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.

This chapter explores the varying meanings and importance of form in the Canterbury Tales. Overall, the focus is on Chaucer’s understanding of form as integral to interpretation. The opening section contextualizes Chaucer’s approach to form within later medieval poetics, contrasting ideas of formal perfection and imperfection in the work of Dante and the Pearl-poet with Chaucer’s responsive and unpredictable forms. The Canterbury Tales is compared with tale-collections by Gower and Boccaccio, and with Chaucer’s other tale-collections – the ‘Monk’s Tale’ and the Legend of Good Women. The chapter explores the interplay and juxtaposition of forms both across the Tales, and within an individual tale (The Nun’s Priest’s Tale). Moving to a micro-level, it analyses one specific form – rhyme royal – by close-reading several stanzas from The Man of Law’s Tale. Finally it argues that Chaucer problematizes the conventional allegorical idea of seeing through form to reach meaning, suggesting instead that form and content cannot be divided. Meaning is inherent in Chaucer’s complex, kinetic, and, above all, multiple forms.

This chapter assesses the linguistic evidence of politeness in medieval Britain. The written sources are scarce, especially for the Anglo-Saxon period. An analysis of relevant lexical items suggests that in Old English, politeness in the modern sense did not play a significant role. Discernment politeness (i.e. the appropriateness of behaviour in given situations) was more important in a strictly hierarchical society, and in religious contexts there is evidence of a politeness of humility and gentleness. The influence of French on Middle English brought new concepts, in particular the concept of courtesy. Detailed case studies of Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales and of the anonymous poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight show how this concept reflects a new type of courtly politeness.

This chapter investigates the use of nominal and pronominal terms of address in Middle English. Under the influence of French, Middle English adopted the distinction between two different pronouns of address for a single addressee: ye and thou. The chapter presents detailed case studies of selected tales of Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales (the Wife of Bath’s Tale, the Miller’s Tale and the Friar’s Tale) and of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. The characters in these sources are shown to use a complex system that is highly responsive to their interactional status, including not only their social relationships but also temporary shifts of conversational power within an interaction. Nominal terms of address are shown to be equally sensitive interpersonal devices that reflect the interactive behaviour between the characters and their social class distinctions.

Chapter 4 argues that the Franklin’s performance serves as the dialectical synthesis of the views on value of the preceding performances, encompassing the wondrous renewal of the Squire, the amoral instrumentalism of the Merchant, and the meta-value of the Clerk. In this way, the Franklin’s performance presents a sober, disenchanted, but nonetheless ultimately affirmative meditation on the creative power of fiction - one that recognizes fiction’s instrumental value but insists that a paradoxically knowing mystification of this instrumentality can be the basis for a practicable ethics for living in a fallen world. To pursue this argument, the chapter performs a close reading of the Squire-Franklin link (taking into account the bearing of manuscript evidence), examines key aspects of the tale’s prologue and narrative, and considers the Franklin’s portrait in respect to the social status of franklins in Chaucer’s day. It concludes that the performance formulates a commitment to literary value that not only transcends the vulnerabilities of the preceding tales, but is also precisely the literary value that someone socially situated like Chaucer is best positioned to create.

Chapter 1 argues that the Clerk’s performance, like Chaucer’s earlier House of Fame, presents an array of different and even contradictory conceptions of literary value in order to give Chaucer’s fiction the distinctive meta-value of standing above any one commitment to literary value, playfully and provocatively assessing competing options, and thereby positioning the implied author as a master of the literary game. For the House of Fame this sort of meta-value serves the purpose of imagining the social identity of customs controller as a legitimate and distinctive locus for poetic composition. In the Clerk’s performance Chaucer imagines the university student as a normative masculine occupation for which meta-axiology is an end in itself, and thereby gives his earlier position a more authoritative and traditional institutional home. To pursue this argument, the chapter considers the House of Fame; select features of the Clerk’s prologue, tale, and epilogue, for the tale focusing on specific wording in light of its Petrarchan source; and the Clerk’s portrait, placing it against the backdrop of what we know about the normative function of the university in Chaucer’s day.

After presenting book’s justification, the introduction articulates its central argument: that the four-tale sequence of Clerk, Merchant, Squire, and Franklin enacts a dynamically unfolding, conflicted meditation on how literary value may be construed in a way that justifies the time, energy, and expense devoted to the writing of fiction - a justification made in respect to other activities pertaining to other values, especially to economic value in the sense of making a living. The introduction then considers the metacritical stakes and implications of this argument along the methodological dimension of the bearing of manuscript evidence on the principles of Chaucer interpretation and the conceptual dimension of the problem literary value. The former consideration reviews the manuscript basis for the book’s claim about the four-tale sequence; the latter consideration indicates theoretical debts (to, e.g., Bruno Latour and Georg Simmel) and introduces several key terms used throughout the book (the most important: literary axiology, axiological person, and axiological logic), explaining the relation of these terms to more traditional ones of Chaucer criticism.

Chapter 3 argues that the division of the four-tale sequence into two fragments has obscured the pivotal function of the Squire’s performance, and especially of the linking passage that accomplishes the positioning of this performance as the dialectical answer to the Merchant’s response to the Clerk. Negating the Merchant’s negation of the Clerk, the Squire’s performance reinstates literary value as the power of the distinctive discourse of romance fiction: the power to provide a restorative vision of a world governed by exactly the kind of ideals that the Merchant’s view understands as mere smokescreens for material desire. Moreover, by associating this kind of literary value with the normative sociocultural practice of a young aristocrat, the Squire’s performance understands literary discourse as also possessing the concrete value of the cultural capital that helps distinguish the elite from the common. The chapter concludes that the Squire’s response to the Merchant nonetheless collapses, not for dramatic reasons (as one trend in criticism has held), but because of a contradiction at the heart of its view of literary value that Chaucer could not overcome.