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MEDIEVAL ENGLAND II

THE AGE OF CHAUCER (1350-1400)

THE 15

TH

-CENTURY (1400-1500)

HISTORICAL BACKGROUND

• (^) The Age of Chaucer opens with one of the most dramatic events in the

human history: THE BLACK DEATH, or the bubonic plague, which raided

Europe from 1348 onwards and did away with one half of the island

population. The effects of such tragic episode are manifold, and they all

point at a growing sese of INDIVIDUALISM.

• (^) The sense of common experience and shared responsibility fostered some

ENGLISH NATIONALISM or patriotic pride, which was reinforced by

increasing hatred for France during the Hundred Years’ War (1337-1453—it

started with Edward II’s claims to the French throne. Conflict between the

French House of Valois and the English House of Plantagenet).

• (^) Moreover, the English Parliament split into the separate House of Lords and

House of Commons, both of them denying foreign jurisdiction in English

matters, including papal authority (England no longer a papal fief in 1371).

• (^) The Plague also brought along substantial moral/religious changes. Escapist, dissolute revelry instead of piety or profound faith and religious life. John Wycliffe , precursor of Reformation, demanded propertyless church and advocated apostolic poverty, and individual access to God further away from church’s intermediation; massive translation of Scriptures into vernacular. The Lollards.
• (^) Secularization of English life and culture, which is mostly held in the hands of laymen.
• (^) English as a distinctly national expression. No more apologetic excuses, but claiming the English language as everyone’s language —the language of parliamentary writs: by Chaucer’s times, French in England had become outmoded.

• (^) London English, the language of city life (law, trading,

parliamentary summons and meetings, a whirpooling public

affairs), a dialect gradually shared by the great university

towns of Oxford and Cambridge, close to the cultural and

political metropolis. Adapting French borrowings to London

English.

• GEOFFREY CHAUCER (1340-1400)

• (^) The first great poet of English literature.
• (^) He was not captive of any special moral, social or political ideas, or set of manners. DESCRIPTION OVER IDEOLOGICAL ALLEGIANCE. At ease with all social levels, rarely prone to judgement, limitless sympathies.
• (^) He represents the NEW MAN: a product of the mercantile middle-classes which participated in courtly life and culture, but who remained involved in down-to- earth, hardheaded business world.
• (^) His life might be summarized as that of a bourgeois with courtly connections: his life was employed in public service (for which he was rewarded) and was frequently sent abroad (Italy and France) whence he incorporated his cultural and social knowledge to his work.
• (^) Continental literary affiliations (French chivalry and Italian Dante or Boccaccio) and Middle Age culture (classic mythology, history and literature; medicine; astronomy; astrology; theology; philosophy). He incarnates the richest picture of Medieval knowledge and milieu.

• (^) His works fall under three periods:
  • (^) 1.- FRENCH PERIOD (to 1372). Indebtedness to French poets and classical material derived from French intermediaries: courtly love tradition (main features) and dream allegory. His translation of the Roman de la Rose; “The Book of the Duchess”.
  • 2.- ITALIAN PERIOD (1372-1385). Enters into contact with the height of Italian Renaissance and the work of Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio. “Troilus and Criseyde” (interest in character protrayal; courtly love conventions and love outside marriage; rhyme royal, Chaucer’s, seven decasyllabic lines, rhyming ababbcc).
  • (^) ENGLISH PERIOD (1385-1400). The Canterbury Tales. Plot. Pilgrimages and Saint Thomas Becket. Characters and social types. The tales’s narrative embeddedment. Anthological gathering of the best from medieval literature : courtly romance, the fabliau, the Breton lai or chivalric romances of love and supernatural elements; the saints’ legends; preachers’s exemplum; sermons; ancient legend, folk-tales, tragedy…

• As noble classes fight in pretty anachronic intestine wars, the merchant classes enrich themselves. Education of the laity increased considerably, thus displacing chivalric idealism and feudal loyalties in a new economic order.
• (^) A strong realistic representation (picaresque stories of rogues and city life) discarded stylized forms of chivalry and religious medievalism.
• (^) William Caxton and the printed word. Consequences. From verse and orality to prose and realism.
• (^) Renaissance now stirring in England. Growing literacy of the lay classes.
• (^) English verse: the Chaucerian tradition.
• (^) English drama (pageants or mysteries, by guilds: popular entertainment and festive/humorous tone; morality plays or allegorical representations of abstractions).
• (^) English religious prose: sermons or didactic prose, translations.
• English romance prose: Thomas Malory’s Morthe Darthur, which abridges French originals, eliminates the supernatural and turns it into simpler prose. Patriotic love for England, nostalgia for chivalric values and knighthood, lament for the downfall of virtue and morality.