We would like to express our gratitude to Helen Hickey and Anne McKendry, who have provided their customary efficient and thoughtful assistance with the research that sits behind this book, and who helped us with careful formatting and sub‐editing. Thanks, too, to our editor at Wiley‐Blackwell, Richard Samson, to Pilar Wyman who prepared the index, and to the anonymous readers who helped us shape the book’s structure.

Most of all, of course, we would like to thank each other.

A roly‐poly, slightly chubby poet gets up early in the morning to go and pick daisies, or falls asleep while reading a book and dreams about gardens, forests, birds and beautiful women. He makes a pilgrimage to Canterbury with a bunch of rogues and sinners he describes in affectionate and loving terms. He narrates and translates other people’s stories, but he is a wildly original poet, and more or less single‐handedly invents the English language. He is knowing and cynical about human failure, but also childishly enthusiastic about all forms of human endeavor. His poetry is outrageously bawdy and full of fart jokes and he is a profoundly pious religious thinker, while also being guilty of anti‐Semitism. His poetry is utterly imbued with medieval culture, but he is also way ahead of his time in his anticipation of our own concerns. His poetry is some of the greatest in the English language, but is also too difficult to read. Chaucer himself is wise and cynical, but his achievement was limited by medieval ignorance and superstition, just as his sympathetic respect for women was restricted by patriarchal ideologies. He is praised as a genius in his own time and has variously been celebrated as a satirist, a reformer, a lyricist, a pre‐Shakespearean lover of bawdy, a sentimentalist, a religious apologist, a humanist, a feminist, a post‐modernist and a queer theorist.

And so it goes. Chaucer’s long reception history is a contradictory mess of changing opinions and ideas about the character of the medieval poet, the nature of his poetic achievement and the interpretation of his poetry. These aspects of his history are so interwoven it can be quite difficult to untangle critical readings of his works from ideas about the medieval poet himself. And nor are these debates confined to the past alone.

All the volumes in this series bring literary history, reception and cultural studies into conversation. They acknowledge that we necessarily approach the writing of well‐known authors with expectations heavily mediated by earlier readers and shaped by a range of expectations that may be based only loosely on historical fact. These expectations shape our choice of which poems to read, how we edit and teach them and, in the case of Chaucer, what we think about the Middle Ages and the meaning of that past for contemporary culture.

In the case of our 30 Great Myths About Chaucer, we are also contending with the extremely complex phenomenon of medievalism. That is, in addition to the myths about Chaucer that emanate mostly from the world of literature, there are many associated “myths” about the Middle Ages that color and inflect the reception of Chaucer. Many of these myths implicitly posit the idea that medieval people and culture were somehow discontinuous with the modern present; as if they inhabited a different world from the social and cultural forms that produced the realist novel, for example, or the poetry of the romantic movement. The medieval past has been profoundly shaped – in both the scholarly and the popular imagination – as an era substantially different from modernity in areas of religious, artistic and political practice and knowledge, to say nothing of social forms, health sciences, costume, dress and the like. A separate volume, entitled something like “30 Great Myths about the Middle Ages,” would be easy to write. No, medieval people did not think the earth was flat; no, women did not wear chastity belts; and no, medieval intellectual life was not stifled by superstition or religious repression.¹

One of the dominant features of much study in the field of medievalism is the pleasant pastime of “correcting” these and other mistakes, or anachronisms in the popular representation of the Middle Ages in fiction and film. We have written elsewhere about the nature of this pleasure, and its implications for both the professional and the amateur study of the medieval past.² In the case of literary history, however, and the reception of a poet like Chaucer, the situation is a little more complex. We can certainly appeal to the “facts,” as we know them from the surviving, albeit partial, records of his life and employment, but we are often talking about the interpretation of literary works where of course, we are on much more shaky ground.

We will find with many of these “myths” that they arise from tiny suggestions in the poems or in the life‐records, hints that have generated beliefs and assumptions that have then shaped the traditions of critical interpretation. It is a pattern that is very familiar from the archives of medievalism.

As with other books in this series, “myth” here does not mean (as it often does) a widely shared, structurally enabling fiction that subtends every aspect of modern life. Rather, it conveys a more localized conception (or misconception) about an author or group of authors. Some of these myths are more deeply held familiar ideas about Chaucer and his works than others; and some have larger grains of truth to them than others. Nearly all, however, are the products of the long history of reading Chaucer’s works for over six hundred years and the intertwined history of biography, criticism and popular culture. Many of our chapters consider the relationship between what we know about Chaucer from external records and what he appears to tell us in his fictions. These stories embrace a range of genres and styles, and in the Canterbury Tales at least, they are voiced by a range of distinctive narrators such as the Pardoner, the Wife of Bath and the Prioress. Such is Chaucer’s mastery of the middle style, in the fearful, lovelorn narrators of The Book of the Duchess and The Parlement of Foules, or the nostalgic romantic with an interest in philosophy in Troilus and Criseyde and the more personal poems addressed to his friends, that it is hard not to compile a relatively coherent composite picture of Chaucerian voice and attitudes. But the external “life‐records” tell us a different story again: these are records of payments, permissions to travel, notices of court cases, grants of clothing and annuities to himself and his family. We need to emphasize that there is no written, textual or documentary allusion to Chaucer as a poet, outside his own writings, from his own lifetime. The witnesses to his life and influence as a writer are entirely posthumous.

This poses a distinctive problem for any biographer of Chaucer. They must all negotiate this gap between the lively personalities and narrative voices that populate Chaucer’s fictions and the “real” or “concrete” evidence found in the surviving documents. Many of our “myths” find their origins in these gaps, and the desire to make satisfying imaginative links between Chaucer’s fictions and what we can piece together of his life. For example, in a number of Chaucer’s early poems, the narrator constructs the persona of a young man who is unlucky or unsuccessful in the art of love, or who is suffering an unrequited love. Fueled by the desire to fill in the historical gaps and to tie this narrative voice to the biographical record, early historical critics went to work to discover the identity of Chaucer’s early love, though without ever resolving the issue (see Myth 3).

The biographical tradition of Chaucer studies dates back to the sixteenth‐century editions of his works, many of which included biographical speculation and narrative along with genealogical and heraldic tables affirming Chaucer’s place in the history of medieval English culture. John Urry also included a biography in his edition of 1721, but the first biography to appear independently of an edition of Chaucer’s poetry was that of William Godwin in 1804. In the twentieth century, John Gardner, Donald Howard and Derek Pearsall all wrote scholarly biographies, and in the early twenty‐first century, Richard West and Peter Ackroyd’s biographies reached a more popular audience. There has also been a recent flurry of biographical activity. In 2014, Paul Strohm published a focused account of one important year in Chaucer’s life: Chaucer’s Tale: 1386 and the Road to Canterbury (2014); and just before this book went to press, Marion Turner’s Chaucer: A European Life appeared to great acclaim. Another study, from Ardis Butterfield, provisionally titled Chaucer: A London Life, is forthcoming. In this book we draw on this biographical tradition, but we also go back to many of the primary source materials, as well as attempting to keep track of some of the recent developments in a range of discursive fields.

Contemporary Chaucerian studies continues to scrutinize the past reception of the medieval poet, and is particularly interested in the way the scribes of his manuscripts and the editors of the early printed texts mediate his works for us in influential ways. Equally, modern criticism is keen to re‐examine the political, social, linguistic and literary contexts in which Chaucer lived and worked; as well as bringing insights and critiques from other fields such as gender studies, queer studies, environmental studies, animal studies and cognitive literary studies. In this book we also engage with some of the striking or influential representations of Chaucer and his characters in the fictions of medievalism, as this has become one of the most popular sites in which people encounter Chaucer today.

Many lovers and teachers of Chaucer are currently grappling with sterner voices and critiques that challenge his central and foundational position in the canons and syllabi of literary criticism. These voices are sometimes raised in defense of less familiar, marginalized writers; but are also sometimes raised in more direct critique of Chaucer’s poetry and the ideas and ideologies it appears to promote. Increasingly, Chaucer has come to stand for a celebration of “canonical” literature that for many is outdated. These traditions are no longer universally admired or taught; and some commentators feel that writers such as Chaucer dominate the field at the expense of other voices and other perspectives. Ideological and political critiques of his texts abound as critics and lovers of Chaucer struggle with the apparent anti‐Semitism of the Prioress’s Tale (see Myth 15), for example, or read about Cecily Champaigne’s abandonment of “raptus” charges against him in the context of the apparent “revenge rape” of the Miller’s wife and daughter in the Reeve’s Tale (see Myth 11).

We acknowledge that, in the contemporary moment, Chaucer is not always a beloved poet, not even among medievalists. But it is fascinating to see how quickly this “lack of universal love” has given rise to what might be the thirty‐first great myth: “Chaucer is no longer relevant.” For some, it is easy to dismiss him as a relic, an antiquated vestige of a bygone era whose mores are as outdated as his language. Nevertheless, we would like to affirm, despite these challenges to Chaucer’s centrality and privileged position as a representative voice, that we have taken great pleasure in this opportunity for re‐reading and re‐visiting his works: for us, they continue to produce a potent cocktail of pleasure, danger and difficulty that provokes powerful questions about literature, its uses and its pleasures. The history of myths about Chaucer is in many ways the history of our long‐standing collective love affair with this most engaging and seductive medieval poet. It is a continuous, unbroken history and its importance is signaled both by the multitude of manuscripts and printed editions containing the poet’s works as well as by six hundred years of popular interest. We hope you enjoy working through these long traditions with us.

Chaucer is regularly named as the father of English poetry, the father of English literature, the father of English literary history,¹ the father of the English language, even the father of England itself.² This first “myth,” with all these associations, is probably the most foundational one for this book, as it sits behind many of the conceptions and emotional investments readers have in the familiar figure of Geoffrey Chaucer. It is also the myth that exemplifies the ways in which this concept in literary history is both instructive and yet also potentially confusing. The idea of fatherhood over a literary tradition is a powerful metaphor that is intimately tied up with ideas of nationalism, masculinity and poetic influence, but we can fruitfully unpack its significance and its history. We may also observe that this kind of praise can be a mixed blessing in the changing fashions of literary study.

It was Chaucer’s immediate successor Thomas Hoccleve who first wrote about Chaucer as a father figure. In several stanzas of his Regiment of Princes, written in 1412, just twelve years after Chaucer’s death, Hoccleve laments the death of his “maister deere and fadir reverent.”³ He praises Chaucer as “universel fadir in science” (“science” is best glossed as knowledge, or wisdom),⁴ and twice calls him his “worthy maistir,”⁵ suggesting a close link between fatherhood and authority. Hoccleve also describes Chaucer as “The firste fyndere of our faire langage.”⁶ This is a tricky phrase to analyze, as “fyndere” in Middle English can mean “poet” as much as “discoverer” and “first” can mean “pre‐eminent” as well as “first.” But the praise is unequivocal: Hoccleve compares Chaucer to Aristotle in philosophy, to Cicero in rhetoric and to Virgil in poetry.

Other writers who did not know Chaucer personally were quick to take up this description of Chaucer as father and laureate poet, moving on from the elegiac mode that dominated Chaucerian reception in the first decades after his death in 1400. Indeed, during the fifteenth century, much writing in English was “Chaucerian” in style and voice, leading to considerable uncertainty – or perhaps we should say fluidity – about the authorship of many texts that appear in the early printed “Works” collected under the name of Geoffrey Chaucer. For many of these editions, the commercial incentive of adding works “never before printed” was an invitation to include poems by Lydgate, Usk and other writers under the “Chaucerian” banner.

By the late sixteenth century, however, Chaucer was already being seen as a figure from a distant or “antique” past. For example, in his Faerie Queene (1596), Edmund Spenser addressed him in old‐fashioned terms as “Dan Chaucer, well of English undefyled” – that is, as the source of pure English – and worthy of being listed on “Fame’s eternall beadroll.”⁷ In his Shepheardes Calendar (1579) and the Faerie Queene, Spenser combined neo‐classical genres (eclogues and epic) with medievalist diction to pay homage to Chaucer. At the same time, Thomas Speght was presenting Chaucer in his editions as an “ancient and learned poet” whose work needed the full apparatus of scholarly introduction, commentary and glosses to be intelligible to modern readers.

It is important to recognize, too, that Chaucer was not always singled out as the only father figure from the medieval period. For example, Richard Baker wrote, in 1643, “The next place after these, is justly due to Geoffry Chaucer, and John Gower, two famous Poets in this time, and the Fathers of English Poets in all the times after.”⁸

By far the most influential naming of Chaucer as a father, however, appears in John Dryden’s Preface to Fables Ancient and Modern (1700). This was a collection of Dryden’s own translations of Chaucer, Boccaccio, Homer, Virgil, Ovid and others, prefaced with a long essay in which he describes Chaucer as “the Father of English Poetry.” Yet Dryden acknowledges the imperfections of Chaucer’s poetry: “Chaucer, I confess, is a rough diamond, and must be polished ere he shine.”⁹ Dryden also pairs this statement about Chaucer’s paternity with the admission that he lived “in the Infancy of our Poetry” and that “We must be Children before we grow Men.”¹⁰ We will return to Dryden’s Preface several times in this book: it is one of the single most influential texts in the making of several myths about Chaucer.

Veneration of the medieval past is often paired with this sense that modernity offers a vast improvement on these faltering first steps towards sophistication. Nevertheless, it is an important aspect of a powerful literary tradition to name its origins and forebears, and Chaucer’s paternity looms large over most standard histories of English literature. If canons of authors and literary histories are structured around the names of individual authors, there is an obvious reason why this might be so: Chaucer is simply the most famous name to pre‐date Shakespeare. But Chaucer’s status as father is significantly bolstered by ideological structures and the particularities of English literary history, especially in the fifteenth century.

Seth Lerer takes a lead from Michel Foucault’s theories of authorship to argue that the ideological and genealogical structures of Chaucer’s authorship are firmly grounded in the dominant conditions shaping literary production in the early fifteenth century:

Like the originary authors Marx and Freud, who would produce a discourse and a form of writing for a culture, Chaucer produces in his own work the “rules of formation for other texts.” The genres of the dream vision, pilgrimage narrative, and ballad, and the distinctive idioms of dedication, patronage, and correction that fill those works, were taken up by fifteenth‐century poets, not simply out of imitative fealty to Chaucer but instead largely because they were the rules of formation for poetry.¹¹

Lerer also suggests that the desire to find an influential and authoritative father figure in Chaucer, in a world where poets and writers actively sought patronage from powerful court figures, is also informed by “the great social anxieties of fifteenth‐century dynastic politics.”¹² It is a curious historical accident that the year of Chaucer’s death, 1400, was the same year in which Henry Bolingbroke, having deposed Richard II in 1399, inaugurated the Lancastrian dynasty, which would be subjected to many challenges and result in violent civil warfare, especially in the second half of the fifteenth century. But even the first decades after Chaucer’s death were shadowed by political instability and anxiety about Henry’s succession; and in literary circles, this anxiety seems to have been felt more deeply through the lack of an obvious successor to Chaucer’s poetic authority.

The scholarly narratives of literary history thrive on such coincidences (Chaucer’s death, the end of the century and the last of the Plantagenet kings); but even more significantly, this pattern suggests that the original idea of Chaucer’s fatherhood is intimately connected with the shadows of mortality and melancholy, as much as with the glory of origins. That is, the metaphorical language of many myths is itself quite telling, and indicative of deeper structures and assumptions about the way we read literature.

For example, the historical context of deep transition from one cultural authority to later imitators finds a methodological echo in the darker, Freudian aspect of literary paternity famously proposed by Harold Bloom in the 1970s.¹³ His concept of “the anxiety of influence” explains literary history and literary tradition as a dynamic, creative struggle fueled by anxiety and defensiveness: to find his own voice, a poet must displace the poet who is his greatest influence, by absorbing but somehow diverging from that voice. (In his first formulations, Bloom wrote only of male poets.) Poetic influence is seen as an agonistic, even Oedipal, struggle for the “strong” poet to displace the poetic father figure by misreading him, and re‐appropriating the imaginative space he occupies, as the best strategy for negotiating the inevitable influence of an admired predecessor.¹⁴ While Bloom was not initially concerned with pre‐Romantic poetry, A.C. Spearing offers a powerful reading of John Lydgate’s The Siege of Thebes, written between 1420 and 1422 (and including the story of Oedipus), as Lydgate’s own Oedipal response to Chaucer: “It is tempting to suppose that in the early part of the Siege Lydgate was unconsciously dramatizing precisely the innocent destructiveness he had to engage in himself in order to survive a father as powerful yet benevolent as Chaucer.”¹⁵

Much of the discussion around Chaucer’s fatherhood is necessarily somewhat circular. He is perceived as a father for a number of reasons: because there is no earlier named candidate for the role in English tradition; because his poetry strikes us as so original and inventive; because his poetic presence and authorial personality seem so benevolent; and, of course, because we often approach him with the expectations of authority and originality that the metaphor of “father” implies. And as many critics point out, his successors sometimes felt infantilized by his greatness. But of course, to name this early influential figure in this gendered language sets up a powerful dominant image of what constitutes poetic authority.

We discuss in Myth 2 the question of whether Chaucer was the first writer of poetry in English; a question that is much easier to resolve at a factual level. There were certainly other poets writing in Middle English before Chaucer (let alone the substantial body of poetry in Old English), and contemporaneously with him. Yet as with Chaucer’s fatherhood, his early followers heavily promoted the idea that English poetry had all begun with him. So, for example, the anonymous author of The Book of Courtesy (1477) wrote:

Like Spenser’s “well of English undefyled,” this imagery draws on the classical tradition of Mount Parnassus, the mythic source of poetry and learning.

Similarly, in the 1532 edition of Chaucer’s works, Sir Brian Tuke also marvels how, during the medieval period, “when doubtless all good letters were laid asleep throughout the world,” nonetheless “suche an excellente poete in our tonge, shulde as it were (nature repugnyge) sprynge and aryse.”¹⁷

Ironies abound even here, though. The idea of a poet “illuminating” a land itself comes from Chaucer, whose Clerk introduces his translation of Petrarch’s tale of Griselda (itself a translation from Boccaccio) with praise of Petrarch’s “rethorike sweete” that has “Enlumyned al Ytaille of poetrie” (IV.33–34).¹⁸ Many of the metaphors and myths of origin we discuss in this book have at least two temporal dimensions: sometimes, as here, we look back through the past to see the shape of each myth as it has developed; in others we also try to examine the conditions that give rise to each idea about Chaucer. We consider here the myth of Chaucer’s “fatherhood” as it has been perceived and expressed by his literary “children” who claim him as forebear; in Myth 2, we will consider the reception of Chaucer in contrast to other, earlier English poets.

Was Chaucer the father of English literature? Perhaps perversely, we suggest that indeed he was, if only because so many writers have thought and written about him in this way. A literary tradition constitutes itself by choosing its own forebears, and by very selective processes of ideological and national interest. Chaucer has held this position in the scholarly and popular imaginary for so long that his position is no longer disputed, though this is not to say that the idea of literary paternity has not come under severe critique from a number of quarters. Many literary scholars over the last forty or so years have worked hard to destabilize such self‐affirming genealogies, critiquing the exclusions and ideological assumptions about the kind of poetic voice and attitudes that are normalized through precisely this sort of self‐selecting tradition. Like other white, male writers, Chaucer is subject to critiques of the canon he seems to inaugurate. If Chaucer is the father of English literature, then he should be the first place we go to in order to re‐think the kinds of literature we want to study. This book is another step in that project, as we turn to examine the origins and implications of many of our ideas about the poet that some have named “Father.”

Of all the “myths” in this book, of old or of more recent standing, this is one of the easiest to dispel. It is the other side of the coin, as it were, to Myth 1, “Chaucer is the father of English literature.” As we saw there, for better or worse, Chaucer is consistently thought of as the oldest poet to exert a benevolent but deep influence on later poetic tradition in England and by extension, on all Anglophone writing.

But was he the first poet to write in English? This is a very different question. There is one linguistic issue to clear up first, and that is what we mean by “English.” Chaucer’s language is known as “Middle English,” the language written and spoken in England between around 1100 and 1500. The phrase makes a careful distinction from “Old English,” the language spoken by the Germanic tribes who settled in England around the mid‐fifth century after the Romans had withdrawn. Most of the surviving manuscripts in Old English were written in the ninth, tenth and eleventh centuries. Many of these texts contain a mixture of Christian and pagan Germanic ideas as a result of the Christian missionary program starting in the sixth century, which had a profound influence on both religious and scribal culture.

Old English is the language of Beowulf, as well as a mixed corpus of heroic narratives, saints’ lives, sermons, letters, translations, personal lyrics and other writings. For our purposes, one of the earliest and most important fragments of poetry is preserved in a Latin text, Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum, translated into modern English as The Ecclesiastical History of the English People, written by the monk Bede in 731 CE. Here Bede recounts the story of Caedmon, a cowherd, who would routinely leave gatherings when it was his turn to sing because he had no musical ability. But inspired by God in a dream, he produces a short poem in Old English, using words and expressions he has never spoken before, honoring the Creation:

The language of Caedmon’s poem is substantially different from Chaucer’s Middle English, and we quote the text in its entirety, partly to give a sense of what English poetry looks like without French and Latin vocabulary, and also to show the patterns of non‐rhyming alliterating poetry, with the first stress after the mid‐line caesura often acting as the foundational alliterating syllable. The literal translation also shows the flexible word order possible when a language is more heavily inflected (for example, when variable suffixes do the work of prepositions), and when the verse form proceeds by paratactic phrases in apposition, rather than sentences structured around a controlling principal verb, as most of Chaucer’s sentences are, even in the syntax of his more complex stanzaic forms, like the seven‐line “rhyme royal” stanza. Bede’s narrative similarly draws attention to the strong oral component in Old English poetry, and again, this is closely related to its appositional form.

Old English is classified as a Germanic language, as are Middle English and Modern English, too. Nevertheless, after 1066 and the defeat of the Anglo‐Saxon King Harold Godwinson by William of Normandy, the language changed gradually but substantially, developing in increasingly fluid exchange with Anglo‐Norman, the French spoken in England after William’s victory. It is difficult to underestimate the enormity of this cultural change, though the greatest linguistic effect was felt first among the nobility, as many Anglo‐Saxon lords were dispossessed after this defeat.

So what was poetic writing like between the eleventh century and the 1360s, when Chaucer began to write? A fair amount of poetry in English has survived, though possibly more has been lost. Lyric poems and songs were not always written down or preserved in manuscripts, and while romances were popular in the thirteenth century, few survive from this period. However, romances such as King Horn and Havelok the Dane offer energetic and enthusiastic accounts of complex dynastic and cross‐cultural plots, determined young heroes, resourceful maidens and the popularity of values such as courage, loyalty and determination.² Some of the more improbably complicated plotlines of these and later romances such as Bevis of Hampton give us some idea of the tradition Chaucer was confidently parodying in his Tale of Sir Thopas. Verse forms varied, too, from the rhyming couplets and tail‐rhyme stanzas of the romances and other poems such as the querulous debate poem, The Owl and the Nightingale (late twelfth or early thirteenth century), to the uneven history of unrhymed alliterative verse form that seems to have undergone a kind of “revival” in the mid‐fourteenth century, and the separate history of prose writing in chronicles and various forms of devotional literature. These writings were not always isolated, either. A significant cluster of writing in English, from a range of styles and genres (romances, chronicles, devotional poems, saints’ lives), had been anthologized in the Auchinleck Manuscript (now in the National Library of Scotland, Advocates MS.19.2.1), written in London in the 1340s, and it may be that Chaucer saw and read parts of this manuscript.

Chaucer, then, was very far from the first poet to write in English. Conversely, it seems likely that when he began to write poetry his chosen language would have been French, which was still the dominant language for literary works in England in the fourteenth century, and the language of his first workplaces, the households associated with the royal court. For example, many scholars believe, on circumstantial evidence, that a number of the anonymous French lyrics preserved in the “Ch” manuscript (University of Pennsylvania MS French 15), dated around the 1360s, were written by Chaucer.³

Chaucer was also the first English poet to translate extensively from Italian, though we should always remind ourselves of the great achievement of John Gower, Chaucer’s contemporary, who wrote substantial works in each of English, French and Latin. In many ways, Gower is the more typical example of fourteenth‐century court culture.

In Myth 1, we discussed briefly the question of Chaucer’s use of English, and the common view, repeated throughout the fifteenth century, that he revitalized the English language and made it worthy of poetry in the high style. As Marion Turner writes of Chaucer’s early poem, The Book of the Duchess, “no one had written this style of poem in English before, and it is extraordinarily interesting that Chaucer now made his intervention into the world of stylized courtly letters in a language that had not previously been a language of literature at the English court.”⁴ Turner stresses Chaucer’s relationship with writers in both France and Hainault (now part of Belgium, and the birthplace of Edward III’s queen Philippa), and argues against the idea that Chaucer might be inaugurating some kind of competitive defense of English to rival the dominance of French. This “could only have seemed ludicrous to a multilingual man such as Chaucer, whose deep and engaged reading of his French and Hainuyer contemporaries is evident in almost every line of the Book of the Duchess.”⁵

Turner follows Ardis Butterfield here, who shows that “there was nothing isolated or autonomous about fourteenth‐century written English.” For Butterfield, to use English in this kind of courtly setting was to be “profoundly aware” of other languages and the relations between languages.⁶ She argues that in its subtle re‐voicings of poems by Guillaume de Machaut and Jean Froissart, this early Chaucerian poem is “brilliantly ambiguous” in its dramatization of poetic subjectivity across cultures and languages: Chaucer is participating in international developments, not striking out for nationalism. As Turner points out, however, after writing The Book of the Duchess Chaucer drew increasingly on the work of Italian writers, especially the poetry of Boccaccio: “Poetically, Chaucer’s consumption of Italian verse was exceptionally productive, generative, and liberating: it energized him and gave him tools and models for innovative literary play.”⁷

The misleading myth of Chaucer inaugurating poetry in English can be read as a symptom of proud nationalist (or English‐speaking) ideology that wants to conflate literary greatness with linguistic inventiveness, and that feeds the idea that English poetry and the English language developed more or less in splendid insular isolation. It also falls prey to the desire to attribute the effects of wide‐ranging social and cultural change to one influential genius, and is part of a self‐perpetuating circle: Chaucer is the oldest poet who regularly finds a place on the English curriculum; and so it therefore appears as if he is the first.

By the late sixteenth century, however, Chaucer’s language was regarded as either intriguingly archaic or hopelessly obsolete, requiring a growing panoply of glossing and commentary to render it legible to all but antiquarians. Larger cultural forces will always be more influential than the work of one writer.

Chaucer’s primacy is bolstered by the fact that his language still seems at least recognizable to modern readers, though this familiarity is a result of the happy accident that the Southeast Midlands dialect spoken by Chaucer was the same language as that of the court’s administration. The stability of London as the capital city meant that modern English has most in common with this dialect of Middle English, rendering Chaucer’s language relatively familiar. The language of the Gawain poet, by contrast, seems far more alien, with different dialectal inflectional forms and a far more specialized and regional vocabulary. Chaucer’s own consciousness of dialect variation (in the Reeve’s Tale) and differences in regional poetic styles (in the Parson’s Prologue) play no small part in this sense that his language represents a kind of “norm” for English.

Nevertheless, Simon Horobin advises us not to make too many assumptions about the similarities and continuities between Chaucer’s language and our own: in syntax, semantics and vocabulary there are still many important structural differences.⁸ On the question of whether Chaucer invented poetic language in English, he did introduce a number of new words (according to J.D. Burnley, Chaucer’s vocabulary was approximately twice as large as Gower’s),⁹ though Horobin advises caution here, too: “it is important that we do not treat all French words used by Chaucer as of equivalent status.”¹⁰ For example, one of Chaucer’s linguistic traits involved moving words from legal or political discourse into other contexts, so while the word may not be “new,” it appears so in this unfamiliar setting. This is particularly the case in what is termed Chaucer’s “high style,” which is characterized by words that stand out stylistically and draw attention to themselves.¹¹

This is one of the areas in which Chaucer’s poetic language was more distinctive, and indeed when his successors praised his innovations, it was often in terms of this more elevated, “laureate” and adorned style, though now we would prefer to praise the subtle and fluid movements between different styles in his work.

Recent work on the linguistic context of fourteenth‐century England also emphasizes its multicultural nature, and many of these words would still have been experienced as borrowings. For Butterfield, for example, there were two vernacular languages in late medieval England: English and French. She also reminds us of the distinction between continental French and Anglo‐French,¹² which was still the dominant language of the English court in the fourteenth century. There is only limited evidence to suggest that the Ricardian court embraced this new English poetic tradition; and indeed, Christopher Cannon suggests that in Chaucer’s time, “the use of English in literature remained rebellious, even if not politically charged,” through its associations with the Wycliffite movement promoting English religious literacy, and the use of English in some political and legal contexts.¹³ Moreover, it has been suggested that poetry in English was really taken up in even a semi‐official way only by the Lancastrians under Henry IV, and more particularly by Henry V, well after the death of Chaucer in 1400.¹⁴

We can confidently “bust” this myth, then. Chaucer was far from the first English poet, and while his own poetic followers were quick to applaud and praise his originality, his apparent primacy in this regard is the effect of much larger historical forces and critical desires.