Abstract
Terry Jones surprised his Monty Python fans by publishing Chaucer’s Knight: The Portrait of a Medieval Mercenary, but continues to surprise Chaucer colleagues with challenges to the conventional thinking that is hard to swallow but difficult to resist. Like Terry’s memorable movie character Mr. Creosote, readers of Who Murdered Chaucer? A Medieval Mystery find themselves gorged with so many tantalizing tidbits that I want to select just one—the redating of An ABC from the beginning of the poet’s career to the end—as an appetizer for considering other rearrangements in the chronology.1 Chaucer’s dream poems House of Fame and Legend of Good Women have always been “naughty bits” difficult to fit into any tidy sequence of the poet’s career.
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Notes
Terry Jones, Robert Yeager, Terry Dolan, Alan Fletcher, and Juliette Dor, Who Murdered Chaucer? A Medieval Mystery (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2004), 337–43.
Derek Pearsall, Life of Geoffrey Chaucer: A Critical Biography (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), 3, and Kathryn L. Lynch, “Dating Chaucer,” Chaucer Review 42 (2007): 1–22 at 2.
Bernhard ten Brink, Chaucer: Studien zur Geschichte seiner Entwicklung und zur Chronologie seiner Schriften (Münster: Russell, 1870), became the basis for the English version History of English Literature: Volume II: Wyclif Chaucer, Earliest Drama, Renaissance, trans. William Clarke Robinson (London: George Bell & Sons, 1893), 33–206.
Walter W. Skeat, The Chaucer Canon (Oxford: Clarendon, 1900), 154–55; see his Complete Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, 6 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1894), 1:lxii-lxiii.
Ramona Bressie, “The Date of Thomas Usk’s Testament of Love,” Modern Philology 26 (1928): 17–29 at 19.
George Kane, “Outstanding Problems of Middle English Scholarship” (1977), rept. Chaucer and Langland: Historical and Textual Approaches (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 228–41 at 235.
Marian Lossing, “The Prologue to the Legend of Good Women and the Lai de Franchise,” Studies in Philology 39 (1942): 15–35.
George F. Reinecke, “F. N. Robinson (1872–1967),” in Editing Chaucer: The Great Tradition, ed. Paul G. Ruggiers (Norman, OK: Pilgrim Books, 1984), 231–51 at 248.
Lee Patterson, Negotiating the Past: The Historical Understanding of Medieval Literature (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987), 3–39.
Larry D. Benson, “The ‘Love-Tydynges’ in Chaucer’s House of Fame,” in Chaucer in the Eighties, ed. Julian N. Wasserman and Robert J. Blanch (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1986), 3–22, offers a topical reading based on the speculative dating of 1379.
Kellie Robertson, “Laboring in the God of Love’s Garden: Chaucer’s Prologue to The Legend of Good Women,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 24 (2002): 115–47, explores the poem’s social and political meaning if dated to the middle 1380s.
Eleanor Prescott Hammond, Chaucer: A Bibliographical Manual (New York: Macmillan, 1908), 376–77.
Edward Kennard Rand, “Chaucer in Error,” Speculum 1 (1926): 222–25.
J. S. P. Tatlock, The Mind and Art of Chaucer (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1950), 64.
David Wallace, Chaucerian Polity: Absolutist Lineages and Associational Forms in England and Italy (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997), 80–82.
John H. Fisher, John Gower: Moral Philosopher and Friend of Chaucer (London: Methuen, 1965), 33.
Helen Cooper, “Welcome to the House of Fame: 600 Years Dead: Chaucer’s Deserved Reputation as ‘the Father of English Poetry’,” TLS 5091 (October 27, 2000): 3–4 at 4; see also “Chaucerian Representation,” in New Readings of Chaucer’s Poetry, ed. Robert G. Benson and Susan J. Ridyard, intro. Derek Brewer (Cambridge, UK: D. S. Brewer, 2003), 7–29.
Deanne Williams, “The Dream Visions,” in The Yale Companion to Chaucer, ed. Seth Lerer (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006),147–78 at 156.
Paul Strohm, “The Textual Vicissitudes of Usk’s Appeal,” in Huchon’s Arrow: The Social Imagination of Fourteenth-Century Texts (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992), 145–60.
Frank Grady, “Chaucer Reading Langland: The House of Fame,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 18 (1996): 3–23 at 4–9.
Robert B. Burlin, Chaucerian Fiction (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1977), 34.
For its dating 1386–88, see John Livingston Lowes, “The Prologue to the Legend of Good Women Considered in its Chronological Relations,” PMLA 20 (1905): 749–864, and Robert W. Frank, Jr., “The Legend of the Legend of Good Women,” Chaucer Review 1 (1966): 110–33.
J. R. Hulbert, “Chaucer and the Earl of Oxford,” Modern Philology 10 (1912/13): 433–37.
Linne R. Mooney, “Chaucer’s Interest in Astronomy at the Court of Richard II,” in Chaucer in Perspective: Middle English Essays in Honour of Norman Blake, ed. Geoffrey Lester (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1999), 139–60.
Robert K. Root, “Chaucer’s Legend of Medea,” PMLA 24 (1909): 124–53.
Richard Maidstone, Concordia (The Reconciliation of Richard II with London), ed. David R. Carlson, trans. A. G. Rigg (Kalamazoo, MI: TEAMS Medieval Institute Publications, 2003), 76–77 (lines 521–24).
John Norton-Smith, Geoffrey Chaucer (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1974), 63.
K. B. McFarlane, Lancastrian Kings and Lollard Knights (Oxford: Clarendon, 1972), 139–232.
V.J. Scattergood, “Literary Culture at the Court of Richard II,” in English Court Culture in the Later Middle Ages, ed. V.J. Scattergood and J. W. Sherborne (London: Duckworth, 1983), 29–41.
Patricia J. Eberle, “Richard II and the Literary Arts,” in Richard II: The Art of Kingship, ed. Anthony Goodman and James Gillespie (Oxford: Clarendon, 1999), 231–53.
John M. Bowers, ‘“Beautiful as Troilus’: Richard II, Chaucer’s Troilus, and Figures of (Un)Masculinity,” in Men and Masculinities in Chaucer’s “Troilus and Criseyde”, ed. Tison Pugh and Marcia Smith Marzec (Cambridge, UK: D. S. Brewer, 2008), 9–27.
John Eadie, “The Author at Work: The Two Versions of the Prologue to the Legend of Good Women,” Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 93 (1992): 135–43; see also Geoffrey Chaucer, Dream Visions and Other Poems, ed. Kathryn L. Lynch (New York: W. W. Norton, 2007), 118–19.
John H. Fisher, “The Revision of the Prologue to the Legend of Good Women: An Occasional Explanation,” South Atlantic Bulletin 43 (1978): 75–84.
John M. Bowers, “Chaucer after Retters: The Wartime Origins of English Literature,” in Inscribing the Hundred Years’ War in French and English Cultures, ed. Denise N. Baker (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2000), 91–125, and “Chaucer after Smithfield: From Postcolonial Writer to Imperialist Author,” in The Postcolonial Middle Ages, ed. Jeffrey Cohen (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000), 53–66.
Robert O. Payne, “Making His Own Myth: The Prologue to Chaucer’s Legend of Good Women,” Chaucer Review 9 (1975): 197–211 at 199.
Michael J. Bennett, “The Court of Richard II and the Promotion of Literature,” in Chaucer’s England: Literature in Historical Context, ed. Barbara Hanawalt (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992), 3–20 at 16; see also Lisa Kiser, Telling Classical Tales: Chaucer and the “Legend of Good Women” (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1983).
Robert R. Edwards, “Ricardian Dreamwork: Chaucer, Cupid, and Loyal Lovers,” in “The Legend of Good Women”: Context and Reception, ed. Carolyn P. Collette (Cambridge, UK: D. S. Brewer, 2006), 59–82.
M. C. Seymour, A Catalogue of Chaucer Manuscripts: Volume I, Works before “The Canterbury Tales” (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1995), 79–100 at 79; see 83 for Cambridge CUL Gg 4.27.
Nigel Saul, Richard II (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997), 245.
John M. Bowers, “Three Readings of The Knight’s Tale: Sir John Clanvowe, Geoffrey Chaucer, and James I of Scotland,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 34 (2004): 279–307 at 279–87.
Aage Brusendorff, The Chaucer Tradition (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1925), 142–43, concluded that the discrepancy between Man of Law’s list of names and the extant Legend resulted from some jesting rivalry between Chaucer and Gower. See John M. Bowers, “Rival Poets: Gower’s Confessio and Chaucer’s Legend of Good Women,” in John Gower, Trilingual Poet: Language, Translation, and Tradition, ed. Elisabeth Dutton with John Hines and R. F. Yeager (Cambridge, UK: D. S. Brewer, 2010), 276–87.
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Bowers, J.M. (2012). The Naughty Bits: Dating Chaucer’s House of Fame and Legend of Good Women . In: Yeager, R.F., Takamiya, T. (eds) The Medieval Python. The New Middle Ages. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137075055_10
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137075055_10
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