tag:theconversation.com,2011:/us/topics/geoffrey-chaucer-81551/articlesGeoffrey Chaucer – The Conversation2021-11-24T13:57:44Ztag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1722102021-11-24T13:57:44Z2021-11-24T13:57:44ZZadie Smith: how the Wife of Willesden brings to life Chaucer’s tale of sex and power<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/433500/original/file-20211123-20-82ghqz.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C0%2C1200%2C671&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">They call her The Wife of Willesden.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://kilntheatre.com/whats-on/the-wife-of-willesden/">Marc Brenner</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>It could be easy to assume that <a href="https://www.bl.uk/collection-items/the-canterbury-tales-by-geoffrey-chaucer">The Canterbury Tales</a>, a collection of stories written in Middle English at the end of the 14th century, would not hold much relevance to contemporary debates about sexuality and empowerment. </p>
<p>But as Zadie Smith shows in her new adaption and her first play, this definitely isn’t the case. <a href="https://kilntheatre.com/whats-on/the-wife-of-willesden/">The Wife of Willesden</a>, is a high-spirited take on Chaucer’s “Wife of Bath”, one of the 24 stories in Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales. </p>
<p>The Canterbury Tales tells the story of a group of 31 pilgrims who meet while travelling from the Tabard Inn in Southwark, South London, to the shrine of St Thomas Becket in Canterbury, Kent. Chaucer’s pilgrims - including Alysoun, the Wife of Bath - take turns telling stories on their travels. </p>
<p>Smith’s tale takes place during a pub lock-in – with locals celebrating the Borough of Brent winning the <a href="https://www.london.gov.uk/what-we-do/arts-and-culture/current-culture-projects/london-borough-culture/london-borough-culture-2020-brent">London Borough of Culture 2020</a>. It was this win that led to Smith (Brent’s most famous writer) being commissioned to write a <a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-59307100">literary celebration of the borough</a>. This is what prompted her to recreate Chaucer’s Wife of Bath in a modern form.</p>
<p>In the original text, audacious Alysoun gives the longest prologue of all of Chaucer’s pilgrims, describing how she has been married five times. She tells her tale about a knight of Camelot who rapes a maiden. As a result, the knight is sentenced by Queen Guinevere to find out what women want most. </p>
<p>For a year he has no luck, but he finally meets an old hag who gives him the answer and in return, he promises to repay her as she wishes – a rash promise he’ll soon regret. The answer turns out to be that women desire “sovereignty” over their husbands, and the knight’s promise means he ends up forced to marry the hag. Luckily for him, she also has the magical capacity to be a beautiful maiden, provided he grants her autonomy to choose which form she takes.</p>
<p>In <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2021/nov/21/the-wife-of-willesden-zadie-smith-kiln-review-rare-earth-mettle-royal-court">The Wife of Willesden</a>, Smith takes audiences from the medieval Southwark Tavern to the present-day Sir Colin Campbell pub on Kilburn High Street. And it is here we meet the red dress-clad, fake Jimmy-Choo sporting, cunnilingus-loving Alvita, played by <a href="https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0673907/">Clare Perkins</a>. </p>
<p>The tale told by Alvita, a 21st-century Wife of Bath, moves the location from the court of King Arthur to 18th-century Jamaica. Smith weaves medieval, contemporary and colonial contexts together with fiercely lewd humour that echoes Chaucer’s own bawdiness.</p>
<h2>Shame and Choice</h2>
<p>The lesson of Chaucer’s Wife of Bath about female sovereignty is particularly poignant because Chaucer was <a href="http://www.umsl.edu/%7Egradyf/chaucer/cecily.htm">embroiled in a rape case</a> of his own. Not much is known about the case other than the fact that Chaucer was released in 1380 from a charge of “raptus” made by Cecily Champaigne, the daughter of a London baker. </p>
<p>“Raptus” in court documents could indicate sexual assault, but also <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/jun/07/document-casts-new-light-on-chaucer-rape-case">abduction</a> for an arranged marriage. But whether or not the Wife’s Tale held personal significance to Chaucer, he chose to add the crime of rape to the tale and had Alysoun tell a story about sexual violence and choice. In fact, the rape does not appear in any of the source texts he worked with when writing his version.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/433502/original/file-20211123-15-bc54ba.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="Opening page of The Wife of Bath's Prologue Tale, from the Ellesmere manuscript of Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/433502/original/file-20211123-15-bc54ba.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/433502/original/file-20211123-15-bc54ba.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=766&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/433502/original/file-20211123-15-bc54ba.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=766&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/433502/original/file-20211123-15-bc54ba.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=766&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/433502/original/file-20211123-15-bc54ba.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=963&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/433502/original/file-20211123-15-bc54ba.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=963&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/433502/original/file-20211123-15-bc54ba.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=963&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Opening page of The Wife of Bath’s Prologue Tale, from the Ellesmere manuscript of Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Wife-of-Bath-ms.jpg">Wikimedia Commons</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>In many ways, Chaucer’s Alysoun is a woman well ahead of her time. She condemns biblical scripture and medieval writings about women’s “chaste” conduct in marriage, arguing that God gave people reproductive organs to use, and she will use hers for profit and pleasure. Alysoun rejects literature that advises women to dress to protect their modesty. Instead, she wears scarlet stockings and new shoes – and goes on pilgrimage to be seen and to potentially woo a new lover. </p>
<p>Alvita is an unashamedly sex-positive woman in her mid-50s. She, like Alysoun, has been married five times. And, in Smith’s rough iambic couplets that render Willesden’s multicultural London dialects into verse, Alvita explains how she refuses to be told, by society, the church, her husbands, how to behave or dress:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>My thing is: you want to think you’re a saint?<br>
Fine. But don’t slut-shame me because I ain’t</p>
</blockquote>
<h2>Women’s Voices</h2>
<p>In Chaucer’s time, Willesden was itself a place of pilgrimage, not least for what was thought to be a black Madonna shrine, <a href="https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/abs/virgin-mary-in-late-medieval-and-early-modern-english-literature-and-popular-culture/walsingham-or-falsingham-woolpit-or-foulpit-marian-shrines-and-pilgrimage-before-1538/0036FA1CFF1396B17C2043C40661CDA0">known as Our Lady of Willesden</a>.</p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/433491/original/file-20211123-21-28hxf3.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="Black Madonna and Child" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/433491/original/file-20211123-21-28hxf3.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/433491/original/file-20211123-21-28hxf3.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=527&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/433491/original/file-20211123-21-28hxf3.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=527&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/433491/original/file-20211123-21-28hxf3.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=527&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/433491/original/file-20211123-21-28hxf3.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=663&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/433491/original/file-20211123-21-28hxf3.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=663&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/433491/original/file-20211123-21-28hxf3.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=663&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Black Madonna and Child statue of Our Lady of Willesden.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Our_Lady_of_Willesden_-_black_madonna.jpg">Wikimedia Commons</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">CC BY</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Smith plays on this by taking Chaucer’s “gat-tothed” (gap-toothed) Alysoun, imagining her as Alvita: “gap-toothed like (pop-star) Madonna”, a smile which Alvita tells us, “suits us both; symbolises passion”. </p>
<p>The comparison with the singer is one of the many instances where Alvita pleads that her many spouses should not treat her like the virgin she assuredly isn’t, but rather as an empowered, independent and experienced partner. </p>
<p>As with Chaucer’s Alysoun, Alvita rated three of her five husbands as good, because they were old and she was able to manipulate them, while two were bad: younger men who cheated, lied and abused her. </p>
<p>Smith’s adaptation uses Chaucer’s references to sexual desire, domestic violence and freedom of choice to explore contemporary concerns such as the sex-positive movement, #MeToo, and incels culture or “<a href="https://www.harpersbazaar.com/culture/politics/a20078774/what-are-incels/">involuntary celibates</a>”. Indeed, Alysoun’s arguments about clothing and sexuality become strikingly relatable to Alvita’s critiques of “slut-shaming” and <a href="https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/men-sexual-assault-clothes-women-victim-blaming-rape-a8792591.html">victim-blaming</a>.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="Woman in red dress flirtatiously sits on man's knee in a pub." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/433503/original/file-20211123-23-1nnfrnv.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/433503/original/file-20211123-23-1nnfrnv.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=338&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/433503/original/file-20211123-23-1nnfrnv.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=338&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/433503/original/file-20211123-23-1nnfrnv.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=338&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/433503/original/file-20211123-23-1nnfrnv.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=424&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/433503/original/file-20211123-23-1nnfrnv.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=424&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/433503/original/file-20211123-23-1nnfrnv.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=424&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Zadie Smith transports Chaucer’s The Wife of Bath to 21st-century northwest London.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://kilntheatre.com/whats-on/the-wife-of-willesden/">Marc Brenner</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Alvita is a thrilling (and perhaps troubling) reminder of the way that the concerns of Chaucer’s medieval characters are still relevant today. Though Smith’s more inclusive rendering gives a voice to those silent in the original text, like Alysoun’s “gossib” (close friend) who becomes Alvita’s outspoken “ride-and-die bitch”, Zaire. </p>
<p>Ultimately though, at a time when even famous women can struggle to <a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/59338205">tell their stories</a> against powerful men, such tales about female agency have never been more crucial.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/172210/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Natalie Hanna does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Zadie Smith’s first play delivers on what women want.Natalie Hanna, Lecturer in English, University of LiverpoolLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1523122021-07-19T12:12:20Z2021-07-19T12:12:20ZCalls to cancel Chaucer ignore his defense of women and the innocent – and assume all his characters’ opinions are his<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/411496/original/file-20210715-15-wkdao0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C1337%2C2246%2C1508&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Was Chaucer a toxic misogynist, or a staunch women's ally?</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/geoffrey-chaucer-english-poet-equestrian-portrait-of-news-photo/113489302">Universal Images Group via Getty Images</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Spying is a risky profession. For the 14th-century English undercover agent-turned-poet Geoffrey Chaucer, <a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=kYzgDwAAQBAJ&pg=PA95&dq=Chaucer+military+intelligence&hl=en&newbks=1&newbks_redir=0&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwikmuL34d_xAhWRcc0KHRMHB0kQ6AEwAHoECAkQAg#v=onepage&q=Chaucer%20military%20intelligence&f=false">the dangers</a> – at least to his reputation – continue to surface centuries after his death. </p>
<p>In his <a href="https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/why-is-chaucer-disappearing-from-the-university-curriculum-leicester-essay-a-s-g-edwards">July 2021 essay</a> for the Times Literary Supplement, A.S.G. Edwards, professor of medieval manuscripts at the University of Kent in Canterbury, England, laments the removal of Geoffrey Chaucer from university curricula. Edwards says he believes this disappearance may be propelled by a vocal cohort of scholars who see the “father of English poetry” as <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/727754">a rapist, racist and antisemite</a>.</p>
<p>The predicament would have amused Chaucer himself. Jewish and feminist scholars, among others, are shooting down one of their earliest and wisest allies. This is happening when <a href="https://voegelinview.com/feminist-thought-of-geoffrey-chaucer-the-wife-of-bath-and-all-hire-secte">new research reveals</a> a Chaucer altogether different from what many current readers have come to accept. My decades of research show he was no raunchy proponent of bro culture but a daring and ingenious <a href="https://theconversation.com/for-the-birds-hardly-valentines-day-was-reimagined-by-chivalrous-medieval-poets-for-all-to-enjoy-respectfully-155099">defender of women and the innocent</a>.</p>
<p>As a <a href="https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=iDoS8ewAAAAJ&hl=en">medievalist who teaches Chaucer</a>, I believe the movement to cancel Chaucer has been bamboozled by his tradecraft – his consummate skill as a master of disguise.</p>
<h2>Outfoxing the professors</h2>
<p>It’s true that Chaucer’s work contains toxic material. His “<a href="https://chaucer.fas.harvard.edu/pages/prologue">Wife of Bath’s Prologue</a>” in “The Canterbury Tales,” his celebrated collection of stories, quotes at length from the long tradition of classical and medieval works on the <a href="https://research.gold.ac.uk/id/eprint/12914/">evils of women</a>, as mansplained by the Wife’s elderly husbands: “You say, just as worms destroy a tree, so a wife destroys her husband.”</p>
<p>Later, “<a href="https://sites.fas.harvard.edu/%7Echaucer/teachslf/pri-par.htm">The Prioress’s Tale</a>” repeats the anti-Semitic <a href="https://www.adl.org/education/resources/glossary-terms/blood-libel">blood libel</a> story, the false accusation that Jews murdered Christians, at a time when Jews across Europe <a href="https://www.montana.edu/historybug/yersiniaessays/pariera-dinkins.html">were under attack</a>.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/411132/original/file-20210713-21-fxqh4g.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="An illustration of two women characters from Geoffrey Chaucer's 'The Canterbury Tales'" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/411132/original/file-20210713-21-fxqh4g.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/411132/original/file-20210713-21-fxqh4g.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=655&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/411132/original/file-20210713-21-fxqh4g.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=655&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/411132/original/file-20210713-21-fxqh4g.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=655&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/411132/original/file-20210713-21-fxqh4g.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=823&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/411132/original/file-20210713-21-fxqh4g.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=823&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/411132/original/file-20210713-21-fxqh4g.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=823&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The Prioress and the Wife of Bath from Geoffrey Chaucer’s ‘The Canterbury Tales.’</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/the-prioress-and-the-wife-of-bath-from-old-england-a-news-photo/1036139720">Universal History Archive/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>These poems in particular generate accusations that Chaucer propagated sexist and antisemitic material because he agreed with or enjoyed it. </p>
<p><a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=5rDoDwAAQBAJ&newbks=1&newbks_redir=0&dq=elaine+tuttle+hansen+chaucer+and+the+fictions+of+gender&source=gbs_navlinks_s">Several</a> <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/issue/40555">prominent</a> <a href="https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691160092/chaucer">scholars</a> seem convinced that Chaucer’s personal views are the same as those of his characters and that Chaucer is promoting these opinions. And they believe he abducted or raped a young woman named Cecily Chaumpaigne, although the <a href="http://www.umsl.edu/%7Egradyf/chaucer/cecily.htm">legal records</a> are enigmatic. It looks as though Cecily accused Chaucer of some such crime and he paid her to clear his name. It’s unclear what actually happened between them.</p>
<p>Critics cherry-pick quotations to support their claims about Chaucer. But if you examine his writings in detail, as I have, you’ll see themes of concern for women and human rights, the oppressed and the persecuted, reappear time and time again.</p>
<h2>Chaucer the spy</h2>
<p>Readers often assume Chaucer’s characters were a reflection of the writer’s own attitude because he is such a convincing role player. Chaucer’s <a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=E4DXD7Sk7WcC&printsec=frontcover&dq=life+of+Chaucer+Riverside+Chaucer&hl=en&newbks=1&newbks_redir=0&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwiws4jr0uXxAhWnEFkFHXbCAOQQ6AEwAHoECAsQAg#v=onepage&q=life%20of%20Chaucer%20Riverside%20Chaucer&f=false">career in the English secret service</a> trained him as an observer, analyst, diplomat and master at concealing his own views.</p>
<p>In his teens, Chaucer became a confidential envoy for England. From 1359 to 1378, he graced English diplomatic delegations and carried out missions described in expense records only as “<a href="https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-riverside-chaucer-9780199552092?lang=de&cc=lt">the king’s secret business</a>.”</p>
<p>Documents show him scouting paths through the Pyrenees for English forces poised to invade Spain. He lobbied Italy for money and troops, while also perhaps investigating the suspicious death of Lionel of Antwerp, an English prince who was probably poisoned soon after his wedding. </p>
<p>Chaucer’s job brought him face to face with the darkest figures of his day — the treacherous <a href="https://www.britannica.com/biography/Charles-II-king-of-Navarre">Charles the Bad, King of Navarre</a>, a notorious traitor and assassin, and Bernabò Visconti, lord of Milan, who helped devise a <a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=0YoxAAAAQBAJ&pg=PA179&dq=Bernabo+Visconti+torture&hl=en&newbks=1&newbks_redir=0&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwizxdyM8t_xAhVZGs0KHZgQCn0Q6AEwCHoECAQQAg#v=onepage&q=Bernabo%20Visconti%20torture&f=false">40-day torture protocol</a>.</p>
<p>Chaucer’s poetry reflects his experience as an English agent. He enjoyed role-playing and assuming many identities in his writing. And like the couriers he dispatched from Italy in 1378, he brings his readers covert messages split between multiple speakers. Each teller holds just a piece of the puzzle. The whole story can only be understood when all the messages arrive. </p>
<p>He also uses the skills of a secret agent to express dangerous truths not accepted in his own day, when misogyny and antisemitism were both entrenched, especially among the clergy.</p>
<p>Chaucer does not preach or explain. Instead, he lets the formidable Wife of Bath, the character he most enjoyed, tell us about the misogyny of her five husbands and fantasize about how ladies of King Arthur’s court might take revenge on a rapist. Or he makes his deserted <a href="http://mcllibrary.org/Houseoffame/">Queen Dido cry</a>: “Given their bad behavior, it’s a shame any woman ever took pity on any man.”</p>
<h2>Chaucer the chivalrous defender</h2>
<p>While current critiques of Chaucer label him as an <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/issue/40555">exponent of toxic masculinity</a>, he was actually an <a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=E5BCs9mylBsC&pg=PA379&dq=Chaucer+human+rights&hl=en&newbks=1&newbks_redir=0&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjKqeXc1OXxAhV3F1kFHZztDcYQ6AEwAXoECAoQAg#v=onepage&q=Chaucer%20human%20rights&f=false">advocate for human rights</a>. </p>
<p>My own research shows that in the course of his career he supported women’s right to choose their own mates and the human desire for freedom from enslavement, coercion, verbal abuse, political tyranny, judicial corruption and sexual trafficking. In “The Canterbury Tales” and “The Legend of Good Women,” he tells many stories on such themes. There he opposed assassination, infanticide and femicide, the mistreatment of prisoners, sexual harassment and domestic abuse. He valued self-control in action and in speech. He spoke out for women, enslaved people and Jews. </p>
<p>“Women want to be free and not coerced like slaves, and so do men,” the narrator of <a href="https://sites.fas.harvard.edu/%7Echaucer/teachslf/frkt-par.htm">“The Franklin’s Prologue” says</a>.</p>
<p>[<em>Like what you’ve read? Want more?</em> <a href="https://theconversation.com/us/newsletters/the-daily-3?utm_source=TCUS&utm_medium=inline-link&utm_campaign=newsletter-text&utm_content=likethis">Sign up for The Conversation’s daily newsletter</a>.]</p>
<p>As for Jews, Chaucer salutes their ancient heroism in his early poem “<a href="https://www.poetryintranslation.com/PITBR/English/Fame.php">The House of Fame</a>.” He depicts them as a people who have done great good in the world, only to be rewarded with slander. In “The Prioress’s Tale” he shows them being libeled by a desperate character to cover up a crime of which they were manifestly innocent, a century after all Jews had been brutally expelled from England.</p>
<p>Chaucer’s own words demonstrate beyond the shadow of a doubt that when his much underestimated Prioress tells her antisemitic blood libel tale, Chaucer is not endorsing it. Through <a href="https://sites.fas.harvard.edu/%7Echaucer/teachslf/pri-par.htm">her own words and actions</a>, and a cascade of reactions from those who hear her, he is exposing such guilty and dangerous actors as they deploy such lies.</p>
<p>And was he a rapist or an abductor? <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/jun/07/document-casts-new-light-on-chaucer-rape-case">It’s unlikely</a>. The case suggests he might well have been targeted, perhaps even because of his work. Few authors have ever been more <a href="https://scholarship.depauw.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1133&context=studentresearch">outspoken about man’s inhumanity to women</a>.</p>
<p>It is bizarre that one of the strongest and earliest writers in English literature to speak out against rape and support women and the downtrodden should be pilloried and threatened with cancellation. </p>
<p>But Chaucer knew the complexity of his art put him at risk. As his character the Squire dryly observed, people all too often “demen gladly to the badder ende” – “They are happy to assume the worst.”</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/152312/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Jennifer Wollock is a member of the New Chaucer Society.</span></em></p>Chaucer’s career as a secret agent helped him assume different disguises in his writing. Some scholars interpret this role-playing as Chaucer being sexist and anti-Semitic.Jennifer Wollock, Professor of English, Texas A&M UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1550992021-02-11T20:10:50Z2021-02-11T20:10:50ZFor the birds? Hardly! Valentine’s Day was reimagined by chivalrous medieval poets for all to enjoy, respectfully<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/383815/original/file-20210211-19-qdtz6d.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=302%2C627%2C761%2C755&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Roses are red, thieving birds are blue. My neck is aching, are you uncomfortable too?</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://digi.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/diglit/cpg848/0494">Universitatbibliothek Heidelberg</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Valentine’s Day <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2012/02/13/opinion/obeidallah-hate-valentines-day/index.html">annoys many people</a>.</p>
<p>For many in a relationship, the pressure to impress a partner can weigh heavily, and expensive gifts serve as a reminder of the <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2010/feb/12/valentines-day-commercialised">relentless commercialization</a> <a href="https://www.researchgate.net/publication/228150577_A_Holiday_Loved_and_Loathed_A_Consumer_Perspective_of_Valentine's_Day">of the holiday</a>. Meanwhile those still looking for love <a href="https://blog.pof.com/2020/01/the-pressures-of-valentines-day-dating-study/">approach the day with trepidation</a> – another reminder of their single status and the pressure to find a partner.</p>
<p>As a <a href="https://scholars.library.tamu.edu/vivo/display/nbfd0863b/Persons/View%20All">chivalric literary historian</a> who has studied the origins of the holiday, I find this a shame. When the notion of Valentine’s Day as a day for romance emerged in the 1380s it was all about love as a natural life force – birds choosing their mates, the freedom to choose or refuse love and the arrival of springtime. But even then many people did not understand or value these things. In fact, that is why it was invented. </p>
<h2>Odes to love</h2>
<p>The first to write of Valentine’s Day – a feast day with <a href="https://www.nationalgeographic.com/culture/holidays/reference/saint-st-valentines-day/#:%7E:text=The%20earliest%20possible%20origin%20story,sacrifice%20a%20goat%20and%20dog.&text=When%20Pope%20Gelasius%20came%20to,put%20an%20end%20to%20Lupercalia.">ancient pagan roots</a> – as a holiday celebrating love and lovers were the 14th-century <a href="https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/geoffrey-chaucer">English squire Geoffrey Chaucer</a> and his friend, the internationally admired <a href="https://d.lib.rochester.edu/teams/text/nicholson-grenier-winther-granson-poems-introduction">knight and poet Oton III de Granson</a>, from Savoy in modern-day France. Both poets were recognized in their own time as chivalrous advocates for human rights. And in tandem, they seem to have <a href="https://www.bl.uk/collection-items/the-parliament-of-fowls#:%7E:text=The%20idea%20that%20Valentine's%20Day,their%20mates%20for%20the%20year.">concocted Valentine’s Day as a day for lovers</a>.</p>
<p>Their work supported principles still important for us today, notably the right to free choice in love and the right to refuse romantic advances.</p>
<p>Chaucer and Granson encountered one another in the service of <a href="https://www.ancient.eu/Richard_II_of_England/">Richard II of England</a> and admired one another’s poetry. Their poems about Valentine’s Day show them operating as an international chivalric team to address pressing issues in the theory and practice of love, then and now.</p>
<p>In the poem “<a href="https://www.poetryintranslation.com/PITBR/English/Fowls.php">The Parliament of Fowls</a>,” Chaucer presents Valentine’s Day as a day when birds gather to choose their mates under the supervision of nature. In the poem, presented as a dream, three rival eagles each express a lifelong commitment to a single female. Birds of lower social status and different temperament, waiting in line, quarrel about how to resolve the impasse so they, too, can select their mates.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="An engraving of four eagles in a tree as depicted in Geoffrey Chaucer's 'Parliament of Fowls'" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/383790/original/file-20210211-15-1ycv2m0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/383790/original/file-20210211-15-1ycv2m0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=452&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/383790/original/file-20210211-15-1ycv2m0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=452&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/383790/original/file-20210211-15-1ycv2m0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=452&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/383790/original/file-20210211-15-1ycv2m0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=568&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/383790/original/file-20210211-15-1ycv2m0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=568&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/383790/original/file-20210211-15-1ycv2m0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=568&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">A 19th-century illustration of Chaucer’s ‘Parliament of Fowls.’</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/illustration-from-the-kelmscott-press-edition-of-the-works-news-photo/464000155?adppopup=true">The Print Collector/Getty Images</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>In the scenario, two of the eagles must be disappointed – Valentine’s Day is no guarantee that all will find love. But in the end the wise female eagle obtains from the figure of Nature the right to take her time in deciding her mate. She chooses not to choose. It is a story of waiting to recognize one’s true love, knowing your own heart and having the right to choose your partner yourself.</p>
<p>Chaucer’s tale relates to an actual courtship that included three suitors and ended in the wedding of two 15-year-olds: <a href="https://www.westminster-abbey.org/abbey-commemorations/royals/richard-ii-and-anne-of-bohemia">Richard II and the princess Anne of Bohemia</a>, in 1382. </p>
<p>Meanwhile, Granson promoted Valentine’s Day in his French poems as a day for human lovers to choose one another and pledge their love, as do the birds. Granson pledges his own undying love to a mysterious lady in his “<a href="https://d.lib.rochester.edu/teams/text/granson-nicholson-grenier-winther-complainte-de-saint-vallentin-garenson">Complaint to Saint Valentine</a>.” There was no merchandise involved and no gifts were expected.</p>
<h2>Free love</h2>
<p>Chaucer and Granson’s celebration of love as a relationship between partners, a union of souls grounded in respect and the freedom of choice, contrasts with many of the traditions of the age in which they lived.</p>
<p>Throughout the Middle Ages, most <a href="https://www.brown.edu/Departments/Italian_Studies/dweb/society/sex/sex-spouses.php">marriages were arranged and often forced</a>, usually in childhood – as <a href="https://www.unicef.org/stories/child-marriage-around-world">many still are today</a> – with the full support of tradition and the law. Saints’ lives and legal documents describe <a href="https://ir.uiowa.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1948&context=mff">parents coercing children to marry</a> by brute force. Chaucer’s own father was <a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=TQHw98Pn16IC&pg=PA371&dq=John+Chaucer+aunt+kidnapping&hl=en&newbks=1&newbks_redir=0&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwia1M3l9uHuAhXaG80KHYaWDLIQ6AEwAnoECAcQAg#v=onepage&q=John%20Chaucer%20aunt%20kidnapping&f=false">kidnapped at age 12 by his aunt</a> in an attempt to force him to marry her daughter in order to gain control over his inheritance.</p>
<p>In this context, Chaucer and Granson reimagined the already existing Valentine’s Day festival to celebrate the potential beauty of love itself. In a world where forced and child marriages are still all too common, it is important to reflect on Chaucer and Granson’s visions. Their reinvention of the day opened the eyes of poets, knights, ladies and just plain folk to the need for respect and self-respect in courtship – and the value of partnerships entered into for love, not just for lust, power or money.</p>
<p>Servants of love, these two knightly poets shaped Valentine’s Day as a gift for future generations. Their chivalrous enterprise deserves to be celebrated as we pursue our own happiness.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/155099/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Jennifer Wollock does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>The view of Valentine’s Day as a day for lovers can be traced back to two medieval poets who stood up for romance and the freedom to choose.Jennifer Wollock, Professor of English, Texas A&M UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1426622020-08-03T05:05:31Z2020-08-03T05:05:31ZChaucer’s great poem Troilus and Criseyde: perfect reading while under siege from a virus<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/350107/original/file-20200729-31-yu15l3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=15%2C4%2C926%2C1194&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Chaucer at the Court of Edward III by Ford Madox Brown (1821-1893)
</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.wikiart.org/en/ford-madox-brown/chaucer-at-the-court-of-edward-iii-1851">Wikiart</a></span></figcaption></figure><p><em>In our series <a href="https://theconversation.com/au/search?utf8=%E2%9C%93&q=Art+for+trying+times">Art for Trying Times</a>, authors nominate a work they turn to for solace or perspective during this pandemic.</em></p>
<p>The Greeks are at the gates, and the city of <a href="https://www.britannica.com/event/Siege-of-Troy-1250-BCE">Troy is under siege</a>.</p>
<p>Every day, the Trojans ride out to do battle with Agamemnon, Odysseus, Ajax and the aggrieved husband Menelaus, whose wife Helen has been abducted by the Trojan prince Paris. But despite this crisis, the Trojan leisured classes carry on with their lives.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/fall-of-troy-the-legend-and-the-facts-92625">Fall of Troy: the legend and the facts</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p>One joyful spring morning, when the sun is shining and the meadows are filled with flowers, a beautiful young widow, Criseyde, sits in her palace, in a paved parlour with two other ladies, while a young maiden reads to them the story of another siege, that of the Greek city of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thebes,_Greece">Thebes</a>. </p>
<p>This pleasant scene is interrupted by Criseyde’s uncle Pandarus, who is bringing the astonishing news that Paris’s younger brother Troilus has fallen in love with her. </p>
<p><a href="https://www.ancient.eu/Geoffrey_Chaucer/">Geoffrey Chaucer</a> wrote his great romance <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Troilus-Criseyde-Penguin-Classics-Geoffrey/dp/0140424210/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&qid=1595565343&refinements=p_27%3ABarry+Windeatt&s=books&sr=1-1&text=Barry+Windeatt">Troilus and Criseyde</a> around 1386. I teach this text every year in my honours class. It is long and difficult, and we normally spend half the semester working through the poem. Even then we don’t read it all in detail. </p>
<p>This year, the global pandemic brings a new context for reading this poem about a passionate but doomed love affair between two Trojans, conducted under siege conditions, in addition to all the constraints Chaucer’s very medieval lovers place around themselves.</p>
<h2>A secret affair</h2>
<p>Chaucer’s language in this text is rich and ornate, and the poem is written in a rhyming stanza whose syntax ranges from elegant to knotty. The narrative is both leisurely and intense. </p>
<p>It offers philosophical digressions about the nature of free will and predestination; but it is also full of intricate private meditations, and absorbing, intense conversations between the three main characters. </p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/350115/original/file-20200729-17-14pfivp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="Book cover: medieval painting of couple" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/350115/original/file-20200729-17-14pfivp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/350115/original/file-20200729-17-14pfivp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=930&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/350115/original/file-20200729-17-14pfivp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=930&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/350115/original/file-20200729-17-14pfivp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=930&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/350115/original/file-20200729-17-14pfivp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1169&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/350115/original/file-20200729-17-14pfivp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1169&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/350115/original/file-20200729-17-14pfivp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1169&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption"></span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.amazon.com/Troilus-Criseyde-Penguin-Classics-Geoffrey/dp/0140424210/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&qid=1595565343&refinements=p_27%3ABarry+Windeatt&s=books&sr=1-1&text=Barry+Windeatt">Penguin</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Nothing in the brutal rough and tumble of Shakespeare’s later play <a href="https://www.shakespeare.org.uk/explore-shakespeare/shakespedia/shakespeares-plays/troilus-and-cressida/">Troilus and Cressida</a> can prepare you for the lyric drama of this poem.</p>
<p>Criseyde’s father has abandoned Troy and gone over to the Greek camp. She has been allowed to remain in Troy, but she is very vulnerable and fearful. The love affair must remain secret to protect her honour; Troilus and Criseyde cannot marry because he is a prince and she is the daughter of a traitor; and nor can they leave Troy and abandon their city. </p>
<p>They are also both overcome by shyness, dread, and reluctance to speak to each other. Indeed, the lovers do not exchange a single word until the beginning of the third book, and by the beginning of the fifth and final book they have parted, never to meet again. </p>
<p>Every year my students bring fresh insights to this poem’s emotional and cultural drama. Although I am on long service leave this semester, I am still conducting my annual reading of the poem on Zoom with a group of friends and colleagues. </p>
<p>Our <a href="https://arts.unimelb.edu.au/ancient-medieval-and-early-modern-studies/seminars-reading-groups/middle-english">Middle English Reading Group</a> is made up of staff, present and former students, and members of a thriving community of scholars and lovers of medieval and early modern culture. </p>
<p>This year, reading together through Zoom offers a powerful contrast with Chaucer’s scene of medieval women’s communal reading. </p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/o0j2ifNeZvM?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption">Leisurely yet intense language fills rhyming stanza – all seven hours of them.</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/say-what-how-to-improve-virtual-catch-ups-book-groups-and-wine-nights-134655">Say what? How to improve virtual catch-ups, book groups and wine nights</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>Reading aloud</h2>
<p>When Pandarus enters Criseyde’s paved parlour, where the maiden is reading from the book about the siege of Thebes, she greets him warmly and brings him to sit next to her. Hoping to turn her mood to thoughts of love, he asks what they are reading: is it a book about love? Is there anything he can learn?</p>
<p>Criseyde teases her uncle and when they have finished laughing she tells him where they are up to. She points to “thise lettres rede,” the <a href="https://www.dictionary.com/browse/rubricated">rubricated</a> or decoratively coloured chapter heading that introduces the next section.</p>
<p>Pandarus replies that he knows all about that sorrowful story but insists they should turn their thoughts to spring, as a prelude to introducing his news about Troilus. He invites her to dance but Criseyde recoils in horror. As a widow, she says, it would be better for her to live in a cave, to pray, and read the lives of the saints. </p>
<p>In typical Chaucerian fashion, this passage shows a female character’s awareness of what she might do, and perhaps should do, but does not. </p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/guide-to-the-classics-homers-iliad-80968">Guide to the classics: Homer's Iliad</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>Unhappy endings</h2>
<p>The domestic charms of this safe interior space, Pandarus’ fearful invitation, and the pleasures of reading and talking about familiar books distract us from the dreadful history lesson in the book they are reading. For just as Thebes was destroyed under siege, so too will Troy be. </p>
<p>Chaucer’s readers knew this; we know it; and even Criseyde’s father, a soothsayer, knows it: he has already abandoned Troy and gone over to the Greek camp, leaving her unprotected except for her uncle who is about to embroil her in the complexities of Trojan court politics.</p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/350105/original/file-20200729-35-ejdhzf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="Book cover: writer Chaucer" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/350105/original/file-20200729-35-ejdhzf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/350105/original/file-20200729-35-ejdhzf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=904&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/350105/original/file-20200729-35-ejdhzf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=904&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/350105/original/file-20200729-35-ejdhzf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=904&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/350105/original/file-20200729-35-ejdhzf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1136&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/350105/original/file-20200729-35-ejdhzf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1136&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/350105/original/file-20200729-35-ejdhzf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1136&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption"></span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.wiley.com/en-au/30+Great+Myths+about+Chaucer-p-9781119194057">Wiley</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>We know that this love story will turn out badly. In the very first stanza, Chaucer has told us the ending of the story: that Troilus will win Criseyde, but that she will forsake him. </p>
<p>Knowing the ending doesn’t affect our pleasure in this text. And so we read on, absorbed by Chaucer’s capacity to conjure the lives of others as they balance distress with hope, and external disaster with private joy. </p>
<p>Like the Trojans, we may not be able to learn from the past so as to avoid disaster. But Chaucer is forgiving, and offers us the seductive pleasures of reading and rereading, and the comfort of repetition.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/missing-your-friends-rereading-harry-potter-might-be-the-next-best-thing-136236">Missing your friends? Rereading Harry Potter might be the next best thing</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/142662/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Stephanie Trigg receives funding from the Australian Research Council</span></em></p>When we feel under siege, Chaucer’s doomed love story during the battle for Troy might be just the distraction we need.Stephanie Trigg, Redmond Barry Distinguished Professor of English Literature, The University of MelbourneLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1360632020-04-09T14:46:41Z2020-04-09T14:46:41ZHow to celebrate Easter under lockdown<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/326840/original/file-20200409-112635-qar213.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C1%2C1022%2C530&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Before social distancing.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Leonardo da Vinci, Chiesa di Santa Maria delle Grazie</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>With churches closed and annual pilgrimages cancelled, Christians across the world are wondering how to give thanks to God this Easter. And not just Christians – think also of “<a href="https://www.churchtimes.co.uk/articles/2017/22-december/features/features/happy-christmas-folks">Chreasters”</a>. Do you attend church only at Christmas and Easter? If so, you’re a Chreaster, and you’re not alone – <a href="https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2014/04/18/when-easter-and-christmas-near-more-americans-search-online-for-church/">research shows</a> that Church of England attendance can increase by <a href="https://www.churchtimes.co.uk/articles/2019/29-november/news/uk/cathedrals-report-rise-in-attendance-during-holy-week-and-easter">50</a> to <a href="https://www.churchofengland.org/more/media-centre/news/christmas-attendance-highest-level-more-decade">100 per cent</a> at those times.</p>
<p>Even if we assume that most Chreasters attend church for cultural rather than strictly religious reasons, there will still be something missing for them and regular churchgoers this year. The lost opportunity to gather with one another in a community, to experience thanks and praise – and to do so within buildings often hundreds of years old, with songs and spoken words often thousands of years old. It is a lost opportunity felt most grievously when now is a time of loss – loss of normality, of society and, desperately, of individual life.</p>
<p>Christians – perhaps more than Chreasters – face another dilemma: should they support the decision to close churches or oppose it as others from <a href="https://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2020/03/keep-the-churches-open">various</a> <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/05/coronavirus-churches-florida-social-distancing">denominations</a> <a href="https://www.euronews.com/2020/03/22/orthodox-priest-arrested-in-greece-for-holding-mass-during-coronavirus-lockdown">have done</a>. Christians have risked suffering and death to worship before, so why not now, runs the argument.</p>
<p>There is no easy answer to that question. However, one response is to reimagine the notion of pilgrimage. As we follow government advice to “stay at home” it is possible to be stay-at-home pilgrims. Stay-at-home or (to borrow from <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=ez7CAgAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false">Max Weber</a>) “everyday pilgrimage” is particularly associated with the Protestant Reformation.</p>
<h2>Martin Luther and faith</h2>
<p>Some of the most dramatic passages in Martin Luther reinterpret the relationship between work and worship. He describes <a href="https://pages.uoregon.edu/dluebke/Reformations441/LutherMarriage.htm">changing nappies</a>, <a href="https://rockrohr.net/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/Luther-WHETHER-SOLDIERS-TOO-CAN-BE-SAVED.pdf">being a soldier, and even executing criminals</a> as Christian works of love, if they are performed as expressions of faith.</p>
<p>In Luther’s theology, it is impossible for anyone to earn righteousness by works: going on a pilgrimage, becoming a monk, and changing nappies are just as ineffectual when it comes to salvation. Righteousness is <em>sola fide</em>, faith alone: the belief in Christ’s death as an atoning sacrifice for humanity’s sin – the sacrifice that Christians celebrate at Easter. But it is better to change nappies than to be a monk or nun, according to Luther (himself a former monk), who disliked the way they isolated themselves from not just everyday life, but ordinary human biology. </p>
<p>Monks and nuns <a href="https://pages.uoregon.edu/dluebke/Reformations441/LutherMarriage.htm">exhibit</a> the “sin” of “pride” – they think they can <em>make themselves</em> holy by contradicting a direct edict from God to “<a href="https://biblehub.com/genesis/1-28.htm">Be fruitful and multiply</a>”. Rather than undertake monastic vows, Luther insisted that men and women glorify in family life – specifically recommending that fathers view changing nappies as something that can be done in “<a href="https://pages.uoregon.edu/dluebke/Reformations441/LutherMarriage.htm">Christian faith</a>”.</p>
<p>Just like monks and nuns, the belief that <a href="https://sourcebooks.fordham.edu/mod/luther-nobility.asp">pilgrimage must be a literal journey</a> encourages people to think there are special places and activities that can make them holy – places and activities not muddied by ordinary life. But it is ordinary life that God created and into which he became flesh and blood. And it is ordinary sinners that he saves. For Luther, a Christian who changes nappies to care for family is not trying to <em>earn</em> something, but to <em>be</em> something: a faithful Christian who imitates <a href="https://sourcebooks.fordham.edu/mod/luther-freedomchristian.asp">Christ by loving and serving others</a>.</p>
<h2>Plough as pilgrimage</h2>
<p>Although stay-at-home pilgrimage is more obviously Lutheran, it is a theme in works on pilgrimage prior to the Protestant Reformation. William Langland’s 14th-century Piers Plowman criticises those who go on pilgrimage in search of holy shrines but not “truth”. Eventually, some genuine truth-seeking pilgrims appear and travel with Piers – but then they have to stop to help plough his “half-acre” field – it seems that this is the pilgrimage, rather than a distraction from it. </p>
<p>Similarly, <a href="https://global.oup.com/academic/product/two-wycliffite-texts-9780197223031?lang=en&cc=in">The Testimony of William Thorpe</a> distinguishes between “true” and “false” pilgrimage. <a href="https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/1468-2281.00151">Thorpe was on trial</a> for being a <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=HQPcCwAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false">Lollard</a>, a religious group that started in England in the 14th century. The Lollards anticipated many of the beliefs associated with the <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=LuAzDwAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcover&dq=companion+to+lollardy&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjTtZmLrNvoAhXHfMAKHQLJAtIQ6AEIKjAA#v=onepage&q=companion%20to%20lollardy&f=false">later Reformation</a>, including the <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=UGi6WWtzkJYC&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false">first efforts</a> to translate the Bible into English so that ordinary people could read it.</p>
<p>For Thorpe, true pilgrims are “discreet” where as false pilgrims make showy trips to Canterbury – which are just self-indulgent holidays. So indulgent, Thorpe laments, they even include playing bagpipes.</p>
<p>Bagpipes aside, the category of “everyday pilgrimage” is not itself without problems. <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=ez7CAgAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcover&dq=max+weber+spirit+of+capitalism&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiW0LWShtroAhXQTxUIHQC9CU4Q6AEIKDAA#v=onepage&q=max%20weber%20spirit%20of%20capitalism&f=false">Weber</a> associated it with the rise of capitalism – and, by extension, the contemporary philosopher <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=OYN88ArbxUAC&printsec=frontcover&dq=charles+taylor+sources+of+self&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjZk82mgtroAhWsUBUIHThBAP4Q6AEIKDAA#v=onepage&q=charles%20taylor%20sources%20of%20self&f=false">Charles Taylor</a> and Cambridge University theologian <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=xGq6BAAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcover&dq=banner+everay+ethics&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjc6ru9gtroAhVASxUIHYyvDZYQ6AEIKjAA#v=onepage&q=banner%20everay%20ethics&f=false">Michael Banner</a> have seen it as underpinning the rise of a secular, consumerist society. If true pilgrimage is work and family life, it is not long before making money and having children are our religion.</p>
<p>But this is just to say “everyday pilgrimage”, like actual pilgrimage, is not an answer on its own. It would need, for example, to be part of a wider denominational reimagining of the digital church services that are happening this Easter.</p>
<p>In the present crisis, we can think of “everyday pilgrimage” together with John Bunyan’s more famous The Pilgrim’s Progress (1678). Here, the character “Faithful” (one of the theological virtues: faith) learns from “Christian” (a Christian on his spiritual journey) that “a work of grace” is discoverable by “heart-holiness, family-holiness … conversation-holiness”. This is because, Bunyan writes:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The soul of religion is the practic[al] part … to visit the fatherless and widows in their affliction, and to keep himself unspotted from the world.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Sadly, in the time of coronavirus, it is sometimes by not visiting others that we are loving them. But if our action (or inaction) each day is the best we can do in our current situation – and we are motivated by an “unspotted” or humble affection for the most vulnerable in society (<a href="https://www.gov.uk/government/news/major-new-measures-to-protect-people-at-highest-risk-from-coronavirus">our own</a> “fatherless and widows”) – we can, like Bunyan’s Christian, count ourselves pilgrims, progressing together, faithfully through, and hopefully beyond, this present valley.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/136063/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Dafydd Mills Daniel does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Churches will remain closed over Easter, but theologians have argued over the centuries that faith itself, not ritual, is the heart and soul of Christianity.Dafydd Mills Daniel, McDonald Lecturer in Theology and Ethics, University of OxfordLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1305142020-01-24T12:18:27Z2020-01-24T12:18:27ZTerry Jones: professional comic, amateur historian, accomplished human being<p>In 2013, Terry Jones said that he wanted to be remembered not for the Life of Brian or the Meaning of Life, but as a children’s book writer and for his “academic stuff”, saying that “those are my best bits”.</p>
<p>As well as being a member of the Monty Python team, Jones – who has <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2020/jan/22/terry-jones-obituary">died at the age of 77</a> – wrote books and articles on Geoffrey Chaucer, attended conferences and made TV shows about medieval life. In 2015, I was lucky enough to share a stage with him in a discussion about Chaucerian biography. Jones’s scholarly work was characterised by his witty questioning of established positions and authority. He wrote from the edges, from a position of irreverence – rather like Chaucer himself.</p>
<figure class="align-left ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/311796/original/file-20200124-81395-4bghw7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/311796/original/file-20200124-81395-4bghw7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=910&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/311796/original/file-20200124-81395-4bghw7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=910&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/311796/original/file-20200124-81395-4bghw7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=910&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/311796/original/file-20200124-81395-4bghw7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1144&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/311796/original/file-20200124-81395-4bghw7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1144&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/311796/original/file-20200124-81395-4bghw7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1144&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Jones’ first major historical work, published in 1980.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Amazon</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Jones’s two books on Chaucer both offered revisionary accounts, the first of Chaucer’s texts, the second of his life. <a href="https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v02/n07/gabriel-josipovici/imperfect-knight">Chaucer’s Knight: A Portrait of a Medieval Mercenary</a> turned established ideas about the highest-class Canterbury pilgrim and the first and longest Canterbury Tale on their heads. Far from being an ideal character, the Knight was, in Jones’s impassioned and influential argument, a mercenary, a cynical thug, out for hire, willing to fight for all the most disreputable causes in Europe. </p>
<p>More recently, the brilliantly titled <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2003/nov/15/classics.highereducation">Who Murdered Chaucer?</a> speculated that Chaucer’s political dealings involved him in conspiracy and that he was ultimately the victim of a Lancastrian plot, an argument that fills in some of the blanks of Chaucer’s last years.</p>
<figure class="align-right ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/311797/original/file-20200124-81341-14fj0x.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/311797/original/file-20200124-81341-14fj0x.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=932&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/311797/original/file-20200124-81341-14fj0x.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=932&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/311797/original/file-20200124-81341-14fj0x.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=932&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/311797/original/file-20200124-81341-14fj0x.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1172&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/311797/original/file-20200124-81341-14fj0x.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1172&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/311797/original/file-20200124-81341-14fj0x.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1172&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Hailed by historian Peter Ackroyd as ‘a refreshing and engaging book’. Published in 2003.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Amazon</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Chaucer’s Knight is an important book in the way that it challenges critical orthodoxies. Jones made many critics move away from conservative positions that had long been relatively unexamined. It shifted the discourse around the Knight, and – 40 years after publication – it remains required reading for anyone interested in the Canterbury Tales.</p>
<p>Jones’s approach was historicist. Rather than assuming that the Knight’s battling was praiseworthy, he investigated contemporary accounts of the battles in which the Knight was involved (such as the notorious <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/25094410">Battle of Alexandria in 1365)</a>, and explored the nature of the garments that he wore and of the knights that Chaucer knew. </p>
<p>He read Chaucer’s sources and, for a later edition, he used new technology to examine the <a href="https://hdl.huntington.org/digital/collection/p15150coll7">Ellesmere manuscript</a> microscopically to see how the Knight’s portrait had been altered – or censored. He suggested that changes had been made to minimise the Knight’s resemblance to Sir John Hawkwood, a notorious mercenary who worked for the Visconti tyrants of Milan.</p>
<h2>His own grail was knowledge</h2>
<p>In both books, one of the things that Jones is interested in is medieval warfare, chivalry and the romance genre itself, the genre of the knight on horseback going on quests and rescuing women. In <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/film/2015/oct/15/monty-python-and-the-holy-grail-review-rerelease">Monty Python and the Holy Grail</a>, which Jones directed, the fabled bravery of knights is parodied when the Black Knight, having had his arm chopped off, declares that it is just a scratch and that he has “had worse”.</p>
<p>While this is a sort-of parody, it is not, in fact, markedly different from what actually happens in medieval romances. In Thomas Malory’s <a href="https://www.bl.uk/onlinegallery/onlineex/englit/malory/">Le Morte Darthur</a>, for instance, Lancelot fights with one hand tied behind his back.</p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/ZmInkxbvlCs?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
</figure>
<p>The comedy of Jones’s approach to the middle ages in this film lay partly in deliberate anachronism, but also in the juxtaposition of fantasy and realism. The political debate in Monty Python and the Holy Grail between the king and the Marxist peasant is a good example, culminating in the peasant’s declaration that: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government … you can’t expect to wield supreme executive power just ‘cause some watery tart threw a sword at you!</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Of course the articulate peasant’s mastery of political discourse is part of the joke. But peasants in the middle ages did rebel against government, question the divine right of kings and think about who should wield power. The joke is less about anachronism than about genre, the juxtaposition of Arthurian fantasy and “real life”. And part of the joke is about how modern readers sometimes take literature too literally, blurring the boundaries between history and fiction, assuming that medieval people actually lived like the characters in Malory’s texts.</p>
<p>One of Jones’ great gifts to scholars of the medieval period, was that he used his fame to dispel myths and to rehabilitate the middle ages. He emphasised that medieval people did not think the Earth was flat and that they were capable of individual self-consciousness and radical innovation. He wrote, in an <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/education/2004/feb/08/highereducation.news">editorial for The Guardian’s education section</a>, that: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>the medieval world wasn’t a time of stagnation or ignorance. A lot of what we assume to be medieval ignorance is, in fact, our own ignorance about the medieval world.</p>
</blockquote>
<h2>Beloved amateur</h2>
<p>Jones was not a professional literary critic or historian, but many students and scholars have gained more pleasure and knowledge from his books than they have from the works of “professionals”. He was an amateur in the best sense – not a dilettante, but someone who read and thought about texts because he loved to do so (the word amateur comes from the Latin <em>amare</em> – to love).</p>
<p>He once said that he was glad he had gone to Oxford, because if he had not: “I wouldn’t have met either Mike Palin or Geoffrey Chaucer — and without those two meetings the rest of my life would have been quite different.” Chaucer remained an inspiration for his entire adult life.</p>
<p>Terry Jones cared about history, and many of us know more about history and literature because of his writings. But the fact that he cared is almost as important as his scholarship itself. He showed many people that you can revel in medieval history and literature, that to think about the poetry of the past is the stuff of life itself.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/130514/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Marion Turner does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>The Monty Python star was also a highly respected author on Chaucer and the writer of a series of children’s history books.Marion Turner, Associate Professor of English and Tutorial Fellow of Jesus College, University of OxfordLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.