Introduction: Chaucer’s Sublunar Region of Mutable Forms

Abstract

The detailed richness of Chaucer’s storytelling and the subtle mechanics of movement in his narrative process can be seen as reflections of the poet’s deep and long-standing fascination with the concept of motion itself—a subcategory of “change” in the medieval world. Within Chaucer’s plotted structures, narrative climax tends to coincide with a pivotal moment of material transformation taking place in the sublunar region of mutability (literally, “below the sphere of the moon”). Underlying structural patterns of interconnected action, interspersed with commentary and dialogue, will culminate in a single, phenomenal incident of physical change. The Canterbury Tales illustrates this narrative technique quite patently. Consider the rapid corruption of Arcite’s body in the Knight’s Tale, the swift transformation of the loathly lady in the Wife of Bath’s Tale, the instantaneous disappearance of the black rocks in the Franklin’s Tale, the transformation of the child in the Prioress’s Tale, the alteration of human blindness into the sight of angels in the Second Nun’s Tale, and the white crow’s sudden metamorphosis in the Manciple’s Tale. Indeed, change in Chaucer’s world is ubiquitous, ongoing, and inexorable. Barry A. Windeatt rightfully remarks on how Chaucer’s inventive literary structures “contain the narrative within a commentary that has transformed meaning by the time the poem reaches its resolution in the structures Chaucer has devised (‘That thow be understonde. God I biseche!’ Troilus v, 1798).”1