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Hello and welcome to this webinar on Exploring Chaucer Here and Now. 

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Thank you for joining us. My name is Helen and I'm the Public Engagement Officer at the Bodleian Libraries. 

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Just to let you know a few practical things before we start. We are recording the webinar but as it is a Zoom webinar, your video and audio are turned off.

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We will be pausing to answer questions at various points during the webinar,

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so please do type your questions in the Q & A window throughout the event. If we don't have time to answer all your questions

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we'll collate the most popular ones and do our best to answer them in the follow-up email.

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We do really value your feedback so please do fill out the short questionnaire,

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the link is in your booking email and it helps us to continue to offer free events like this for everyone.

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So this webinar will be exploring the themes in the Weston Library exhibition Chaucer Here and Now, using items that enrich those that are on display.

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The exhibition is open until Sunday, the 28th of April so do come along if you can.

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Our speaker today is Marion Turner, J.R.R. Tolkien

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Professor of English Literature and Language at the University of Oxford and curator of Chaucer Here and Now. 

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Marion will be in conversation with Dr. Matthew Holford, J.R.R. Tolkien, Curator of Medieval Manuscripts.

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So I'll pass over now to Marion. Thank you

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Helen and welcome everyone, and thank you for joining us.

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I hope that some of you are able to come to the exhibition,

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but it's also really lovely to be able to offer something of a taste of the

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exhibition to people who might be in parts of the world where they can't come and

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we've got a really lovely set of manuscripts and early printed books to show you today.

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So the Chaucer Here and Now exhibition, it's really about the idea that there are many different Chaucers.

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As you probably know, Chaucer was a great medieval poet and is, has really stayed well known for hundreds of years.

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But each generation invents their own Chaucer.

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And what I mean by that is that different aspects of Chaucer have been popular in different centuries.

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At different times we see readers responding to him in different ways. Different Chaucers, different parts of the Tales

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might be a favourite for people in the 15th century compared with the 20th century.

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When we look across time, we can see that the forms in which Chaucer was read were really different across time and the

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kinds of ways in which people creatively responded to Chaucer also changed radically across time.

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So this evening we're going to try and give you a bit of a flavour of that so starting with early

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manuscripts in the 15th century and going right through to some adaptations from the 21st century.

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So we're going to start back in the medieval period in the generation after Chaucer's death with 15th century manuscripts.

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It's great to have you here Marion, thank you so much for coming in.

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And you've chosen a 15th century manuscript of the Canterbury Tales to start with so people can see perhaps the top of the page

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there's a running head that says The Cook. So we're in The Cook's Tale, which is perhaps not one of the most famous tales.

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So can you tell us why you've chosen that to start with? Yes, absolutely.

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So I chose this to try to start to give a flavour of how irreverent 15th century scribes and readers were.

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Because if you can see on The Cook's Tale, and I don't know how well people can see down here.

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But at the bottom of this, are we able to zoom down here to see these, these lines?

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We'll try while I'm talking. So essentially, if you're reading an edition of The Cook's Tale today,

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yeah, that's great, that's great.

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What you'll see is this part where it says 'And had a wife, that kept for countenance, A shop, and swyved for her sustenance' and at that point,

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sustenance, the Tale finishes. That's what Chaucer finished on, 

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It's an unfinished Tale and if you're reading the Riverside Chaucer, or another modern edition

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that's where it will end. And some of the early manuscripts including

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one that's in the exhibition, it stops at that point and says essentially Chaucer didn't write any more.  It says 'of this tale, maketh Chaucer no more'.

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But that's not what this scribe has done. This scribe has thought well

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that's a bit rubbish, having an unfinished tale.

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So what this scribe has done, has added, and if you can see the bottom two lines here, 'but hereof I woll passe as now and of yong Gamelon

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I woll tell yap'. So what he's doing here, is he simply adds another tale, but he doesn't tell the reader that this tale is not by Chaucer at all.

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And if we can start turning over the pages to show how long he goes on for,

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Yeah, yeah, we'll just show you, people watching, a sense of how long this new tale goes on for.

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So the Tale itself has just been about 50 lines, 80 lines, and now

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the scribe has added in a completely different tale.

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On it goes the tale of Gamelan.  And medieval readers or listeners are not given any kind of cue that this is not by Chaucer.

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Yes this is still the tale of Gamelan, pages, and pages and pages.

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So it's far, far longer than the real Cook's Tale, ie the Tale that Chaucer actually wrote. 

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And yup it is still going on, pages and pages and pages of it.

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So what we're seeing here is a different voice, the voice of a scribe, the voice of an editor,

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of another, of another writer dominating, taking over from Chaucer, yeah, and that's it.

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And then it says there at the end, 'here endeth The Cook's Tale

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and here beginneth, the prologue of The Man of Law'. But it hasn't been The Cook's Tale at all.

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And this is really typical of the way that medieval editors or scribes interacted with medieval literature, including with Chaucer's text.

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So if you look at different manuscripts of The Cook's Tale, one of them will be unfinished,

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one of them will have this tale.

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There's another one where it's still in the style of Chaucer but it finishes his own story, just adds a bit to kind of round it off

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ok. So what we're seeing varies. I mean one thing I like to think of it as is a kind of medieval fanfiction.

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I mean, today a lot of young people write fanfiction and it seems like a very 21st century Internet kind of thing to do.

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But actually that's been happening across time that people have wanted to add endings to stories that they liked, or that they perceived as unfinished.

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They wanted to do more. They want to, to put their own spin on it.

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So I think that's just a really interesting aspect. And we don't have, you know, today when we're all reading a book in a class

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all the students have got the same thing. That's just not what it's like in the manuscript culture.

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If you're reading a manuscript, that manuscript is unique, not just in tiny spelling variance but in the very words that are on the page.

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And that's, Chaucer's particularly sort of susceptible to this isn't he, because of the Canterbury Tales being left unfinished? Can you say a bit about that?

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Yes, absolutely. So when Chaucer died, he didn't leave a complete Canterbury Tales,
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he left a morass of papers, and you know some people call them fragments,

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other people don't like that term any more. But essentially what we can see is that it's certain that some Tales are supposed to follow the other.

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So sometimes there's a kind of internal coherence where at the end of the general prologue,

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they draw lots and we're told that the Knight's going to tell the next tale and then the Knight tells the next tale. 

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At the end of the Knight's Tale there's a discussion about who's going to come next amd the Miller is drunk

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so it's going to be him, we know that the Miller's Tale comes next. Sometimes there are groups of Tales, well, we know that they are in that order.

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Then there's another group and you don't know which one's supposed to come next.

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So scribes have no choice but to make some kind of intervention because you have, they have

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to bind them together in some way and you have to put them, put them together somehow.

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So, so, scribes do have to intervene. And that's the case

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you know, with lots of Chaucer's other texts as well.

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They do that, many of them are unfinished or or in a mess, we don't have anything, any literary texts that we know were in Chaucer's hand

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so that he hinself wrote, that hasn't survived, and very likely he might have written them very roughly or he might have written them on a wax tablet in bits,

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and then passed them on to scribes. So, you know, people weren't thinking at that time

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oh it's really important to preserve the author's handwriting. In fact, it was much better to preserve it in the scribe's handwriting, the scribes knew how 

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to write better, nore neatly and more readable way.  Although Chaucer is very rude about his own scribe isn't he?

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Yeah. Yeah, absolutely.

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There's a short poem in which, you know, he complains and worries about the fact that his scribe Adam is making mistakes and he has to rub and scrape because of Adam's negligence.

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So yeah, he certainly is worried about that.

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But at the same time he doesn't do much to stop that happening in that some of his contemporaries left you know much more finished

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and lavish manuscripts and Chaucer seemed to be a bit worried about making big presentation presentation problems

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So there seems to be a much more chaotic situation when he dies.

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So I think, yeah,

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it does leave his text particularly open and kind of vulnerable to these changes because as I say scribes had to make changes to make the text readable at all.

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But I think that is a very, it's a really interesting aspect of medieval and early modern culture for a long time

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that people did think of texts as collaborative so that although yes, Chaucer worried about scribes

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putting mistakes in but he fully understood that lots of people would be part of the making of the book,

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that he was writing texts and he would have early versions, then he changed his mind, I mean it was circulated

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and then people commented on them and then he changed his mind so that we can see different versions where we can see,

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for example, that the Shipman's Tale was originally supposed to be told by the Wife of Bath, part of his work in the female voice,

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but then he changed his mind and changed which Tales people are going to get. There's different things where we can see the process

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where he may have circulated it in one form and then he changed his mind as his thinking matured, as he read other things.

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You know, there's another text, the Prologue, the Legend of Good Women where he says he wants it to go

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to the queen at Eltham or at Sheen. And then there's another version which he wrote after the queen died

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when he took those lines out, because it was insensitive to have them in there after Anne of Bohemia had died.

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And in a way, that's the kind of thing that, that is much harder in print culture. You know in a manuscript culture

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you can kind of withdraw it and in the next version that circulates is changed, and there's not the same one

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published copy that is out there in multiple, in multiple copies now.

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And I think we're going to move on and look at a different tone now.

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Yeah. Should we look a bit at this kind of, the other kinds of things that, this is a good example here

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I think. Just to look at the other ways in which scribes intervened in manuscripts.

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So I think this is a really clear example of where you can see the writing in the main columns, which is the text itself.

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And this is now The Man of Law, but then a striking red commentary on the side.

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And so this is really where today when we read books, particularly if we're studying them or if they're older books

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we're used to textual apparatus, by which I mean glosses, notes at the back, sometimes, sometimes glossaries at the back as well as on the page.

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You know there might be notes that point you to sources or other information. And I guess this is a very early version of that in that scribes will put comments in the margins.

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And that's partly why we've got these big margins to allow, they allo people to do that.

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And usually they're telling the reader about things like sources, biblical quotes that might relate to what's being,

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what's being said in the main text and what you often see such as here, so this kind of early commentary by scribes is often in Latin.

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And so you also see, given that, that English is a less prestigious language at this time, you could read that as either a rival authority,

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the scribe saying well I'm more knowledgeable and authoritative, this is the Latin, but it also in some ways could be seen as giving more authority to the English text,

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by framing it with the Latin by saying, Well, this is partly based on these Latin texts.

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So it gives more of a kind of sense of the educated background behind this text.

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But you really often see this and partly it also I mean, it's, sometimes it's helpful,

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but sometimes it also, of course, sends a reader in a particular direction.

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So I don't know if you've had that experience where you get a secondhand book or a library book and someone

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else has underlined bits or pointed things out and it kind of skews your own reading

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because you think that must be important, why have they underlined that? Yes. And you know, and it kind of directs you to reading it in a particular way that, you know,

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that in some ways at the expense of the history of the book and reading, but in some ways

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oh, that's, that's, that's very prejudiced me to read in a particular way.

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We definitely get that a lot in medieval manuscripts.

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We're going to talk later about how Chaucer's sort of canonised to become the Father of English poetry

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Are these glosses sort of the begining of that almost, giving his work a sort of authority that it might not have had without them?

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Yeah I think that's a really interesting point because I think in some ways,

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in some ways, yes. You could see that this is worth having a proper commentary.

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This is them saying yes, we think it deserves that.

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But then sometimes what you have in this kind of commentary is is a, so in particular what you often see in manuscripts is, against the Wife of Bath's Prologue, is

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lots and lots and lots of comments that are arguing with the Wife of Bath and that are really saying don't listen to her

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there's a, there's a more authoritative way of thinking about women which isn't the way that she's talking.

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So sometimes we see this. So firstly what I think is that scribes do different things so that sometimes the scribe is actually denigrating the text and saying I know

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better. Sometimes the scribe is supporting the text, but even then implying that you need the scribe as well.

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So I think it is finely balanced, but really important to, I guess the think about that fact that

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they're not all doing the same thing. Just as every manuscript is different,

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sometimes, you know, sometimes different scribes are going to have different, different attitudes.

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And that's one of the, as you know really well, how amazing it is to look at the different things that are in manuscripts. So this is,

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here we've got the Canterbury Tales, but sometimes you might just have an individual tale and then you might have a recipe or something like that.

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All kinds of different things are in there, so each one is so unique.

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For you know, that particular household, that particular person.

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And I guess if we if we look later in this manuscript, we can also see the evidence of use across the years.

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If we go right forward to folio I think it's about 119, what we start to see later commentary as well.

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I think that's also interesting when we look at something like this, the 15th century, it's 600 years old.

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So people have read it over time.

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And of course, now, it's now at a time when, you know, people are not allowed to make marginal notes now it's safely in the Bodleian.

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But if we look here, I don't know if we can manage to zoom in on some of these at all,

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to get some, see if we can manage to zoom on here because. This is The Wife of Bath isn't it

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you can see someone's engaging with this text in particular, which is interesting.

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Yeah, absolutely. And this is a much later and I don't know, maybe it depends on your your screens and your eyesight or whether you can make this out.

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But what is says here is a definition of gentility over here.

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And it's in English now. So now we're a couple of centuries later, people are now writing their comments in English, not in Latin.

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So that's a major change.  You know in Chaucer's time every educated man is trilingual, so English, French and Latin. Chaucer knew more languages than that.

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Educated women in English and French, less likely to have Latin.

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As time goes on, it's much more likely that people are using English as their main language.

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Of course, Latin remains really important language of education particularly for men but for hundreds of years,

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well into the 19th century and beyond for some parts, but English is becoming much much more common, the kind of thing you would, you might write on, might write on manuscripts.

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And this is also, you know, it's not the professional scribes writing the comments,  this is someone who's reading

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and owning the manuscripts and is scribbling on it for themselves

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you know reminding themselves, what's going on here, you know, what are they,

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What are they interested in? So I think that also, that reminder that what we've got here, when we've got manuscripts,

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is not just a record of the moment when they were made, but the record of what's happened up to this time and that's what's so fascinating to think well 

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where did this go in the 16th century, the 17th century before it came into the Bodleian.

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And now, of course, we preserve them and don't let people do this kind of thing.

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But of course, in a way that means we lose,

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there's a layer of how people are interacting with them. And I guess another thing that I'd point out here is that, as you just said right here we've got The Wife of Bath.  And The Wife of Bath in this manuscript

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is coming after the Merchant. But if you're reading your standard edition today, that's not the order that they're in.

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And so as we were saying before, you know scribes had to stick things together in the order that made sense to then for whatever reason,

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it might depend on what links they had, sometimes they would have to add different links to make it make sense because there wasn't a certain order.

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And the order that we have in our standard edition today is just what one scribe thought was best, it's not Chaucer's version,

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because he didn't leave a set version of how the Tales should have worked.  We're going to move on in just a second to look at a very,

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very nicely made and fancy manuscript and maybe it's going to make this one look

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a bit scruffy in comparison and I mean is that typical of manuscripts of Canterbury Tales and

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of Chaucer generally? They're really varied. So we don't have any manuscripts from Chaucer's own lifetime.

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The earliest manuscript is from around 1400, around the year of his death, and it is a bit scruffy, the Hengwrt Chaucer.

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But then the one that was made just after that, the Ellesmere Chaucer,

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which is in California, so the Hengwrt's here in the exhibition at the moment on loan from the University of Wales. The Ellesmere which is in California

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it is a much larger looking manuscript, a much more luxury manuscript with with beautiful miniatures. But there are these scruffy manuscripts as well.

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and partly that's beacuse so many manuscripts have survived I mean we've got over 80 manuscripts of the Canterbury Tales which is a lot to have survived from that time.

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So we do see a whole range of different kinds of people reading them but we do have some really luxurious beautifully

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illuminated manuscripts but yeah there are quite scruffy ones as well but the scruffy ones tell the interesting stories.

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Absolutely yes. But yeah, let's let's move on.

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Especially because we've just been talking about the English notes and we're going to move on to talk about other languages and why they mattered to Chaucer.

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So while we move the the visualiser over, I'll talk a little bit about what the point is of this.

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So many people know Chaucer as the father of English literature, and people talk about him as this great English poet, and of course he was.

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But it's really important to note that Chaucer wasn't really reading in English.

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He wasn't reading much English poetry at all. Mainly he was reading French, and Latin

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and most importantly, Italian. And so I thought it would be really lovely just to look briefly at another manuscript partly because it is so beautiful,

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this one, but also because it's an Italian manuscript, it's a manuscript, it's a Boccaccio manuscript

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and Chaucer used Boccaccio's work more than anyone else's, though he never mentions it.

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But he is Chaucer's most important source. And Chaucer was able to access Boccaccio because Chaucer could speak and read Italian,

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unlike most people at the time, and the Tuscan dialect in particular.

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So Chaucer went on at least two trips to Italy in 1373 and 1378,

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to Genoa and Florence, to Milan and Pavia in Lombardy, He, probably there, though he also had access to Italian

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merchants in London, but probably there he picked up manuscripts, he read Dante, he read Petrarch and

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most of all, he read Boccaccio.

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So by reading Boccaccio, that really changed what the kind of poetry he was able to write, both in content and in form.

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And so here we have the Decameron.

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And I don't know if people can see this beautiful picture down here, but it's just an example of the gorgeousness of illumination.

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And what we see here is Boccaccio's

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characters that, his tale telling group, because this is another tale telling group like the Canterbury Tales

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was to be a generation later, and they gather here in Santa Maria Novella. So this is an image of Santa Maria Novella, the church in Florence,

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where they all meet and they decide they're going to flee the city, flee the plague and go and tell stories in the countryside.

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And that's a kind of model for what Chaucer's much more motley crew of pilgrims do in the Tabard Inn and going off in the Canterbury Tales.

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That really brings out the contrast between those two groups,

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really brings out what is distinctive about The Canterbury Tales doesn't it. Yeah, exactly.

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And I think when you look at the sources,

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that really helps you to see what is different about what Chaucer is doing. So Boccaccio you know amazing writer but what he does

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in his tale telling groups they are all of the same social class, they're all gentle, they're related, they're friends whereas what Chaucer's saying

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well let's listen to a miller and a cook and a wife of Bath and a lawyer and a merchant and a sailor as well as the knight.

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And that whole idea of listening to multiple different voices is so important.

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So although he is doing something different from Boccaccio, he really couldn't have written his text without having read the Italian poets.

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And when we look at other, other of Boccaccio's texts, we can see how he's drawing on Filostrato for

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Troilus and Crisede for the Knight's Tale, for example,

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and Chaucer developed stanza forms and different kinds of poetic lines also based on what the Italian poets were were doing.

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We should probably pause for some questions before we move on again.

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So, yeah, we'll, we'll see if Helen has any questions coming in that she'd like to to ask us.

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So we haven't had anything yet. So now is your chance everyone so please do

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put the questions into the Q&A. But while we're waiting I just wanted to ask you from something you said.

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Do you think there's a better order of tales in which to read them or does it really not matter?

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And how does that help? Well, I think it does.

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It certainly matters that you read what is known as the first fragment first,

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because you have the general prologue that sets it all up in the Tabard Inn

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and those first few Tales they absolutely, they have to be in that order.

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And the Parson which at the moment is last, I think it makes a lot of sense for that to be last because in the Parson's prologue

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we're told the sun is setting and the scales of justice are hanging in the sky and it's very much an ending.

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But the bits in between, I think you can read them in lots of different orders.

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I think it isn't supposed to be progressing through, that everything is being set side by side.

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It was supposed to, I mean, I think it's actually would be a really invigorating thing to read them in different

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orders and think about how that might change how we, how you think about them.

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So we've had a couple of questions come in, thank you. So firstly, who were the scribes and where were they working?

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Well, that's such a great question. Yes. So because people often think that scribes must have been in monasteries, for example.

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And of course there are lots of scribes in monasteries, there's also scribes in great households.

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So in your important noble households. But, but really crucially at this time, there are also scribes in the city, so in London.

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So for most, for much of his life, Chaucer is working in London.

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He's the son of a merchant. He works as a customs officer for a long time, and he was engaging with scribes who were working in civic bureaucracy,

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who were working at the Guildhall or who were working for individual livery companies,

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who were working down in Westminster in the Privy Seal and in the offices of government.

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And so those people might have have salaried jobs, which were as civil servants, for example, but they were also taking on piecework,

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which might be sometimes copying out bits of poetry,

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but also writing say a parliamentary petition to someone who wants to, who wants to to approach Parliament in some way.

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And we can see the same handwriting going across those different kinds of documents.

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So at this time, you've got someone who they might be writing political documents in the daytime and then copying out The Canterbury Tales in the evening.

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So, yeah, really, really interesting to think about how does that, that economy is working across the city,

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mercantile life, writing down accounts, but also writing poetry.

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It's not that different from Chaucer himself who had a day job

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as a bureaucrat? Yes. He was, we think of him as a writer now but that was basically just a hobby and not how he earned his living, he was sort of an administrator. 

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Exactly. And it's really important to to note that as far as we know, he never earned a penny from his writing.

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There's no evidence that he did. That

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he was, quite infuriatingly, there he was doing his accounts all day, then going home writing The Canterbury Tales by candlelight in the evening

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in his little flat above Aldgate in London.

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So you know just extraordinary to think about how much he was driven, obviously, to, to write and to think in this, in this way.

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But absolutely, he always, always had lots of day jobs

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and really interesting ones throughout his life, you know, MP, diplomat, soldier, prisoner of war when he was a teenager.

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It's such an amazing life. I'm just going to ask one more before we move on.

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So the first manuscript you showed, was that written in Latin or Middle English, we had a question. And was Middle English the main language

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used to translate Chaucer's work during that time?

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So Chaucer wrote in Middle English. So all the manuscripts of the Canterbury Tales are indeed in Middle English.

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So, and that's a really interesting about Chaucer. It would have been more, more usual for someone like that to be writing in French, in Latin,

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his contemporary Gower wrote three long poems, one in French, one in Latin, one in English.

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But although Chaucer may have written in French in his early life, that hasn't survived.

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You know, we only have poems in Middle English. So his work is not being translated into other languages in his lifetime or just afterwards.

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It's all written in Middle English. But the scribes would sometimes write comments on the side in Latin.

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But his own texts remain in Middle English. It's not until the 17th century when someone called Kynaston does translate Troilus and Criseyde back into Latin

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on the kind of basis that educated men could understand Latin better the Middle English at that point.

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But up until then his texts remain in Middle English. So we have got more questions, but we'll come to them in the next slot.

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So we're now going to move - Yes, let's move, let's move onto the next item. Yes and I'll talk a bit about what we're going to do now, which is talking about print.

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So we have a few manuscripts and towards the end of 15th century, Caxton came over to England and set up his printing press in Westminster right next to London.

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And that really changes literary culture in England in all kinds of ways as it was changing literary culture all over Europe at this time.

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The first long text that Caxton printed in English in England was the Canterbury Tales.

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And down in the exhibition we have that first edition and second edition, which has beautiful pictures in it.

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And then after that, throughout the 16th century, lots and lots of editions of Chaucer were produced.

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And what we have here is a famous edition from 1598 printed by someone called Speight.

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And so Shakespeare would have read this, this version of Chaucer.

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And Shakespeare was fascinated by Chaucer.

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And in all of his plays, we can see references to Chaucer's text, sometimes more overt, sometimes more, more in passing.

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But he and all his contemporaries were really interested in Chaucer's texts.

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And what we see here on this opening page is 'The works of our ancient and learned English poet Geoffrey Chaucer

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Newly printed'. And back in the 1530s,

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that was the first time, so an earlier printer in the 1530s

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had printed Chaucer's texts as a works and that was the first time that someone writing in English was deemed worthy of a works.

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Before that, it was only Latin writers who got the oeuvres, the works.

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But now, in the 16th century,

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people are really starting to gear up for this idea that Chaucer had now been dead long enough to be seen as a proper authority.

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Before that, the classical poets were the authorities, but now the English poet, there's enough distance to think of him as a proper father figure

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and people were starting to do that in the generation after his death. To talk about him as Father Chaucer, as someone to be revered.

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But that becomes much clearer in in print culture.

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We start to get these kinds of texts with their elaborate apparatus and elaborate depictions of Chaucer,

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the father figure, which we'll, we'll show you more of in a moment. Yeah.

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I mean it's very monumental, isn't it, that opening page.

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Yeah. With its pillars. I mean it looks as you say, exactly like a monument.

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If we page through this, there's all sorts of prefacery material.

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Yes. So first of all, an address to a friend and then we start to get the, the apparatus.

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So the life of our learned friend Chaucer.  And that begins something you might have found in sort of Latin writers before isn't it, a sort of preface.

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Yes, absolutely. We get kind of these little bits about his marriage, his family tree, his children,

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what did he do. So again, much more like, we start, like

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we get in a modern edition now of here's the biography, here's why he matters.

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You don't get that in medieval manuscripts. The idea of the author wasn't, the author wasn't revered in the same way.

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And now there's much more sense of the importance of the named author being attached to the text.

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And that makes the text seem more important. But at the same time, yeah, you start here

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where this is the kind of contents of the things that are in here.

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But people who know about Chaucer's texts will notice that, though it might be hard to see from there,

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but that some of these texts are not by Chaucer at all.

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And so, you know, this one, The Flower of Courtesy, The Belle Dame, The Testament of Love, they're not by Chaucer and sometimes even says

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I mean this is an interesting one because The Flower of Courtesy, number 32 here,

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it says in this book is set forward the rare virtues of a certain lady made by John Lydgate as some thing.

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So it's even saying there that this isn't by Chaucer, but we've put it in the works. Just in case.

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I mean it's funny that people are going to be much more interested in reading it if

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it's packaged up with Chaucer, but there's other things which people thought were by Chaucer.

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So this one, the Testament of Love,

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Chaucer did compile this book as a comfort to himself after great griefs conceived by some rash attempts of the commons, I mean it's just totally made up.

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It's by Thomas Usk a contemporary of Chaucer's, but it had nothing to do with Chaucer.

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So there's still I mean, I guess it goes back to what we were talking about in the,

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in the first manuscript we looked at, of all kinds of liberty are taken with what is

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imagined to be by Chaucer or pretended to be by him, the name of, the name of the author

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now gives these texts validity. Yeah, we get on now

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to my favourite thing. You're talking about father Chaucer. Yeah, exactly. Talk us

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through this. This amazing image. I'll try and zoom in a little bit more closely.

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So this, I think, is the image that for hundreds of years a lot of people have thought of when they thought about Chaucer.

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And it's essentially an image of patriarchal Chaucer. It's based on earlier images of the poet.

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But this with all this apparatus is only comes about now in these printed texts.

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And so we see Chaucer here as kind of middle aged, serious patriarchal figure with his rosary and his pen looking, you know, large and serious.

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But what's really interesting is that the top, the title is The Progeny of Geoffrey Chaucer.

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So the children are the descendants of Geoffrey Chaucer.

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So it's really emphasising him as father and that's to what extent it's a literal father in that on the right, so going down here,

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What we see is his actual family tree.

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So we have Chaucer up here, his wife, down here is his son, his son's wife and her family, down and down through the generations. So down that side

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it's his actual family tree, Chaucer, as someone who who was a father, a grandfather.

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But on the other side, interestingly, we have the royal family tree.

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Now, Chaucer was connected to the royal family, though not by blood,

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But what we see at the top is in fact the central figure at the top is Chaucer's father in law,

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because Chaucer's father in law had one daughter who married Chaucer,

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had another daughter who was the long term mistress of John of Gaunt, the son of Edward the Third.

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They had several illegitimate children, the Beauforts. John of Gaunt was married to two much more important women.

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And then after they died, his third wife was Chaucer sister in law.

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So he married her to great, great scandal at the end of his life because this had bee, she'd been his mistress

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for decades. Everyone knew that, they had all these illegitimate children.

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But he married her and had their children retrospectively legitimated.

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But a clause was put in by Parliament saying that this didn't give them any right to the throne.

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But nonetheless, every one of our monarchs since Henry the Seventh has been descended from

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the Beauforts and has claimed their right to the throne from this illegitimate line.

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So that's the line that's shown down here. And although they are not in any way connected to Chaucer by blood,

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the look of this page with the progeny of Geoffrey Chaucer across the top, his children down here, and then the royal family,

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it goes down here to Henry the seventh. The image of it is that he is the father of the nation.

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You know he is patriarchally connected to the king himself.

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So not only father of English literature, but kind of father of England, which I just think is an amazing image,

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the way that he's being set up here. And all these coats of arms at the bottom as well.

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Yeah. Is there some, something there, some slight anxiety about his social origins 

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or status do you think, so sort of wanting him to be a bit more noble than he really was?

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Yeah, maybe. And that's because of the tomb here. So if you, you know if you travel just a few miles from Oxford,

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you get to a little village called Ewelme where Chaucer's son's tomb is and his granddaughter's.

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So Chaucer's is in Westminster Abbey now, Poet's Corner, though when he died he wasn't, there was no Poet's Corner

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he was buried there because he lived in the precinct of Westminster Abbey at that time.

364
00:36:57,400 --> 00:36:58,930
But his son's, his son's

365
00:36:58,930 --> 00:37:07,659
tomb is notable for being dominated by lots of coats of arms that don't have much to do with him, have more to do with his wife, who was more important.

366
00:37:07,660 --> 00:37:15,960
So we see there, because his son became much more important than him, his granddaughter became much, much more important than her own parents.

367
00:37:16,000 --> 00:37:20,860
So there had been a kind of social climbing through those generations quite quickly.

368
00:37:20,860 --> 00:37:24,729
So, yeah, I think that sense of, he wasn't himself that socially important

369
00:37:24,730 --> 00:37:31,840
but he's now depicted with the granddaughter who became a duchess, all these families that were surrounding him.

370
00:37:32,260 --> 00:37:40,600
But I think it's, it's him giving validity to the monarchs as well as these aristocrats giving validity to him,

371
00:37:40,600 --> 00:37:48,669
because he is now being lauded so much as this great authority poet figure, which he wasn't seen as in his lifetime.

372
00:37:48,670 --> 00:37:51,700
You know, in his lifetime he was an experimental poet.

373
00:37:51,700 --> 00:37:56,019
He was certainly respected by those who knew him, but not hugely,

374
00:37:56,020 --> 00:38:02,919
widely circulating in that manuscript culture and not seen as this kind of serious, authoritative patriarch.

375
00:38:02,920 --> 00:38:05,590
You know, he was experimental and new and daring.

376
00:38:05,680 --> 00:38:14,420
So in some ways, this kind of serious patriarch idea has really done him a disservice I think and stopped some people recognising the, the fun,

377
00:38:14,940 --> 00:38:21,080
the innovation, and those kinds of aspects of him. Well, we've got something very different coming up next haven't we. From

378
00:38:22,200 --> 00:38:25,550
patriarchal Chaucer to a completely different world. Yes. So still in the world of print.

379
00:38:25,640 --> 00:38:35,180
Yes, absolutely. Yes. So so as well as entering into these printed editions, what we also see, so this is 1598.

380
00:38:35,420 --> 00:38:42,170
And in exactly this kind of time, we also see more spin off texts coming.

381
00:38:42,200 --> 00:38:46,530
So people who are responding creatively. So we've just been looking at

382
00:38:46,630 --> 00:38:55,700
an edition, but we also see poets, writers, playwrights starting to write new texts that are inspired by Chaucer's texts,

383
00:38:55,700 --> 00:39:01,040
and particularly people inspired by the Wife of Bath, other Chaucerian texts as well

384
00:39:02,030 --> 00:39:03,620
but particularly the Wife of Bath.

385
00:39:03,920 --> 00:39:15,500
So what I'm showing you here is the Wanton Wife of Bath, which is a ballad, and we first have references to it from around 1600 and then 1632.

386
00:39:15,680 --> 00:39:22,940
And on those records, at those times the ballad was burnt and the printers were put in prison because people were worried about it in all kinds of ways.

387
00:39:23,150 --> 00:39:26,720
But many more versions were written across the centuries. It was hugely popular.

388
00:39:26,900 --> 00:39:35,059
And I'll just, I'll just read out a little bit of it. So it's the Wanton Wife of Bath and it says at the top here that it's to the tune of The Flying Fame.

389
00:39:35,060 --> 00:39:44,150
So this was sung, but I'm not going to sing. So I'll read you out the beginning.  In Bath a wanton wife did dwell as Chaucer he did write, who

390
00:39:44,150 --> 00:39:51,440
did in pleasure spend her days in many a fond delight. Upon a time sore sick she was and at the length did die

391
00:39:51,830 --> 00:39:55,790
The soul came to Elisium's Gate and knocked most mightily.

392
00:39:56,330 --> 00:39:59,750
Then Adam came unto the gate who knocketh there quoth he

393
00:40:00,140 --> 00:40:05,800
I am the Wife of Bath she said and fain would come to thee. Thou art a sinner, Adam said,

394
00:40:05,990 --> 00:40:15,020
And here no place shall have; Alas for you, good Sir, she said, Now gip you doting Knave. I will come in in spite, she said, of all such churls

395
00:40:15,020 --> 00:40:22,880
as thee; Thou art the cause of our woe, our pain and misery. Thou first broke the commandments to pleasure thine own wife.

396
00:40:23,450 --> 00:40:26,810
When Adam heard her tell this tale, he ran away for life.

397
00:40:28,190 --> 00:40:32,150
And it goes on like that with all these different biblical figures come to Heaven's Gate,

398
00:40:32,360 --> 00:40:36,139
tell her she can't come in. She confronts them with their own sins.

399
00:40:36,140 --> 00:40:43,010
they run away. Eventually Christ comes and she, spoiler alert, does get let in at the end.

400
00:40:43,400 --> 00:40:52,670
But I think it's a, it's a lovely text because it it really shows, I think, the life of Chaucer's characters outside their text,

401
00:40:53,090 --> 00:41:01,520
how much they they took on a life beyond the Canterbury Tales, entered the popular imagination and how that couldn't be suppressed.

402
00:41:01,520 --> 00:41:03,950
So as I say this was burnt, people didn't like it.

403
00:41:03,950 --> 00:41:12,620
We have lots of, you know, and sometimes people seem to complain about a latent Catholic theology, and then it was rewritten in more Protestant form

404
00:41:12,620 --> 00:41:20,650
for example. At one point I think people were concerned about its rebellious nature once at times of rebellion, but it kept coming back

405
00:41:20,660 --> 00:41:24,500
and I think that's a kind of nevertheless, she persisted. You know, she keeps coming back.

406
00:41:24,800 --> 00:41:32,720
And that's what we see with lots of Chaucer's characters and texts. People just keep wanting to read them across time. Is it particularly the Wife of Bath do you think?

407
00:41:33,230 --> 00:41:37,400
Yeah, it is particularly The Wife of Bath. There's one example from Skelton.

408
00:41:37,430 --> 00:41:43,220
who was a poet writing late 15th, early 16th century, and he writes in one of his poems about the Canterbury Tales,

409
00:41:43,340 --> 00:41:50,750
and he gives four lines to the Canterbury Tales and then ten to the Wife of Bath so all the rest of the Canterbury Tales just get hese four lines.

410
00:41:51,080 --> 00:41:58,550
So certainly other texts there are still, there are still responses to them, but a real dominance of the Wife of Bath.

411
00:41:59,300 --> 00:42:05,660
And so when we look across time, so something like this ballad, but then there's also in the 18th century,

412
00:42:05,660 --> 00:42:10,540
for instance, Alexander Pope translates to her Prologue. He also,

413
00:42:10,780 --> 00:42:14,209
he also writes a version of the House of Fame, but he translates her Prologue

414
00:42:14,210 --> 00:42:16,210
but he takes out all the bits that are about sex

415
00:42:16,220 --> 00:42:23,720 
so it's only half as long as the original. Dryden writes about how the fact he doesn't dare to translate her Prologue but he really,

416
00:42:23,720 --> 00:42:30,830
really wants to, but it's too licentious but he translates her tale along with three other texts as the most Chaucerian of texts.

417
00:42:30,830 --> 00:42:38,239
But one of them is not by Chaucer. So he chooses The Flower and the Leaf, a non-Chaucerian one, as one of the best examples of Chaucer's text.

418
00:42:38,240 --> 00:42:44,240
It really reminds us of how people have their own idea of Chaucer, which doesn't relate to Chaucer himself.

419
00:42:44,630 --> 00:42:47,959
And then that same era John Gay writes

420
00:42:47,960 --> 00:42:55,130
a play, The Wife of Bath in 1713 and then another version in the 1730s, and that's just a snapshot from one era.

421
00:42:55,370 --> 00:43:00,649
So right across time, the Wife of Bath does seem to dominate people's imaginations,

422
00:43:00,650 --> 00:43:04,880
although people are certainly interested in other Chaucerian texts too.

423
00:43:07,120 --> 00:43:15,250
So I think we'll pause for some more questions if that's ok. So we've got one and it's just come in about which printing do you think most launches

424
00:43:15,320 --> 00:43:19,760
Chaucer's legacy? Is it the 1477 Caxton or later ones?

425
00:43:19,780 --> 00:43:23,380
Or was his reputation already assured by the kind of later editions?

426
00:43:24,330 --> 00:43:31,350
That's yeah, that's a really interesting question. So I think that hindsight is such an interesting thing, isn't it. I mean,

427
00:43:31,350 --> 00:43:36,989
I think in a way I probably have to say the Caxton because it's very hard to know

428
00:43:36,990 --> 00:43:41,410
what would have happened later without, if Caxton hadn't printed The Canterbury

429
00:43:41,430 --> 00:43:50,459
Tales, those kinds of hypothetical histories. And the fact that Caxton, Caxton was particularly wanted to print things that

430
00:43:50,460 --> 00:43:55,260
were written in that East Midlands dialect in the South Eastern form of English.

431
00:43:55,260 --> 00:44:01,260
And so now people living in England are very aware of the dominance of the South-East,

432
00:44:01,260 --> 00:44:06,180
of dialects of the South-East, and that really starts to get going in the 15th century.

433
00:44:06,390 --> 00:44:11,280
So things written in the North West dialect, for example, like Gawain and the Green Knight, don't get printed,

434
00:44:11,280 --> 00:44:16,710
you know don't get printed until the 19th century and Caxton is, you know, really starts that off.

435
00:44:17,640 --> 00:44:29,160
So even though that then is, Caxton's version doesn't have nearly as much reach or influence as a version such as Speght, in its own, in its own time.

436
00:44:29,400 --> 00:44:36,240
But it's hard to know how things like Thynne and Speght in the 16th century, how they could have come about if there hadn't been Caxton.

437
00:44:36,240 --> 00:44:40,920
Do you think that's true, what do you think? That's a good question, isn't it?

438
00:44:42,150 --> 00:44:49,000
I mean, the interesting, another interesting thing is that in the 16th century, with these big editions,

439
00:44:49,300 --> 00:44:53,680
that's all you get of printed Chaucer isn't it, you don't get the Canterbury Tales being printed on its own.

440
00:44:53,680 --> 00:44:57,190
And so so people, if people want to read Chaucer they have to read it 

441
00:44:57,760 --> 00:45:06,050
in this monumental works volumes, which is quite an interesting, unusual feature of his reputation at that time.

442
00:45:06,070 --> 00:45:11,830
Yeah, really different way of reading. Yeah. But in a way that's quite good to have to read the other things as well, even though some of them aren't by him.

443
00:45:12,520 --> 00:45:19,540
And they're giving him this sort of scholarly apparatus aren't they, so one of them I think has a glossary for the first time, to make it easier to read. Yes, hard words.

444
00:45:22,300 --> 00:45:25,360
And we just had a question on which translation do you think is the best,

445
00:45:25,420 --> 00:45:29,810
Coghill's or a different one. Oh, okay.

446
00:45:30,160 --> 00:45:34,450
Yeah, I mean. Yes, there are, there are,

447
00:45:34,490 --> 00:45:40,340
there's another good one, I'm just right this moment blanking on the translator's name,

448
00:45:40,340 --> 00:45:45,430
but it will come to me in a minute or we will put it in the email afterwards, because there are, there are a few, I mean I do think Nevill

449
00:45:45,820 --> 00:45:51,790
Coghill, although it's old, I do think it's still good, but there is another more recent one which I often recommend, but I am blanking on it right now.

450
00:45:51,910 --> 00:46:00,820
But we will send it afterwards. I think we will, we will move on, I'm conscious of time. Yes the Victorians are coming. We have lots more questions which hopefully we'll have time for at the end.

451
00:46:01,810 --> 00:46:06,640
Yeah, I think I've been going on too long so I'll try and be briefer as we talk about the Victorians.

452
00:46:06,730 --> 00:46:16,630
So I want to say a few things about what happens to Chaucer when we get into the wonderful 19th century, which always does the same thing.

453
00:46:17,440 --> 00:46:22,680
So what we've got here, what we're about to show you, is William Morris's Kelmscott Chaucer.

454
00:46:22,780 --> 00:46:27,610
So this is probably the most famous edition of Chaucer after Caxton.

455
00:46:27,650 --> 00:46:33,000
So William Morris in the late 19th century set up

456
00:46:33,000 --> 00:46:43,350
the Kelmscott Press and he, along with the artist Edward Burne-Jones, published this extraordinary edition of Chaucer.

457
00:46:43,680 --> 00:46:48,329
And as you can see, although this is the late 19th century and they're printing this, they're making

458
00:46:48,330 --> 00:46:50,970
it look like a medieval manuscript.

459
00:46:51,180 --> 00:47:00,510
It's this incredible production values that make it look absolutely gorgeous and it is really inflected by the values of the pre-Raphaelites,

460
00:47:00,720 --> 00:47:11,010
pre-Raphaelite medievalism. And what you see here in the image, so this idea of the poet alone near a fountain in his flowing robes.

461
00:47:11,670 --> 00:47:15,000
This is not at all a reflection of 14th century life.

462
00:47:15,450 --> 00:47:19,530
This is a reflection of how someone like William Morris thought about the Industrial Revolution.

463
00:47:19,770 --> 00:47:28,740
So he is kind of saying the medieval era was this wonderful time before factories, before industrialisation, before the creation of cities.

464
00:47:29,010 --> 00:47:37,480
This was a time of beauty when poets would wander around in their robes and in fountains, in this beautiful, bucolic idyll.

465
00:47:38,040 --> 00:47:47,160
But Chaucer of course lived in a city near the minting of coins, and abattoirs and furnaces and was involved in trade.

466
00:47:47,370 --> 00:47:55,080
He wasn't wandering about like this on his own. And indeed, as I was saying before, the idea of making poetry is actually very, very collaborative, that

467
00:47:55,090 --> 00:47:58,190
it really wasn't about this going off on your own idea, you know,

468
00:47:58,230 --> 00:48:01,620
I think that's not at all what Chaucer thought about his writing.

469
00:48:01,890 --> 00:48:10,800
So it's a really interesting image for telling us not about Chaucer, but about how that some people from the 19th century wanted to think about Chaucer.

470
00:48:11,430 --> 00:48:17,280
It's a massive work, isn't it? I think we need to say this because it might not be clear to people through the visualiser.

471
00:48:17,640 --> 00:48:23,760
It's the biggest of all the objects we've got here. Yeah, I sort of put my hand in for scale perhaps.

472
00:48:23,920 --> 00:48:29,850
It really is a sort of enormous and very, very handsome book. It's gorgeous,

473
00:48:29,850 --> 00:48:35,310
but it's certainly not something you would carry around to read on the new Victorian trains or anything like that.

474
00:48:36,150 --> 00:48:46,770
But let's flick forward to look at a couple of the other images here, because again, as we were just talking about with the 16th Century works,

475
00:48:47,040 --> 00:48:55,380
what we've got here in the Kelmscott, is again, it's the works, it's not just the Canterbury Tales, it's all, it's all the different texts of Chaucer's.

476
00:48:55,650 --> 00:49:00,299
So we thought it would be interesting just to show you, for example, the Treatise on the Astrolabe though,

477
00:49:00,300 --> 00:49:05,030
actually, while Matt's flicking through, notice that we've still got the red comments on the side,

478
00:49:05,040 --> 00:49:08,760
you know, just like a manuscript you have this rubrication that we were showing you earlier.

479
00:49:09,160 --> 00:49:15,120
But so the Treatise on the Astrolabe, another really interesting text for thinking about multilingualism,

480
00:49:15,120 --> 00:49:20,220
for example, because so here is a picture and it's supposed to be Chaucer with his son Lewis.

481
00:49:20,580 --> 00:49:23,670
So this is a text that Chaucer wrote in the early 1390s.

482
00:49:23,940 --> 00:49:29,820
He'd given his son, his ten year old son, an astrolabe, which is an instrument that helped him to tell the time.

483
00:49:30,760 --> 00:49:32,200
But his son isn't very good at Latin.

484
00:49:32,520 --> 00:49:39,810
So he says he's written, he translated this tract into English to help his son understand how to use this scientific instrument.

485
00:49:40,230 --> 00:49:48,180
And Chaucer had translated the tract from Latin, but the Latin was itself a translation from Arabic,

486
00:49:48,510 --> 00:49:51,809
and the Arabic text had been written by a Persian Jewish writer.

487
00:49:51,810 --> 00:49:59,930
And Chaucer knew this. So it's a really interesting example. Again, going back to this Father of English literature idea that Chaucer was a world writer, you know,

488
00:50:00,270 --> 00:50:04,410
he was not only European, but in many ways global as well.

489
00:50:04,570 --> 00:50:13,920
He was aware of this number of texts written in Hebrew and Arabic as well as texts written in Latin, French, Italian as I was talking about earlier.

490
00:50:14,070 --> 00:50:17,290
I think the Treatise on the Astrolabe is just a lovely example of that.

491
00:50:17,880 --> 00:50:25,080
I mean, right now, actually in this opening page, there's a bit here where he talks about the Greeks, the Arabians in Arabic, the Jews in Hebrew,

492
00:50:25,080 --> 00:50:33,750
the Latin folk in Latin and links all these languages as being, you know, great important languages of learning and education and also vernaculars that people speak.

493
00:50:34,200 --> 00:50:39,000
It's interesting, isn't it? Because it's, it's almost like a manifesto for English

494
00:50:39,010 --> 00:50:44,630
this even though it's, it's not a sort of famous literary work.

495
00:50:44,920 --> 00:50:50,559
It has this interesting thing where he says, well, I'm writing in English and don't be sort of angry at me or scorn me

496
00:50:50,560 --> 00:50:54,870
because, you know, even the Latin texts originally they were translations.

497
00:50:55,360 --> 00:51:00,370
And so, you know, there's nothing wrong with translating stuff and making it more widely available.

498
00:51:00,790 --> 00:51:08,690
Absolutely so it's that sense, that yeah, English is is just as valid as these other languages, but it's not a sense of it being better.

499
00:51:08,710 --> 00:51:14,230
It's not that colonial kind of Englishness that we get, particularly we start to get in some moments

500
00:51:14,230 --> 00:51:18,370
in Ireland in the Chaucer's lifetime that conveyed a position of linguistic imperialism,

501
00:51:18,370 --> 00:51:21,719
but it's not happening much at all until much, much later

502
00:51:21,720 --> 00:51:26,230
in the sense that English actually had been seen as a very inferior language.

503
00:51:26,230 --> 00:51:32,780
And he's trying to say that look English can be seen as a language of science or of poetry, just like other languages.

504
00:51:32,800 --> 00:51:38,260
So it's a it's a really interesting moment where English is the poor relation language at this time.

505
00:51:38,470 --> 00:51:44,530
And the other thing I just think is lovely about this text, and it's the only time in any of his writings that he talks about a family member,

506
00:51:44,830 --> 00:51:50,559
about someone that he's writing his text for, and the fact that it's his little ten year old son is actually quite moving.

507
00:51:50,560 --> 00:51:57,010
I think, in a way though, you know, we're never supposed to be moved personally as literary critics, but actually I am by this.

508
00:51:58,270 --> 00:52:07,010
And then while we move on through the book. We thought we'd show you a bit of the Houe of Fame because look who doesn't like a giant eagle

509
00:52:07,040 --> 00:52:16,959
seizing little Chaucer and taking him up to the ether. I mean, the House of Fame is just an extraordinary poem, which is, it's about writer's block,

510
00:52:16,960 --> 00:52:23,350
it's about Chaucer not knowing what to write a poem about. And this image, is an image in which he can see,

511
00:52:23,350 --> 00:52:33,100
so all the names of great authors are written in ice and you can see that the names are not, are not full there, they've melted away.

512
00:52:33,370 --> 00:52:39,460
Because what happens is that if the sun happens to shine on the names, then they melt away, they half vanish.

513
00:52:39,730 --> 00:52:44,620
And it's a comment on the idea of the literary canon and the randomness of fame.

514
00:52:44,950 --> 00:52:53,529
So just as Chaucer has become this great canonical poet, he himself was really sceptical about the idea of the canon. You know he's saying,

515
00:52:53,530 --> 00:52:58,510
well, actually there's a real randomness about what happens to survive.

516
00:53:00,210 --> 00:53:03,390
It's not very, sort of widely read perhaps, is it now

517
00:53:03,390 --> 00:53:06,800
but it really, obviously it really inspired Burne-Jones, didn't it

518
00:53:06,810 --> 00:53:10,260
because these pictures are fantastic. Yes and it's my very favourite Chaucer, the House of Fame

519
00:53:10,860 --> 00:53:15,540
just amazing text. You know, it's a, it's a kind of, it parodies Dante

520
00:53:15,990 --> 00:53:19,800
it's about, it's very autobiographical but also very imaginative.

521
00:53:19,950 --> 00:53:28,550
He goes up to the heavens, he looks everywhere to try and find out, how he can find something to write a poem about it's very metatextual, texts end up coming to life.

522
00:53:28,560 --> 00:53:34,440
It's just, it's an absolutely extraordinary poem. And I could talk about it for a long time, but I won't.

523
00:53:34,470 --> 00:53:37,799
But I'll say one or two things about the Victorians.

524
00:53:37,800 --> 00:53:45,090
So we've looked here at this very monumental Victorian book, but I also brought my own collection,

525
00:53:45,090 --> 00:53:50,910
a tiny little children's version of Chaucer from almost exactly the same time.

526
00:53:51,300 --> 00:53:57,570
And the reason that I thought it would be nice to talk about this as well, is that another big trend in Victorian times
 
527
00:53:58,560 --> 00:54:02,730
about Chaucer was to, was these children's versions.

528
00:54:03,030 --> 00:54:08,190
So children's versions of Chaucer. We're trying to get you to be able to see it.

529
00:54:08,640 --> 00:54:17,250
So this is, so many, many children's versions of Chaucer in the 19th century where suddenly people decided that this was suitable for children.

530
00:54:17,550 --> 00:54:20,610
Now they did that by censoring it, in honesty.

531
00:54:20,820 --> 00:54:27,270
So when you go through this Stories from Chaucer in these Books for the Bairns series, you'll find,

532
00:54:27,280 --> 00:54:35,820
you know, for example, what you will find is the Franklin's Tale about love and betrayal.

533
00:54:36,030 --> 00:54:44,070
The the Squire's Tale, the the Clerk's Tale about an obedient woman, the Knight's Tale about chivalry.

534
00:54:44,280 --> 00:54:52,320
The Nun's Priest's Tale, which is a beast fable. You won't find the Miller's Tale, the Merchant's Tale, which is fabliau tales about sex and adultery.

535
00:54:52,920 --> 00:54:58,460
The children's versions, and there are dozens of them, they never, ever include any of the fabliau.

536
00:54:58,890 --> 00:55:05,760
So it's a very skewed view of Chaucer, it's didactic Chaucer, it's Chaucer, and in the prologues people, the editors,

537
00:55:05,760 --> 00:55:12,000
the people redacting often say, you know, these stories are to teach children how to be good people.

538
00:55:12,150 --> 00:55:16,350
And anyone who's read the whole Canterbury Tales thinks wow, that's really extraordinary.

539
00:55:16,920 --> 00:55:20,549
But that's what they say. And this is, this particular version,

540
00:55:20,550 --> 00:55:25,650
so the Books for the Bairns series, they were, they were cheap books.

541
00:55:25,830 --> 00:55:30,990
They were made for poor children so that they could read Chaucer and lots of other classics as well.

542
00:55:31,260 --> 00:55:39,930
And interestingly, the man who published these Books for the Bairns, he wanted to educate children for children in this great literature.

543
00:55:40,320 --> 00:55:45,590
He also campaigned for the raising of the age of consent from 13 to 16.

544
00:55:45,600 --> 00:55:48,929
He was also involved socially in thinking about what childhood

545
00:55:48,930 --> 00:55:56,310
is and how he could actually do social things for children as well as publishing these versions.

546
00:55:57,260 --> 00:56:02,180
And then, and then when we also look at this version it says here 'Illustrated by Edith Ewen'.

547
00:56:02,340 --> 00:56:08,940
So another thing I wanted just to get across is that women are starting to get more involved in adapting Chaucer in the 19th century.

548
00:56:08,940 --> 00:56:16,000
So in children's versions, both writing and illustrating. And I know we're nearly out of time,

549
00:56:16,030 --> 00:56:19,080
so I will just say a couple of things to bring us up to the modern day.

550
00:56:19,350 --> 00:56:27,230
So in the 20th century, in contrast to didactic Chaucer, we're getting absolutes in. In the 20th century we get things like Passolini's film,

551
00:56:28,110 --> 00:56:35,730
and that's only about the sex tales and he tells some stories which aren't about sex in Chaucer and he puts lots and lots of sex in.

552
00:56:35,940 --> 00:56:38,730
So and that's just the usual of thinking about Chaucer

553
00:56:38,880 --> 00:56:44,820
as the 19th century obedient women, didacticism, chivalry version, they're both really, really skewed.

554
00:56:45,060 --> 00:56:52,760
I think that's a, that bawdy Chaucer idea really dominated a lot of the 20th century, alot of the adaptations.

555
00:56:53,160 --> 00:56:58,440
And then just in the last 20 years there's been a lot, you know a huge upsurge

556
00:56:58,620 --> 00:57:03,440
in Chaucerian adaptation. And that's so interesting, you know Chaucer is so alive today.

557
00:57:03,450 --> 00:57:09,510
I think in the last 20 years there's been more adaptations probably than there were in the previous 20 years.

558
00:57:09,810 --> 00:57:14,879
And I've just brought two, two, for kind of a quick show and tell. So Refugee Tales.
559
00:57:14,880 --> 00:57:23,190
There's multiple versions of this now. So these refugee, real refugee stories told by modern authors but inspired by The Canterbury Tales.

560
00:57:23,670 --> 00:57:28,840
And then finally I also brought with me Zadie Smith's Wife of Willesden.

561
00:57:29,330 --> 00:57:38,910
So Zadie Smith, one of our most famous current authors who wrote her first play a couple of years ago, an adaptation of the Wife of Bath's Prologue and Tale.

562
00:57:39,210 --> 00:57:44,010
And before we hand over for a last few questions, I'll read you a tiny bit from The Wife of Willesden,

563
00:57:44,220 --> 00:57:56,220
which is I think, makes the Wife of Bath into a modern 21st century London woman of Caribbean origin and puts the Tale into 18th century Jamaica.

564
00:57:56,400 --> 00:58:03,510
And one thing that she says is 'when wives spoke thus 600 years ago, you were all shocked then.

565
00:58:03,960 --> 00:58:08,580
The shock never ends when women say things usually said by men'.

566
00:58:09,420 --> 00:58:15,300
So it's a lovely quote, which really reminds us that the things that Chaucer was writing about are still relevant to us today.

567
00:58:15,870 --> 00:58:19,240
But let me handover to Helen and see if we can manage to fit in a few questions.

568
00:58:19,260 --> 00:58:22,860
Thank you very much. So, yes, we do have one question that leads on very nicely from that,

569
00:58:22,860 --> 00:58:32,100
which is what inspired Chaucer to create such bold and powerful women characters like the Wife of Bath and Madame Eglantine in the 14th century? That question has come from India.

570
00:58:32,770 --> 00:58:39,330
Oh wow, wow, thank you for joining us. So I think that yeah, this could be a huge answer so I'll try and be quick.

571
00:58:39,570 --> 00:58:43,260
I think Chaucer was really interested in multiple perspectives,

572
00:58:43,260 --> 00:58:50,190
so not only the perspectives of women as well as men, but also in the perspectives of people from a range of different classes.

573
00:58:50,190 --> 00:58:58,020
So I think his interest in creating strong women was part of his interest in not only telling stories from the dominant point of view.

574
00:58:58,310 --> 00:59:01,590
You know he's interested in trying to get into other people's shoes,

575
00:59:01,590 --> 00:59:06,900
to think about things from perspectives that people didn't usually bother with in literature.

576
00:59:07,110 --> 00:59:13,379
And I think that he was, he was, of course, inspired by lots of texts, but then he turns them around.

577
00:59:13,380 --> 00:59:15,660
So he's taking lots of texts which are writing

578
00:59:15,670 --> 00:59:23,430
one thing about women and doing something really different with them and he himself lived in a world where he was surrounded by strong women.

579
00:59:23,640 --> 00:59:28,959
And some people have talked about the 14th and 15th centuries as relatively a golden age for women.

580
00:59:28,960 --> 00:59:31,470
And after the plague, there were more opportunities for women.

581
00:59:31,860 --> 00:59:38,519
He was surrounded by women who worked and were powerful, including his wife, his mother, the queens at the time.

582
00:59:38,520 --> 00:59:42,030
So there were a lot of powerful women in his own life as well.

583
00:59:43,170 --> 00:59:49,880
Thank you. And just to pick up on some of the earlier points about his globalism and his travel, a couple of questions about Italy.

584
00:59:49,890 --> 00:59:58,320
Why did he travel there? What inspired him, and do you think some of his, the influence of Italian texts is more obvious in some of his other works?

585
00:59:58,770 --> 01:00:04,770
Yeah. Okay. So he travelled there as part of his job, so he wasn't just going there on a holiday.

586
01:00:04,980 --> 01:00:11,100
He went there in 1373 in order to negotiate a wool treaty in Genoa.

587
01:00:11,100 --> 01:00:17,030
And then he went on to Florence, almost certainly to negotiate with the Bardi banking family on behalf of Edward III,

588
01:00:17,040 --> 01:00:21,080
because the Bardi family were Edward III's bankers. In 1378,

589
01:00:21,090 --> 01:00:27,690
he went to Lombardy in order to try to negotiate a marriage alliance, Richard II, which didn't happen in the end.

590
01:00:27,690 --> 01:00:34,740
But that was, he was there to talk about that, and also to negotiate with some English mercenary soldiers who were there at the time.

591
01:00:35,130 --> 01:00:38,910
So both times he went for work and we have such great records about Chaucer,

592
01:00:38,910 --> 01:00:43,170
we know so much more about him than we do about Shakespeare, for example, because he was a civil servant.

593
01:00:43,170 --> 01:00:48,240
So we, you know he was paid by the day when he went, we know how many days he was absent for,

594
01:00:48,270 --> 01:00:52,710
we know how many people went with him, we know who went with, we know so much about him.

595
01:00:52,920 --> 01:00:59,150
But the reason that he was chosen for those missions was because he knew Italian and most people didn't at that time.

596
01:00:59,160 --> 01:01:03,540
But he probably knew Italian because he was from a mercantile not a royal background.

597
01:01:03,540 --> 01:01:08,760
So he'd been brought up in the city of London surrounded by bankers and merchants who spoke Italian.

598
01:01:09,000 --> 01:01:14,550
Then when he got a court appointment, he was the obvious person to be sent on these diplomatic missions.

599
01:01:14,970 --> 01:01:21,060
And yes, we certainly do see the influence of Italian more strongly on some of his text than others.

600
01:01:21,060 --> 01:01:26,430
So, for example, the very early Book of the Duchess doesn't show the influence of Italian.

601
01:01:26,700 --> 01:01:31,650
Sometimes we see texts which more obviously show the influence of other things,

602
01:01:31,740 --> 01:01:36,690
so such as The Treatise on the Astrolabe, not really influenced by Italian. But most of his texts

603
01:01:36,840 --> 01:01:38,669
we see a lot of influence in Italian.

604
01:01:38,670 --> 01:01:48,899
Many of the Canterbury Tales, Troilus, The House of Fame draws strongly on Dante, for example, The Clerk's Tale on Petrarch and translation of Boccaccio.

605
01:01:48,900 --> 01:01:51,930
So we do see it right across most of his work.

606
01:01:52,560 --> 01:01:56,150
So given that, why did he write in English? Yeah

607
01:01:56,160 --> 01:01:59,950
so I think it's important to note that he's not the only person doing that.

608
01:01:59,970 --> 01:02:07,640
So sometimes people say, think of him as more unique than he was. So at the time

609
01:02:07,650 --> 01:02:11,670
as I mentioned before, someone like Gower was writing in English, but also in French and Latin.

610
01:02:11,910 --> 01:02:19,260
But we start to get more poets writing in English at this time. He's part of a movement which is going across lots of different areas.

611
01:02:19,260 --> 01:02:25,530
So we've got more, a bit more English starting to be used in the law courts and in Parliament from the 1360s onwards.

612
01:02:25,830 --> 01:02:32,860
We have more things in the last quarter of the 14th century, more scientific and medical tracts being translated into English.

613
01:02:32,880 --> 01:02:39,300
There's a bit more bureaucracy in English, and this is all kind of building up from the expansion of bureaucracy in the 13th century.

614
01:02:39,840 --> 01:02:44,040
So I think that Chaucer is part of that move, but he is really at the forefront of it.

615
01:02:44,220 --> 01:02:50,270
And I think that largely he is trying to show the English can do what Tuscan has done.

616
01:02:50,280 --> 01:02:54,270
So because he is so rooted in that international European environment,

617
01:02:54,750 --> 01:03:03,270
he sees that a vernacular language has been kind of taken and yoked to produce this great literature in Italy just a generation earlier.

618
01:03:03,510 --> 01:03:10,680
And he wants to do that for English as well. So he's doing something that seems to be national, but that is part of an international trend.

619
01:03:11,520 --> 01:03:17,190
The last time we were in here, Marion, was with Ian Hislop looking at the Tale of Thopas,

620
01:03:18,330 --> 01:03:22,830
which was very interesting because that represents some of the earlier writing in English 

621
01:03:23,170 --> 01:03:30,749
that Chaucer might have read when he was young I suppose but he's, his attitude to that is is quite complicated.

622
01:03:30,750 --> 01:03:39,120
Exactly, yeah he's kind of mocking some of the traditional English forms like the tail rhyme, that kind of romance form and then

623
01:03:39,120 --> 01:03:45,990
developing these new forms in English and making English into something much more literary in a way, and more innovative,

624
01:03:46,200 --> 01:03:51,980
and also of course by writing in English, he is able to reach people that he wouldn't have been able to reach if he wrote in Latin,

625
01:03:52,020 --> 01:03:55,430
such as women, as well as people from a broader base of social classes.

626
01:03:55,680 --> 01:04:00,540
Although, you know, your average ploughman is certainly not getting an opportunity to hear the Canterbury Tales,

627
01:04:00,810 --> 01:04:05,940
but you know the Tales are being read out in inns, the women women certainly accessing them as well as men.

628
01:04:06,390 --> 01:04:10,350
He was trying to reach, I think, a broader audience that would otherwise have been possible.

629
01:04:10,740 --> 01:04:14,370
Thank you. So we're almost out of time, but we've got a couple of great questions I'm just going to put together,

630
01:04:14,510 --> 01:04:20,830
which is, one is do you think he had a big, a big ego and would he have been good at a dinner party, would you want to know him?

631
01:04:21,750 --> 01:04:25,170
Okay. So I actually don't think he had a very big ego.

632
01:04:25,200 --> 01:04:30,819
I think that it's really interesting the way that what, we see in his text, there's a great moment in The House of Fame,

633
01:04:30,820 --> 01:04:36,360
in fact that we were looking at under the visualiser there, don't know if we can switch back over to The House of Fame,

634
01:04:36,600 --> 01:04:42,509
but you know where he, the Chaucer figure, someone saying to him 'Friend what is thy name, art thou here for fame?'

635
01:04:42,510 --> 01:04:47,610
And he says, No, I don't want anyone to have my name in hand, 'for what I drye or what I thinke,

636
01:04:47,610 --> 01:04:52,530
I wol my-selven al hit drinke' I don't want anyone to know what I'm really thinking.

637
01:04:52,920 --> 01:04:59,760
I think there is this way in which Chaucer wants to preserve something of himself away from celebrity.

638
01:04:59,760 --> 01:05:06,479
He doesn't want to be over Twitter all the time, for example. I think he would have be an amazing dinner party guest.

639
01:05:06,480 --> 01:05:13,350
I mean, this is someone who just reads everything, is absolutely fascinated by knowledge.

640
01:05:13,350 --> 01:05:16,559
He'd have been, he's so curious, he's doing so many new things.

641
01:05:16,560 --> 01:05:23,340
I just can imagine little better than sitting down at a dinner party and talking to Chaucer. It would be incredible.

642
01:05:24,060 --> 01:05:30,299
Thank you. Well, that's a lovely place to finish. So thank you both so much for leading our discussion today.  So Marion Turner

643
01:05:30,300 --> 01:05:33,040
and Matthew Holford, thank you everyone for joining us today. I know

644
01:05:33,060 --> 01:05:38,250
we've had people from all over the world, so it's great that you've been connecting with us and sharing your curiosity.

645
01:05:38,580 --> 01:05:44,639
Please do take a moment to fill out the feedback form if you can, we do appreciate it and we do hope to see you again soon.

646
01:05:44,640 --> 01:05:47,220
But for now, thanks again and have a good evening.