Chaucer was a champion of true diversity
The broad sweep of society in ‘The Canterbury Tales’ is as relevant today as it was in the 14th Century
Don’t chuck Chaucer! That was my first thought on reading the University of Leicester’s plans to drop The Canterbury Tales from the English curriculum. And don’t throw the “Beowulf ” out with the bathwater. According to proposals, it’s goodbye Geoffrey, Grendel, “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight”, the Norse sagas and anything written before 1500. Hello “excitingly innovative” new modules promising: “A chronological literary history, a selection of modules on race, ethnicity, sexuality and diversity, a decolonised curriculum and new employability modules.” Are you excited? I know I’m not.
“Wepyng and waylyng” are the words that open the prologue to “The Merchant’s Tale”. We should all be weeping and wailing at this summary unsaddling of Chaucer and his contemporaries. For if you are looking for lessons in sexuality, diversity, class, status and social mobility, Geoff ’s your Middle English man. Indeed you might argue that The Canterbury Tales is a shining, sweet and showery example of diversity, tolerance and free speech. All the pilgrims (at least, as far as Chaucer got in writing them) take their turn. We meet “a compaignyge of sondry folk, by aventure yfalle in felaweshipe”. It’s the crucial line: a company of sundry folk, thrown together in fellowship.
It is a crotchety, competitive sort of fellowship. They snipe and mock and pick holes in each other’s stories, but they do ride together and they do, grudgingly, listen. As Joe Biden said on Wednesday: “Let us listen to one another. Hear one another. See one another. Show respect to one another.”
Every pilgrim has his platform: man and woman, priest and ploughman, doctor and miller. The assembly is a portrait of Chaucer’s times – and every individual portrait endures. How immediate, how familiar are his riders. Is The Knight not the very model of the modern humble-bragger? He is a very worthy man (we hear it said five times), but not as modest as he might pretend. Did he mention he had fought at Alexandria? Siege of Granada? Algeciras, Morocco, Turkey? Been there, done that, bought the armour.
As for his son, The Squire, a “lusty bachelor”, with his curly locks and short gown and his singing and dancing and jousting and all-night love-a-thons … can’t you just picture this 14th-century Harry Styles? Then there’s the simpering prioress Madam Eglantine, with her prettily pleated wimple, her bleeding heart and her lapdogs fed on milk and fine white bread. She’d make a fine virtuesignalling Instagram influencer.
If you’re in the market for strong women, the far-travelled, muchmarried (five times and counting) Wife of Bath was leaning in and running rings around the boys more than 600 years ago. I don’t know about protofeminist, but she’s certainly an Independent Woman. When The Pardoner interrupts, trying to make her tale all about him, she shuts him up with a brisk: “Abyde!” That’s what to say to a mansplainer: “Abyde!”
We rightly bang on about fake news, and misinformation and media manipulation. What better training for reading between the lines than hearing what Chaucer’s pilgrims tell us about themselves – the glossy, Photoshopped broadcast version – and what they inadvertently reveal? Beware the politician who begins his speech like Chaucer’s Merchant by telling you what a very “burel” man he is, how unlearned, how rude in speech, how bare and plain. One of the people, just like you. And think twice before you believe the venal Merchant who tells you that never was a man so cursed in his wife. Alarm bells ought to be clanging. Domestic abuse? Coercive control? Gaslighting? #Metoo?
Of course we don’t read Chaucer or “Beowulf ”, or Shakespeare for that matter (he, at least, has survived the bonfire of the syllabus), for their “relevance”, or to improve our “employability” – and certainly not, as one professor put it, to “compete on a global level”. We read to be inspired and transported. We read for the rhythm of language. We read to form a picture of the past. I defy you, after this last stale and stuck-at-home year, to read the opening lines of the general prologue, all breezes and bird song and breathing new life into nature, and not feel the same restless stirrings that set our pilgrims on the road to Canterbury.
“Thanne longen folk to goon pilgrimages.” We long to go anywhere – but while we can’t there’s Chaucer.