Chaucer's "Literature Group" and the Medieval Causes of Books

Abstract

Modern readers often confront medieval text as if it were Chinese encyclopedia that exhibits, as Michel Foucault puts it, exotic charm of another system of thought, even as it exposes limitation of our own.' The sequence and arrangement of things seem strange to us because we have lost the categorical grid that names the hidden relationships prescribing their order. VII of The Canterbury Tales, for instance-a story that links together the tales of the Shipman, the Prioress, the pilgrim Chaucer, the Monk, and the Nun's Priest-is notoriously problematic.2 F. N. Robinson observes that there seems to be no principle of arrangement save that of contrast or variety. Larry D. Benson, the most recent editor of Chaucer's works, notes that Fragment VII is the longest and most varied of the fragments and lacks any very clear unifying theme. 3 The fragment, in short, like Borges's Chinese encyclopedia, has eluded our powers of classification; its underlying conceptual code has largely remained undeciphered. Concentrating on the evidence of the links, Alan T. Gaylord suggested two decades ago that the fragment is controlled by single, though admittedly very broad subject: the art of story-telling. Gaylord's tentative designation of VII as literature group has gained fresh (albeit indirect) support recently in the growing awareness that Chaucer's work, taken as whole, exhibits an undisguised self-consciousness about the making of make-believe and represents, as Robert Edwards puts it, a sustained reflection on the nature and devices of art. 4 Not only does Chaucer fictionalize himself as writer in the dreamer-persona of the early poems, the narrator of Troilus and Criseyde, the accused (and penalized) poet of the Legend of Good Women, and Chaucer the pilgrim; he creates in each of the pilgrims