Marion Turner, Chaucer: A European Life. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019.
xxii + 624pp. with 19 colour + 2 b&w illustrations, and 3 maps. ISBN 9780691160092. £30.00 cloth.
In this wonderfully readable and richly informative ‘literary biography’, Marion Turner has ‘chosen to tell the story of [Chaucer’s] life and his poetry through spaces and places’, by considering ‘the things that surrounded him, the streets he walked, the communities in which he participated, and the structures that he inhabited’ (3, 4-5, 8). As it explores ‘the places he visited, the buildings he inhabited, the books he read, and the art and objects he saw’, her analysis takes the form of a series of ‘vivid episodes’, moving (for instance) from ‘the commercial wharves of London to the frescoed chapels of Florence and the kingdom of Navarre, where Christians, Muslims, and Jews lived side by side’ (jacket blurb). Chaucer is presented as a great European writer (not just the father of English literature, if by that appellation insularity is implied), whose ‘protodemocratic’ literary achievement manifests a conviction that ‘we need to hear as many voices as possible’ (8, 405). Cosmopolitan, tolerant, much-travelled, sensitive to issues of gender stereotyping and showing some appreciation of cultural diversity, essentially secular in outlook even though he mastered the genre of the saint’s life and (eventually) turned out a fine penitential treatise: this is a highly ‘relatable’ Chaucer, a figure who will appeal to the ‘broader audience’ that Turner seeks for her book (8). But there is a lot to live up to here. Did Chaucer actually live that life? Some skepticism is in order, even as one enjoys the many pleasures of this exhilarating biography.
Turner’s style is her own – lively, vivid, witty and often chatty, dispensing many delightful confections of information by way of contextualising the few hard facts that are known about the poet’s life. Given that meagre information and the length of this book (599 pages), Turner has had to turn to other sources. She amplifies Chaucer’s life narrative by deploying information from social and political history, along with studies of living conditions and aristocratic fashions, ranging from what the nobility ate and the clothes they wore to how they performed (and occasionally challenged) their self-constructing gender roles. Then there is the (infinitely interpretable) evidence from Chaucer’s writings themselves, which are often cited as a means of illuminating the poet’s life, even as the poet’s life-records are deployed as a means of illuminating his poetry.
A particularly vivid episode occurs when Turner imagines the teenage Geoffrey being turned into ‘a beautiful object of display’, ‘a fashion plate’, in the household of Elizabeth de Burgh, countess of Ulster, where he may have pranced around wearing a short tunic and leggings or tights of a type which were, according to contemporary moralists, ‘laced up together provocatively in such a way as to emphasise the genitals indecently’ (48). Here and throughout this book, Turner has the ability to make historical information (of which we are given an abundance) come to life. I was particularly struck by the image of Chaucer, encamped outside the fortifications of Reims as a soldier in the besieging English army, whilst at least one and possibly two of his major French literary sources and influences, Guillaume de Machaut and Eustache Deschamps, were on the other side of the wall. (Here the phrase ‘anxiety of influence’ takes on a whole new meaning).
On occasion Turner can get quite gossipy, as when she opines that, in the life spent attending and living with the high-ranking aristocratic ladies she served, Chaucer’s wife Philippa may have found ‘an escape route … from a less-than-perfect marriage’ (61). There is no historical warrant whatever for that claim. But it certainly enlivens the narrative. However, the risk of blurring the boundaries between historicising biography and historical novel is obvious. Did Chaucer have a daughter named Elizabeth, to be identified with ‘Elizabeth Chaucy’, a Benedictine nun? [1] Turner quickly accepts that he did, and launches an excursus on typical life-styles of fourteenth-century nuns. This is an instance of how, in this book, hypotheses for which there is no conclusive evidence can harden into unqualified fact. One might also worry about the confidence with which Turner declares that Chaucer had a long-standing and meaningful relationship with John of Gaunt. Keeping the academics happy whilst keeping the nonprofessionals reading is no easy task.
Turner’s eagerness to provide broad historical contextualisation can seem rather extreme, as when she announces that ‘To understand Chaucer’s visit to Genoa, we have to try to grasp something of world economics in the fourteenth century: how the Crusades, the slave trade, ship design, European politics, and the desirable products of the Middle East and beyond[,] all affected the trading systems that crisscrossed the world. But we also have to understand how the world system affected and was affected by English sheep’ (145-6). Quite a tall order! Yet the chapter thus intimidatingly introduced ends with an enlightening comparison of Boccaccio’s Decameron and Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales as texts that both ‘depend upon a mercantile genesis and audience’ (164). What about those English sheep? ‘In the early 1370s’ certain people close to the king ‘were profiteering by negotiating with Italian merchants to allow them to ship wool direct, evading Calais and its duties, to the fury of many Londoners’ (154). Chaucer, Turner suggests, was probably acting in the service of one of the chief evaders, John of Gaunt, the death of whose first wife Blanche he had commemorated in The Book of the Duchess, and who recently had begun an affair with Chaucer’s sister-in-law, Katherine Swynford. Turner’s biography is a capacious, hospitable one, and it’s always pleasing to be offered more information rather than less, particularly when it’s as engaging as this is.
A fine example of Turner’s ability to relate Chaucer’s life-records to his poetry in a compelling fashion occurs when she compares the young man’s possible experiences as a prisoner of the French (he was ransomed by Edward III, for a modest sum) with the descriptions of the horrors of war in The Knight’s Tale, which include an account of how Arcite and Palamon are imprisoned without hope of any ransom. Turner sees here especial cruelty, though it could equally well be argued that, in an age in which the ransoming of prisoners was a highly lucrative business (as she herself notes), Theseus’s refusal to make money out of his captives’ misery is a mark of his aloof indifference to mercenary considerations. Subsequently he releases Arcite for free, because a friend asks him to, and when it is agreed that the two young men should fight with Emily as the prize he further displays his largesse by having a brand-new amphitheater and three temples built at his own expense. Arcite’s funeral costs a pretty penny too.
That is a matter of competing critical interpretations. Much more significant in a book which has set up a pattern of reading history with and against literature are those points at which certain intersections demand attention, which is not paid. Take the case of Chaucer’s trip to Navarre in 1366, on a diplomatic mission about which we lack any detail. Turner speaks of a region in which Christians, Muslims and Jews lived side by side (a claim highlighted in the jacket blurb, as quoted above). The actual political situation was not quite as rosy as that statement implies,[2] and two of the Canterbury Tales offer horrifyingly negative views of the possibilities for inter-faith coexistence and religious tolerance. The Man of Law’s Tale pits Constance, sent to effect the conversion of Muslim Syria to Christianity, against a sultaness who holds firm to the holy laws of the Koran, with bloody results (and with the sultaness’s beliefs being obscured within a totalising denigration of her as a treacherous and mannish woman). The Prioress’s Tale, which receives scant attention in Turner’s book, spectacularly dramatises the difficulties of Jews and Christians living in the same city. The cruel murder of a Christian child results in every Jew with knowledge of the plot being put to a painful death. The blatant antisemitism of this tale subverts any attempt to construct a cosmopolitan, tolerant Chaucer – a man who during his trips abroad must have become aware of the crucial role which Jews played in the European banking system and within European culture generally. Even more hopefully, he may have heard about the papacy’s attempts to debunk the ridiculous ‘blood libel’ calumny which cost so many Jews their lives. However, to judge from Chaucer’s œuvre, his respect for religious relativism seems largely confined to virtuous heathen, who lived before the advent of Christ (and therefore are safely dead) and/or who were in genuine ignorance of the Christian faith – like the virtuous and wise King Cambyuskan (=Ghengis Khan?),[3] lauded at the beginning of The Squire’s Tale. Living, contemporary Jews and Muslims presented tougher problems of cultural response and ideological judgment.
Then there are the issues raised by Turner’s treatment of that most controversial of all the Chaucer life-records, the charge of rape (raptus – the technical meaning of the term has been much contested)[4] brought against the poet by one Cecily Champaigne. This encounter was ‘almost certainly sexual, perhaps nonconsensual’, opines Turner, going on to note that eventually Chaucer ‘paid the accuser off’ (210-11).[5] But ‘We don’t know’ what occurred; ‘What happened between Chaucer and Cecily Champaigne cannot be recovered by us; it remains uncertain, unknowable perhaps to anyone but the two of them’ (211, 212). That certainly rings true, though a similar comment might be made about the relationship between the poet and his wife Philippa– yet Turner feels able to judge this as ‘at best a marriage that petered out’ (211).[6] Further, lack of detailed factual knowledge need not hinder a creative attempt to read a life-record alongside a literary instantiation of a shared issue, as Turner demonstrates again and again throughout her book. The rape scene in The Wife of Bath’s Tale is the most obvious comparator, but, going beyond that, it is remarkable to note the number of episodes of male violence against women (including rape or the threat thereof) that feature in Chaucer’s works: the Man of Law’s tale of multiple assaults against Constance, the Clerk’s saga of serially humiliated Grisilda, the Second Nun’s description of the protracted martyrdom of Saint Cecelia, the Physician’s grisly account of a father’s murder of his daughter … To which may be added the threat of nonconsensual sex in the Franklin’s tale, and even the way in which the allegorical Tale of Melibee begins, with the protagonist’s wife having been beaten and his daughter mortally wounded in five places. The list is a long one. Looking beyond and before the Canterbury Tales, one may note the sexploitation suffered by so many of the heroines in the Legend of Good Women, including the rapes of Lucrece and Philomela. Even more tantalising is the fact that what now is the prologue to the Man of Law’s Tale may have been the first attempt at introducing a collection of Canterbury tales. Therein reference back is made to the Legend, and the narrator proceeds to usher in a tale which involves two cruel exiles of an innocent heroine, a false accusation of murder (of her best female friend) and a rape attempt. What is to be done with all this evidence is, of course, a matter of debate. Suffice it to register the frequency with which Chaucer turned to the topic of female virtue under attack, and the pivotal place it occupies in his creative trajectory; it seems to have been a major driving-force.
What is indubitable is that the issues raised by the life-records of Cecily Champaigne’s raptus are pressingly au courant. The New Chaucer Society conference which is to be held at the University of Durham (UK) in July 2020 will include a session on ‘(Re)Orienting around Cecily Chaumpaigne’, which aims to move away from attempts to exonerate the poet and ‘explore how we might productively reorient Chaucer studies around the possibility of a rapist poet’ (given what is termed the ‘likelihood that Chaucer committed an act of sexual violence’). A particular welcome is extended to papers that address ‘the ways that writing about Chaucer and Cecily invites scholars into, or excludes them from, the field’.[7] Here, then, Cecily (and all she encapsulates) is being placed at the very centre of Chaucer studies. Diverse folk diversely they seyde….[8] And some of the speakers at that event may not be satisfied with Turner’s ameliorating reading of The Wife of Bath’s Tale as ‘a meditation on the importance of respect and dignity for each human being, and for treating each person as an individual’, with a redeemable rapist realising something of what he has put his victim through when he exclaims, ‘Taak al my good and lat my body go’ (463, 464).[9]
Trying to sketch the route Chaucer travelled to become the arch-poet of the Canterbury Tales is the major challenge for any Chaucer biographer, and Turner rises to the occasion with eloquence and enthusiasm. The story that needs to be told is of how Chaucer, on his literal Italian travels, gained access to a rich cache of texts scarcely (if at all) known in England yet ended up producing a masterpiece of his own which diverged surprisingly from them. Turner dramatically imagines Chaucer’s culture-shock during his visit to Lombardy in 1378, where he ‘experienced a regime of absolutism and extreme brutality, a regime in which only the Visconti voice mattered’ (314). That challenging experience seems to have coincided with a major engagement with the ideas of Petrarch and Dante, who (Turner argues) in their own ways also projected imperial ambitions. Those poets believed in history-as-destiny, whereas Chaucer’s writings suggest ‘that when people believe in one truth, sovereign power, and unchallengeable discourse, a lot of other people tend to get damaged, even killed’ (335). What a sensible and unpretentious Englishman he sounds. Turner claims that he developed an ‘intense suspicion’ of their ‘ideologies’, which extended to a tacit rejection of Petrarch’s ideal of ‘writing in solitude’ for a small élite audience and Dante’s grandly theologising poetics – ‘unlike Dante, Chaucer actually refuses to have his vision’ (405, 505). In contrast with the Visconti library, which ‘offered a model of cultural production that was decisively rejected by Chaucer’, he ‘chose the Southwark inn as his cultural home’ (405), this being an appropriate symbolic space for a poet who ‘repeatedly emphasised in his poetry the need to go to the streets and to listen to all kinds of people’ (405). In the Canterbury Tales all kinds of people are listened to, as Chaucer applies the principle of ‘equivalence’:
The genius of the Tales lies in its valuing of difference qua difference, and its refusal either to collapse those differences or to prioritise saint’s life over folktale, man over woman, knight over miller, marquis over peasant girl, moral truth over poetic line, idea over rhetoric. Readers must make decisions for themselves: ‘Al that is writen is written for oure doctrine’ (Retractions, 1083; emphasis Turner’s; 366-7)
Here we see Chaucer revelling in different perspectives, Turner declares – even venturing a comparison with Giotto, whose work he may have seen during his time in Florence (161, 401).
All of this is brilliantly said, but the Retractions’ citation of St Paul (Romans 15:4) is meant to emphasise the necessity of readers making the right moral choices (not just any decision), taking the good out of whatever they read, however hard that may be, and not being led astray by writings that ‘sownen [lead] into synne’. All that is written may indeed be taken as written for our instruction, but that does not mean that all texts are equal; democracy (or indeed ‘protodemocracy’) in the world of books, as in the real world, is a contentious concept. ‘Chaucer makes it clear that he will not openly guide our interpretation or hierarchize meanings: he encourages his readers to make their own decisions and find their own moral in a deeply troubling world’ (465).[10] But in that ‘deeply troubling world’ meanings did have their hierarchy, and not all interpretation was of equal value; Holy Church, not the individual reader, had the final say in matters of belief, and following the condemnation of some of John Wyclif’s teachings at the Blackfriars Council of 1382 her voice was resonating loudly.
Turner offers a very cursory treatment of the ‘Lollard Knights’ (John Clanvowe, Lewis Clifford, John Montagu, Thomas Latimer, Richard Sturry, et. al.), several of whom were well-known to Chaucer and some of whom shared his literary interests. The issue of why at least certain aspects of Wyclif’s thought might have appealed to such men, and indeed to Chaucer himself, is not investigated,[11] and no space in found, even in this voluminous book, for an explanation of the fundamental ideas that constituted Lollardy. Even more fundamentally, Turner seems to want to recuse Chaucer from participation in orthodox Christian rite or belief. For her, the Retractions are to be read as a site of resistance rather than of religious compliance and contrition. That resistance is supposedly expressed through passivity and deferral: ‘Chaucer imagines the author under the control’ of two audiences, God and the human reader. He has to await the grace that God must actively send, even as he awaits the reader’s verdict on what is commendable in his writing and what is not. Refusing ‘to specify which of the Canterbury Tales might lead one to sin’, Chaucer demands ‘that the reader participate in the work of interpretation’, even as he underscores his own lack of knowledge, his ‘unkonnynge’ (505). Yet the poet seems in no doubt that he has produced ‘translacions and enditynges of worldly vanitees’, unhesitantly specifying Troilus and Criseyde, The House of Fame, The Legend of Good Women, The Book of the Duchess and The Parliament of Fowls as works in need of forgiveness, whilst offering up by way of expiation his Boethius translation together with saint’s legends and books of morality and religious devotion. As I read this passage, Chaucer sees the buck as stopping with him, rather than with his reader, and he is actively, meekly, beseeching Christ, the Virgin Mary and all the saints, for grace. I cannot see any passivity here.
Turner’s reluctance to engage with the issue of Chaucer’s religiosity extends to her account of the poet’s final residence in the precincts of Westminster Abbey. This is seen as a central and ‘convenient’ location, close to the shops (it ‘offered easy access to commercial locations’, 492-3). The possible religious significance of the move is here downplayed (surely there were other ‘convenient’ places to live in the area?), though Turner accepts that the poet’s subsequent ‘burial in the abbey strongly suggests he had a warm relationship with the Benedictine community’; the fact that ‘he was buried near St Benedict’s Chapel’ implies ‘he was accepted as a friend by the monks, and enjoyed close and warm ties with them’ (495). Given that Chaucer survived for less than a year in that location, it might be speculated that his reason for being there involved more than mere friendship and companionable socialising with the monks; perhaps this aged textual makere was preparing to meet his maker.
‘Literary stereotyping [of members of religious orders] tells us nothing … of Chaucer’s relationships with members of such orders in his own life’ (495). Indeed, and neither does it tell us anything about how Chaucer perceived his relationship with God. But one can engage in informed speculation, as Turner does concerning so many other matters in Chaucer’s life where we also have a deficit of information.[12] (Did Chaucer really wear those crotch-hugging tights in Elizabeth de Burgh’s household?) Chaucer’s churchmen do not fare very well in her analysis, as when the ‘perspectives’ of the Pardoner and Parson are deemed ‘unreliable’ (406). The blatantly despicable Pardoner is obviously fair game, but seeing the Parson as peddling ‘an inflexible, rigid, schematic morality’ requires a radical interpretive decision whereby much established church doctrine is reduced to the subjective, with this figure being seen as just another tale-teller rather than the voice of a higher authority that transcends all fabulation.[13]
The obvious fact that Turner’s Chaucer is more secular than mine[14] may serve to illustrate the point that there are many Chaucers out there (and more are in the making).[15] Marion Turner’s biography provides a very attractive if somewhat flattering and occasionally airbrushed portrait.[16] She presents a man of civilised values who reflected much of the best, and some of the worst, features of his age. One can happily spend time with this humane construct though 599 pages of print. This is indeed a long book, but the fact that many different things are happening between its covers should be noted and may be admired: in addition to the ambitious life-narrative and the tour of the spaces and places Chaucer once inhabited we are treated to much fine literary criticism. There’s a lot of bang for the buck here – and the price tag is a quite modest one, certainly by the standards of academic publishing.
Above all else, Turner is an excellent raconteur, and the pleasure she takes in bringing together her diverse materials is infectious. Chaucer: A European Life is warmly recommended; it deserves a wide and appreciative readership.
Alastair Minnis
Yale University
[1] Writing in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography’s entry on Chaucer (latest version, 24 May 2012), Douglas Gray declares that there is ‘no good evidence to support this’ conjecture. https://www.oxforddnb.com/view/10.1093/ref:odnb/9780198614128.001.0001/odnb-9780198614128-e-5191.
[2] As has been noted by Joe Stadolnik in his review of Turner’s book: ‘Chaucer’s Traces’, Los Angeles Review of Books, June 26, 2019, at https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/chaucers-traces/. Cf. Turner’s wistful mention of cases in which Londoners treated ‘European immigrants … with notable equity’ (27). Despite the potentially provocative subtitle of her book, ‘A European Life’, Turner does not make any substantive allusion to the current crisis in Britain’s relationship with Europe.
[3] Turner identifies Cambyuskan with Ghengis Khan (435), but the matter is far from settled.
[4] The complexities and ambiguities surrounding the case are underlined in a recent article by Sebastian Sobecki, ‘Wards and Widows: Troilus and Criseyde and New Documents on Chaucer’s Life’, ELH, 86.2 (2019), 413-440. Here it is argued (unconvincingly, in my view) that Chaucer may have been seeking a wife for his ward Edmund Staplegate – hence the ‘abduction’ or attempted acquisition of Cecily Champaigne for this role, following a not-uncommon practice (according to legal records), which ‘need not have been done against her or her family’s wishes’. But things didn’t work out (Staplegate may have refused ‘to agree to this match’), and so Cecily sought damages against that aggressive matchmaker, Chaucer (423). The story was picked up by the Guardian newspaper (June 7, 2019); see https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/jun/07/document-casts-new-light-on-chaucer-rape-case. Sobecki takes pains to emphasise that his objective is ‘not to exonerate Chaucer’: ‘just because he was legally entitled to arrange a marriage for his ward between 1377 and 1382’ does not rule out the possibility that Cecily was ‘a victim of [his] sexual aggression’ (423). One correction to this article: speaking of Criseyde, Sobecki remarks that ‘Chaucer turns Giovanni Boccaccio’s virgin into a young widow’ (427); in fact, she is already a young widow – and very much an Ovidian ‘merry widow’ – in Boccaccio’s Filostrato. Intriguingly, Chaucer obscures that fact until the very last book of Troilus and Criseyde, presenting Criseyde as if she were a ‘virgin’, a woman inexperienced in matters of love.
[5] Douglas Gray, in the DNB article cited above (n. 1), presents the issue rather differently: ‘All that is known for certain is that Chaucer was cleared of responsibility’.
[6] The allowances which John of Gaunt paid to Philippa between 1378 and 1383 (she died in 1387) definitely seem to indicate that she was living apart from Chaucer, in separate domiciles, at least for certain periods. One might make the obvious point that couples can maintain loving and supportive relationships, though spending much time apart. The intimacy developed here may be of a deep psychological closeness, which doesn’t include physical or sexual intimacy. See the study by Crystal Jiang and Jeffrey T. Hancock, ‘Absence Makes the Communication Grow Fonder: Geographic Separation, Interpersonal Media, and Intimacy in Dating Relationships’, Journal of Communication, 63 (2013), 556-77.
[7] Here I quote from the conference website, at http://newchaucersociety.org/pages/entry/2020-congress
[8] To appropriate a phrase from The Reeve’s Tale, I(A), 3856. Hopefully the following line will prove prophetic: ‘But for the moore part they loghe and pleyede’.
[9] This ‘very serious tale’, Turner declares, ‘forcefully puts forward the position that women and men of all ages and estates are moral equivalents’ (464). Her extraordinarily positive reading is somewhat challenged by the tale’s concluding emphasis on the sexual gratification the once-loathly damsel bestows on her wayward husband, all her learning and expertise in true nobility being set aside as she treats him to a ‘bath of bliss’ (III(D), 1253). When she transforms from wise old woman to desirable girl this shape-shifting fairy puts off her learning and moral authority. Little, if any, evidence of the knight’s moral reformation is provided, and women’s true role (according to misogynistic tradition) as providers of sexual pleasure rather than learning is confirmed. To my (more cynical) mind, the force of antifeminist satire is much stronger here than Turner would allow.
[10] This generalisation follows on from a discussion of the Nun’s Priest’s Tale.
[11] It is remarkable how the share price (so to speak) of Lollardy has declined among Chaucerians. A decade ago, every conference involving Chaucer would have featured papers that agonised about where to place him on the spectrum between orthodoxy and heresy, and wondered whether his Christianity was radical, reformist or merely conventional and social.
[12] I myself side with Nicholas Watson’s suggestion that Chaucer’s professed spirituality may best be understood with reference to the mediocriter boni, those not-too-good (or bad) Christians who need to spend some time in purgatory, hopefully being fast-tracked through purgative pain by the suffrages and prayers of the living. ‘Chaucer’s Public Christianity’, Religion and Literature, 37.2 (2005), 99-114.
[13] Turner further argues that ‘demonstrably subjective aspects of the tale throw into question the idea that one can find … external objectivity’ therein (479). So, then, the relativism which, in her view, permeates the Canterbury Tales extends even to the Parson.
[14] But of course, I am aware of the importance of this concept for an understanding of Chaucer’s self-fashioning. See Alastair Minnis, ‘Secularity’, in Geoffrey Chaucer in Context, ed. Ian Johnson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 178-86, 453-54.
[15] A spate of introductory books have appeared in the past few years. See for instance Paul Strohm, Chaucer’s Tale: 1386 and the Road to Canterbury (New York: Viking, 2014); Alastair Minnis, The Cambridge Introduction to Chaucer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014); and David Wallace, Geoffrey Chaucer: A New Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017). To my knowledge, two more biographies are being written.
[16] Turner’s Chaucer portrait contrasts intriguingly with the less flattering one of Caroline Barron. Barron depicts him as an inveterate outsider, an observer rather than a participant, ‘who appears to have held himself aloof from the social circles of London civic society, the worlds of the parish, ward and civic governance and, ultimately, also the worlds of the aristocratic household and the royal court and civil service’. That amounts to a rather troubling amount of withholding. There is worse to come. Chaucer was a group-member rather than a leader, whose modest social accomplishments are marked by a ‘lack of worldly status or, perhaps, [a] lack of ambition’. ‘In the Custom House he was in a position of only nominal authority’, and – the coup de grâce – ‘he never led any of the many embassies on which he was sent’. Chaucer’s true place was in a ‘republic of scholars’ and ‘academy of letters’, Barron continues; it was in ‘this social circle, and perhaps only there’, that he ‘may have felt that he belonged and where he would in turn, have been truly respected and admired’. ‘Chaucer the Poet and Chaucer the Pilgrim’, Historians on Chaucer: The ‘General Prologue’ to the ‘Canterbury Tales’, ed. Stephen H. Rigby and Alastair Minnis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 24-41 (35, 40-41).
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That amounts to a rather troubling amount of withholding. There is worse to come.
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