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This book on Geoffrey Chaucer explores the relationship between Chaucer's poetry and the change and conflict characteristic of his day and the sorts of literary and non-literary conventions that were at his disposal for making sense of the society around him. Critics who consider the social meaning of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales fall into two main schools: those who present his social thought as an expression of the dominant spirit or ideology of his day and those who see Chaucer as possessing a more heterodox voice. Many of the present generation of Chaucer critics have been trained either as 'Robertsonians' or as 'Donaldsonians'. For D. W. Robertson, even those medieval poems which do not explicitly address religious issues were frequently intended to promote the Augustinian doctrine of charity beneath a pleasing surface; for E. Talbot Donaldson, there are 'no such poems in Middle English'. The book sets out the basics of the Augustinian doctrine of charity and of medieval allegorical theory and examines 'patristic' interpretations of Chaucer's work, particularly of the 'Nun's Priest Tale'. It looks at the humanist alternative to the patristic method and assesses the strengths and weaknesses of the patristic approach. The book also outlines some of the major medieval discourses about sexual difference which inform Chaucer's depiction of women, in particular, the tendency of medieval writers to polarise their views of women, condemning them to the pit or elevating them to the pedestal.
Bakhtinian and the New Historicist, which have been popular in recent years, it is still true to say that many of the present generation of Chaucer critics have been trained either as ‘Robertsonians’ or as ‘Donaldsonians’. These great scholars, D. W. Robertson and E. Talbot Donaldson, personify the two major schools of Chaucer interpretation considered in this chapter: the ‘allegorical
to have been preconditioned by the newly fashionable Robertsonian view. Lemoine’s entry was not obviously less well written or well researched than the others. He was clearer than the others in his description of the historiographical traditions: medieval writers seeing the crusades in religious terms as legitimate and salutary; later writers regarding them as ‘pious follies’; and, latterly, others, such as Robertson, accepting them as ‘necessary’ and positive in result if not action. That his ultimately hostile assessment received only an ‘honourable mention’ is
argued, the rise in free boroughs in the west. Gibbon used Voltaire’s very words in describing Louis IX, a victim of ‘holy madness’. Even his unusual criticisms of Saladin (‘a royal saint’, ‘in a fanatic age himself a fanatic’) seem forced, designed simply to be different rather than offering a new judgement based on critical consideration of the sources; literary knock-about not measured argument. However, in his summing up ‘the General Consequences of the Crusades’, Gibbon is compelled to take a clear position between what could be called a Humean and a Robertsonian
approach, and many scholars, for a variety of reasons (Robertsonianism being one of them), were reluctant to adopt or just outright opposed to it. Insofar as I am addressing the judgement of Chaucer’s texts per se, then, my topic necessarily has roots in deeper soil than the shifts in critical approaches over the last three-quarters of a century. Nonetheless, those shifts provide a revealing lens and