 First Wednesdays is sponsored by the Vermont Humanities Council and by the Kellogg Hubbard Library with video production supported by Orca Media. Good evening, everyone. Welcome to First Wednesdays, this wonderful statewide humanities lecture series sponsored by the Humanities Council, Vermont Humanities Council. And also, and the Uncomical Executive Director of the Kellogg Hubbard Library, we are very pleased that we are the local hosts of this series. It's great to have the First Wednesdays here eight months of the year. It's just great. And also, this is the beginning of Poem City. So this is a big event throughout the month of April. There are programs in the back right outside the door there. And 42 different events this month. There's more than one a month. Lots and lots of great stuff. I especially recommend the Robert Frost on Thursday the 19th over at the Humanities Council. Peter Gilbert does a great job with that every year. We also have sign up sheets coming around. So if you're not already on mailing list for Humanities Council, that's a great opportunity. And we have feedback sheets out just outside the door. So if you fill one of those in afterwards, that would be helpful too. So in a moment, I'm going to ask you to welcome the Executive Director of the Vermont Humanities Council, who is going to introduce this evening's speaker in modern English, not in Middle English right here. But anyway, would you please welcome Peter Gilbert. Well, thank you, Tom. Thank you all for being here. It was a pleasure to have no snow on a First Wednesday occasion. That's pretty special around here. I want to thank, first of all, the host of the First Wednesday's program here in Montpellier, the Kellogg-Hubert Library, and Rachel Sanichelle and Tom McCohen for being about the best dark colleagues and hosts that one could imagine for this program. I also want to thank the three statewide hosts for First Wednesday's, the Alma Gibbs-Donchin Foundation, the National Life Group Foundation, and the Institute of Museum and Library Sciences through the Vermont Department of Libraries. I want to do a little housekeeping here because, as you know, we've had to cancel two First Wednesdays back to back. And so I want to tell you that two weeks from tonight is the rescheduled program from February. It's the Fetford Chamber Singers who are going to be singing poetical-related music, and that's going to be at the Unitarian Church two weeks from tonight. The March program is going to be on June 20, and I encourage you to go to that too. The speaker has the memorable name Ed McMahon. It's not that Ed McMahon. He's not available. But Ed McMahon is a distinguished fellow who's going to be talking about the importance of uniqueness in place unless our state or community end up looking like everywhere America. So I encourage you to go on those. Next week's program is going to be on time. Carol Berry is going to be speaking about Vincent Van Gogh and the books he read. So those are three terrific programs, two of them, and Fort Nightwake, two weeks apart. It's a pleasure to introduce our speaker this evening. Mr. Travis retired from Dartmouth College where he was an English professor back in 2015. He was the Henry Winkley Professorship of Anglo-Saxon and English Language and Literature. He taught courses on Chaucer, medieval drama, Old English and Icelandic literature, men's studies, and literary theory. His major field of interest has always been Chaucer and his book, Disseminable Chaucer, won the Burke's Warren Prize for Excellence in Literary Criticism in 2010. I will just say that I know from personal experience that Professor Travis encouraged his students to develop skills in reading Chaucer's Middle English with accuracy, or at least attempting to, and dramatic insight. It's a pleasure to have Peter Travis here. Please join me in welcoming him. There's a handout that is going to be part of your homework assignment, so does everybody have one? Okay. Anybody else? So, in many ways it's wonderful to be here. I guess the first wonder is that Peter Gilbert introduced me. He didn't for some occult reason explain what he knows about Chaucer and how to memorize Chaucer and make your own tape of Chaucer or your own CD of Chaucer, and that's because he took the Chaucer course that I taught at Dartmouth low those many, many, many years ago. So, it's rather a wonder to see teacher and student from those bygone days still managing to make it around their minds alive. So, it's really wonderful to have Peter introduce me. The other thing that's making it wonderful for me is that I have to, the plan is to go for about an hour and a half. I want the first 45 minutes to be mostly me, but I want you to interrupt me anytime and the next 45 minutes to be Q&A. But my maternal grandmother's maiden name was Domena, and there's a restaurant in town, Domena's, which was started by my kid's sister just a little while ago and I've only eaten their one, so I'm going to make sure I make it down there before nine. Before they close. Before they close at nine, yes, yes, okay. How many of you have had some familiarity with Chaucer? How many of you, okay, that's a lot of hands. I said something about our age too, probably. How many of you studied Chaucer some, what, in high school? That's a lot of hands. In college? Still a lot of hands. Anybody go beyond that? A few ringers? Where are you? Graduate school. Graduate school, cool. I have a personal friendship with John Elder, who we shared Chaucer sales over a couple of years. Okay, and how many of you memorized some of Chaucer? Look at all those hands. Well, one of the things I promise you will do is we'll do some of the introduction to the general prologue and get our chops up again reading some middle English. If you were a generation or two less wise, your hands would not be going up very much because one of the things I've noticed over the years is that Chaucer's being studied a little bit less in AP English and memorizing Chaucer is pretty much a dying art. It used to be when I got on a plane, somebody turns to me and I feel like I do want to talk to the... If I feel like I'm not so clean on wanting to talk to that person, and that person says, well, what do you do? I say I'm a medievalist, and that just shuts it right down. But if I say I teach Chaucer, I just just pause and then, oh, ho, ho, ho, ho, ho, ho, ho, ho, ho, ho, ho, ho, ho, ho, ho, ho. There's a beautiful way of going through midlife, but there are fewer and fewer students who are learning how to do this. Okay, so I have a bit of an assignment given myself about talking about Chaucer, and I really want to talk about Chaucer writ large, but we're also going to read some passages and do some close analysis. Chaucer himself, folks who you're coming in, let's give you... Does it have to have that hand up, right? Chaucer, born in the 14th century, 1345, something like died in 1400, was sort of upper middle class. His father was a vintner, a London boy. We don't know if he went to university, but he obviously acquired an extraordinarily extensive education. He was a polyglot, like almost anybody in the literati class. His age, his time, so that he could command at least four different languages, or let's say three anyway, which were, first of all, English, and then... French, because French is the language that came in with 1066 and all that. It was the power language even in Chaucer's time. It was the language of law, and it was the language of elegant poetry. So French, English, and then... Pardon? Did I hear you? Latin. Latin, I'm sorry, I didn't hear you. Latin, absolutely. Why? Because Latin was the language... If you went to grammar school, why do we still call it grammar school? The first thing you did is you started reading Latin and learning the grammar of Latin. And you started reading The Sticks of Cato. You started reading The Fables of Esau. The book that I wrote on Chaucer, which took me only 25 years to write, is about this one beast fable that Chaucer wrote, the Nun's Priest's Tale. And I argue that it's Chaucer's Ars Poetica. He sort of crams everything into this mash-up of a poem. And so that's very much about poetry. And he was trying to bring his, you know, he was succeeding in bringing his readers back to the basics of literature, literary appreciation, literary composition, and literary analysis. So we have French, English, Latin, and then beyond that, Chaucer actually traveled to Italy several times. And when he came back, it's clear that he was extremely accomplished in Italian. He essentially brought Dante, Dante's poetry into the English canon. He brought Boccaccio and so on. A little bit more about Chaucer's life. He married, married up. He did not seem to live with his wife all that long. For many months and any year, his wife was staying at court. She was a lady in waiting. He was a man of many useful means. He was clerk of the King's work. He was the King's forester. He was probably his most important job was as the customs officer who was in charge of all the wool going out of England and to the continent. Wool was the major English export in Chaucer's time. And in fact, even today, as I understand it, the Queen of England, which he sits on her throne, she puts her feet, her elegant feet on a pillow and what's in the pillow, wool. So he was an extremely important position, very easily corruptible for a short length of time. Then the political climate changed. He was let go. He went to Kent and for the last 13 or 14 years of his life seemed to have lived further away from the power center, although he was never terribly close. He was just looking on from the outside in the power center. He was lucky that he wasn't beheaded at a few very dicey moments. He was involved in the 100-year war for a short period. He was captured. He was ransomed. But going to Italy as an ambassador for Richard II, he was in pretty important negotiations. And there, although we don't think he met Boccaccio, he picked up a lot of poetry and brought it back. There are, I think, something like 457 entries into Chaucer's life records. Not a single one of those life records mentions the fact that Chaucer was a poet. We do know that he was known and recognized as a poet in the court and in the coterie of the literati and the telegencia. We are pretty certain he read his poetry aloud and we certainly, his manuscripts were being shuffled around. But it wasn't until a generation after his death that he suddenly became, suddenly, very important. Everybody thought of themselves as a neo-Charsarian poet and Chaucer became the father of English poetry from there on out. So he now, even though we're not memorizing his lines very much, is still considered to be one of the, say, top three of the pre-modern poets. The others would be Shakespeare, Milton. So his cache or his cultural capital is still very high. I belong to the fraternity and sorority of Chaucerians and we're still doing quite well. I just got an invitation, I think I'm going to say no, to contribute some essays for a four-part encyclopedia of Chaucer's studies. It's going to be about this big. So in terms of the industry, Chaucer is still doing pretty well. But I'm a little bit worried as we go, not that I disapprove of where we're going, but we're going much more into global literary studies and further away from the annual file alignment that we have been in. So that's Chaucer's life. The poetry that he wrote in his life, and I'm going to concentrate on the Canterbury Tales, it's what we mostly remember. But I don't want to give short shrift to everything else. Early in his career, he wrote four dream visions. One was the Book of the Duchess, and in force a great deal by Anglo-Norman poetry. One was the House of Fame, which was a kind of parodic mash-up and send-up and parody of Dante's Divine Comedy. Another one was a Parliament of Fowls, which is a Valentine's Day celebration of love and the erotic polity. All the players are birds, and it's really an inquiry into what is love and what makes the world go around and what is nature and what is sex. And in fact, it's the first poem I have to mention in Valentine's Day. It seems in fact that maybe somehow Chaucer invented the same Valentine's Day. And then there's The Legend of Good Women, which is a series of tales about women who were not that good and who suffered a great deal. The other major poem that Chaucer wrote before he got to the Canterbury Tales in the last 14 years or so of his life was Troilus and Cressata. Any recognitions of Troilus? Chaucer wrote, I mean, Shakespeare wrote Troilus and Cressata. Robert Henryson, in between the two of them, wrote his version of the Troilus story. But this is a long poem, five parts, epic, romance, philosophical inquiry, set in Troy, but very much about civilization and its discontents about courtly love and about warfare and essentially about Chaucer's contemporary life and culture, although it is set very much in the classical past. And it also happens to be the Greatest Love Poem written in the English language. Should I say that again? The Greatest Love Poem written in the English language is a beauty. Some Chaucerians say, I sort of prefer Troilus over the Canterbury Tales. So the Canterbury Tales are the tales that we know are no best. And as I mentioned, Chaucer is writing those tales for the last 14 or so years of his life. They survived in many fragments. They floated around in his lifetime. He obviously had many readers, but they never were a unity. There never was a single manuscript. And we're not at all clear what Chaucer's final version of that masterpiece might have been, is probably the truth. It was that he was just going to keep writing tale after tale after tale, fitting them in here, here, there and there in some ways that made sense in some ways that, frankly, did not make sense. What was supposed to make sense in the 13th century was a master summa, a great work which puts everything together in a kind of encyclopedic synopticon of all Western learning. And so you would have Dante's Divine Comedy where you have a hundred cateches, right? And when you get to a hundred, you know you're there, okay? Or the Decameron, again, by Boccaccio, a hundred tales, when you get to the last one, you know you're there. In the Canterbury Tales, there was a kind of sort of casual agreement as to how many tales were going to be told and there were going to be 120, a little bit more about that in a minute. But I think that's sort of Chaucer's inside joke. Okay, you guys, you can write a hundred. I'm going to do more than that. I'm going to do 120. But he only ended up with about 24. He probably would have kept on adding some here and there and moving them around in those different fragments until he came to the very end. There's no doubt that he came to the last tale, but more about that in a minute. He had a choice to make, first of all, write in English. He could have written, as we've already mentioned, in other languages. He could have written in Latin. He could have written in French. His contemporary John Gower wrote in Latin and French and also in English. But Chaucer, with a few exceptions, decided to write just in English. And this was a significant, maybe, political and cultural decision to have been made. It's not that English was considered to be a highly refined, poetic, cultivated language. In fact, just remember, in the 14th century, and after that as well, England was this tiny little dot out in the North Sea. It was so far away from the center of the action, culturally, religiously, philosophically, and in every other way. And the language, who read English in the 14th century? Only simple-minded Englishmen. So he was making a major decision that he was going to try to do something that could at least stand up, in some degree, against the poetry of the Italian verse of Boccaccio or the French of Macho, et cetera. Okay, so he decided that he's going to write an English poem about the English and about contemporary Englishmen in English, in Middle English. Poetry in England had been thriving. First of all, and you all know that Chaucer's poetry was Middle English. But there was something before Middle English, Lo, what do we call it? Old English, right? And I'll give you a little bit of Old English, okay? Just to get, you know, just to orally get the sense of what it was like. This is the first poem to have been recorded in the English language. It's about the 8th century. It's Cadman's Hand. Some of you may remember Cadman's Hand. Neuschelencherian, heaven reaches wide. May it hold its master on this mode, you think. Work, Wolderfader, Swaye, Winder, US. H.A. Drüchten, after Tehde, Firmvoldan, Freya, all michi. Any raw responses to that? Extremely Germanic. Extremely Germanic, who said that? Okay, it is, why is it very Germanic? It is German. English is an entirely Germanic language. You can go into how you define one in a language. Totally Germanic. Anything else? Do you notice about it? Rhythmic. Rhythm, yeah, and open up on what do you mean by that? What is the rhythm? Regular stresses on the line. Part A, yes. Very regular stresses. As a matter of fact, I think of chopping wood, you know? I used to chop wood to Old English, you know? Hunk, hunk. And then what's called a caesura, a pause. Hunk, hunk, all right. Very strong tetrameter beat, right? It's only later, Chaucer brought it in. Actually, we have iambic pentrameter, and we have a fifth beat, and he starts, you know, jazzing around with what can happen. But it's a very rhythmic kind of poetry. And did I see a hand here? No? Go ahead. Has anyone, have you ever heard anyone compare Old English to rap? Oh, totally. Good. And why did you say that? It just occurred to me that I saw someone reciting it like that. Well, it is. Very much like rap. The question, please. The question was, am I too far away? Should I try to stay here? Okay. I asked a video man, it's all right. If I get excited, I'll try to stay right here. All right. It is very much like rap. Although all the rhythms of rap come from West Africa and so on. And in rap you have, you know, a lot of scratching of the record and, you know, beats back like that. But you have the whole variety of rhythms. In Old English, you had a harp, which was plucked. Okay. And there have been attempts to try to reimagine what that harp was like. And then you had not rhyme, but you had alliteration. And so you had rules of alliteration. There have to be three or two alliterative stresses. And then there's a rule of stresses as well in those. And this was oral formulaic poetry. And it was a poetry that was composed according to some rather complicated parameters and paradigms of imagery, of sound and alliteration and of rhythm. And if you were a good show, as they were called, a master poet in Old English poetry, you could stand up and recite poems for hours. You had not memorized them. You did not memorize them, but you had a conception of what the poem was like and what the narrative was like. And you could do all kinds of ring, all kinds of changes on that because there are different ways of describing a battle scene. There's a different way of describing ships and things like that. If you think of Homer for a moment, yes, that's also an oral formulaic tradition. So that's a tradition that survived up until the 11th century. And then, you know, things really changed very radically. In Chaucer we have oral poetry because I'm pointing my ear. Chaucer read aloud, but it was also literate poetry and he was writing it down. And the sound of the poetry, now, is different from that Germanic sound that we've just heard. So let's turn to our handout here. And after, I just gave you some dates and so on, we have the introduction to a general prologue that a number of us remember, rather fondly. And I am going to read a bit so you can get to hear it. Then we can talk about what it sounds like and then we're going to go back and read it together and do some other things as well. The first line, Juan del Apro with a churros sota, the draught of March has passed to the rote, see where we are? Hey, how timely can it be? Right? That's exactly where we are, right? As the sweet showers, weren't they sweet this afternoon? You know, replacing the drought of March, okay. So, to hear a little bit more, and then I'm going to have you chime in and we can do it in unison, too. But I'll just, for those of you who want to be reminded or haven't heard it for a while, Juan del Apro with a churros sota, the draught of March has passed to the rote, and bothered every vein and switched liqueur of which virtue engendered is the floor. Juan se firis ache with a suet of breath in spirit hath in every holt and hath the tender cropis, and the younger sooner hath in the realm his howl the churrosy runna, and smaller foolers mock and melodia that's sleepin' all the niches with open ear, so pricketh and not sure hear carriages. Thun-longen folk to go on pilgrimages and parmas for to saken strungest raunders to ferner hallways, cooth and sundry londas. Unspeciallly from every churrosender of Engelon, to countably they wender the holy, blissful, martyr for to saken that hemeth open on that they were saken. Now, it's a lot to sort of take on when you're trying to read it and trying to hear it and trying to interpret it, but let's have an impressionistic response, too. What are the impressions? How does it hit you? Yes? So, things stand up, especially the line about the little birds that can't keep their eyes closed. I think about that every spring. Me, too. Incredible stimulation. So, I have a question that everyone... Is it about the birds or is it about... We don't want to leave the birds, right? It's about the first line, actually. Well, can we do a little bit on the birds and then we'll get to your question? Birds? So, what are the birds doing here? They're mock and melodia. They're mock and melodia. They're jumping up and down on the branch. They can't sleep. Why can't they sleep? They're so hot. They're so charged. They're so turned on. They're so ready to fall in love, right? So, it was wonderful. Just one of the pizzicati, you know, way of expressing the beauty, the lyricism of ardent desire. Yes, now. First line. Yeah, okay. Maybe this is totally well known, but I always think that April being the cruelest month... Yes. ...of T.S. Eliot has to be a reference to... Totally, absolutely. ...since I've had it all wrong. Well, okay. April is the cruelest month with the opening of the wasteland. Well, what's T.S. Eliot doing to where we are right now? What is he saying about the Great Tradition or about cultural change? But inside out, it's the longing that he feels is unrequited. You're talking about Eliot? Yes. Yeah, that would be the cruelty that it's unrequited, right? Or... He's also evoking the First World War, isn't he? Well, this is, you know, this is the wasteland that he's talking about, and everything has gone down the tubes, right? And so spring, which would be the season of rebirth, regeneration of joy, of potential salvation, you know, Anglo-Catholic, is not, it's just a wasteland, it's death, nothing is being renewed. So it's a totally direct citation, you know, an intertextual citation, and it's just to be contrasted with, let's add the adjectives here. What would some of the adjectives or nouns that you would like to add about the feeling of, about life or about the world or about nature that you get from Chaucer? Art, art, art, art are right, and... And longing. And longing, oh gosh, desire, desire, longing, and, but that's good longing. Yes. And... It's not really Scandinavian, Danish or Norwegian or any of those. Yeah, well, I think... It's not like a Burtman film. Burtman's pretty dark for Chaucer, but there is, and maybe it's my own inflection, but I think, and I think I may be sort of Scandinavianizing a little bit. But remember, Scandinavian is German as well. Swedish is. Okay, okay. In places. Yeah, right, well, why not? I mean, Scottish, we're talking about, we're not talking about Gaelic Scots, we're talking about English Scots or Lallon Scots, and sure, maybe a little there, or Irish. I've spent a couple of years in Ireland, and I find myself sort of swerving over there as well. But mostly, it's of course American as my accent. If you hear British, you know, they read it differently. But also, go ahead, yes. I was just going to say, it also reminded me of independent people. Oh, that locks it up? Yes. And one of the characters is a poet. Right. Jartar, and so you never heard his poetry, because he was known for his traditional kind of poetry. Right. Yeah. Well, the Icelandic poetic tradition is another one. The Icelanders did come over to England after Chaucer's time, I mean, before Chaucer's time, sorry, before Chaucer's time, but languages were close enough so that they could understand each other. The Icelandic poetic rules are much more complicated than the Anglo-Saxon ones are. But in the independent people, he's keeping that alive. And that was 1930s. I mean, that was an accurate depiction of what they were doing. Still then, I have fallen in love recently with the Icelandic sagas. But, okay. Okay, also, have you mentioned French? I mean, didn't you hear the French there? This is something that's really been added to the mix, which adds, I don't know, what you want to call it, but to the oral effect and the lyricism of the poetry, and also makes it easier for us to begin to make sense of it, yes? Okay, a few more responses to this passage. April, even here in Vermont, always gives the promise of spring, regardless of the fact that it's snow this morning. You still, the daffodils are coming up, and it's going to happen. Like many of us, these pilgrims have been cooped up all winter, and they're just bursting. Same as the daffodils, same as the birds in their stomach. They've got to get out of the house. Far off shrines, they don't want to just go to the neighbors. They want to get out and do research. That is so clear. That's kind of a wonderlust, right? Perhaps to where the sun shines. And the burstingness, where are they going? You mentioned it, but where are they going towards? To the shrine of St. Thomas? Yes. And for the endless relics? Yes. I mean, Chaucer could have, this is all one sentence, by the way. Did you notice? One ample, ardent, deeply breathing sentence. You have to take a breath and keep on going. But where do you end up? I mean, it's a little bit, if either a non-sequitur or a surprise, where are they all going with this bursting outness to the shrine of St. Thomas? Where, the last two lines, the holy, blissful martyr, Fortus Seca, that Hammeth hopon, when that they were a seca. A wonderful remission. Seek and seek, seek and seek. And so you end up with a spiritual longing, right? A spiritual desire, which is going beyond the Elon V. Tile desire, or the sexual desire, or the Wunderlust desire. Whether or not they are conflatable, whether or not they are opposable, whether or not one builds on the other, questions to wonder over. But all by way of showing you how rich, yes, and how exciting this springtime opening is. Yes, way back there. It's always, I first read this word part of that 50 years ago, and it always feels like a very joyful passage. Yes. But also the rhythm, part of the rhythm is the rhythm of walking, of setting out on foot, knowing that you may be walking for 50 miles or a thousand miles. Right. Or if you're lucky, you're riding, you know? Okay, so beautiful. Let's ride or walk forward a little bit from that. So this is the introduction to the Canterbury Tales. They're tales told while we're riding, right? They're told by 30 pilgrims, or just by chance, by Aventura cost, meet in one inn, the Tabard Inn in southern south of the Thames. And the innkeeper, Harry Bailey, we learned his name in due time, decides that he would like to ride with them as well, partly because it's going to be good business. And he says, well, let's, you know, let's entertain ourselves as we go along. So we will tell stories, tales as we go out and tales as we go out. And he's the guy who comes up with the idea, well, each of us will tell two tales going out and two tales coming back. And, you know, it's like what happens when you're thrown together in a group. I don't want to be too pejorative about the sort of person that always takes over, but he's a takeover kind of person. Harry is like that. But everybody said, okay, whatever you say. And Harry says, I'm going to be the judge for the person who tells the tale of best sentence and most alas. That is most meaning and most delight. So if you were to add them all up, as I mentioned already, there would be 120 tales. But then Chaucer in this frame narrative and this really nothing like it elsewhere in Western literature, where you have individualized people, and we'll get to the individualization in a minute, each tell one or two tales, which are tailored, that's not a pun, for them and they get involved with each other. They get in some kind of dialogue with each other. They get into some kind of series of debates with each other. Somebody mentioned the wife of Bath. The wife of Bath introduces a sequence of tales that turned out to be many different readings of the sacrament of marriage or the existential challenges of marriage and things like that. But it is a wonderful pulperie of a variety of tales which seem to have things to do with each other, but they're not just lined up in a kind of linear fashion and saying, okay, this follows this, tit follows that and so on. So there's a wonderful collection of tales being told, the poetic fiction is, as you're on the road, going to Canterbury. And I think it's important never to forget that these are told on a pilgrimage, never to forget what the ideal of pilgrimage is and that pilgrimage is a metaphor for the pilgrimage of life. Canterbury is a simulacrum of the New Jerusalem, but also what are some of the real realities of pilgrimages in Chaucer's time, what do you think? What were people really doing on pilgrimages? Not very sacred, right? I mean, people went on pilgrimages, well, to steal from each other, to get away from the spouse, to have a wild time, to never change from what they were before, maybe even get worse. And so the Lawlards, who were the Puritans on the theologically political left, said this is one of the worst offenses of the Catholic Church pilgrimages. So it's a complicated ritual in its valence or its significance goes in many directions and Chaucer's exploiting it. Okay, with us so far? Now, everyone, except you know two, of these pilgrimages, the 30 of them, is given a portrait, sort of a personal poem describing who they are. Following certain rules of portraiture, they are called a fictiones, and each one is a remarkable accomplishment in his or her own right and each one could be studied at great length. I have just chosen one for us to do some close reading. You ready for this now? To see how we can do reading through one portrait. It's not like we're going to get retailed by this person, but this is the monk. So the next, I guess with the back of the handouts, that would be a little, is a portrait of the monk. Before we start, these pilgrims, for the most part, don't have personal names. They're just called the so-and-so and the so-and-so. So this is the monk. What was a monk? What is a monk? What were monks? What's the ideal monk? What do you think of? What do you think of? Religious. Religious. And there are a lot of religious people on this pilgrimage, and a lot of them are not treated very well by Chaucer at all. Okay, so, religious, keep on going. Silent. Yes? A lot of the contemplation. Well, okay, you do have the right wing, the Cistercians who have vows of silence. But what are the vows that they all take? Poverty. Okay, don't go too fast. Poverty. Chastity. Chastity. Obedience. Got it? Poverty. Chastity. Obedience. Okay. What else about monks? What is the life? Which... Well, don't go too... Don't editorialize yet. Okay. And, okay. What else can you say about monks? They've lived out of society. They've lived out of society. The secular church, like priests and so on, lived in society and dealt with their parishioners. Right? In the towns, in the villages, in the cities. But if you took vows of claustration, you lived in a cloister, and it was supposed to be a Hortus conclusus. That is supposed to be a terrestrial image of the eternal garden of paradise. Right? So you went into this closed off world, and what did you do in that world? Pray in work. Yes. You prayed and you... Worked. Worked. Pray in work. Okay. Orare and laborare. All right? You pray and you work. Anybody want to add a bit more there? You had the hours. The seven hour... These are seven different occasions in one day that you went and worshipped, and you read... Did I hear something? Can we also study? Okay. They're different. Monastic orders had different attitudes towards study. Is study work? Some of them were quite scholarly, and they would sit there in their scriptoria, and they would read the sacred texts, and that was considered to be a very devout way of life. By the way, when they read, did you know that they read aloud? The whole idea of reading silently was sort of a bastardized reformation concept. But yes, they could read. But the attitude towards reading, was it a luxury or was it not a luxury? Was it only for the intelligentsia? It was a live issue. Yes? I know I'm anticipating a little bit, but you wouldn't normally assume that a holy man would be terribly attractive or robust. Okay. We were getting there. All right. I'm sort of setting up the ideal. The precepts that are for the most part operative. I think we're fine, unless anybody wants to add something. Okay. So, let's begin. I'm going to be reading a bit. This is going to go sort of pretty fast. I know I want to concentrate on the very end of this, but we can do some stuff. So, you know, asking ourselves, oh, look at this. Oh, what about this? What is Charles at doing here? How are we supposed to feel? Okay. It's called literary criticism. All right. Okay. A month there was a fair for the maestria and it would be there. The Lovitt veneria, a manly man to bane and obit obel. Full stop. Any thoughts? And you've got your translation done. No, you don't have translation. Okay. There was a monk and he was an excellent guy. He was a cool dude. And, oh, what's an outrider? Right. Okay. Let's pause right there. You know, there was a capacity that has a title that was really important to what? To monasteries. Why? Because what was happening with monasteries? Well, before Charles's time, they were becoming wealthy. They were dealing with the outside world. You know, they had farms. They had estates. They had wealth. They had wealth. And some of them extraordinarily wealthy. All right. And if you had all of that going for you, you had to. You needed entrepreneurs. You need businessman types. You need, you know, people who know how to deal with merchants and other, you know, out in the world. So you have outriders. So that's what we have with this guy. How do you feel about that? I don't know. He loved veneria. Comment? He wasn't chased. Oh, wait a minute. Journal of venery. Oh, my goodness. Worldly things. Look where her mind is going. What does venery mean? I'm deploying your very good instincts. What is venery? Hunting. Hunting? Deer. You have venison. How could you ever think that you're supposed to think of something like that? So at the point so far, I don't know, ambiguity, suggestiveness, innuendo, satire, irony, parody, or straightforward, he likes to hunt deer. Okay. Get those fives right there. Okay. Moving right along. A manly man. Oh, boy. I teach a whole course. This is not literature. It's something on masculinity. So what does that mean? Ask yourself. But this is what we told. It's really important about this guy. He's a manly man. And he really should become an abbot. Okay. Moving right along fast. We're trying to do the whole picture. Well, many a dainty horse had hay and stubble. And when he rode, men meeked his beetle hair, jingling in a whistling wind, alzcler, and aches lewd as doth the chapel bella. There, as his lord was caper of the cellar. Okay. A little bit of just sort of what's being told there. What do we, what do we, yes. It's as loud, his bridal jingles as loud as the chapel bell, which is ironic a little more. Well, it is, you know, there's a scene that these are the Canary Bellas jangling along. Well, but I think you're implying is, of all things to compare those, you know, those bells to the, oh, the chapel, forgot about the chapel bell, you know, what space is there between the sound of the bells on his, on the bridal and the bells in the chapel? Major, a major wide gap between the two of them. Any other comments, one or two? The decorative nature, which you don't associate with being amongst. Okay. Chaucer has a way of communionizing. He takes on the attributes and the sensibilities and the interests and the persuasions of people he's writing about. And you can tell it's, and Chaucer is saying, oh, he's got this bridal, he's got the jingling and the whistling, it's clear and loud and so on. This is an appreciation for the sensuous, I don't know, tactileness and specificity and aliveness of all of this. And after all, what does he like? He likes riding, he likes horses. So in a way, Chaucer is taking on that interest in the equestrian, yeah. Do you think sometimes he's looking for a rhyme and he leaves it to the reader's intellect to make something interesting about it? What does that mean? What do you mean by that? Well, I'll say it again. Do you think you have a special rhyme here? Just any two lines, can you accept the rhyme? I'm just any two. Do you want me to read two rhymes? Just, yeah. Her, Claire, Belle, Cell. Stable. Yeah? Her, Claire. I think sometimes reports, they're looking for a word that's kind of tricky to find a rhyme for. And that will generate some thought on the person that was reading it to make it a little more interesting than maybe what he even thought of. I would agree with you. I think if you can find, if you can work for a rhyme, maybe you can find something that you didn't even know was there in your subconscious, right? I don't think the good poets are never desperate, but I think there are serendipities. Oh, he came like that. There's one a little bit further, Cloister and Oyster, okay? Fantastic rhyme. However, I was sort of disappointed to find out people have been using that rhyme for decades, you know? But okay, so can I? All right, so we stopped right there. The rule of St. Mar and of St. Benet, because that it was old and some del straight. What are we talking about here? Monastic rules. Monastic rules, okay? The Benedictines and Maurus. Because it was old-fashioned, old-fangled, a little bit too strict, okay? Because of that, hey, this Ilke Monk let old a thing, yeah, a thing as pasta and held after the newer world as pasta. Hey, you have not of that text to pull it hen. They say that Hunch is being not holding men. Name that a monk, when he is wretched lace, is linked to the fish that is water lace. This is to say a monk out of his Cloister. But, Filke text, hey, held not worth an oyster. Oh, yeah, okay, you got it. So, help us out here. What do we see here? What's going on? We have a modern monk, right? We have a liberated monk, right? Help me out. I want some more adjectives. We have a monk who doesn't like the old ways. Keep on going? Wretched. Well, wretched is sort of... He sheds water. He means, yeah. But he's of the new order, right? He's a new man. He's a new religious. And he's liberated from, you know, the confinements and constraints and the anal retentiveness of the old order. Now, the last word here, last line. But Filke text, held hey not worth an oyster. And he said his opinion was goad. What does that mean? I, you know, who's I here? Chaucer. Chaucer. Now, who is Chaucer? It's another thing because Chaucer is, you know, projecting himself into this whole pilgrimage. Chaucer puts himself at the very end of all of the portraits with this Rapscallians, the runts of the litter. And he says, and then I was there on the poem. But he says, he's intruding and said, and I said his opinion was good. Chaucer is saying, let's just be very literal. What is he saying? Yes? I think Chaucer makes himself a sort of Stephen Colbert character. There's so much gullibility and admiration. Okay. Let's hold on to Stephen Colbert, because he's a very complex Colbertist. I would say Chaucer is a little bit more of an ironist or a satirist, but they then diagram over that. But he's saying, I agree with him, right? His opinion was good. So all of a sudden you have this guy coming in, the narrator, as a person who is taking his position. And he says, what should he study and mock himself a wold upon a boat in Cloister all the way to Porter or swing in with his hand as a laborer as Austen bit? Who shall the world be they serve it? Let Austen have his sweet, so Henry served. Boy, he's really getting on a terrier. What's he saying? Why should he study, right? Yeah, why should he be closeted, Cloistered? Right. Why should he pour over a book? Remember the question we just asked? And why should he work with his hands? Right? And laborer as Austen, Augusten, bad, how shall the world be served? Please help me out here. What's going on? Where are you? Are you being manipulated? Where is Chaucer? Where are we supposed to stand about this? Chaucer's championing his hero identifying with the monk and saying, right on, I understand. But isn't that deeply ironic? Isn't it satirical though? Ironic, satirical. Huh? Tung and cheat. Tung and cheat? Yeah. Are you sure? I'm not being, you know, Chaucer is identifying with this guy, asking questions about this. I would say, I can't dwell on it too long, but I think this is a very Chaucerian moment, and Chaucer's leaving it to us. I don't like calling Chaucer a satirist because I just think he's too nuanced. But he also sort of portrays himself and you feel as if he's going along. That's sort of a bit of a naïve, you know? A little bit gullible, a little bit overly impressionable, but he said, well, that makes perfect sense. Perfect sense. And it's not like it's 100% wrong. In another era, you could have been burned at the stake for those do-senses alone. Well, everybody was writing anti-religious satire all the time. If you wanted to get a target, get a religious order. So I mean, people say, oh, because everybody's like that, I haven't been religious. No. Okay. So he says, let Obstin have his swing, to him reserve it. Therefore, I like Chaucer's, therefore it's better than anything else in his poetry. Therefore, he was a precursor, a rite, precursor meaning? Hunter. Grey hounds. He had his swift, his fooled, and fleet of pricking and of hunting for the hara, was all his lust, for no cost will they sparre. He say, a slave, I'm not going to go for a while, not stop. Perfele it out the hand with grease, that the fiennest of a laund, and for to fasten his hoad under his chin, a head of gold, a rot for a full curious pin. A luke-naught, in the greater end there was. His haid was bollard, that shone as any glass, and aches fast, as he had been anointed. He was a lord, full-flat, and gold-point. His e'en stape, and drolling in his haid, that staim it as a furnace of a laid, his boat as supple, his horse in great a stat, knew certainly, he was a fair prelate. You could only have three more lines. Thoughts, comments, impressions, of the monk himself. What do you see of him? What does Chaucer focus upon him? Well. Okay. Namely? Gold. Okay, gold. Right. Gold shows up an awful lot in the general prologue. Keep on going. Jewelry, and horses, and trappings, and beautiful leather. What's he like as a manly man? Manly. Stout. Stout is pretty good. Well-fed. Well-fed. Well-fed. Powerful, physical, somatic, corporeal. Right? And he's presented as, really, the opposite of what it should be. Yeah. So you have a guy who's amazingly, let's get the adjectives here. Anything about his spirituality? No, ma'am. Anything about his reading scripture? Anything even about his business dealings? He is a man of the flesh. Yeah. Yeah. The note says that the love knot is an elaborate knot. Yeah. Could that also be a reference to his lack of chastity? Well, there are little, tweaky moments in this portrait, but then many other tweaky moments and other portraits, and as you go along, you find they become more and more suggestive, but there is, there are informations here. I mean, even pricking. He's a prick-a-sewer, you know? I don't know. It's not quite what might come to our mind, but it was not not there as a possibility. So there are these moments that make you think about what you think you should not think about, about this guy, which sort of goes along with his carnality. The things about the sounds of the words that are more suggestive than possible of their actual everyday meaning. Good. I agree. Chaucer had a great ear for the sounds of words. Now we have three more lines, and then we have to try to wrap this up and move forward. He was not Paul as a four-pened ghost, a fat swan, lewitt hey best of any roast. His palfrey was as broon as is a barrier. Any comments? Yeah. I've never picked a swan, but if it's anything like goose, we're talking about something incredibly rich. Incredibly rich and rare and expensive, right? Absolutely. And more? He had a robust... Yeah. Oh, yeah. I mean, he's a good point. On point in French. I mean, he is so... I mean, it's almost like he just came out of the oven. You know? Yeah. Right. Yeah, he's so meaty. Yeah. Can I call you... These two lines. He was not Paul as a four-pened ghost, a fat swan, lewitt hey best of any roast. Just tell me about for a famous ghost and our notes, I don't think help us too much. Ghost? Okay. When we think of ghost in a religious context, what do we think of? The Holy Spirit. That's what it really means here, okay? And he was not a four-pened ghost. And what are our notes here? Or tormented. Four-pened means excessively pined away. Okay. A spirit who is, you know, who was just so attenuated and emaciated that he's almost not flesh. Okay? And Chaucer says, God, thank God he wasn't a four-pened ghost. Let's wait a minute. Four-pened ghost. We're on a pilgrimage. What, in a pilgrimage context or a Christian context, might you think of in terms of a physical presence which is four-pened and ghost-like? In pale? I'm thinking of a, you know, just a physical form where it's a... What's your thinking of a figure from an El Greco painting? Exactly. An El Greco saint. Remember those very, very sort of angular, un-fleshy, tortured souls out there in the desert praying. Or, so you can think of all of those saints You know, this is a guy called Jesus Christ and what do you see when you see him on the cross in the Middle Ages or in the Renaissance? A four-pened ghost, right? But what's happening with that ideal of self-mortification, of denial, of living for the spirit and not in the flesh? What's happening here? It's been pushed way around and what I want to underscore is what's happening with us as readers? Oh no, we don't want a four-pened ghost around here. So you see what's happening with us as readers as Chaucer's leading us through and you hit four-pened ghosts and you say, how did I get here? So Chaucer's always very subtly asking, where are you? What do you believe in? Okay, now, maybe ten more minutes to do an awful lot. The rest of the can of retails. Generically extraordinary variety. You have epic romances. You have saints' lives. You have beast fables, which I've mentioned already. You have tragedies, a whole list of tragedies. You have the wife of Bath. Somebody mentioned it. The wife of Bath, whom you may remember, one of the most extraordinary women in all of English literature, who sort of takes over when she finally steps forward. She goes on. Her prologue is about 700 lines, which is about 500 lines longer than anybody else's prologue. And she just becomes an amazing presence. She gets involved in disputation after disputation after disputation with her imagined adversaries. And her imagined adversaries are male clerics who have been taking positions century after century on what subjects. First of all, marriage, yeah. Nature, women, sex. And she says, what's wrong with these people? Don't they know what the world is about? Don't they understand something about sexual desire? Don't they understand that God had a reason to make sex so damn sexy? Do they really have any idea of what women really are like? Where is all this misogyny? The Middle Ages were extraordinarily rich, non-stop misogyny. She says, why is there so much misogyny? Well, where have the women been vis-a-vis the power of writing? Nowhere, because they do not have the privilege of writing or of reading scripture. So she becomes a theologian of the first order. Now, she breaks all the rules. She confesses to a lot of the sins that have been attributed to women. And when you say, you say we women are this, damn right we're this. And we're even worse than that. I'll tell you about that. But she starts a whole series of tales that deal with the marriage they call the marriage group. And interestingly enough, her tale is a romance, an authoring romance, a bit of a surprise. The very last tale in that group, I just finished writing my article on it for, thank God, after years labor is the Franklin's tale. And Franklin tries to resolve all the marriage issues, but it really, I think, collapses in his hands. There are Saints tales. There's a tale about alchemy. The group is joined by an alchemist and his yeoman come writing in what's happening here. And the yeoman stays. The alchemist leaves. He tells us all about alchemy. Obviously, Chaucer was interested in alchemy as well. And on and on and on, tale after tale, talking to each other, talking to the neighbors, but also involved in a kind of disputatio, as you feel like you're making some progress, but you also feel like maybe we're not making progress. Contradante, where you know you're starting down in Progatorio, I mean, you're starting down in Ferno, and then you're going up in Progatorio and up here, Chaucer is sort of, you're swooping around, you're crash landing, you're taking off again and so on. So when you get to the end of the Canterbury tales, do you make it to Canterbury Cathedral? No. And it's clear that Chaucer did not want his pilgrims to arrive. After his death, a few poets tried to end it. But he, I think he was thinking that this is the profoundest way to do it. Who am I to say this is the ending? Who am I to say that this is the New Jerusalem? It does end with a long meditation on the Seven Deadly Sins by the Parsons. And it also ends with Chaucer's own retraction. And as my students like to say, this really is a bummer. Because after all of these tales, all of this extraordinary poetry, incredible variety of people talking about, you know, a cornucopia of human experiences. Chaucer ends with four tales. The first one is the one that I wrote my book about. And the other two are about three other things. But they all seem to be meditations upon poetry and the pleasure we take in reading poetry. The last tale, the Parsons tale, the Parsons says, you will not get any more poetry from me. You'll not get any more rhyme from me. I'm going to go to the straight and the narrow and tell you a moral, edifying, uplifting tale about the Seven Deadly Sins and also about penitence, satisfaction, and penance. Which he does. And it's long and it's in prose. Students don't like it. But most Chaucerians assign it, or at least parts of it because they feel this is a very important part of the Canterbury tales. At the very end, Chaucer in his own voice, whatever that means, offers his retraction pretty short. And what he says is that I may have made a lot of mistakes in writing this poetry. I may have written them in ways which led people away from the good rather than towards the good. I had hoped that Christ would have inspired me and my intent was this. All that is written is written for our dark three. But then he says, where for? And after the where for, he says, I want to be forgiven for all of my guilt. And my guilt's are that he lists every work of literature that he wrote except for the ones that are transparently, incontrovertibly Christian and didactic. And then he ends with a prayer to Christ that he'd be forgiven for his sins. So the Canterbury tales ends with a kind of deconstruction of the Canterbury tales. But Chaucer takes a 180 degree turn it would seem and he accepts his own poetry, his beloved poetry as his own sins and we're left with that paradox or with that downer or with all of those difficulties to start thinking again about, well, he didn't burn them, did he? Like Chaucer tried to do. But he left us in a kind of limbo land as to what poetry is about and why a man would give his own life to writing poetry. I think Chaucer had planned to end his poetic career that way. It wasn't a sudden, oh gosh, I'm getting close to the end of the world or something like that. But it's a very problem, I've written about it and I've got lots of feelings about it or thoughts about it. But it is a very powerful and challenging conclusion to a work of literature which is one of the great masterpieces of the English canon. So that's the end of my formal talk. It went on a little bit long. In response to what you were just saying, is it possible that there was a political or in some way self-protective motivation to his writing that? Well, that's a good point. As was, I think, fairly common throughout that era and the Renaissance, especially the Reformation for people who had ideas that were out there and got nabbed by the church or whoever to write some kind of recantation for the sake of not being persecuted or not being burned at the stake or not losing their position or what have you. Is there a possibility that there was some such one? I think I'm speaking my own persuasion here. It's a possibility but it's a very, very slim possibility. Everybody is writing satires as I mentioned against the church and the abuses of the church. Why were they doing that? Because they wanted to improve the church. Nobody was doubting their faith except maybe for the law that I mentioned. Chaucer almost got into a little bit of hot water about law of the but he escaped it. There were another part of your question formulaic or not that formula doesn't mean that they didn't believe people even in mid-career feeling that they needed to retract their sense of responsibility for writing literature which was not entirely appropriate because it was one example and took a turn in another direction. My own persuasion is that Chaucer no, he wasn't afraid of being persecuted by the church or judged by the church. My own, this is the position I'm taking in writing actually, really is he's drawing a circle of authorial responsibility not only around his work of literature and not only around his work of literature and himself, his own intentions because in that retraction talks about my intentions this is what my intentions were but all the way around his readers and the work and himself. In other words, he is self-assessing he is holding himself accountable for all the misreadings of his poetry he's saying I can't simply stand back and say there it is guys do with what you will good luck so it is a very strong self-judgment but it's taking the role of the poet extremely seriously and very much within a Christian context for the ill effects of our good intentions that's me there but it seems to me to fit in better with the rest of the Chaucer that I know other, hi an alumna about 200 years before the printing press yeah, printing press was 1484 how did that kind of transcribe when they're not literate people even to read in English and the printing press really gave this a chance to fly yeah it was all manuscripts until Caxton in the 1480s what was the first work that Caxton with his new wonderful press to publish the Canterbury Tales but it's not like they didn't survive they survived terribly well in manuscripts manuscripts are not in agreement with each other but it's not like the press saved these poems but like with everything else the press made everything that was published much more available to a wider wider readership and that would have included Chaucer so he survived by me that's right actually the manuscripts are much more survivable because they are on skin and that's almost indestructible when you get into paper things don't last quite so long who would have actually transcribed uh, scribes you had small businesses in London all in a row and you had people who were good scribes they wrote it out and it was pretty important but not very lucrative job to have Chaucer actually wrote a poem to Adam Scrivain Adam my scribe bought my text I would bring it to you but it's a curse poem and he just curses his scribe six ways to Sunday for getting everything wrong and for having to scrape in the Roman scribe and change it over again and one of Chaucer's scribes his name has just been discovered in the last decade a major bit of difference there's a very first one when was this translation like a better word who did this when was that now as I was just driving out of my driveway being a little bit late I said oh my goodness I forgot something I didn't bring the book that that translation is from but it's only three or four years out it's by Sheila Fisher, she's the translator and Norton is the press and I have been very unhappy with all translations of Chaucer until this one and I'm very happy with this one and of course that I taught Osher Adarmath to adults recently we found out that some people got so used to reading the translation on the right page they've got over to the original so this is a very very pleasing translation Sheila Fisher Norton one more question please do you use the same same approach to poetry is da da da da da da da da da da da da do you use the same thing through all of them or did he go off on tangents for nine of his years he was I am a pentameter couplets that's what we're reading so I'm a pentameter is what da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da Trails sweat it that I mentioned was in Rime Royal these are seven lines more complicated rhyme and he wrote the entirety of that Masterpiece in Rime Royal he used a few other forms of rime some of them parodic some of them experimental but for the most part he was I am a pentameter that he used one question. Are there any songs that were sung during the time he wrote this that were just passed down through? Can you think of one song that was written at the same time? There were a lot of lyrics that have survived, but lyric means no song, but mostly the words. You're getting, I'm getting a little bit out of my feel, but yes, there are some where the nooms which are, you know, what you write and the score to show where the voice is going that have survived, and they have been resurrected and performed. The answer is yes. Yeah, not much in 1398 when Henry IV came into power, Chaucer wrote a poem to the new king. This is Dysart, you know, now where are things. It's a complaint to my purse, and my purse is too light and I wish she were pregnant. So he wasn't, he never got, yeah that's right. He never got wealthy. He did at John Afghan was a major patron of him. Where did he live? Before he went to Kent, he lived for a good part, you know, for more than a decade. In Allgate, this is, Allgate is a gate that's the old gate over one of the gates going into the city of London, and it was kind of man cave. It wasn't very pleasant. It wasn't very warm, but it was free, thanks to Richard II. But if, but he couldn't have done bet, you know, he just wasn't, poets didn't make money. You know, look at Dante, who was always traveling around and mooching off very important dignitaries and nobles. No. No. I mean, he made money by being a by working for the government. That's what he did every day. He worked with the king and for the exchequer, etc., and he made enough money to get by. But that's, that's, that's about it. A lot of his friends were much better off than he. And so he was always in this sort of liminal position with well off people, some of them quite powerful, some of them quite political, and some of them learned it and some of them less so. But he was sort of the poor cousin type. Yes. I recognize that this might be a difficult question given the kind of ambiguity of the number of the portraits or of the programs. But to what degree would you say that or do you think that Chaucer was able to or did transcend the kind of politics of his time? In particular, I'm thinking of the wife of Bath, you know, which is in some ways, I mean, you call her a theologian in the first order, but in some ways she's also made to seem ridiculous. Yeah. Or the produr's tale, which you could read on one level as like an incredibly anti-Semitic tale or on an ironic level of she's the one that looks ridiculous and savage in the tale. And so my question is always, you know, was he able to escape the kind of prejudices of this time and have a kind of more humanistic view that, you know, I mean, he seems like a guy who loves people. Yes. Right. And so it's hard for me to think of him as someone who's misogynistic or anti-Semitic. And I'm wondering how you've been able to deal with that ambiguity. Right. And the English teacher speaking here, tell me your name again. Ben. Ben. And when, in the regard, but I mean, Ben, wouldn't you agree that, I mean, to bring this in the classroom you find these these issues are so alive and that you as teacher are put on a spot, you know, what, where does Chaucer really stand? And one of the big questions of Chaucer, much more than almost all the major poets, is who are you Chaucer? Will the real Chaucer please stand up? And he's been called a laodicean. That is, laodiceans that they don't, they're always on both sides of the fence at once. And Chaucer is very, very careful not to show his hand. Or he'll play peek-a-boo. Right. He'll go back and forth, back and forth. With the two examples you mentioned, we'll take the, the, the Pirates' Tale rife with anti-Semitism. No, I mean, it's there from beginning to end. Well, Chaucer's living in anti-Semitic time. In the, the Parsons' Tale, there are passages that are anti-Semitic that choose in the Parsons play are accused of being responsible for, for Christ's death. Is this Chaucer's embracing a position like that? We always want to make writers from the past that we really love and enjoy and admire more modern, you know, than they, they might really be. This happens with Shakespeare a lot. He was really way ahead of his time, whatever in the world that means. I think to use another one of your words, I mean, I think Chaucer is a humanist, but a Christian humanist. He's much more interested, finally, I think, this is my shtick, in where we stand, where we are, our belief systems are and so on. But the Wife at Bath is a real challenge and he does not make it easy for you. He's not, I, I'm, he's not being, you know, misogynistically satirical from beginning to end, but he's not, I used to be involved. Peter, were you there when we had a debate Alan Gaylord and I? Okay, those are the old days. The senior medievalist and I decided that we take the Wife at Bath on as a entertaining teaching icon. And Alan, who was a remarkable actor and brilliant in so many ways, my senior colleague, I just dedicated my article last week to him. And I took roles. Alan was a Salinas Goliardis and Alan was all for life, love, women, song, dance, the most liberal readings of the scripture you could possibly have. And I was Petrus Travisensis and I came in, in sort of Franciscan garb, whacking my head, you know, ashes and things like that. But for almost two hours, we went at it, citing scripture, Galatians, St. Thomas, St. Aquinas and things like that. I mean, St. Augustine and so on, really doing a full number on this debate as it was a disputation in Chaucer's own time. So in Chaucer's own time, the whole question of St. Thomas was actually absolutely liberal and hard to believe. But why it should sex and marriage be a pleasure? Isn't marriage a sacrament? But isn't sex a sin or venial sin at least? No. It's a whole wonderful book called Contraception by the Jesuit priest on this. Chaucer is in the middle of that. And yes, he does not make it easy for you. You don't know where he stands. But finally, I think he's asking, well, where do you stand? These are, you know, and this is not simply pro and contra or anything like that. And the same thing with anti-Semitism. I think that, I'm talking about, I think that Chaucer is more evolved than Shakespeare. And it takes with Shylock. More evolved. I'll take that stand. It'll take me a long time to try to defend myself on that. But even so, that doesn't mean that he is, say, you know, a wondrous, you know, liberal by 21st century standards. A few more questions here. Yes. Me, myself? I make an awful lot of that. But we sort of almost forget that they're on a pilgrimage because they get involved in all sorts of debates, battles, scurrilous stuff. In fact, the last tale, which is a kind of Ovidian myth, is about as disgusting. You know, Abed writes about poetry and metaphor and metamorphosis and so on. It is so sickening that Chaucer's last poem should be a poem about poetry where there is no redeeming value whatsoever. So I think Chaucer, what's the question I'm asking? Oh, yes. And so, I mean, where's Dante? By the end of, you know, the Divine Comedy, you're right up there in the Seventh Sphere, right? The Pima Mobile. Chaucer, you're mucking, you know, you're sort of walking along in the muck trying to make your way past a town called Bob up and down, you know, on your way, but you haven't made it here. It's sort of very modern or postmodern. But that, in a way, is a kind of treat occurred. I thought we're supposed to be on a pilgrimage. I thought we were going towards salvation. I thought poetry could save us or at least help us. And at least as a group, as a community, can help each other. And this is like, you know, the Whereas it's turned into a parapathetic moth-out. Moth-out. It's certainly a parapathetic something, but it's going downhill. You know, it's like a broigle painting, going downhill. Yes. This photograph, can you give us an idea of how many people, very few people could read this? How did they, who were the ones that made the copies of it? How many copies were available? What were the class of people that were privileged to read this? And did they have any public readings or anything? Okay, three questions or three and a half questions. One, for the most part, they would be the aristocrats and the learned and the wealthy who would have copies or who could read it. But remember, we've got a pretty large group of people who are the intelligentsia. I mean, if you've got any education, no problem whatsoever in reading it. It's owning it, which is the real challenge, because every one of these is extremely, extremely expensive. So if you had 12 books in your library, you were almost like a millionaire. And that's a nice three and a half questions. This one right here, I noticed I just ran them off. And I skipped off, I skimmed off the top. But that's the most famous manuscript. That's the Ellesmere manuscript. If you've ever been to the Huntington Library and Pasadena, California, there it is. I got a wonderful scholarship for a year there and I'll go and genuflect in front of that one. That was a presentation copy, which means it was done very beautifully to be very valued to be very expensive. We don't know to whom it was given or who paid, you know, who is the patron. But that's unusual. The other manuscripts are just doing their work. When was it written? Okay, 15th century, you know, within 25 years after Chaucer's death, way back in the point of his work. I've seen various additions that do not include the Really? Yeah. Which library? Oh, there's a manuscript there without the retraction. Okay, all right. So I'm just, you know, are we certain that this was something because, you know, there was a time whoever was the scribe or, you know, producing a manuscript would insert, you know, something that you wanted to put in, not necessarily what was Chaucer's. Yeah, you know, there have been so many attempts by a few scholars to try to save ourselves from the retraction. If you follow me, right. And you know, one of them says, Well, that line, I don't think Chaucer wrote. Okay. Or he wouldn't a scribe wrote that and things like that. But the preponderance of the evidence manuscript after manuscript after manuscript, is that the retraction is there? Chaucer wanted to be there. It flows right from the Parsons tail. So it's this wishful thinking to try to make it go away. Not that some people, I mean, it could be that some, you know, there are about 87 different manuscripts and they're, they're far from being equal to each other. But I'll Chaucer and say Chaucer meant it to be there any minute to be that way. Then the next step is what do you what do you do with it? Since you said he didn't burn them, if he let in, if you get through all this, you're enjoying it. That's right. So you get to the retraction at the very end, you've made the journey. That's right. When the retraction like that make you kind of say, well, no, but this part was wonderful. This part was wonderful. And it would make you highlight all the best things in the work. And therefore, you know, you're gonna say, well, I'm not going to be like that person. Because I think a decent moral Christian person would read or, you know, Christian time would read it and know what's good, good, bad. And retraction like that would make you just kind of cling to the better parts. What are the better parts? What's the better parts that you would get out of it? Anything that you positive that you got out of it, right? That would make you I shouldn't be like that. Or I should be like Chaucer has a quote from Romans 15 for that he uses twice once is in the retraction. All that is written is written for our doctrine for our doctrine. And that is my intent. All that is written is written for our doctrine, our teaching our education, our doctrine. And that is my intent. I've dwelt and print on this at great length. That's exactly what you know, you're talking about. With everything has been written for our doctrine for our education. That means that everything is for our own good, or for our own education. In other words, whatever it is, if it's a graffito, you know, if it's rap, if it's trash, if it's pornography, if it's whatever, there's something there that may be for our doctrine. Okay. That's that was actually John, John Milton's position, because good and ill are so intermedal, we cannot have censorship, except for religious tracks and things. Okay. So I think Chaucer is another thing you're saying is that he's probably asking us to reread. Go back again. If this came as a total shock. Maybe you have not been reading it as well as you might be reading it. He does the same thing or similar thing with toilets and crusader. But when you I mean, you're usually afraid that what we like most, I think Chaucer is asking us, Well, what are our principles of liking this? You know, is it the juicy parts, only the juicy parts, only the the family over things like that? Everything is part of this, you know, this vision that he has. And maybe we should read the same slides much more carefully. Only like the juicing parts. Most people might go, gee, we didn't have a problem. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. My recall is revealing to me about the personalities. And surprising about it was enlightening and on the characters and how he was describing that, right? Because he was taking, you know, away from that you would have about certain figures with comments. And I think we're probably ready. Probably ready. No, one more question. Yes. Still funny after all these years. You want to give us just one or two examples of what you found funny in the country? That actually is not my title. It's made up by I gave this the first Wednesday talk somewhere else. And they said we're gonna jazz this up and something. And I said, I'd use it. I think I would first probably identify Chaucer as a comic poet. But it doesn't mean it's just full of, you know, hijinks. He wrote tragedies, he won't say it's lies. He wants a whole variety of poems. But I think he's comically profound. Probably the best known low jinx moment in Chaucer. I mean, most of the funniness is in the way he tells the story. But Chaucer is well known for the Miller's Tale. The Miller's Tale is a bad Fabio. It's one of the best bad jokes ever written. It's very long, complicated. But there's a moment that everybody remembers, where there's there's a triangle. There are two young lovers, male, both of them, one of them very somatic, one of them sort of fruits and boots kind of guy. They're according the same young life of an old carpenter. And the fruits and boots guy, this guitar and so on is going to go and serenade Allison, who's already agreed to go to bed with this his his competitor. And she just says, go away, go away, go away. And he says, Oh, please, kiss me at least before I leave. And she says, Okay, make yourself ready. And she sticks her rear end thing to the note on out the out the window. And he gets on his knees and puts up his he's he's very a labial kind of guy. And to kiss her. And what she does, he says, and he starts back, he says, a beard, a beard. I never thought a woman had a beard. So now he he's he's been a dissolve and he's been sort of saying from all of his romantic illusions, but he now wants justice and revenge. So he goes in the middle of the night and gets a plowshare from Gervais, who's, who's a blacksmith. So he's got this hot plowshare that he brings back. And he asks Allison to come back because he has a ring that he's going to give her as a present. And Allison's lover, the other clerk, they've been in bed all night, says, it's my turn now. And she's this is not funny, is it? And, and so he, he puts his arse out the, the window, and then the hot culture goes up that arse. And Nicholas, he says, water, water, God's sake, water. Now I have to go back and tell you another part of the story. The carpenter husband has been duped by Nicholas that the world is coming to an end. And they have to like, like Noah and his wife come up with some needing troughs so they can float out when the and be saved from the flood. So this stupid old carpenter builds these puts these Kimmelins up in the, up in the rafters of the, of the barn, and then he falls asleep in one of them. And he wakes up and he has somebody water, water. So as he was instructed, he cuts the he cuts the ropes and down he goes, the floor, everybody from town, especially the clerks run, look at, look at this old guy and laugh at him and said, this man is well, this man is crazy. It really isn't funny that way, is it? But as you have been set up for it, because you've forgotten all about Walter, you've forgotten all about the, about the, the end of the world. And you, despite yourself, participate in the kind of rough comic justice that is being administered to these three male, foolish guys. Boy, that's a bad joke. I still think it's one of the funniest stories in literature. Peter.