Chaucer for Fun and Profit

Abstract

The experience of studying the Canterbury Tales (the text on which I will concentrate in this essay) involves historical discovery, philosophical seriousness, emotional engagement, and, often, spontaneous laughter. A good deal of historical groundwork is necessary to prevent this many-faceted text from being a mere relic from the past, charming perhaps, but quaint. Such historical inquiry itself affords the pleasure of intuiting how the tales speak to one another, to the fiction as a whole, and to the culture from and for which the text was first written. Yet the philosophical issues it raises, often lightheartedly, are still being pondered, though in somewhat different formulations. Attention to the Canterbury Tales as art discloses even more immediate pleasures, since art seems to defy time, facing readers directly and challenging their sense of the world and place in it. Of all pre-modern writing, except Shakespeare’s, the Canterbury Tales seems most likely to confront students in this direct way. The intellectual pleasures and profits involved in a Chaucer course are inextricably entwined—you can’t learn from Chaucer’s work without having fun, and you can’t have fun without exploring the complexities of Chaucer’s representation of felt life in late medieval England.