Medieval Grammatical Theory and Chaucer's House of Fame

Abstract

In the House of Fame, Chaucer takes up the problem of the nature of traditional texts and suggests, with humor and skepticism, that literary discourse is reducible to a form of speech, spoken sounds inscribed in texts as a form of written memory perpetuated by the arbitrary institution of tradition. Lady Fame personifies this institution. Although many critics have considered the House of Fame to be a poem about poetry and the burden of the past,' the key assumptions of medieval literary theory upon which the poem depends have not yet been discussed. Chaucer exploits some common topics of medieval ars grammatica, the discipline directly concerned with language, writing, and the texts of the auctores, and the literary problems developed throughout the poem are to be understood in the light of medieval grammatical theory. Chaucer interpreted Ovid's description of the Hall of Fama in Metamorphoses 12 with the conceptual framework of grammatical theory, giving Ovid's account of repeated spoken utterances (voces) a literary significance, and the Eagle's lecture on speech follows the topics of exposition found in the commentaries on Priscian's Institutiones grammaticae 1, De voce. Drawing from well-known treatises, commentaries, and encyclopedias of the medieval grammatical tradition, I will demonstrate that Chaucer relies upon, and assumes his reader's acquaintance with, some commonplaces of grammatica on the topics of speech, writing, texts, and history. The significance of grammatica for medieval literary theory and Chaucer studies has not yet been recognized. Throughout the Middle Ages grammatica was understood to have two related branches: the study and interpretation of traditional literary texts (ars interpretandi or enarratio), and the systematic account of literate discourse or linguistic theory and pedagogy (ratio recte loquendi et scribendi).2 The departments of grammatica were refor-