe, but he hadde rowthe
And pitee of my sorwes smerte,
That man hath a fendly herte;
For whoso seeth me first on morwe
May seyn he hath met with sorwe,
For y am sorwe, and sorwe ys y. (BD 574-97)

But whoever would test himself
Whether his heart can have pity
Of any sorrow, let him see me.
I, the misfortunate, who death has made naked
of all the bliss that ever was made,
I worth worst of all people,
That hate my days and my nights!
My life, my desires, are hateful to me,
For what is pleasing and myself are enemies.
Death itself is fully my enemy;
It will not let me die.
For when I follow it, it flees;
I would have it, it does not want me.
This is my complaint without remedy.
Always dying and not dead,
That Sisyphus, that lies in hell,
May not of more sorrow tell.
And, by my faith, whoever knows all of
My sorrow, unless he have pity,
And pity of my sorrows pain,
That man has an evil heart;
For whoever sees me first in the morning
Will say he has met with sorrow,
For I am sorrow, and sorrow is me.

He says, if you want to test whether or not your heart can have pity, just look at me. And, first, what a horrible test! Who would agree to it? Our Narrator. But I think the thing that really strikes me when you think about responding to the grief of others, with pity or with sorrow, or any other compassionate response, we think about that being about the other person. We are trying to console them or offer some amount of amelioration. But the Black Knight is clear: this testing is focused on the narrator and not him. He asks the narrator to test himself: can you feel pity? Don’t focus on his own affected state. And, I think that is a shocking thing to say.

You’re right. Speaking to someone in grief is so difficult. It’s almost presumptuous to think that one could offer some form of consolation like the Narrator does. How do we react to another person’s grief? It’s incredibly tough.

It’s so natural to do what the Narrator does. It’s as if he’s read a medieval guide to grieving with your friend.

Yes! A what to say or do in this situation Reddit response.

He works through it and offers stories, exempla, don’t engage in self-harm behavior advice, talks about medical things he can do. So he’s a good medieval subject in that he wants to provide advice. And, I think that’s so natural. Many scholars read this as a consolation poem—whether one meant to console John of Gaunt or whether about the consolation for the Black Knight—but for me what is powerful about this poem is that it forces us to think about how often the act of wanting to console or please someone is us trying a bunch of things that are on the surface meant to make someone feel better but really are to make ourselves feel comfortable in the face of such discomfort and pain. You want their pain to end. But the Black Knight is not interested in that. He wants the Narrator to work through his own feelings. And the poem enacts that. The Black Knight reminds the Narrator again and again that he cannot fix his grief. He just can’t. He can just assay himself.

This all reminds me so much of Pearl, the last poem we delighted in. The Black Knight is not an angry griever. He is just in grief. He is wisely in it, which distances us as readers. He is, like the Pearl-maiden, teaching in this context. Chaucer’s Narrator is super uncomfortable in a different way than the Pearl dreamer. He is dreaming about how to help someone who is in grief. It’s not as if you can fix them like you can with the body. But in a sense, he is helping him by having him narrate his grief, right?

There’s this really powerful refrain, which contain my favorite lines from this poem. When someone explains their pain, we cannot know their pain. All we can do is listen to their description, we can try to connect to it, but we cannot know it. Our Narrator is trying to show he understands. He says, your grief can’t be that intense that it is worth all of this. People fall out of love all the time, because that’s what he thinks has happened. That the Black Knight’s lover has betrayed him. And they go through this question and answer again and again. And at each stage, the Black Knight says, “It is not so.” This happens first at lines 742-4: “…hyt ys nat soo. /Thou dost ful lytel what thou menest; / I have lost more than thow wenest.” You don’t understand. And to his credit, the Narrator does want to test himself. So he’s like, what do you mean I don’t understand? Help me; walk me through it. And the Black Knight says, here’s what my lover was like. He talks about Blanche, and he gets the opportunity to narrate his loss in a way that is not maybe fully ameliorative but quite powerful. It can be powerful for a person to have the chance to name their grief and loss for themselves—instead of have someone name it for them.

Kind of like a confession almost. Chaucer seems to play with that here, too, as the Narrator tries to take on the role of the confessor. And, the Knight responds to the Narrator with something like, “How could I repent for my love?” But, to your point, he is going through his memory of her, and the Narrator, whether knowingly or not, has him recount their whole story—how they met and fell in love. When we love someone truly, there’s the question of how do we live in a world where that person no longer is?

It’s such a profound question—how do we go day to day? Your routines are changed; the people you talk to are changed. The Black Knight really gets to explain and explore that in a rich way. Chaucer at his best gets to show, not tell us, that there is something very powerful about how grief is all encompassing—it impacts everything from your every day life to your memories. You get to keep those memories but also explore if there is a way forward.

Ok, but is there a way forward? How does it all end?

We get the return of my favorite line! Starts at 1305. We have received this beautiful and rich description about exactly what we’ve just talked about from the Black Knight where he’s narrated his grief, who Blanche is, and the joy of their loving. Our Narrator steps in and asks, sir, where is she now? The Narrator thinks maybe he can fix it by simply finding her. Our Black Knight must be exasperated by this point. He’s like, look, I’ve told you before that I have lost her: “‘Thow wost ful lytel what thow menest; / I have lost more than thow wenest.’ / God, wot, allas! Ryght that was she!” (1305-7) The Narrator responds, “Allas, sir, how? What may that be?” (1308). And then this exchange really gets me every time, because it’s so deliberate. Throughout both the Black Knight and Narrator are both very bookish and very wordy. But then we get three sentences in a single line. The Black Knight says she is dead. We get a shocked, Nay! A single word from the Narrator. And our Black Knight says, “Yes, be my trouthe!” I promise. By my truth, this is what happened. And, the Narrator asks is that your loss. My God. It is routhe; it is sorrowful. And we get this wonderful rhyme between trouthe and routhe. He finally understands the Black Knight’s great sorrow. And then the poem rapidly ends. There’s no more conversation. The last thing the poem records the Black Knight saying is: yes, she is dead, and this is my truth. And everything wraps up. The Narrator wakes up very suddenly in his bed. He’s got his book from Ovid that he had at the beginning of the poem next to him, and he’s like, you know what? I need to write this dream down. So here’s my dream! I’ve written it.

And it’s a shocking end. Chaucer is famous for not ending his poems. Sometimes he will not wrap it up. This one has an ending, but it’s a really shocking one. This abrupt exchange and then the Narrator waking up to write the dream down. Critics are always a little unsure what to do with it, but to me it makes perfect sense given what we’ve already talked about. Because what else is there to say? What our Narrator has finally learned is that there is nothing he can say. If there’s any consolation, that’s what he can offer: to listen, understand the limits of his knowledge, and just sit with the Black Knight’s grief.

Which is so uncomfortable. Especially today. So sitting with someone in grief must have always been hard but feels really hard today when we have so much to distract ourselves from it.

It’s like what we talked about at the start. There’s such a push for us to feel comfortable. But this is such a deeply uncomfortable ending. But if this was written for John of Gaunt, I think it was satisfying for him to receive. Because one of the things that is a genuine gift when you are grieving is for other people to acknowledge the pain that you are in and to sit with you and your grief—not to try to make it better, but just sit in that discomfort together.

I think it would have been very satisfying on some level or offered some consolation as limited or as painful as that consolation or satisfaction might be. It’s also a good marker for us right now: it’s a really hard thing to do, but it’s really important if you are in mourning or if you want to try to grieve with someone else. It’s a necessary work to do.

It must have also offered Gaunt some sort of delight, too. The manner in which Chaucer represents himself. Of course, when he was ready for it and in the space to receive it. That’s the beauty of Chaucer, isn’t it? You go into it, and it’s playful, learned, philosophical, and theological—there are so many layers. That is also part of the delight. And the slipperiness. I continue to call Chaucer slippery. By the end, you said it ends abruptly— he’s already alluded to all of the famous dream interpreters. So he asks, what are you going to do with it, reader? So it is for John of Gaunt but also, as you said, the poem has literary aspirations to join in a tradition of dream visions.

That’s exactly right. If we could go back to a point we discussed earlier about John of Gaunt teaching the Narrator, he is also teaching the reader, which is really distinctive for medieval dream visions, especially ones about lost love. Chaucer is trying to articulate something new here by having the griever insist that there is a limit to the language of consolation—that it can only go so far. And for me, that is what makes the poem sit so powerfully.

That’s certainly how I feel, too. Even when I attempt to explain my own grief, never mind understand someone else’s. I really admire writers who capture something like this because I don’t feel like words are ever adequate, especially when helping someone else. Even when trying to express my own feelings.

We fall into the trap of trying to assay ourselves! Maybe don’t do that.

Don’t do that! It’s like with love. We are always trying to capture love and voice it. And love is also really elusive. Like grief. You grieve because you love. And Chaucer frames it in this way; it feels right. It’s hard to capture the love and the grief. And this poem combines those things.

Maybe to come back to discomfort one more time. That’s why it is so important to sit with the discomfort because if you try to brush it aside too quickly—the discomfort of trying to grieve with someone else, or sit with their grief, or even the discomfort of grieving itself—you lose the love, too. You lose both. And what a shame—more than a shame. That’s devastating. That’s a huge loss—much worse than just grieving. If you lose the love and the memory. It’s important to hold onto those things.

Up Next: The Miller’s Prologue and Tale

Yow loveres axe I now this questioun:
Who hath the worse, Arcite or Palamoun?
That oon may seen his lady day by day,
But in prison he moot dwelle alway;
That oother wher hym list may ride or go,
But seen his lady shal he nevere mo.
Now demeth as yow liste, ye that kan,
For I wol telle forth as I bigan.” (1347-54)

I ask you lovers this question:
Who has it worse, Arcite or Palamon?
One may see his lady every day,
But in prison he must dwell always;
The other one, can ride or go wherever he wants;
But never see his lady evermore.
Now judge this as you like, you who can,
For I will continue the tale that I began.

This brings us to the love fools, the two main lover knights of the poem, Palamon and Arcite (aka Philostrate). Two almost identical, unfortunate, wounded, young, royal cousins who just barely survive the siege on their home.

Instead of letting them die in the Theban battle, Theseus sends them to Athens, “to dwellen in prisoun…For everemoore; ther may no gold hem quite” (1023-24). Their fortune at first appears glum. No ransom is a cruel fate.

It is in this tower, this prison, that Palamon and Arcite both get shot with Cupid’s arrow through their eyes and become love sick over Emily who has no idea that they exist and, even when she does, has no real preference for either. Poor guys.

And so bifel, by aventure or cas,
That thurgh a wyndow, thikke of many a barre
Of iren greet and square as any sparre,
[Palamon] cast his eye upon Emelya,
And therwithal he bleynte and cried, “A!”
As though he stongen were unto the herte.” (1074-9)

And so it happened, by fate or fortune,
That through a window, thickly set with many bars
Of iron great and square as any wooden beam,
[Palamon] cast his eye upon Emily,
And in response he winced and cried, “Ah!”
As though his heart had been stung.

Of course, Arcite has the same happen to him:

And with that sighte hir beautee hurte hym so,
That, if that Palamon was wounded sore,
Arcite is hurt as muche as he, or moore.
And with a sigh he seyde pitously,
’The fresshe beautee sleeth me sodeynly
Of hire that rometh in the yonder place;
And but I have hir mercy and hir grace,
That I may seen hire atte leeste weye,
I nam but deed; ther nis namoore to seye.’” (1114-22)

And the sight of her beauty hurts him so,
That if Palamon was sorely wounded,
Arcite is hurt as much as him, or more.
And with a sigh, he said piteously,
’The fresh beauty slays me suddenly
Of her who is roaming yonder below,
And unless I have her mercy and hir grace,
That I may see her at least,
I am but dead; there is nothing more to say.

This experience of Cupid shooting a lover straight through their eyes to their heart, without the lover’s consent, is a favorite of Chaucer and his muses. We still have the cliché of love at first sight today. The motif of love’s fatal glance was likely founded upon the Greek Empedoclean theory of vision accepted by Plato and passed down through the Arabs that taught that the beams of light transmitted by the eye joins it to the object it is viewing. The eyes of the beloved strike through to the lover’s heart by the joining of their eyes.1 In this tale, this action is the catalyst for the breakdown of the chivalrous and filial bond between the knights. Palamon attempts to hold Arcite to his chivalric bond, arguing that he saw and loved Emily first; however, Arcite argues that Palamon loved Emily because he believed her to be Venus, a goddess, and beyond that Arcite contends that natural law, the law of love, trumps the chivalric, positive law.

Do you think that Arcite’s argument that romantic love trumps chivalric duty ultimately is what causes his demise in the Knight’s—who upholds chivalric virtue above all—story? Why is it that Arcite prays for victory in battle to Mars, not for Emily alone to Venus as Palamon does, if this is his view?

Love Sickness

Love sickness was considered a very real ailment in the Middle Ages, shown in how Arcite’s appearance changes due to his remorse at not being able to be with his love when he is first exiled. This change initially works out for him: he is able to disguise himself as Philostrate and return to Athens and see Emily every day. It also arguably foreshadows his ultimate demise.

Medieval physicians considered lovesickness to be closely related to melancholia, experienced mainly by noble men who sought out university-trained physicians to cure, and a potentially terminal condition.2 Even today, neuroscientists acknowledge that being in love decreases activity in the prefrontal cortex of the brain (the part responsible for decision making, rational thinking, and judgement!).3 It is not surprising, then, that we see lovesickness come up in stories dealing with courtly love—another sort of social ethic derived from the French troubadours and Ovid.

To return to the Knight’s question to his fellow pilgrims at the opening of this post—who had it worse Palamon or Arcite?—I think the answer changes. However, at the end, Arcite drew the short stick. He prayed to Mars for victory in the battle (2420) while Palamon prayed only for Emily (2246-7). The detailed, technical, and drawn out description of Arcite’s wound and the aftermath of it on his body is pretty awful, and his whole appearance changed for the worse because of his pining for Emily. He even foresaw his own death: “I nam but deed; ther nys no remedye” (1274). Yes— I would without a doubt say Arcite had it worse in the end, even if he had some years outside of the tower before his cousin of bodily freedom (his mind and heart were still imprisoned) and even if he won the battle and is thus remembered as the flower of chivalry (3048). And even if Palamon thought he’d be the one martyred for love (1460). Do you agree? Also, guard your eyes!

Fortune, Astronomy/Astrology, and the Planetary Gods

When he first hears Palamon cry, Arcite thinks he is despairing over their perpetual imprisionment and blames Fortune and some wicked disposition of Saturn. The addition of Saturn is unique to Chaucer, and Saturn comes back into play at the end of the poem when he determines how to appease the other Gods and restore order by killing off Arcite.

Arcite, in his attempt to console his cousin, explains,

Fortune hath yeven us this adversitee.
Som wikke aspect or disposicioun
Of Saturne, by som constellacioun,
Hath yeven us this, although we hadde it sworn;
So stood the hevene whan that we were born.
We moste endure it; this is the short and playn. (1086-91)

Fortune has given us this adversity.
Some wicked aspect or disposition
Of Saturn, by some constellation,
Has given us this, although we swore the opposite would happen;
So stood the heaven when that we were born.
We must endure it; this is the short and plain.

The two royal knights have fallen prey to the goddess Fortune, whose wheel ever turns. Pictured above you can see how a king has the farthest to fall on her wheel. The Knight makes many references to the cruelty of Fortune throughout the tale. At the end, the idea of an ever-changing world, from woe to mirth back to woe is invoked as the reality of the world’s transmutation.

But Fortune isn’t alone in her cruelty, as the Knight explains through Ovidian references we observe in the descriptions of the Gods’ temples, the classical gods were notorious for their fickle nature and ill treatment of mortals. Chaucer emphasizes the dual nature of the gods as deities and planets in this tale.

Throughout his writing, Chaucer, much like his muses, contemporaries, and legacies, is interested in astrology/astronomy, then considered interrelated terms, and their relationship to the actions of humans and the seasons.4 Arcite’s and Palamon’s birth charts predicted their imprisonment. For those interested in horoscopes today, you will find much to delight in Chaucer’s writing, as you shall see as we continue! For short poems outside of the Tales, check out the “A Treatise on the Astrolabe” and “The Complaint of Mars.” We will read more references to the planetary Gods in the Miller’s next tale. Chaucer was interested in the tools used to divine human life and how they can be used to tell stories.

We also see this on display in this tale in the detailed descriptions of the ornate oratories Theseus builds for the gods and the stories painted therein of their actions. The planets, and their divinities, help us characterize and understand the outcomes of Theseus (Mars/Saturn), Emily (Diana), Palamon (Venus), and Arcite (Mars), whether we find them just or not.

What do you make of Fortune and the planetary Gods in this tale, especially in the larger frame narrative of a Christian pilgrimage? Is Chaucer pointing out the tragic nature of a world governed by such divinities? What is he saying about secular elite culture here?

Consolation?

I would be amiss if I did not take a moment to acknowledge the consolation at the end of The Knight’s Tale, often called Theseus’s “First Mover” speech.

After Arcite’s unfortunate and rather painful death that Saturn devised to appease Mars and Venus, Theseus is described as inconsolable, save for by his father, the wise Egeus, who offers consolation and brings up the idea of a pilgrimage again, but comes to a harsh or “neoplatonic cliché” of a conclusion: “This world nys but a thurghfare ful of wo, / And we ben pilgrymes, passynge to and fro. / Deeth is an ende of every worldly soore.”(2847-9)5 Lost are all the redemptive and healing qualities of a Christian pilgrimage in this classical world, at least from Egeus’s old wisdom on the world’s transmutation. And it’s hard to be consoled by what he says. But Theseus is. Theseus’s own consolation builds off of his father’s, though he invokes a monotheistic god “the First Mover,” in this case Jupiter, who has planned out everything and every person’s fate. He borrows from Boethius, though in a fragmented fashion. There are tensions in this speech—for one, Jupiter’s order has already been proven ineffectual in the very conflict of the Gods that resulted in Arcite’s death that he and his realm is now mourning. There is little choice both in mortals and in those in Theseus’s court—Emily must marry Palamon; she has no choice, as Diana has already made clear and which Theseus will demand. She will be wedded despite her prayer to stay a maiden for life. Palamon gets the girl, but he has lost his kinsmen, one of his own home that he has given up for Athens. The Knight does not acknowledge any of this, though:

For now is Palamon in alle wele,
Lyvynge in blisse, in richesse, and in heele,
And Emelye hym loveth so tendrely,
And he hire serveth so gentilly
That nevere was ther no word hem bitwene
Of jalousie or any oothere teene.
Thus endeth Palamon and Emelye;
And God save al this faire compaignye! Amen. (3101-8)

For now is Palamon all well,
Living in bliss, in richness, and in health,
And Emily loves him so tenderly,
And he serves her so gently,
That never was there a single word between them
Of jealousy or any other annoyance.
Thus ends Palamon and Emily;
And God save this fair company! Amen.

Despite the Knight’s confidence, critics have puzzled over this speech. Is it effective? Does it fail because there is no redemptive mercy through Christ available in the afterlife to these characters despite the Knight’s ending conclusion and prayer? Finally, do we really get a true happy ever after? If you were left feeling uncomfortable, know you aren’t alone, as you will soon see!

***

To borrow the Knight’s own analogy, forgive me for having my weak oxen swiftly plow over this very dense field of a poem. I hope this helped you delight in and navigate some of what Chaucer is up to in this tale and guides you as we move on to the rest.

Next Up: A Delighting With! Interview with Dr. Jessica Hines on The Book of the Duchess

And

The Miller’s Prologue and Tale

The Knight is delighted to tell the pilgrims a story from the past. The Knight’s own story is now very old and the old stories he refers to even older. And yet, we still delight in and reimagine them.

These lines evoke one of the most delightful human experiences—a shared appreciation of timeless stories that offer many enduring truths and tensions. The Knight’s Tale is overflowing with them, and I will do my best to cover some of the ones that will help us not only understand a little about what Chaucer is up to in this particular tale but also ones he will continue to engage with throughout the collection. Of course, there’s much more to discuss than I will have space or time for here, and there’s a rich and extensive critical history that I will not cover. Suffice to say: Many have had very different feelings about this tale across time! I write this mainly to give you confidence in your own reading. Given the length of this tale, I will split my thoughts into two posts (not four!). The next and final post on this tale will touch on Love Sickness, Fortune, Astronomy/Astrology, and the Planetary Gods, and Consolation. A fitting post to celebrate Saint Valentine’s Day! Please let me know in the comments what you’ve noticed!

***

The Knight introduces us to one of the lengthiest tales in the collection and one steeped in classical tradition and philosophical discourses on fortune. And, of course, one that includes the ever popular love triangle trope!

In many manuscripts, the epigraph to the tale is part Latin, a quote from Statius’s Thebaid written in the first century C.E. (“Iamque domos patrias, Scithice post aspera gentis Prelia, laurigero, &c”)1 (12.19-20) and part English (“Here bigynneth the Knyghtes Tale”). And the tale itself is divided into four parts with Latin headings (e.g., Explicit prima pars; Sequitur pars secunda).

Though some members of the pilgrimage party would have understood the reference and Latin (then the language you needed to know to be considered literate), many would likely have had no idea what the words meant as most of us today do not without the help of textual editors and translators. This tale is meant for an elite audience who were well versed in theology, grammar, rhetoric, and dialectic—namely, learned clerics and aristocrats, the latter who cared about courtly manners and the code of chivalry. What did the less noble pilgrims think, I wonder? Is the inapproachable register to most of the party perhaps a reason the Tales shift so abruptly to the drunken Miller’s bawdy fabliau?

The merry, veteran crusader and campaigner Knight in stained armor not only directly quotes the Latin of the Thebaid but primarily reimagines Boccaccio’s Italian fourteenth-century epic Teseida that tells the story of the Theban cousins Palamon and Arcite and their love of Emily and combines it with ideas from even more hard-hitters such as Ovid’s Metamorphoses and Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy (which Chaucer translated into English earlier in his career), among others. This is not only one well-traveled knight but one learned one! The Knight tells a classical story peppered with late medieval anachronisms and one based on sources that Chaucer had been thinking with across his writing career.

Some themes Chaucer just doesn’t want to quit, especially in his Boccaccian and Boethian reimaginings, and love, aventure, order, free will, governance, and pre-Christian virtue are some highlighted here. He experiments with how a medieval Knight might think with these topics.

Muses and Legacies

The story of Thebes and Italian poetry captured Chaucer’s imagination. He’d already engaged with Boccaccio’s Teseida and Statius’s Thebaid in an earlier, experimental, long-form poem, Anelida and Arctia, though critics largely view that work as less polished than The Knight’s Tale, especially as it appears to be unfinished, despite the fact that it remains Chaucer’s most structurally and metrically elaborate surviving poem.

Some scholars debate that the Knight’s Tale was written before the Tales were conceived and therefore were later retrofitted for the Knight and the tale-telling contest. Regardless, it fits in well as the first tale and sets the bar rather high given its style and form and philosophical and classical themes. Though this elevated style doesn’t last long, as you will see as soon as the drunken Miller interjects himself and disrupts the Host’s order after the Knight’s tale is told. Chaucer continues to play with order (and disorder) throughout the Tales—social order, registers, and expectations. It is also a preoccupation of his in this particular tale.

Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale inspired many other famous English works— such as, John Fletcher and William Shakespeare’s play Two Noble Kinsmen, John Dryden’s poem Palamon and Arcita, parts of Shakespeare’s infamous play A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Patience Agabi’s poem “Emily” in Telling Tales, as well as, to a lesser extent, the 2001 film “A Knight’s Tale.” Remember this one that includes charming anachronistic elements and introduces a nude Paul Bettany as Chaucer?:

These creators (among them the infamous English playwright and the first appointed Poet Laureate of England, respectively), reimagined what this story could do, much like Chaucer did with his sources, though to different effects.

But enough of the muses and legacies, which would each be excellent topics for their own posts, and which I give you occasion to read and watch when you’ve finished Chaucer’s.

I’ll use the Knight to help me get back to Chaucer’s version:

I have, God woot, a large feeld to ere,
And wayke been the oxen in my plough.
The remenant of the tale is long ynough.
I wol nat letten eek noon of this route;
Lat every felawe telle his tale aboute,
And lat se now who shal the super wynne;
And ther I lefte, I wol ayeyn bigynne. (886-892)

I have, God knows, a large field to plow,
And weak are the oxen in my plow.
The remainder of this tale is long enough.
I will not then delay our journey;
Let everyone tell his tale along the way,
And let us see now who will win the supper;
Where I left off, I will again begin.

The Knight as storyteller, rather unexpectedly, imagines himself as a plowman, plowing a field. A rather amusing choice not only because of his class but also the irony that, though the Knight says his oxen are weak, he is about to reimagine an Italian epic and include Boethian philosophy and other ideas from classical texts. Though this could be another use of the modesty topos, which we have already seen Chaucer use for the narrator in the General Prologue and which he will continue to use for different pilgrims throughout the Tales, there is something rather interesting about this particular image of the Knight as Plowman. It may be worth pointing out that critics largely agree that we have an ideal representation of each of the estates in the General Prologue— the Parson, the Knight, and the Plowman. The rest of the pilgrims are largely, as we have already observed, corrupted versions of their professions. What do you make of that?

Chivalric Romance

Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale isn’t an epic like his main muse but is rather what scholars label a chivalric romance. Chivalry and romance are likely familiar words to you, but they are slightly altered in their modern form. If you have read stories about the legendary King Arthur, you are already well acquainted with this genre.

The portrait of the Knight in the General Prologue helps us understand his character and what sort of story he will tell. Not only does he himself subscribe to the chivalric code but he also would be a consumer of the genre. We are told by the narrator that:

A Knyght ther was, and that a worthy man,
That fro the tyme that he first bigan
To ryden out, he loved chivalrye,
Trouthe and honour, fredom and curteisye. (GP 43-6)

A Knight there was, and that, a worthy man,
Who from the time he first began
To ride out, he loved chivalry,
Truth and honor, generosity and courtesy.

Chivalry, truth, honor, generosity, and courtesy are all characteristics of the Knight and of the chivalric code that he identifies with. Though chivalric romance is flexible in many ways, its characters are usually kings, queens, and knights, and the plot usually deals with love, journeying, virtue, and the supernatural told in the vernacular, the spoken language, in this case English. Chaucer inherited this genre from the French. The word romance comes from the French romans or speech of the people, or not in Latin or Greek. Not quite the etymology you likely imagined when you think of romance novels today, though you might now understand the modern genre of “romantasy” as something that is not really new. The medieval genre of romance often combined love stories and fantasy! We will continue to see this combination throughout the Tales as romance is a favorite genre of Chaucer’s, which also makes this a fitting first tale as we can track how his treatment of it changes in this collection depending on its teller. This tale helps us see how influenced Chaucer is by classical stories and contemporary French and Italian styles and literature.

Chivalry was also Chaucer’s (and his Knight’s) lived reality. Edward III, the long-reining monarch Chaucer was born under, was particularly fond of the Order of Chivalry. He sought to re-create an Arthurian Round Table of 300 knights and famously founded the exclusive Order of the Garter, which survives to this day. He hosted many spectacular and dramatic tournaments, one of which found the royal party dressing up as swans, peacocks, and dragons.2 Edward III was also a campaigning king. In his early reign, he had a lot of success. Chaucer himself stood as a witness in the Court of Chivalry (such a thing existed!) in a case regarding a coat of arms.3 The chivalric was not all glamour, and Chaucer would have understood the horrors of war (himself having been captured and ransomed), its violent qualities, and the growing critique of its practices.

Chaucer gives us a model veteran Knight in the General Prologue—one who fights in many actual historical campaigns and crusades that took place during Chaucer’s life across the known world, though ones distant from the politically tumultuous London. Through this pilgrim and his tale, Chaucer is exploring what chivalric virtue looks like in a pre-christian time, an ongoing preoccupation of his and many of his contemporaries. But does he give us an ideal ruler in Theseus?

The Knight considers Theseus an upholder of chivalric virtue, despite his flaws. We see this especially through the Knight’s repeated descriptions of Theseus’s pity, another part of the code of chivalry and a virtue Chaucer engages with repeatedly in its various registers. Characteristics of chivalry are seen in different characters within this tale, but especially shown in Theseus.4 We are introduced to the noble Duke of Athens and are told about his very recent defeat of the Amazons and their “regne of Femenye” (877). The classical chivalric world is one where masculine authority prevails, much like it did during Chaucer’s life. In other tales, Chaucer gives more of a voice to his female characters, but not in this one. Unlike his source, Chaucer doesn’t linger on Theseus’s victory over the Amazons. Instead he focuses on the scene that occurs on his way home from that victory. Theseus is described as not only a fierce warrior but also as wise and gentle and especially chivalrous. Despite his initial reaction of anger when misunderstands their mourning gear and weeping to be affronts to his honor, Theseus takes pity on the company of noble ladies whose late husbands are not being given a proper burial in Thebes by Creon:

This gentil duc doun from his courser sterte
With herte pitous, whan he herde hem speke.
Hym thoughte that his herte wolde breke,
Whan he saugh hem so pitous and so maat,
That whilom weren of so greet estaat;
And in his armes he hem alle up hente,
And hem conforteth in ful good entente,
And swoor his oath, as he was trewe knyght... (952-959)

This gentle duke came down from his horse
With a piteous heart, when he heard the women speak.
He thought that his heart would break
When he saw them so piteous and powerless
Who, previously, were of such high estate
And he picked them up with his arms at once
And comforted them with good intentions,
And swore his oath, as he was a true knight…

Though Theseus is a proven conqueror and acts as such—he has the God of War, Mars, on his banner—he is described as gentil, one of noble manners—not quite the gentle we think of today, perhaps, but on the road to that meaning in this instance. He takes the women in his arms and promises to rectify the wrongs of the tyrant Creon, and he follows through on this promise at once.

The Knight juxtaposes the Amazonian women (recently defeated, taken from their home, and mostly voiceless) and the noble widows who are begging for Theseus’s mercy on his way home from his victory. Especially as we get a mirrored scene of the former Amazonian women pleading for Theseus’s mercy later in the poem. The Knight again shows us how easily Theseus moves from passion to pity through the intercession of women and the use of his reason.

When he comes upon the cousins dueling in the grove, Hippolyta, Emily, and the other courtly women plead with him, and Chaucer uses one of his favorite, and most beautiful lines, to describe the change in Theseus: “For pitee renneth soone in gentil herte” (1761). Theseus, though at first enraged when he discovers who the cousins are, is calmed by the courtly women’s pleas, much like Saturn is by Venus’s tears, and allows his wrath to pass once he exercises his reason—a mark of a good ruler and a trait not shared by all rulers in The Canterbury Tales, as we will see.

Theseus’s pity, the Knight explains, comes from his noble and chivalrous heart. And in Theseus’s own words to himself, “… Fy / Upon a lord that wol have no mercy…/ To hem that been in repentaunce and drede” (1773-6). He allows his heart to be changed and forgives the lovers:

Who may been a fool but if he love?
Bihoold, for Goddes sake that sit above,
Se how they blede! Be they noght wel arrayed?
Thus hath hir lord, the god of love, ypayed
Hir wages and hir fees for hir servyse!
And yet they ween for to been ful wyse
That serven love, for aught that may befalle.
But this is yet the beste game of alle,
That she for whom they han this jolitee
Kan hem therefore as muche thank as me.
She woot namoore of al this hoote fare,
By God, than woot a cokkow or an hare!
But all moot ben assayed, hoot and coold;
A man moot ben a fool, or yong or oold—
I woot it by myself ful yore agon,
For in my tyme a servant was I oon.
And therfore, syn I knowe of loves peyne
And woot hou soore it kan a man distreyne,
As he that hath ben caught often in his laas,
I yow foryeve al hoolly this trespaas. (1799-1818)

Who may be a fool but if he is in love?
Behold, for God’s sake that sits above,
See how they bleed! Are they not well arrayed?
Thus has their lord, the god of love, paid
Their wages and their fees for their service!
And yet they believe falsely that they are sensible
Those that serve love, whatever might befall them.
But that is yet the best game of them all,
That she for whom they have this happiness
Gives them as much thanks as me.
She knows no more about all this hot fare,
By God, than a cuckoo or a hare knows!
But all must be assayed, hot and cold;
A man must be a fool, though young or old—
I know it well myself a long time ago;
For in my time, I was also love’s servant.
And therefore, since I know of love’s pain
And know how sorely it can a man constrain,
As he that has been caught often in his thread.
I forgive you wholly for this trespass.

Instead of ordering the lovers be put to death or reimprisoned, Theseus determines that they will battle properly, according to their rank, in the lists (a tournament) with 100 knights each for Emily’s hand and later insists that there will be no lethal combat. Chivalric romance, indeed!

Though it would be wise of us to remember Chaucer is slippery—and Theseus’s treatment of the bodies in Thebes, his refusal to let the royal cousins be ransomed, and his inability to resolve their love conflict without some form of violence (even if it isn’t meant to be mortal), among other things reveals he is not without fault. Through Theseus’s characterization, we observe the tensions within the classical world and in the chivalric identity.5 A tension between the ideal and its reality. More on that and the ending in the next post.

What did you make of Theseus and his treatment of the women and the cousins? Of how he treats his prisoners? What do you make of this paradox of being at once a conqueror who does not allow ransom and is thus called a tyrant by Palamon but also one who allows his mind and heart to be changed? One who is at once described as prideful (with all the polysemous positive and negative meanings) but also as noble and reasonable. What is Chaucer up to here?

Next Up: The Knight’s Tale Part 2 of 2: Love Sickness, Fortune, Astronomy/Astrology, and the Planetary Gods, and Consolation

Every time I revisit the General Prologue1, I am struck by how simultaneously playful and learned Chaucer is and just how slippery! His knowledge of the world and the goods and crafts within it is on full display here, very reminiscent of Shakespeare. I am transported to the Tabard Inn in Southwark in the fourteenth century as I learn about specific battle sites and the rusty and stained mail coat of the Knight and about the courtly eating habits of the Prioress “Madame Eglentyne,” her love of dogs, and her use of unsophisticated French and about the rich gear of the guild members and the exemplary begging practices of Friar Huberd and about the pus sore of the Cook Roger, among many other things! The pilgrims come to life, and though they are types, they nonetheless feel very real as I meet them and learn details about their manners and dress through Chaucer (the writer and the narrator and the pilgrim).

The Canterbury Tales is a work about story telling—about the stories we tell ourselves and the ones we tell each other, about the forms we tell them in, and about the oppositions within them. Stories in various registers about what the world asks of us and what God asks. About virtue and vice. About truth and lies. About love and loss. About laughter and sorrow. About high and low art. About Carnival and Lent. About order and disorder. About being an individual and a member of a community. About experience and authority. About men and women. About tyranny and mercy. And so much more as we will read!

The Frame

We begin our Canterbury Tales reading pilgrimage with the General Prologue, which gives us the frame to the entire collection—a pilgrimage to the shrine of Saint Thomas Becket and a tale-telling contest for a dinner at the Tabard Inn paid for by the losers.

Pilgrimage—not only the religious pilgrimage to Canterbury the pilgrims set out on but also a metaphorical one for life: “we been pilgrymes passynge to and fro" (Knight’s Tale 1.2848). This sacred pilgrimage is brought down to earth by the real catalyst for the storytelling—the Host’s proposed contest for a dinner at the expense of the other pilgrims. A competitive spirit permeates a lot of the tales themselves, encouraged by the Host. Almost from the very beginning, we see some of the more worldly pilgrims trying to “quitte” each other (repay, match, enact revenge… another one of those key polysemous words to look out for). Though the narrator doesn’t judge some of his fellow pilgrims deceitful practices, the pilgrims themselves sure judge each other!

The pilgrims are heading from a suburb of London at the time—Southwark on the South Bank of the Thames—on a pilgrimage to the infamous English shrine of “the hooly bilsful martir” former Archbishop of Canterbury Saint Thomas Becket who was killed due to his once dear friend Henry II’s outburst famously translated in film to “Who will rid me of this meddlesome priest?” on December 29, 1170 by four knights in Canterbury Cathedral (17). To simplify what occurred between Becket and Henry II: the Archbishop once served the English king but became a proponent of the independent power of the church, which caused their falling out.

This saint and site grew in popularity during Chaucer’s lifetime when English politics were just as—if not more so—tumultuous. And in the next centuries they continued to be. You won’t be able to see the original shrine today, only what may have been the base of it at the British Museum, thanks to King Henry VIII, who had it destroyed in 1538 after declaring Becket a traitor instead of a martyr. Despite that, Thomas Becket is still considered a saint by the Roman Catholic Church and Anglican Communion, and you can go on this pilgrimage to Canterbury Cathedral today. This trip wouldn’t take long by car, but it would have taken days to traverse the ~sixty miles on horseback.

Pilgrimage not only carried with it the obvious serious undertones of penance and redemption but also ones of deceitful tale-telling. In the prologue to another canonical fourteenth-century London poem Piers Plowman, William Langland shares that some pilgrims were thought of as liars:

Pilgrymes and palmers plighten hem togyderes,
To seke seynt Iame and seyntes of Rome,
Wenten forth on here way with many wyse tales
And had leue to lye aftir, al here lyf-tyme.

Pilgrims and palmers pledged to travel together
To seek Saint James and the saints of Rome,
Went on their way with many wise tales
And took leave to lie about it for a lifetime. C-text Prol., 47-502

There was acknowledged displeasure at the development of fiction that took place on pilgrimage routes, and Chaucer’s frame captures this tension by staging the sacred occasion and a secular tale-telling contest that contains fictional lewd stories, even if it also has edifying ones. Chaucer is, as he repeats, a fellow pilgrim, a recorder of life, not an arbiter:

Wel nyne and twenty in a compaignye
Of sondry folk, by aventure yfalle
In felaweshipe, and pilgrimes were they alle…
So hadde I spoken with hem everichon
That I was in of hir felaweshipe anon…
Me thynketh it acordaunt to resoun
To telle yow al the condicioun
Of ech of hem, so as it semed me,
And whiche they weren, and of what degree,
And eek in what array they were inne.

Fully nine and twenty in a company
Of various people, come together by chance
In fellowship, and all were pilgrims…
I had spoken to everyone of them
That I was in their fellowship at once…
I think it is in proper order
To tell you the full circumstances
Of each of them, so as it seemed to me,
And what they were, and of what social rank,
And also about the clothes they were dressed in. (24-41)

Chaucer endeavors to capture his fellow Englanders on the page as they appeared to him—“so as it semed me.” The “me” is Chaucer the pilgrim who already has explained that he made fast friends with all twenty nine of his fellow pilgrims just after being introduced to them.

The fact that Chaucer the writer chooses not only to represent his own estate (or class) but those across the estates makes his frame collection unique. Boccaccio’s De Cameron is often cited as a muse for Chaucer’s story-telling frame. However, Boccaccio’s work consists of tellers of the same class who tell tales in a static location—nobles who have fled to the countryside to avoid plague-ridden Florence.

Framed story-telling collections came to the medieval West from the East, and they were popular in Chaucer’s day. His likely friend John Gower also experimented with the form in his Confessio Amantis (Confession of a Lover). But unlike Gower’s exempla, Chaucer’s tales are themselves in distinct genres and some are—in the tradition of medieval law and theology— in direct dialectical debates. Though the Canterbury Tales is in line with the tradition and its peers, there is something still unique about its method.

Chaucer’s pilgrims have a less dire need to leave the city than Boccaccio’s nobles— they are venturing to Saint Thomas Becket’s shrine “from every shires ende / Of Engelond” and from all three estates that make up the tripartite schema of society: those who pray (clerics), those who fight (knights and nobility), and those who labor (workmen) (14). An unlikely pilgrimage party! A majority of the population consisted of the third estate (the laborers) the class Chaucer himself was in.

All of the pilgrims in the General Prologue are introduced by Chaucer the pilgrim in a similar fashion—no matter their class nor their level of morality. Indeed, what also makes Chaucer unique from his contemporaries who also treat social class in their prologues is that his narrator, whether ironically or not, admires the moral ones as much as the corrupt ones. After all, he is simply a fellow traveller. Though, of course, the irony of much of what the narrator says is on the page. His portrait of the Monk, for instance, asks us “How shal the world be served?” (187). An odd question to ask of a monk who should be in the cloister and not hunting. Even odder, the Monk thinks the Benedictine Rule is worth nothing, and Chaucer the pilgrim proclaims that his “opinion was good” (183) and “Lat Austyn have his swynk to hym reserved!” (188). When reading this well-fed and dressed Monk against the ideal “good” and “povre” but “rich… of hooly thoght and werk” Parson (477, 479), who Chaucer the pilgrim also admires (“A bettre preest I trowe that nowher noon ys” 524), it is hard to tell how Chaucer the pilgrim defines good.

In his literary treatment of social class, Chaucer the writer is keenly aware that all of the estates have mutual obligations towards one another—to uphold common profit. However, he knew that worldly flourishing depended on another kind of profit— individual financial profit. The definition of profit that we think of today.

Chaucer presents his pilgrims in an atypical order from the start, mixing different estates seemingly due to their professional relationships rather than based on their profession alone. The first religious portraits we get next to each other are of the very worldly Prioress and Monk. The Merchant and the Friar are also connected through order. Though merchants receive a lot of criticism in other works that engage with social class, as well as provide a challenge for the Church at this time, Chaucer hardly spends time describing his. Though the Merchant practices usury (then considered a sin), he is deemed a “worthy man,” just as the scheming Friar who saves souls not for God but for money. Look at which pilgrims follow each other to get a sense of the sometimes surprising professional similarities and networks Chaucer is calling attention to.

Chaucer the pilgrim apologizes for the disruption in the tale-telling order to come:

Also I prey yow to foryeve it me,
Al have I nat set folk in hir degree
Heere in this tale, as that they sholde stonde.
My wit is short, ye may well understonde.

Also I pray you forgive me,
I have not placed the pilgrims in their social degree
Here in this tale as they should stand.
My wit is short, you may well understand. (743-746)

Not only in the tale-telling order does this disruption occur, but the Host positions himself out of degree as the pilgrims’ guide and is elevated by them to their “governour” to judge and keep record of their tales and to set the winning dinner price (813, 816). But, unsurprisingly perhaps, we find he is not quite as obedient and good at keeping order as the pilgrims initially think he is.

Instead of appointing the first tale teller, the Host has the pilgrims draw straws before they depart. The Knight wins the draw much to the joy of the party, but you will soon see that his tale is followed by the drunken Miller, much to the displeasure of the Host who wanted the Monk to go next.

Interplay between pilgrims within the prologues and tales helps us identify a rough order in which the tales should be read, but we cannot know Chaucer’s final intentions. Though the Host proposes each pilgrim tell four tales in total, we only get one from most of those mentioned, none from others, and some tales from pilgrims who are absent from this prologue. Remember Chaucer left the Tales incomplete and gave no explicit indication of his desired order of reading, or even any indication he had a finalized order in mind. And there is debate not only about order among scholars but also about whether the tale really fits the teller. We will revisit the portraits of the pilgrims when we get to each of their tales. You will have to let me know your thoughts on these matters as we go.

Reading Schedule

This will be your year (at least!) of Chaucer! My aim is to get out a post bi-monthly (cover two tales each month). However, life sometimes gets in the way of the best plans and some tales require more attention than others. Therefore, consider this a hopeful promise. Here is the order I will be going in regardless of pace (following the groupings in the Wadsworth edition). They survive in ten fragments:

Fragment 1: General Prologue; The Knight’s Tale; The Miller’s Prologue and Tale; The Reeve’s Prologue and Tale; and The Cook’s Prologue and Tale

Fragment 2: The Man of Law’s Introduction, Prologue, Tale, and Epilogue

Fragment 3: The Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale; The Friar’s Prologue and Tale; and, The Summoner’s Prologue and Tale

Fragment 4: The Clerk’s Prologue and Tale; and, The Merchant’s Prologue, Tale, and Epilogue

Fragment 5: The Squire’s Introduction and Tale; and, The Franklin’s Prologue and Tale

Fragment 6: The Physician’s Tale; and, The Pardoner’s Introduction, Prologue, and Tale

Fragment 7: The Shipman’s Tale; The Prioress’s Prologue and Tale; The Prologue and Tale of Sir Thopas; The Tale of Melibee; The Monk’s Prologue and Tale; and, The Nun’s Priest Prologue, Tale, and Epilogue

Fragment 8: The Second Nun’s Prologue and Tale; and, The Canon’s Yeoman’s Prologue and Tale

Fragment 9: The Manciple’s Prologue and Tale

Fragment 10: The Parson’s Prologue and Tale; and, Chaucer’s Retraction

Encouragement!

If this is your first time reading, or if it has been awhile since you’ve read the Tales, give yourself grace. If you are reading out of your “brick” or other scholarly edition, go slowly. Or, read a translation first and then go to the Middle English so that you have a general idea of the content first. There’s much lost in translation, of course, but a modern translation is a helpful place to start, especially if you find yourself getting overwhelmed. Don’t give up! We are going to go slow, and you can go at whatever pace makes sense for your life right now. These posts will be waiting for you whenever you are ready. Read them first or read them after. There is no right way. Personally, I prefer to enter a text without much knowledge about it. Then go back and learn more and read again. With all great literature, the text only gets better each time you revisit it.

I encourage you not to read for mastery this time as you might once have for a school assignment. Read for delight—in the theme of this newsletter. Chaucer, I suspect, would have preferred you read that way.

Please keep me updated to how your reading is going in the comments. What did you notice? What excites you? What are you finding delightful? Difficult? And by the end, let me know which tale you think should win the dinner.

Many thanks for joining me here and for your support!

Up Next: The Knight’s Tale

When Geoffrey Chaucer wrote in England, not only was the computer an unimaginable tool but also arguably print itself. William Caxton would not set up his printing press there until around 1476, though one of the first texts he’d print would be Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales of which around 21 copies remain.1 All books were manuscripts— texts written by hand—mostly copied by scribes, instead of by the authors themselves.

Chaucers Wordes Unto Adam, His Own Scriveyn

Adam scriveyn, if ever it thee bifalle
Boece or Troylus for to wryten newe,
Under thy long lokkes thou most have the scalle,
But after my makyng thow wryte more trewe;
So ofte adaye I mot thy werk renewe,
It to correcte and eke to rubbe and scrape,
And al is thorugh thy negligence and rape.

Adam, scribe, if you ever
Miscopy my Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy or Troilus and Criseyde again
Under your long hair, may you have a scalp infection
Unless you copy it more faithfully to my poetic creation;
Often daily, I revise your work
To correct it and in addition rub and erase (scrape the parchment),
All because of your negligence and haste.2

This short poem written by Chaucer, described to “read like some of the personal epigrams of the ancients,” gives us insight into medieval concerns with this book-copying practice. As evidenced, scribes played an integral role in textual transmission and their own unique idiosyncrasies showed up in their copies. No doubt this likely concerned the creators of texts who would see what they imagined sometimes re-imagined in copies. You will see a diverse range of spellings, for one, across copies of the same text (a gift to us today as it helps us discover where certain manuscripts were copied!) and changes to words and order. There also were scribal errors, which many academics who transcribe manuscripts themselves are sympathetic to.3 Authorial control was no doubt weakened by this middle role.

The scribe Chaucer chides in this lyric is called Adam, who some scholars have surmised may have been Adam Pinkhurst—debated copyist of, among other texts, the Ellesmere Chaucer (regarded as the best copy) and the Hengwrt Chaucer— but the name Adam is also arguably an allusion to the Adam of Biblical fame.

This dense and very short poem is at once a playful curse-threat to one of Chaucer’s scribes (Adam) and a philosophical meditation on the medieval writing process. Delightfully Chaucerian, it showcases just how slippery Chaucer’s polysemous words are—a necessary preparation for our entrance into the Canterbury Tales—and how much may be lost, therefore, when not reading his work in the Middle English. You may miss, for instance, the richness of “wryten newe,” “thy worke renewe,” “after my makyng,” and “thorugh thy negligence and rape.” As you read Chaucer, consult the Middle English Dictionary to learn the different denotations of even seemingly familiar words.

But Chaucer, like his scribe Adam, is a translator— in Chaucer’s case from other languages into English and in the Canterbury Tales from the fictional mouths of other English speakers onto the page. He admits across his oeuvre the challenge of translation in its various forms. In the Canterbury Tales, Chaucer the narrator/pilgrim continues to (whether ironically or not) call attention to his labor to get what each pilgrim says right and record it according to their own method, shown well in his widely-debated apology to the reader in the General Prologue:

But first I pray yow, of youre curteisye,
That ye n'arette it nat my vileynye,
Thogh that I pleynly speke in this mateere,
To telle yow hir wordes and hir cheere,
Ne thogh I speke hir wordes proprely.
For this ye knowen al so wel as I:
Whoso shal telle a tale after a man,
He moot reherce as ny as evere he kan
Everich a word, if it be in his charge,
Al speke he never so rudeliche and large,
Or ellis he moot telle his tale untrewe,
Or feyne thyng, or fynde wordes newe.
He may nat spare, althogh he were his brother;
He moot as wel seye o word as another.
Crist spak hymself ful brode in hooly writ,
And wel ye woot no vileynye is it.
Eek Plato seith, whoso kan hym rede,
The wordes moote be cosyn to the dede. GP 725-742

But first I pray yow, of your courtesy,
That you do not attribute it to my rudeness,
Though I speak plainly in this matter,
To tell you their words and their behavior,
Nor though I speak their words accurately.
For this you know as well as I:
Whoever must repeat a story after someone,
He must repeat as closely as ever he knows how
Every single word, if it be in his power,
Although he may speak ever so rudely and freely,
Or else he must tell his tale inaccurately,
Or make up things, or find new words.
He may not refrain from (telling the truth), although he were his brother;
He must as well say one word as another.
Christ himself spoke very plainly in holy writ,
And you know well it is no rudeness.
Also Plato says, whosoever knows how to read him,
The words must be closely related to the deed.4

Chaucer attests to care about representing the pilgrims according to their own unique narrative voices—something we will discuss in the next post.

Sitting down with our scholarly edition of Chaucer, we are experiencing it in a different way than Chaucer would have thought possible, though there’s no doubt scholarly editors deeply care about getting it right, likely even more than some medieval scribes.

Whether by writer revising scribe, as Chaucer explains he does by rubbing and scraping the parchment, or by writer revising oneself, many of the canonical texts that survive from this period were highly revised, and some, like the Canterbury Tales, were even left unfinished. But that reality is lost in the way we normally are introduced to these works in an age that prioritizes and upholds at least the myth of publishing a near-perfect work.

It is often impossible to tell, unless told, that the Canterbury Tales are incomplete in our modern editions. In the Middle Ages, as evidenced in the remaining manuscript copies, some of the Tales were copied without the others, and when complete, out of order.

And Chaucer wasn’t alone in this. Not only his but also many of his contemporaries’ poems and other writing circulated in imperfect and incomplete versions in small circles and would be read aloud for dramatic effect.

Today, we have also lost that performative feel of these medieval texts. The editions we meet these stories in are written by scholars who have based their versions on multiple circulating manuscripts deemed the most reliable, or sometimes just on one. The feel and look of such an edition with contextual footnotes already puts us in a perhaps necessary but nonetheless foreign mode of ingesting the text. It’s hard to know just what Chaucer would have thought about the scholarly edition that most encounter his work in.

The material realities of textual transmission in the Middle Ages are perhaps even more alien now than ever, especially as we rely more and more on computers that make the composing and copying process easier and less human, though still as error prone as ever. Back then, textual creation was especially laborious, expensive, smelly, and not vegan. Paper would not find its way from China to the Arab world to parts of Europe to England until likely the later fifteenth century.5

The act of creating a manuscript relied on a collaboration between animal, plant, insect, craftsman, merchant, monk, writer, among others. The material being written on was animal skin, usually sheep, cow, or goat—called vellum or parchment, technical words used interchangeably—that had been treated with lime, water, and chalk. Lime to break down the “hair side” after initial scraping by a knife or rock and to discourage worms from eating the leaves (what we would today consider pages). Chalk to fill in the pores and irregularities on the “skin side.” It could take up to a hundred (in the case of longer and larger texts) livestock to create one book! And it was not a fast or independent endeavor. Professionals in the later Middle Ages could likely complete a full-length manuscript in a week, while a monk in the eleventh century might only be able to complete three or four a year.6

Once treated, the skins would then be folded for the size of the final book— words you may have only heard in relation to Shakespeare come in handy here—folio (one fold); quarto (two folds); octavo (three folds); and, duodecimo (four folds). Finally the leaves would be sewn together in quires, or gatherings, or signatures of usually eight to 10 leaves (bundles of pages, you can still see these separate groupings of pages in modern books) that would be sewn to each other.7

When you see references to manuscripts in this Substack and elsewhere, you will see reference not only to the page (leaf) number (as you would in books) but also to whether the writing appears on the back side (left-side of an open book) of a leaf (verso) or on the front side (right-side of an open book) of a leaf (recto)— these are simplified to v or r, respectively. Therefore, the citation above for Chaucer’s short poem to Adam, Cambridge, Trinity College, MS r.33.20, f.367r refers to the library where the manuscript is housed “Cambridge”, the name of the manuscript “MS r.33.20”, as well as the leaf and the side it appears “f.367r.”

The writing instrument used by scribes was usually a quill (geese or swans allegedly made the best ones!), and the inks used within could be from materials as distinct as iron or oak gall, gold (illumination), or charcoal or even ashes, depending on the sites they were made and their financial status. If one added in any colored ink, usually red, it is called rubrication.8 The diversity in manuscript material highlights the extensive and vast global trade routes of the Middle Ages.

And the content of the manuscript was not always clear by its outward appearance— don’t judge a book by its cover, indeed! A copy of the Bible, for instance, could be ornate (a piece of art!) or plain with diluted black ink in the form of ashes used depending on the wealth of the monastery it was copied in and its intended audience. And sacred and secular texts by different writers were often bound together in the same codex.

Some of the surviving Canterbury Tales are pieces of art with marginal vine work, while most are quite plain. Same text— different audiences.

For arguably the most beautiful copy, observe the Ellesmere Chaucer and the glorious, golden and multi-colored, demi-vinet borders in the margins as well as the initial (enlarged beginning letter at the start of a section), and the pilgrim portrait (in this case allegedly Chaucer himself telling the tale of Melibee!):

I encourage you to go back to the early copies of the Canterbury Tales in manuscripts, especially as viewing them online has never been easier, to read the way Chaucer’s audience would have. If you are lucky enough to live by or visit a rare book library that has a copy, go see it, smell it, and feel it— if allowed! It will only enrich your reading.

Regardless of where you keep yours, you hopefully look at it every now and then and think, I should read, or re-read, that. You may even have fond (or dreadful!) memories of the year when you were forced to memorize the opening eighteen lines of the General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales.

“Whan that Aprill with his shoures soote
When April with its sweet-smelling showers
The droghte of March hath perced to the roote,
Has pierced the drought of March to the root,
And bathed every veyne in swich licour
And bathed every vein (of the plants) in such liquid
Of which vertu engendred is the flour;
By which power the flower is created;
Whan Zephirus eek with his sweete breeth
When the West Wind also with its sweet breath,
Inspired hath in every holt and heeth
In every wood and field has breathed life into
The tendre croppes, and the yonge sonne
The tender new leaves, and the young sun
Hath in the Ram his half cours yronne,
Has run half its course in Aries,
And smale foweles maken melodye,
And small fowls make melody,
That slepen al the nyght with open ye
Those that sleep all the night with open eyes
(So priketh hem Nature in hir corages),
(So Nature incites them in their hearts),
Thanne longen folk to goon on pilgrimages,
Then folk long to go on pilgrimages,
And palmeres for to seken straunge strondes,
And professional pilgrims to seek foreign shores,
To ferne halwes, kowthe in sondry londes;
To distant shrines, known in various lands;
And specially from every shires ende
And specially from every shire’s end
Of Engelond to Caunterbury they wende,
Of England to Canterbury they travel,
The hooly blisful martir for to seke,
To seek the holy blessed martyr,
That hem hath holpen whan that they were seeke.
Who helped them when they were sick.1

Those lines will ring in your mind as you remember moving your tongue around those words that at once sound familiar but strange.

Or, as is sadly becoming more likely now, you may not have ever heard of this writer called Chaucer, except for in passing, nor heard or read any of his poems, not even the Canterbury Tales. Even if you have read some of them, you likely have not read the words in Middle English nor been forced to memorize and recite the opening lines, for better or worse. Of course, worse in my view. But, I am biased.

For the past few newsletters, I’ve opened with a quote written by Geoffrey Chaucer—the man given the name “The Father of English Literature”— to guide us into the strange linguistic terrain that is early English. Therefore, I’d like to continue our delighting by (re)introducing you to his once infamous Canterbury Tales. The form each entry will take is still being solidified as I think about each Tale with you and its muses and legacies in the theme of this newsletter.

For there is no better writer to start with than one who speaks both to his age as well as to our current day. One who is, as Ben Jonson once famously wrote of William Shakespeare, not of an age, but for all time.

Given the required brevity of Substack posts, I will not go into much detail about Geoffrey Chaucer’s life here. You can hear me talk a bit more about him on Old Book’s with Grace’s podcast2 or better yet read his Life Records (which we are so lucky to have!) as well as some wonderful biographies.3

What I do want to convey here is that Chaucer was not who we today would consider a professional writer; he held a wide variety of “day” jobs while he was composing the works that would make him be remembered throughout centuries.

He wrote during the later part of the Middle Ages in a chiefly London dialect and was considered a great translator of continental European poetry into English. His Reeve’s Tale gives us one of the earliest representations of dialect as dialect in English, which we will look at when we arrive at that tale.

He witnessed plague in London as well as multiple political changes and challenges, namely the Peasant’s Revolt— the inflection point occurring right outside his place of residence (Aldgate, see image below). And, he chose rather unfashionably at the time to write all of his major works in English.

So, whether you’ll be reading with me out of your copy of the “brick”, an interlinear-or facing-translation, or another version!, please share with me in the comments what purpose you are bringing to your (re)read (will you, for instance, attempt to memorize lines in Middle English to recite to your family and friends this go round?) and what you would like to see in the posts to come. I only ask that you read the Middle English at least alongside a translation. You can do it!

Very much looking forward to diving into this familiar yet alien world together.

Next Up: General Prologue

Ther was also a Nonne, a Prioresse
That of hir smylyng was ful symple and coy
…
And Frenssh she spak ful faire and fetisly
After the scole of Stratford atte Bowe
For Frenssh of Parys was to hire unknowe”

Chaucer, Canterbury Tales, General Prologue, ll. 118-119, 124-126.

So what is Middle English? Before we answer that, let’s delight in a related question first: What is Anglo-Norman French? The French spoken in England in the 11th and 12th centuries highlights the shared history between England and France (sometimes referred to as soeurs ennemies!)1 and helps us understand how English went from

Germanic Old English:
Hwæt sægest þu yrþlingc?2

To its modern form:
What say you, Plowman?

As Chaucer’s narrator explains, the Prioresse speaks not the “Frenssh of Parys”— French of Paris/Central French (the ancestor of Modern French)—but the French of the school of Stratford at Bowe, or what is Anglo-Norman French (dictionaries sometimes refer to it as Northern French).3

Though by Chaucer’s day the English regarded the French of Paris as the sophisticated dialect, a version of Anglo-Norman French was the language of the English nobility for approximately two centuries!4

Both Early (approx. 1066-1325) and Late Middle English competed with other written languages for status and took inspiration from them. While Middle English kept its status as the vernacular (or spoken language) of most people, Latin (the language of the church and laws) and French (the language of the court and of the upper class) were the languages found in most of the writing of the early Middle English period. Literary evidence shows that many English writers likely knew and wrote in French and that much of the earliest French vernacular writing came from England.

Anglo-Norman’s entry to England is largely due to the result of the Battle of Hastings. After his defeat of Harold Godwinson in 1066, William of Normandy replaced many of the English aristocrats with Normans and gave them vast amounts of land to reward their loyalty as well as elevated Anglo-Norman speaking bishops, thus creating the trilingual context. And his actions had the effect of approximately two centuries of English kings primarily being monolingual French speakers. It was not until centuries later, until Edward I (1272), that historians suspect that an English king had good control of the English language that his subjects spoke, and it wasn’t until 1362 that English was used to open Parliament. Even Henry II (r. 1154-89), Queen Matilda’s son, the first Angevin and Plantagenet king, likely needed a translator to understand English. Therefore, though French use declines in England by the thirteenth century, it reigned as the primary language of the English nobility for centuries.

The Normans not only influenced the language but also the architecture of England, including such infamous UNESCO World Heritage Sites as Durham Cathedral, that houses the bodies of St. Cuthbert and the Venerable Bede, and the Tower of London, built by William of Normandy on the Thames River to protect London.

***

In the literature of this early Middle English period, the French are known for bringing fin’amors (courtly love) to England. Many writers in England and the British Isles contributed to this tradition in French first and then later in their own vernacular. Examples still popular today are the tales of King Arthur.

One such writer who participated in the Arthurian tradition, thought to have written in Henry II’s court, is Marie de France. Her infamous Lais (short narrative poems with octosyllabic rhyming couplets) were dedicated to a king and inspired by Breton minstrels who sung at court.

As with many of the writers of the period, we do not know much about Marie. British Library Harley MS 978 gives us the two main works that are attributed to her— a collection of Aesopic Fables (or, Ysopë) and the full collection of her twelve lais with a prologue.5 In this manuscript, we learn that Marie wrote them from her explanation at the end of her Fables that ‘Marie ai nun si sui de F[ra]nce’ ('Marie is my name and I am from [of] France') and from the werewolf lai Guigemar, “Oez, seigneurs, ke dit Marie” (Listen, lords, to the tale of Marie).

Take a look at Marie’s French from the first stanza of the Lais' prologue:

Ki Deus ad duné enscïence
E de parler bone eloquence
Ne s’en deit taisir ne celer,
Ainz se deit volunters mustrer.
Quant uns granz biens est mult oïz,
Dunc a primes est il fluriz,
E quant loëz est de plusurs,
Dunc ad espandues ses flurs.

Whom God has given intelligence
and the great gift of eloquence
must not conceal these, or keep still,
but share and show them with good will.
When much is heard of some good thing,
then comes its first fine flowering;
when many more have praise to give,
these blossoms flourish, spread and thrive.6

To hear how the language might have sounded, visit the Fordham Library’s collection from the French of England and hear Judy Shoaf read Lanval via Arthuriana’s website.

***

Not only is MS Harley 978 important to literary scholars because it contains the most complete version of Marie’s Lais and her Fables, it is also an important manuscript to musicologists because of the compositions in it. Harley 978 is a miscellany— a collection of different texts— written for monks at Reading Abbey (founded by Henry I).

I would be remiss to end our delighting in this particular moment and in MS Harley 978 without (re?)introducing you to, debatably, the oldest surviving written instance of “fart” in English— “uerteþ”— and the first rota in English, as well: “Sumer [Spring] is icumen in”!7 The oldest copy is in MS Harley 978 and a picture of the leaf below is displayed at the Reading Abbey Ruins.8

Sumer is icumen in·
Lhude sing cuccu·
Groweþ sed and bloweþ med·

And springþ þe wde nu·
Sing cuccu·
Awe bleteþ after lomb·
Lhouþ after calue cu·
Bulluc sterteþ, bucke uerteþ·
Murie sing cuccu·
Cuccu, cuccu, wel singes þu cuccu·

Ne swik þu nauer nu·
Pes·

Sing cuccu nu. Sing cuccu·
Sing cuccu. Sing cuccu nu·

Spring has come in,
Loudly sing, Cuckoo!
The seed grows and the meadow blooms
And the forest springs anew,
Sing, Cuckoo!

Ewe bleats after lamb
Cow lows after the calf,
Bullock leaps, buck farts,
Merrily sing, Cuckoo!

Cuckoo, cuckoo, well you sing, cuckoo;
Don't ever you stop now,

Sing cuckoo now. Sing, Cuckoo.
Sing Cuckoo. Sing cuckoo now!

Take a listen to this rendition done by Exeter University students:

Until next time…

It is an honor to have Dr. Grace Hamman— author of the delightful Medievalish with Grace Hamman Substack, many esteemed books and articles, including her forthcoming Ask of Old Paths: Medieval Virtues and Vices for a Whole and Holy Life, and host of the podcast Old Books with Grace— as my first “Delighting With” guest. I am thrilled to share with you her pearls (pun-intended!) of wisdom about studying Middle English and the gorgeous verse of Pearl.

This is an especially fitting Middle English text for us to discuss as Grace and I met what feels long ago while pursuing doctorates in a dual English and Divinity course on the Pearl- and other medieval poets at Duke University. I hope you delight in this chat as much as we did!

Hello, Dr. Grace Hamman! I am so thrilled that you are here delighting with me and that you are the first Delighting With guest as you are my inspiration in this space.

Before we turn to the passage in Middle English you chose to delight in with us today, I wanted to ask you about your Middle English origin story. What made you want to enter into this alien language and time period initially?

It’s one of those questions people ask me regularly, and I’m sure it’s one you get asked fairly regularly, too. Everyone thinks that Middle English is pretty niche: How did you get into that? It’s a story that somewhat changes because there were several different paths that converged. One of those paths was that I was always into history and literature, and I loved reading old books from the time I was a little kid. I loved Louisa May Alcott and all of the nineteenth-century novelists. I loved history and all of the Dear America Diaries. All that stuff. And then, I started realizing that words had histories, too! For me, that was first through names. I was really interested in naming and name histories, which is very classic seventh-grade super nerd.

When I was in college, I was an English major and took a class called History of the English Language. And, oh gosh— that same thing I was obsessed with years before with names, turns out it was the entire language that you could do that with! You could trace these words and see their histories and their paths and their beauty and their hidden meanings, their deeper origins. And I just thought that was the coolest thing. So then I took a Middle English Chaucer class in my undergraduate and thought, ok this is really interesting; this is cool. But I still wasn’t thinking, I will become a medievalist now! That was just a fun thing. I still thought I was more into novels. So when I did my master’s degree—partially because I didn’t know what else to do with my life and thought I can do this for free and teach—I took a class that was on other Middle English that was not Chaucer. In that class, I encountered Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and Piers Plowman and some of the works that really, all of the sudden, made me fall in love with Middle English. I was a Christian at a very secular university, which was great for me, but it was wild to all of the sudden enter a world where theology was just as inescapable as any other big-idea concept. In all of my other classes, it had largely been ignored, but you can’t ignore it in Middle English. So it was a blending of things I deeply cared about. From then on, I just kept going. All of the sudden, I was getting a doctorate and so in love with Middle English. I think it’s really beautiful. A beautiful language that also has a lot to tell us about ourselves that we sometimes forget.

I love how paths in life take us in different directions than we expect. And then, somehow, it was always meant to be because it ends up being the convergence of, as you said, so many things we care passionately about but didn’t quite know existed until we stumbled into them.

That’s right. How often is it with a passion that it happens that way? You wouldn’t have been able to look ahead and see that. You would have never been like medievalist, yes, that’s what I am going to do! But then, in retrospect, you look back at all these little threads that cross each other, and it almost seems inevitable. But at the time, there was no way you could have seen them. So that’s the beauty of it.

I didn’t know that you were obsessed with names from a young age and that was the catalyst into your Middle English future and your way to meet me!

I know, right?! It’s amazing.

You’re gesturing to it in the final part of your origin answer, but why do you think that everyone should know about Middle English? Why should they study it? Not just people in the academy—anyone, anywhere. What is rewarding about it to you?

I love how you ask what’s rewarding about it because one of the things you and I share in our study and pursuit of Middle English is that we strongly feel that the payoff is not obvious. You cannot instrumentalize it. Like so many of the humanities, their beauty is in the delighting, which you so often talk about. When you spend a lot of time with old words, you have to slow down. You can’t go fast. So that’s automatically a check for us in our culture today. And something that is useful. But that’s not the point of studying Middle English. That’s a side bonus. Middle English is beautiful on its own terms, and it also is like anything that is different from your current context and culture, it is going to invite you into deeper, more contemplative, more meditative thinking about the world you live in instead of knee-jerk reactions because of familiarity. And when it’s at the level of language, I think that becomes even more obvious. In my dissertation, I wrote on humility in late-medieval contemplative writing. The reason why I chose to do that is because I kept coming across the notion of humility, or even the actual word humility, in these Middle English texts. And this word humilite is working differently than the word I know in modern English. It’s doing different things; it has a different weight to it. It has a different way of impacting the reader. And so, I was drawn to unpacking this word and this concept that still exists today. I never would have thought about it so deeply had I not been introduced through these foreign forms that were still my language, technically, but in such a different world and being used with such a different weight. That has been a huge gift of Middle English to me. I am paying attention to things that maybe I would have missed.

I love that. Middle English makes us pause when so often everything is about faster-faster in our current culture— how much can you consume? But you can’t consume even the language of Middle English fast. It’s multi-layered. With that in mind, what are you delighting in with us today?

One of the texts that tipped me head-over-heals into Middle English— that made me think this is amazing, this is beautiful and fascinating— was the works of the anonymous Pearl-poet. For me initially, it was Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. But really, the poem I love even more by this anonymous-fourteenth-century poet who was living to the northwest of London is Pearl. I wrote my first dissertation chapter on it. It was the first poem in Middle English that I had to sit with for a super, super long time. And so, it holds a special place in my heart because of that. I thought that I would read to you the last stanza of Pearl.

Ooh yes— what a choice! The most beautiful verse in all of Middle English! I’m excited. Do you want to preface it, especially because it’s the last stanza?

I’ll give you some background. Here’s the thing with Pearl— I hesitated to choose it for awhile because it is a poem that pays off your reading through reading the whole thing with great intention. It is not a quick, digestible, easy thing. So I was a little nervous to choose it because the way that we are reading it right now is not the way that you should read it, technically. But, I love this particular dialect. This is not the London dialect. This is not Chaucer’s dialect. It’s a harder form of Middle English because our Modern English is a direct ancestor of the London dialect, which is what the Canterbury Tales was written in. And then, later, Shakespeare and the Early Modern works are all directly coming from the London dialect. So this is a different kind of dialect. And that’s why I chose it because it’s fun to see the diversity of Middle English, too, and it’s so beautiful. And, like you said, I don’t think he has a competitor for the most beautiful poetry in English, in Middle English, and maybe all of English.

I agree!

He’s up there for all of English.

Pearl really is such a beautiful poem, and your writing on Pearl is so sharp, Grace. The poem itself is about loss thematically. Maybe you could share a little about that?

There’s a lot of mystery around the origin of Pearl. We know nothing about the poet who wrote it or why he wrote it unlike some other Middle English poets where we have a little more context. It’s about the loss of someone very dear to either the poet or to the poet’s persona. But he is writing about grief very personally. So even if it is not a direct loss, we know it is coming out of some experience of grief specifically. Because I don’t think you can write poetry like this without it being personal in some way. So we don’t know if this is autobiographical, but this is about an experience of grief. The poet opens with a person, a man who calls himself a jeweler, and he has lost his precious pearl. His pearl has gone into the earth. We know, in classic medieval fashion, that he is talking allegorically, and is also talking about an actual experience of grief, a person, who he is calling his pearl, who has died. The Pearl-poet, and medieval people in general, love speaking in multi-layered referential points. He is the jeweler whose lost his pearl, and he is also a man who has lost his beloved. I read the poem as the loss of a child. Many critics read it that way or as the loss of a lover. The poem is not too specific about the relationship, but we know it is someone who was very near and dear and someone who was very young.

The dreamer falls into a swoon on her grave and experiences what we call a dream vision. And dream visions were a very popular late medieval genre that stretched back to antiquity where the main character, as we say now but they would not have used that language, has a dream that is theologically- or philosophically-loaded. A lot of the time it has to do with heaven or the afterlife or an allegorical story. Chaucer writes these dream visions that go back to Macrobius and all these Latin writers. So it is a very storied tradition that this poet is participating in. He goes into a dream vision. And his dream vision is that he finds himself in this stunningly beautiful, bejeweled landscape. This poet loves ornate, intricate poetry. And he just goes wild. He has the most amazing poetry describing the Kingdom of Heaven. And he meets this young girl who he recognizes immediately as his lost pearl. This is the story of her teaching him about the nature of the Kingdom of Heaven within the context of grief. And that is the story. and eventually, he is so caught up in the excitement of the moment—sorry, spoiler alert!— that he crosses the river dividing him and her to possess her, even though he knows he shouldn’t. And then he wakes up. The dream vision ends. At first he is disappointed, but then he comes to a peace that is beyond understanding. And his grief remains, but he has this new experience of peace. So that is this stanza that I am going to read.

To pay þe Prince oþer sete saʒte
Hit is ful eþe to þe god Krystyin;
For I haf founden Hym, boþe day and naʒte,
A God, a Lorde, a frende ful fyin.
Ouer þis hyul þis lote I laʒte,
For pyty of my perle enclyin,
And syþen to God I hit bytaʒte,
In Krystez dere blessyng and myn,
Þat in þe forme of bred and wyn
Þe preste vus schewez vch a daye.
He gef vus to be His homey hyne
Ande precious perlez vnto His pay.
Amen. Amen. (1201-1212)

To please that Prince, to be contrite,
Can all good Christians still incline.
For He is near, both noon and night,
Our God, our Lord, and Friend. For mine
Was a fair fortune when on height
For my pure pearl I swooned, supine.
Since then I’ve stayed true and right.
So with Christ’s blessings, free and fine,
Which in the form of Bread and Wine
Many a mortal daily sees,
Oh, may we serve Him well and shine
As precious pearls our Lord to please.
Amen Amen1

What made you think of this particular part of the poem?

This is my favorite stanza because it is a prayer. And it is a confounding prayer. Because the narrator has not shown us that he has changed from the person at the start of the poem who was struggling so much. At first you wonder, what are you supposed to do with a prayer like that? Everything in the past few thousand lines has been a struggle and not straight forward. How can he pray something like that? It doesn’t seem authentic to his experience. So that’s a challenge. Secondly, in classic Pearl-poet fashion, he loves to bring images back up again. These lines are actually a call back to the first stanza of the poem where he talks about pleasing the prince and becoming a precious pearl in his service. So he’s coming full-circle back to the beginning of the poem, but all this stuff has happened in between. And what I love about that is that you can’t explain it away easily. That’s authentic to an experience of grief and reconciliation where there’s no words that tie it up. You just go back into it. People have talked about the shape of the poem. They say that it’s round like a pearl, but it’s actually a spiral. You are always going back to the beginning of this experience, but you’ve read it and been through it. And so, you will never read it again the same way. I think he is thinking about spiritual transformation and how we return to these prayers and to these places of suffering and of grief and how the Lord is with us in it. The easiness of reconciliation isn’t that it is actually easy, because it is actually very hard, but that Christ, in the form of bread and wine, that Eucharistic image, and the image of friendship and lordship, is present. That’s a very simplistic way of expressing a complicated poem and complicated idea. But I love how he is thinking of spiritual formation and transformation in reading.

Not simplistic at all! That’s so beautiful and true. I always try to use the poet’s alliterative verse and repetition to help me unpack this, as you rightly say, very complicated poem. The precios perle wythouten spote— one of the repeated final lines in his opening stanzas (in many different spellings!)2— who turns into the dreamer’s little queen, among other things, and ultimately into the Christian community. As you said, the dreamer begins and continues to grow more possessive in spite of his pearl’s teaching, but then he prays in this completely transformed manner. It reminds me that it is hard not to focus on our own singular desires in our humanity, but those desires are completely transcended in community— in the body of Christ.

And what you are saying about grief makes me think of how we all share in grief. It’s a communal experience. At the beginning, the dreamer, like so many of us, is wrapped up in his own iteration of loss, that he isn’t able to comprehend any of the spiritual truths that are taught to him by his precious Pearl. And it’s so relatable, but you want to shout at him, come on! But he just won’t receive her teaching, no matter her varied approach, often in dramatic form. But by the end, he comes to this beautiful sentiment.

Yes, I love how he’s always expanding images. They are never static. They never stay where they are. So in the beginning he’s lost this pearl. It’s his pearl. He can’t find it. He is devastated by its loss. By the end, he has still lost his pearl, she is not back with him on earth; however, that central image of the lost pearl has been transformed and expanded into this pearl imagery that comes from the gospels and the Kingdom of Heaven that was always there underneath that image but is now the forefront of that image. Where that pearl cannot be lost and that we are all precious pearls held in that divine love is the final image of the poem. He does that classic medieval move where he is combining images of homely hyne (humble servants) and precious perlez (precious pearls). So he’s combining lower images with these high images. He is breaking apart the barriers between the high and low. He is crossing earth and heaven. He is still there in this spot of earth— this burial mound he is atop. But now there is a spiritual vision to it. It doesn’t leave the grief, but he is in a context instead of only himself in his deep loneliness.

It’s such a fitting passage to choose in light of what you said earlier about why we should study Middle English and its contemplative and meditative qualities. Because you can’t just— and it’s like this with all poetry even in modern English— read it fast and expect to understand all of it at once. I wonder if the loss of an appetite for poetry as a form is because we are not really trained to think with the multi-layered aspects of language. We are not as familiar as perhaps they were—of course, they as in those few who had the privilege to read and write and share in that knowledge in the Middle Ages, but I think even more generally medieval people were more comfortable with slowing down and contemplating ideas than we are now— with allegory because of the Church. The art they would see and the liturgy itself held many levels of meaning at once and that would have been the context for much of their worldview. So the Pearl-poet is breaking down binaries but to understand that it demands an attention that we are poorly trained in given our technology-driven “what’s the easiest way not to think?” world. We get bogged down by what the poem is demanding of us, even in translation. How depressing to miss all of the thought that has been poured over every word and the wisdom that the poem has to offer us, as you just shared.

I completely agree. We catch a glimpse of a world where— it’s not like there weren’t any distractions in the Middle Ages, obviously they had a thousand chores to do daily, a thousand things to worry about, just like we do—but they did not assume that by reading something once you would understand it. In fact, they typically thought the opposite. And the more rewarding a work, the more time and attention it demanded. That’s an expectation we have to adjust as we approach Middle English ourselves. We want it to be very open to us and accessible, and I don’t think that’s a bad instinct. Sometimes medieval people were too obscure and too opaque for their own good, but I will say that is something that I think that they can teach us, especially poetry by the Pearl-poet, Chaucer, or others. It’s particularly obvious in these more difficult dialects how slow you have to read. You just heard how I was translating as I went, and the fact that I had to adjust myself and repeat myself several times, even though I’ve been reading this poem for well over a decade, that goes to show you that these poems really demand your attention, and they demand returns. That is one of the most wonderful things that Middle English can teach us— real slow attention. Do you want deeper meaning? That requires sitting with, and it requires the respect of prolonged attention. Then, it will offer itself to you in that. That’s an attitude towards reading that we are not necessarily used to all the time. Reading like that can teach us then how to approach people like that. It can expand outside our reading to our interactions with each other in the body of Christ, or in difficult situations where you want to write off and judge as quickly as possible. When you are slowing down in other areas, and paying attention in other areas, it opens up invitations for slowing down in your personal life, as well.

That’s really well said. Slowing down often causes you to sit with ideas that are not familiar to you and engage with them in a generous manner as opposed to knee-jerking to dismissing it as too hard. Or thinking, it’s too alien; I couldn’t possibly relate to it. For me, it’s easier to see the connection points when I slow down. It’s easier for me to stop and reflect on how what I am reading changes what I know. Slowing down with the text, as you said, doesn’t only make you a more generous and patient reader but also makes you a more generous and patient person. It can also give us more of an understanding of who we are within a larger community.

If you let it. Of course, I don’t think everyone who reads the literature of the past encounters it that way.

Fair, but we are saying that you should encounter literature of the past that way!

True, at our best, as readers, that happens. When we read with open hearts like that it is infectious in other parts of our lives.

And certainly Middle English literature is a tradition that we are steeped in, at least in the English-speaking Western world, so it is interesting to observe how Middle English writers thought with ancient thinkers outside of their own cultures and context. We know that the so-called Father of the English language, Geoffrey Chaucer, was a diplomat and translator. He was thinking with other languages and cultures outside of his own. Middle English can be a gateway into learning other languages for all of those English-speakers who have been too intimidated to try. Middle English is hard, it is not “snap of the fingers” accessible, but it is still somewhat familiar. You do not have to completely transform how you think in order to enter into it. There is a culture and time gap, but the language is a version of the English that we are speaking today, even if it is in the harder dialect of the Pearl-poet. There are still words that are recognizable. I tell people who are afraid of Middle English, look, you are speaking English, this is a version of English. Why not try a little bit and impress yourself with how much you do understand? It will then provide training on how to do that with completely different languages.

As you said, Grace, you’ve been studying Middle English for decades, and you are still learning from it. What a pleasure to be able to sit with an earlier form of the language and a text and keep returning to it and thinking through it and meditating on it and coming to different conclusions. What more can you ask from anything?

I always think that’s the mark of really good literature, too. Not that it evolves dramatically but that you are constantly catching at new shades, new possibilities that you didn’t see when you first read it— five years ago, ten years ago, fifteen years ago— that’s the joy of something really well crafted in literature. It is going to keep offering itself to you.

Spiritually, too— as you said, you can’t deny that these writers were thinking through that lens. They were puzzling through tough theological quandaries that may at once seem easy but are quite difficult. Pearl shows us that quite profoundly. Not that anyone thinks that grief is easy.

Pearl asks us to think about the ways we seek easy answers for hard things. It’s an obvious theme in this stanza, but it’s apparent also when the narrator is speaking to his daughter—his lost Pearl in the kingdom, the end of the stanza includes an actual paternal blessing to a child. The dreamer is constantly seeking the easy answer to hard things, but his Pearl is constantly correcting him. She’s the teacher. You see the traditional hierarchies are turned upside down— a father is taught by his child, a woman teaches a man, a person who barely knew the Lord’s Prayer now has become a scholar of theology and scriptural passages. We even learn from that model in this poem about how we want easy answers to these big theological questions that are not given to us in a straight-forward way. This poem does a beautiful job of complicating things, not for complication sake, but for our spiritual lives, which is fascinating.

I could listen to you talk about this poem forever, Grace, but I think I am almost at the email word count limit! It’s been so lovely to have this conversation and to delight with you in this stanza. What you’ve said could also be the theme of this Substack— don’t go looking for easy answers in Middle English! But look for delight.

I love that. I think you can’t go wrong whether you are looking at Middle English or Early Modern English if you are reading it for delight and pleasure. It will give things to you if you are approaching it in that way. If you are reading it as a checklist, that won’t necessarily happen. I love how you put the emphasis on delight here as that is the door to so much understanding. Medieval theologians believed that love and understanding are inseparable from each other. That’s how we learn. So that’s a great way in. You can pick one word that you love and that can be your way in. You can enjoy that you made that one connection. That’s a wonderful start.

And with that advice, I am going to end this first Delighting With! Thank you so much, Grace, for taking the time to delight with us and for all of these pearls of wisdom for us to reflect on.

Please check out Grace’s work at the links above and read Pearl. If you want to read the Middle English and a Modern English translation side by side, check out Casey Finch’s translation of The Complete Works of the Pearl Poet.

Until next time, stay well!

Ye knowe ek that in forme of speche is chaunge
Withinne a thousand yeer, and wordes tho
That hadden pris, now wonder nyce and straunge
Us thinketh hem, and yet thei spake hem so… (Troilus and Criseyde, II.22-25)1

You know moreover that forms of speech change
Over a thousand years, and words then
That once had currency, are now astonishingly absurd and unfamiliar
When we think of them now, and yet they spoke them in that manner…

English—in all its forms— is a delightfully strange and striking language. Geoffrey Chaucer’s infamous quote above calling out the reality that language changes across time and that older forms “now wonder nice and straunge” gets to the heart of the theme we are delighting in today— English is a language that is not static but is in flux across time and even today. Its older forms at first seem absurd at worst and unfamiliar at best to most modern speakers. However, as we walk back in time through the forms, I hope that the earlier ones become less absurd, unfamiliar, and intimidating to you and instead become not only somewhat familiar but also, if not already!, delightful.

Though I will be attending to the four major forms scholars use to track the change in the English language over time, please know that these are written samples of the various forms English has taken, not the only forms in a period. Much as the language I am writing is not the only form of Late Modern English written or spoken.

Last time we very briefly delighted in the five now strange letters (þ, ð, æ, ʒ, and ƿ) that show up in Middle English and Old English manuscripts. We also delighted in an excerpt from the widely-circulated 14th-century text Speculum vitae that introduced the three major languages in use in England post-1066: Latin, Anglo-Norman French, and Middle English. But there was an earlier form of English spoken after the Romans left and the Germanic tribes settled there (~400 AD)— what linguists refer to as Old English.2 To answer the question I often get most— Why is Shakespeare not Old English?—let’s begin with the order and names of the four major historical forms:

Old English → Middle English → Early Modern English → Late Modern English

A popular way of introducing the different forms is through a comparison of a text that circulated during all periods The Pater noster (Our Father), its Latin name, or the one commonly known today The Lord’s Prayer from the Book of Matthew.3

As always, listen to me read the first two versions and/or try to read them aloud yourself— yes, even the Old English!:

Old English (OE from roughly the 400 AD through 1066)

Lord’s Prayer 1, Exeter Book, c. ~970, (f. 122r)4

[....]g fæder, þu þe on heofonum eardast,
geweorðad wuldres dreame. Sy þinum weorcum halgad
noma niþþa bearnum; þu eart nergend wera.
Cyme þin rice wide, ond þin rædfæst willa

aræred under rodores hrofe, eac þon on rumre foldan.
Syle us to dæge domfæstne blæd,
hlaf userne, helpend wera,
þone singalan, soðfæst meotod.
Ne læt usic costunga cnyssan to swiðe,

ac þu us freodom gief, folca waldend,
from yfla gewham, a to widan feore.

Middle English (ME, from ~1066 to about the 1500s)

Taken from an inserted treatise on the Pater noster in The Book of Vices and Virtues5

Oure fadre þ^t art in heuene. halwed be þi name…
Þi rewme come to þe in to þe blisse of heuene…
Be þi Wille done, as it is fully don in heuene. so be it don in erþe…
Oure eche dayes breed: graunt vs to day…
Forgyfe vs oure dettes: as we don to oure dettoures…
Oure fadre Lede vs not in to temptacioun…
But gracious fadre, delyuere vs fram yuele. (f.36a-f.36c)

Early Modern English (EMnE, Shakespeare’s English ~1500s to about 1700s)

King James Bible (1611)

Our father which art in heauen, hallowed be thy name.
Thy kingdome come. Thy will be done, in earth, as it is in heauen.
Giue vs this day our daily bread. And forgiue vs our debts, as we forgiue our debters.
And lead vs not into temptation, but deliuer vs from euill:
For thine is the kingdome, and the power, and the glory, for euer, Amen.

Late Modern English (LMnE, roughly 1700s on)

Our father who is in heaven,
Blessed be your name.
May your kingdom come,
May your will be done,
On earth as it is in heaven.
Give us this day our daily bread
And forgive us our sins,
Even as we forgive those who sin against us.
Lead us not into temptation,
But deliver us from evil.

You will at once begin to understand why Shakespeare isn’t Old English (or what I refer to here as one of ME’s muses). Shakespeare’s English is what linguists refer to as Early Modern English (or what I call one of ME’s legacies) and is much closer to Modern English than Old English—both in time and form.

Old English (Englisc) is a Germanic language almost completely foreign to Modern English speakers now. The earliest remaining written form of Old English was inscribed in runes, not in manuscripts but on artifacts such as on the infamous Ruthwell Cross (c. AD730-760), considered the finest surviving sculpture of the period:6

The Ruthwell Cross is huge (5.3 meters / 17 ft. 4 in.) and includes Latin inscriptions, scenes from the life of Christ, and runic carvings of short extracts from “The Dream of the Rood,” such as

ᛣᚱᛁᛋᛏ ᚹᚫᛋ ᚩᚾ ᚱᚩᛞᛁ (runes)
Krist was on rodi (transliteration)
Christ was on the cross (Late Modern English translation)

The poem is the earliest recorded dream poem in English and recounts the poet’s dream about Christ’s cross speaking to him about the experience of carrying Christ during his crucifixtion. The full-length poem is beautiful and reveals much about the culture of those who spoke Old English. For instance, in this poem, you meet not meek Jesus, but warrior Jesus! I delighted in that the first time I learned about early medieval culture and read the poem. The full-length version is recorded in the 10th-century Vercelli Book.7

Those who spoke Old English were not always Christian. Before their widespread conversion in the late sixth century, they were pagan, which is perhaps why the juxtaposition of heroic and Christian ideals manifests in rather fascinating ways.

Another surviving runic artifact is the indecipherable finger-ring at the British Museum that was found in the hamlet of Kingsmoor.

Some scholars surmise that the inscription “᛭ᚨᚱᛦᚱᛁᚢᚠᛚᛏᛦᚱᛁᚢᚱᛁᚦᚩᚾᚷᛚᚨᚴᛏᚨᛈᚩᚾ / ᛏᚨᚿ” and transliteration “+ÆRKRIUFLTKRIURIÞONGLÆSTÆPONTOL” is a charm, and they argue the words have a magical sense.8 Some posit that it inspired J.R.R. Tolkien’s magical rings of power. I certainly see how it likely inspired the one ring to rule them all!

The earliest remaining manuscripts were written by scribes in Catholic monasteries. Harley MS 4657 shows us the work of the scribe attempting to transform the Germanic runic symbols into the Latin alphabet:9

Though Old English is a language very different from the English we speak and write today—even when it is written in the Latin alphabet instead of in Germanic runes!— it is delightful to find the words that are still comprehensible. Maybe you recognized fæder (father) and noma (name) in the Lord’s Prayer 1?

Old English is not a mix of two language families like Middle English (Germanic and Romance), but solidly Germanic, though Latin words did make their way into Old English due to the Germanic tribes contact with the Romans on the continent and through the christianization of them. And, some OE dialects were influenced by other languages beyond Latin— such as Scandinavian languages in the north. However, there was a dedicated attempt, as evidenced in the written documents that survive, to invent new words in Old English rather than adopt foreign words as Middle English would later do not only with Latin but also with Anglo-Norman French. In Old English, instead of using the Latinate word discipulus, or disciple in Modern English, for instance, the Old English scribes who translated the Latin Bible used leorningchniht “a knight of learning.” A banquet, or convivio, in Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People became a gebeorscipe, or “a beer-ship, a drinking party.”10 Absolutely delightful!

Despite Old English appearing foreign and intimidating to modern English speakers, much of modern English comes from Old English words from the various dialects, though from West-Saxon arguably the most. West-Saxon was the dialect of King Alfred, also called “Alfred the Great,” (d. 899) who commissioned scholars and linguists at his court in Winchester to produce and translate manuscripts of classical literature and philosophy into the West-Saxon dialect of Old English. We are indebted to this dialect for words such as heofonum (heaven) and hrofe (roof) and for many of the surviving manuscripts from this period.11

Historians use the Norman Conquest in 1066 when William the Conquerer (named so, though he had a claim to the throne) took power to mark the end of the Old English period and the beginning of the Middle English period. Keep in mind that, as with all periodization, there was no miraculous date when Old English transformed into Middle English, nor was there ever one uniform way the language looked or was spoken. Wessex, the home of Alfred’s court, under Norman rule became a remote part of William the Conquerer’s realm and thus lost its prominence. Despite the fact that Anglo-Norman became the language of the court, there were areas in England where there is little if no recorded French influence on the language. In those places, Old English seems to have simplified on its own— both in grammar and in pronunciation. This evidence reveals that Old English was likely already changing before the Norman conquest.12

Here ends Middle English Delights n.2: Part 1 of our delighting in the early English language forms! I hope that it is clear now, if it wasn’t before, why Shakespeare is not Old English, though an older form of the English language.

What do you find delightful about Old English? Hope to read your answer in the comments!

Next Up:

Middle English Delights n.3: Part 2 of our delighting in the early English language forms: So what exactly is Middle English?

And our first Delighting With!: a short interview with a fellow Middle English delighter that introduces us to the delighter’s favorite ME passage (or a muse or legacy passage) and the delighter’s ME origin story.

Additional Resources:

Seth Lerer’s Inventing English: A Portable History of the Language: Revised and Expanded Edition

David Crystal’s The Stories of English

Lingthusiasm: A delightful podcast about linguistics

Old English Online: “A website designed to help users learn to read Old English”

Dr. Ophelia Eryn Hostetter’s Old English Poetry Project, which includes “translations of almost 79% of all extant Old English poetry can be found here (that’s 23,662 lines out of about 30,000 extant lines)” for free!

Hana Videen’s The Word Hord: Daily Life in Old English and her blog The Old English Wordhord

Oxford English Dictonary’s Old English An Overview

Stay warm and healthy, and see you in March!

The playful orthography is one of the many qualities of Middle English that brings me delight. Delight I want to share with you here as we think with Middle English (language, literature, manuscripts, art work, drama, theology, music, etc.) and its muses and legacies. In the various spellings above, you can at once see a few of Middle English’s linguistic legacies and muses. You might have been puzzled and/or intrigued by the Middle English letter yogh (ʒ) in the third spelling delyȝte as I once was. You may have thought about the runes of Middle English’s predecessor, Old English, or perhaps one of its legacies, the runes used by the famous medievalist and fantasy novelist J.R.R. Tolkien in his Middle Earth books.2 Yogh is not a rune, though it is a legacy of one. But, just as runic letters, it has largely been forgotten by modern English speakers.3

For over a decade, I have thought with ideas expressed in earlier forms of English and about medieval and early modern culture. My specialization is in early English literature, and I’ve published and taught undergraduate and graduate courses on it and topics related to it. During my studies and teaching, I noticed that Middle English (and Old English) is beginning to be left out of curricula. Many people now believe that Shakespeare is Old English. To them, English began with Early Modern English and arrived at the English we speak today— the Old English of Beowulf (Hwæt!) and the Middle English of The Canterbury Tales (Whan that Aprill with his shoures soote…) even forgotten.

Because I consider this a great loss, my aim for this Substack is to share information and resources in this public forum with anyone and everyone who has an interest in thinking with me about Middle English and its muses and legacies, regardless of prior knowledge.4 And, I’m in great company!5 Not only have I experienced delight in studying and teaching these topics, but I also have witnessed many people across diverse backgrounds share that same delight. And, as those who chose to write in the vernacular in medieval England understood, there is nothing more delightful than shared knowledge.

My aim here is not only to make Middle English accessible but also to introduce some of the (now) alien and (at once) familiar aspects of thought expressed in it, as well as attending to what served as its muses and what became its legacies. Given that broad range, and the subject matter itself, I intend for this Substack to be eclectic. Wish me luck!

Middle English was the language understood by all classes during a time in England when to be literate was to read and write in Latin and when the language of the aristocracy and law was French. Indeed, as the anonymous fourteenth-century writer of the widely-circulated text Speculum vitae writes in a rather lengthy explanation of why he chose to translate Somme le roi by Laurent d’Orléans, OP, into Middle English:

(Let’s dive right into rhyming couplets in the Northern dialect of ME!… Listen to me read it if you’d like or read it aloud yourself [ME tip: you’ll understand the language better if you read it aloud— don’t be shy or worry about pronunciation!]):

In Inglische tunge I sal yhow telle,
If yhe so lange with me wil dwelle.
Na Latyne wil I speke ne wast
Bot Inglische þat men vses mast,
For þat es yhour kynde langage
Þat yhe haf mast here of vsage.

Þat can ilk man vnderstande
Þat es borne in Ingelande,
For þat langage es mast shewed
Als wele amonge lered als lewed.
Latyne, als I trowe, can nane
Bot þa þat has it of skole tane;
Summe can Frankische and na Latyne
Þat vsed has court and dwelled þarin;
And som can of Latyne a party
Þat can Frankys bot febilly;
And som vnderstandes Inglische
Þat nouthir can Latyn ne Frankische.
Bot lered and lawed, alde and yhunge,
Alle vnderstandes Inglische tunge.
Þarefore I hald it mast siker þan

To shewe þe langage þat ilk man can,
And al for lewed men namely
Þat can na manere of clergy.
To kenne þam war mast nede,
For clerks can bathe se and rede
In sere bokes of Haly Writte
How þai sal lif, if þai loke itt.
Þarefore I wil me haly halde
To þat langage þat Inglisch es called. (ll. 61-90)6

In the English language I shall now tell,
If you will stay with me for awhile.
I will not speak or employ Latin,
But English that men use most,
For that is your natural language,
That you use most.

That can such person understand
That is born in England.
For that language is most used
By both educated and uneducated.
Latin, as I trust, can none understand
But those who have taken it in school.
Some know French and not Latin
Because they have used it at court and dwelled therein;
And some can use Latin somewhat
That can use French but feebly
And some understand English
That use neither Latin nor French.
But educated and uneducated, old and young,
All understand English.
Therefore I believe it most certainly then

To teach in the language that such people can understand,
And for all uneducated people primarily
That do not understand the form of the clergy’s writings.
To teach them what they need most to know,
Because the clergy can both see and read
In their books of Holy Writ
How they shall live, if they comprehend it.
Therefore I give my holy cure
In that language that English is called.7

Above is a manuscript leaf from a copy of Speculum vitae that includes the excerpt I quoted.8 I’ve added yellow lines to mark the beginning and end of the quote. Enlarge the image and see if you can read the original (hint: the text is slightly different from the Hanna edition transcription I included that pulls together numerous manuscript copies).

One of the earliest Somme le roi texts (the French text the Speculum vitae writer translated into Middle English) was likely intended for the king and queen of France and their royal circle and includes masterpieces of gothic illustration.9 Talk about a different intended audience than the Speculum’s uneducated one! For a taste of how ornate medieval manuscripts could be, check out this illustrative and illuminated royal leaf:

My hope is that we can all once more understand Middle English— and delight in it, its muses, and its legacies, the latter which all English speakers are a part. Maybe this delight will cause us to forgive ourselves and others for our poor modern English spelling and grammar once and for all! I surely hope it does. Please understand any errors here to be intentional— in the spirit of Middle English!

Subscribe now