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-simplification, I suggest a common element in these strategies: it was simply too hard, and generally unpalatable, in the nineteenth-century English cultural climate to credit the ‘Father of English poetry’ with a sincere medieval Catholicism. To identify Chaucer as an adult Catholic with a strong religious allegiance would have meant for most readers branding him as fundamentally un-‘English’ – subservient, superstitious and illiberal, rather than the manly, sensible, tolerant fellow most of them desired. The problem was not simply fear of the Church as ‘a totalitarian, foreign