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Child Chaucer and the Play of Imagination

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Abstract

Positioned within the context of cognitive theory of the twelfth century, namely Richard of St. Victor’s Benjamin Minor, is a figure for the Chaucerian imagination I am calling “Child Chaucer.” Based on an obscure manuscript illumination of the author as a boy, Child Chaucer represents the élan vital that animates the voices of naïve narrators such as Geffrey in Sir Thopas, the Squire, and speakers of the House of Fame, the Parliament of Fowls, An ABC, and the Legend of Good Women. When Chaucer’s narrators exhibit a propensity for getting carried away by the exuberance of storytelling, or slyly indicting readers for their shortcomings, or mischievously manipulating the precepts of Nature, Child Chaucer is at play.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    The Complete Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, ed. Bliss Perry (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1904), 277

  2. 2.

    Geoffrey Chaucer, The Riverside Chaucer, 3rd edition, gen. ed. Larry D. Benson (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987), 437. All quotations derive from this edition.

  3. 3.

    Richard of St. Victor: The Twelve Patriarch, The Mystical Ark, Book Three of the Trinity, trans. Grover A. Zinn (New York: Paulist Press, 1979), 57.

  4. 4.

    John M. Manly and Edith Rickert, The Text of the Canterbury Tales, 8 vols. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1940), I: 585 (Bodley 686, f. 1).

  5. 5.

    See Chaucer Illustrated: Five Hundred Years of The Canterbury Tales in Pictures, ed. William Finley and Joseph Rosenblum (London: The British Library, 2003). Finley and Rosenblum describe the image as follows: “He has a well-drawn boyish face, clean-shaven, with brown typically cropped hair, and his eyes look towards the adjacent text” (44). James Wimsatt, Chaucer and the Poems of “CH,” Middle English Texts Series (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 2009), traces the poet’s education in service at court and poetry beginning at age fourteen. “As a young courtier, he was expected—in the fashion of the Squire of Canterbury pilgrimage—to master the genteel graces: horsemanship, jousting, dancing, painting, polite conversation with the ladies, and composition and performance of poetry” (1).

  6. 6.

    Brian Sutton-Smith, The Ambiguity of Play (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), 2.

  7. 7.

    Ibid., 48.

  8. 8.

    Ibid., 47–48.

  9. 9.

    Nicole Lassahn, “Pseudo-Autobiography and the Role of the Poet in Jean Froissart’s Joli Buisson de Jonece,” Essays in Medieval Studies 15 http://www.illinoismedieval.org/ems/VOL15/15ch14html. See also, Michelle A. Freeman, “Froissart’s Le Joli Buisson de Jonece: A Farewell to Poetry?” Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 314 (1978): 235–247.

  10. 10.

    Boethius: The Consolation of Philosophy, trans. Richard Green (New York: Macmillan, 1962), 3.

  11. 11.

    Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture (Boston: Beacon Press, 1955), 119.

  12. 12.

    Martha Dana Rust, Imaginary Worlds in Medieval Books: Exploring the Manuscript Matrix (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007).

  13. 13.

    Ibid., 9.

  14. 14.

    Rust, 16–17.

  15. 15.

    Jacque Le Goff, The Medieval Imagination (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988). Had Le Goff looked closely at Galen’s notion of imaginatio, his argument for a monolithic medieval model might have found additional support; brain diagrams from the Middle Ages suggest that perspectivists took Galen’s notion seriously.

  16. 16.

    See Richard K. Emmerson and Ronald B. Herzman, The Apocalyptic Imagination in Medieval Literature (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1992); Paul Strohm, Hochon’s Arrow: The Social Imagination of the Fourteenth Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992); Marie Hélène Huet, The Monstrous Imagination (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993). We might also include the literary imagination, the dialogic imagination, the moral imagination, and the legal imagination in this constellation of ideas.

  17. 17.

    Leah Sinanoglou Marcus, Childhood and Cultural Despair: A Theme and Variations in Seventeenth-Century Literature (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1978), 17. See Nicholas Love, The Mirrour of the Blessed Lyf of Jesu Christ, ed. Lawrence F. Powell (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1908), 47; also, Meditations on the Life of Christ, trans. Isa Ragua and Rosalie B. Green (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961), 71–72.

  18. 18.

    Russell A. Peck, “Chaucer and the Imagination,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer: Proceedings, No. 2, 1986 (Keynote address), ed. John V. Fleming and Thomas J. Heffernan (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1987): 33–48. See also Linda Tarte Holley, Reason and Imagination in Chaucer, the Perle-Poet, and the Cloud-Author: Seeing From the Center (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011).

  19. 19.

    Murray Wright Bundy, The Theory of Imagination in Classical and Mediaeval Thought (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1927), 184. This is a major divergence from Grosseteste, Bacon, Ockham, and others who refer to this phenomenon as abstract cognition.

  20. 20.

    See Rita Copeland, Rhetoric, Hermeneutics, and Translation in the Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991).

  21. 21.

    Eleanor Johnson, Practicing Literary Theory in the Middle Ages: Ethics and the Mixed Form in Chaucer, Gower, Usk, and Hoccleve (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 61.

  22. 22.

    Ibid. See also Eleanor Johnson, “Chaucer and the Consolation of Prosimetrum,” The Chaucer Review 43.4 (2009): 455–472.

  23. 23.

    Walter Benjamin, “The Task of the Translator,” trans. Harry Zohn, in Theories of Translation: An Anthology of Essays from Dryden to Derrida, ed. Rainer Schulte and John Biguenet (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 71–82. See also Tim William Machan, Techniques of Translation: Chaucer’s Boece (Norman, OK: Pilgrim Books, 1985).

  24. 24.

    Jean de Meun’s Old French translation, also in prose, is likely to have influenced Chaucer as did Nicholas Trivet’s commentary.

  25. 25.

    See Alastair Minnis, Translations of Authority in Medieval English Literature: Valuing the Vernacular (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009).

  26. 26.

    Ralph Hanna, Riverside Chaucer, 395.

  27. 27.

    Alastair J. Minnis, “Langland’s Ymaginatif and Late-Medieval Theories of Imagination,” Comparative Criticism 3 (1981): 71–103 (72).

  28. 28.

    Laurence J. Kirmayer, “Toward a Medicine of the Imagination,” New Literary History 37.3 (2006): 583–601 (593).

  29. 29.

    Galen is credited with having established the three-celled cognitive theory well before late medieval writers, and in fact provided the basis for the theories of Robert Grosseteste, Roger Bacon, William Ockham, Duns Scotus, Thomas Bradwardine, and Robert Holcot. See Russell A. Peck “The Materiality of Cognition in Reading, Staging, and the Regulation of Brain and Heart Activities in Gower’s Confessio Amantis,” in John Gower: Others and the Self, ed. R. F. Yeager and Russell A. Peck (Rochester, NY: Boydell and Brewer, 2017).

  30. 30.

    On the Properties of Things: John Trevisa’s translation of Bartholomaeus Anglicus’s De Proprietatibus Rerum (Oxford: Clarendon Press 1975): 1:98. I’ve modernized the orthography.

  31. 31.

    Minnis, 74.

  32. 32.

    Grover Zinn, Richard of St. Victor: The Twelve Patriarchs, the Mystical Ark, Book Three of the Trinity (New York: Paulist Press, 1979).

  33. 33.

    Ritva Palmén, Richard of St. Victor’s Theory of Imagination (Leiden: Brill, 2014), 83.

  34. 34.

    Raymond D. DiLorenzo, “Imagination as the First Way to Contemplation in Richard of St. Victor’s Benjamin Minor,” Medievalia et Humanistica 11 (1982): 77–98 (79).

  35. 35.

    Palmén, 83.

  36. 36.

    Zinn, 59.

  37. 37.

    Ibid.

  38. 38.

    Ibid.

  39. 39.

    Ibid.

  40. 40.

    Zinn, 57.

  41. 41.

    Michelle Karnes, Imagination, Meditation, and Cognition in the Middle Ages (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 28–29.

  42. 42.

    Palmén, 87.

  43. 43.

    The Middle English is from the anonymous translation of Richard of St. Victor’s Benjamin Minor, “A Tretyse of the Stodye of Wysdome that Men Clepen Beniamyn,” ed. Phyllis Hodgson, in Deonise Hid Divinite and Other Treatises on Contemplative Prayer Related to the Cloud of Unknowing, EETS, o.s. 231 (London: Oxford University Press, 1958), 12–46 (xlvi).

  44. 44.

    Most recently expanded upon in Paul Strohm’s Chaucer’s Tale: 1386 and the Road to Canterbury (New York: Viking, 2014). Given the occupational risks and covert dealings of Chaucer the man, perhaps this is not surprising.

  45. 45.

    Robert Jordan, Chaucer and the Shape of Creation: The Aesthetic Possibilities of Inorganic Structure (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967), 7–8.

  46. 46.

    Yvonne J. Truscott, “Chaucer’s Children and the Medieval Idea of Childhood,” Children’s Literature Association Quarterly 23.1 (1998): 29–34 (32).

  47. 47.

    See J. J. Anderson, “The Narrators in the ‘Book of the Duchess’ and the ‘Parlement of Foules’,” The Chaucer Review 26.3 (1992): 219–235.

  48. 48.

    Lee Patterson, “‘What Man Artow?’: Authorial Self-Definition in The Tale of Sir Thopas and The Tale of Melibee,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer (1989): 117–175.

  49. 49.

    Ibid.

  50. 50.

    Allan Gaylord, “The Moment of ‘Sir Thopas’: Towards a New Look at Chaucer’s Language,” The Chaucer Review (1982): 311–329. See also “Chaucer’s Dainty Doggerel’: The Elvyssh Prosody of Sir Thopas,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 1 (1979): 83–104.

  51. 51.

    All but Pleyndamour, a knight who appears to be a figment of Chaucer’s imagination or the hero of a non-extant romance.

  52. 52.

    “The Peterborough Lapidary,” in English Mediaeval Lapidaries, ed. Joan Evans and Mary S. Serjeantson, Early English Text Society, o.s. 190 (London: Oxford University Press, 1960), 107. See Marbode of Rennes’ De Lapidibus, ed. John M. Riddle (Weisbaden: Steiner, 1977) under the symbolic meaning of “topaz”: “It surpasses all gems in clarity and is prettier to look at. It symbolizes those who love God and their fellow man … those who love their fellow men shine as gold and they are cleansed of their grime of this century and being intent always on heavenly things they become clearer or purer and more beautiful” (127–128).

  53. 53.

    J. Allan Mitchell, Becoming Human: The Matter of the Medieval Child (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014), 105.

  54. 54.

    Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, “Diminishing Masculinities in Chaucer’s Tale of Sir Thopas,” in Masculinities in Chaucer: Approaches to Maleness in the Canterbury Tales and Troilus and Criseyde, ed. Peter Beidler (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1998), 144.

  55. 55.

    Marcus, 94.

  56. 56.

    Georgia Ronan Crampton, “Chaucer’s Singular Prayer,” Medium Aevum 59.2 (1990): 191–213.

  57. 57.

    Georgiana Donavin, Scribit Mater: Mary and the Language Arts in the Literature of Medieval England (Washington, D. C.: Catholic University of American Press, 2014). See also Alfred David, “An ABC to the Style of the Prioress,” in Acts of Interpretation: The Text in its Contexts 700–1600, ed. Mary J. Carruthers and Elizabeth D. Kirk (Norman, OK: Pilgrim Books, 1982), 147–157.

  58. 58.

    Danièle Alexandre-Bidon and Didier Lett, Children in the Middle Ages: Fifth-Fifteenth Centuries, trans. Jody Gladding (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1999), 30.

  59. 59.

    Donavin, 177.

  60. 60.

    Kim M. Phillips, Medieval Maidens: Young Women and Gender in England, 1270–1540 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003), 51.

  61. 61.

    Adrienne Williams Boyarin, “Inscribed Bodies: The Virgin Mary, Jewish Women, and Medieval Feminine Legal Authority,” in Law and Sovereignty in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, ed. Robert S. Sturges (Turnhout: Brepols, 2011), 237–259 (244).

  62. 62.

    Donavin, 171.

  63. 63.

    Ibid.

  64. 64.

    Alfred Thomas, Anne’s Bohemia: Czech Literature and Society, 1330–1420 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), 1.

  65. 65.

    See David Wallace, Chaucerian Polity: Absolutist Lineages and Associational Forms in England and Italy (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997). Anne of Bohemia was also the name of Charles IV’s third wife, the (“woman after whom the English queen, wife of Richard II, was named”), 337.

  66. 66.

    Nicola McDonald, “Chaucer’s Legend of Good Women, Ladies at Court and the Female Reader,” The Chaucer Review 35.1 (2000): 22–42 (22). Julia Boffey and A. S. G. Edwards, “The Legend of Good Women,” in The Cambridge Companion to Chaucer, ed. Piero Boitani and Jill Mann (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 112–126. Sheila Delany, The Naked Text: Chaucer’s Legend of Good Women (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994); Alcuin Blamires, The Case for Women in Medieval Culture (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997); Michael Hanrahan, “Seduction and Betrayal: Treason in the Prologue to the Legend of Good Women,” The Chaucer Review 30.3 (1996): 229–240; Lisa J. Kiser, Telling Classical Tales: Chaucer and the Legend of Good Women (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983); Carolyn P. Collette, ed. The Legend of Good Women: Context and Reception (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2006); Hi Kyung Moon, “‘The Legend of False Men’: Chaucer’s Legend of Good Women Re-titled,” http://hompi.sogang.ac.kr/anthony/mesak/mes111/07munhk.htm.

  67. 67.

    As noted by R. Barton Palmer, the desire to avoid censure is not unique to Chaucer but extends to “the poem’s most important source, Guillaume de Machaut’s judgment series, the complexly linked Jugement dou roy de Behaingne and Jugement dou roy de Navarre.” See “Chaucer’s Legend of Good Women: The Narrator’s Tale,” Chaucer Studies 31 (2003): 183–194 (185).

  68. 68.

    McDonald, 27.

  69. 69.

    Ibid., 27–28.

  70. 70.

    Ibid., 36. The Findern anthology (Cambridge, University Library MS Ff. 1.6) belonged “to a provincial gentry family …. The names of five women appear in the manuscript, two as scribal signatures, following lengthy stints of copying, and three in the margins of various texts. The families of all five named women can be traced among the prominent landholders living on the estates in the immediate vicinity of the Findern family seat in Derbyshire” (15). See also, Felicity Riddy, “Mother Knows Best: Reading Social Change in a Courtesy Text,” Speculum 71 (1996): 66–87.

  71. 71.

    John Steadman, “Chaucer’s Eagle: A Contemplative Symbol,” PMLA 75.3 (1960): 153–159. “In Canto ix of Purgatorio Dante expressed the same spiritual event through two different allegories—his flight with the golden eagle and his ascent with Lucia. The poet dreams that an eagle with feathers of gold swoops down from the skies, seizes him in its talons, and bears him upwards to the sphere of fire. Upon waking, he learns that a lady called Lucia has carried him to the entrance of Purgatory in his sleep” (156).

  72. 72.

    Glenn Steinberg, “Chaucer in the Field of Cultural Production: Humanism, Dante, and the House of Fame,” The Chaucer Review 35.2 (2000): 182–203 (196).

  73. 73.

    Karla Taylor, Chaucer Reads ‘The Divine Comedy’(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1989), esp. Chap. 1.

  74. 74.

    Stephen Kruger, “Imagination and the Complex Movement of Chaucer’s House of Fame,” The Chaucer Review 28.2 (1993): 117–134 (117).

  75. 75.

    David Bevington, “The Obtuse Narrator in Chaucer’s House of Fame,” Speculum 36.2 (1961): 288–298.

  76. 76.

    Ibid., 294.

  77. 77.

    The Etymologies of Isidore of Seville, trans. Stephen A. Barney, et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 264.

  78. 78.

    Truscott, 32.

  79. 79.

    Ibid., 33.

  80. 80.

    Taylor, 38.

  81. 81.

    Kurt Olsson, “Poetic Invention and Chaucer’s ‘Parlement of Foules’,” Modern Philology 87.1 (1989): 13–35 (21).

  82. 82.

    These are Larry Sklute’s remarks in Virtue of Necessity (Columbus: The Ohio University Press, 1984), 23–24 as quoted in J. J. Anderson, “The Narrators in the Book of the Duchess and the Parlement of Foules,” 219–235.

  83. 83.

    Rust, 28.

  84. 84.

    Truscott, 33.

  85. 85.

    Ibid., 33.

  86. 86.

    L. O. Aranye Fradenburg, “Imagination,” in A Handbook of Middle English Studies, ed. Marion Turner (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2014), 15–31 (18).

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  1. English, Western Michigan University, Kalamazoo, Michigan, USA

    Eve Salisbury

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Salisbury, E. (2017). Child Chaucer and the Play of Imagination. In: Chaucer and the Child. The New Middle Ages. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-43637-5_2

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