Chapter 4 - Chaucer’s Northern Consciousness in the Reeve’s Tale

Summary

Chaucer efficiently mimics northern English dialect in the Reeve’s Tale, and critics tend to see these imitations as attempts by the poet at linguistic realism or comedy, but Chaucer uses the North of England as setting in four of the eight stories from the Canterbury Tales that arguably take place on English soil. Chaucer does not view the North simply as a cultural “other”; he knew the region well through his own travels and through the many political relationships he maintained during his career as a bureaucrat. Chapter 4 argues, then, that while Chaucer engages base northern stereotypes at the surface of the Reeve’s Tale, this engagement betrays a more pronounced northern consciousness in Chaucer’s work than critics have previously noticed. Critics are not wrong to discuss Chaucer as a European author, but, this chapter contends, we must also recognize him as an English poet who understood the complex negotiations of nation that were taking place in England in the late-fourteenth century.