Abstract
Not unlike the Ages of Man theories he inherits, Chaucer’s concept of the child is complex and variable as he exploits the play space between youth and maturity. However age is constructed, whether by chronology, physiology, legal precedent, or by social and cultural expectations, age matters in Chaucer’s work. By foregrounding the child and children, by recognizing the poet’s childlikeness, his excursions into imaginary spaces beyond the material world, we can see something more nuanced about childhood and the child. Children have been brought out of the shadows of obscurity in this study. We need only to recognize them as actively engaged individuals with voices of their own.
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Notes
- 1.
L.O. Aranye Fradenburg, “Living Chaucer,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 33 (2011): 41–64 (41).
- 2.
Alison Gopnik, The Philosophical Baby: What Children’s Minds Tell Us About Truth, Love, and the Meaning of Life (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2009), 11.
- 3.
Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture (Boston: Beacon Press, 1955), 119.
- 4.
Richmond lists editions into the nineteenth century: William Caxton (1478), William Thynne (1532, etc.), Thomas Speght (1598), John Urry (1721), Thomas Tyrwhitt (1775–1778), William Pickering (1845), Robert Bell (1854–1857). Chaucer’s work was famously taken up by subsequent writers, including Lydgate, Spenser, Shakespeare, Henryson, Dunbar, Milton, Dryden, Pope, Tennyson, and Longfellow. She also notes a moment of discontinuity when the Royal Commission of Fine Arts “decided in 1836 that murals should decorate the newly rebuilt Houses of Parliament and set the subjects for the first competition to be from British history or to illustrate Spenser, Shakespeare or Milton—not Chaucer.” She surmises that the exclusion of Chaucer was a decision predicated upon his religious affiliation.
- 5.
Karla Knutson “‘Lessons Fairer than Flowers’: Mary Eliza Haweis’s Chaucer for Children and Models of Friendship,” Studies in Medievalism 20 (2011): 79–97. David Matthews addresses the bowdlerization by Haweis as an infantilization process predicated upon genre and class—chivalric romance for the nobility, fabliau for the lower classes. He argues that the adolescents of the Miller’s Tale are treated like children: “Nicholas, Alison, and Absolon have become children: the carpenter, an oppressive master. In their larking about, the children do no great damage, and the carpenter, when he tumbles from the roof, is punished as a bad parent-figure rather than as a jealous husband” (95). See “Infantilizing the Father: Chaucer Translations and Moral Regulation,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 22 (2000): 93–114. See also Velma Bourgeois Richmond, Chaucer as Children’s Literature: Retellings from the Victorian and Edwardian Eras (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2004).
- 6.
Knutson, 80.
- 7.
Ibid., 89.
- 8.
Ibid., 80.
- 9.
Stephanie Trigg, Congenial Souls; David Matthews, “Infantilizing the Father.” This issue is touched upon in the introduction.
- 10.
Richmond, 10.
- 11.
John Dryden, “Preface to Fables Ancient and Modern: Translated into Verse, from Homer, Ovid, Boccace, & Chaucer: with Original Poems,” in The Works of John Dryden, ed. Vinton A. Dearing (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 34.
- 12.
Seth Lerer, Chaucer and His Readers: Imagining the Author in Late-Medieval England (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 86–87.
- 13.
See Robert J. Meyer-Lee, Poets and Power from Chaucer to Wyatt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). Lydgate is considered to be the first poet laureate of England.
- 14.
Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973, reprint, 1997).
- 15.
See Richard of St. Victor’s discussion of imagination in Richard of St. Victor: The Twelve Patriarchs, The Mystical Ark, Book Three of the Trinity, trans., Grover A. Zinn (New York: Paulist Press, 1979).
- 16.
Fradenburg, 44.
- 17.
Ibid.
- 18.
Roni Natov, The Poetics of Childhood (New York: Routledge, 2003), 3.
- 19.
Gopnik, 5. She challenges the assertions of both Freud and Jean Piaget.
- 20.
Cited on the dust jacket.
- 21.
Brian Sutton-Smith, The Ambiguity of Play (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), 2.
- 22.
The relevant part of the soliloquy goes as follows: “All the world’s a stage/And all the men and women merely players;/They have their exits and their entrances/And one man in his time plays many parts,/His acts being seven stages” (Act 2, scene 7).
- 23.
Gopnik, 14.
- 24.
Gary Dickson, The Children’s Crusade: Medieval History, Modern Metahistory (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008).
- 25.
Jessica Mellinger, “Fourteenth-Century England, Medical Ethics, and the Plague,” AMA Journal of Ethics 8.4 (2006): 256–260. Mellinger cites the average life expectancy for women at 29 years, for men, 28. See also, Chris Given-Wilson, “The Late Middle Ages in England,” in An Illustrated History of Late Medieval England, ed. Chris-Given Wilson (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996). “The Black Death—or bubonic plague—of 1347–1350 was the most catastrophic natural disaster in the recorded history of Europe: in the space of about three years, it wiped out between a third and half of the continent’s entire population” (4).
- 26.
See Deborah Youngs, The Life Cycle in Western Europe, c. 1300–c.1500 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006), 25. “Chroniclers across Europe agree that, while the Black Death of 1348–1349 hit a broad cross-section of society, children were the major victims of plague in the later fourteenth century and fifteenth century…. In England, Spain and France the plagues of 1361–1362 and 1369 were believed to target infants and young men: the Anonimalle chronicle (from northern England) labelled the 1361–1362 attack ‘the plague of children’ (‘la mortalite des enfauntz’)” (25).
- 27.
“Ring-a-round the rosie,/A pocket full of posies,/Ashes! Ashes!/We all fall down.” This is the American version of the rhyme thought to have alluded to early episodes of the plague in England. While folklorists dispute that claim, the rhyme and its subject matter have been ingrained in the culture of childhood in America.
- 28.
Steven Justice, “Literary History,” in Chaucer: Contemporary Approaches, ed. Susanna Fein and David Raybin (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2009), 199–214 (210).
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Salisbury, E. (2017). An Afterword. In: Chaucer and the Child. The New Middle Ages. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-43637-5_7
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