Mary Flannery - Geoffrey Chaucer: Unveiling the Merry Bard

28:38And so the Book of the Duchess is very much in this tradition. It begins with a description of an unnamed narrator figure who is having trouble sleeping. And in order to solve this problem, he eventually decides to essentially promise Morpheus, the God of Sleep, that he will make him an incredibly fabulous feather bed. This is the detail that always charms and delights students whenever we're reading this poem. And so, you know, miraculously, as soon as he's made this promise, he happens to fall asleep. And it's at this point that we are plunged into what would have been very familiar conventional imagery in dream poetry for medieval readers.

29:21You're in this sort of beautiful bedroom, but it's clearly springtime. You go out into nature and everything is blossoming, blooming. He hears a hunt in the distance and eventually he happens upon a figure who seems to be experiencing a lot of grief. It's this man in black. And so most of the dream poem consists of a sort of dialogue between the narrator and this man in black, in which the narrator tries to ascertain the cause of the man in black's grief. And it seems very, very likely indeed that this is a poem that was written to commemorate the death of Gaunt's first wife, Blanche, which would have occurred around 1368.

30:05And so this may not have been written in direct response to her death, so immediately following it, but very likely for one of the commemorations that Gaunt seems to have held sort of year after year after her death. Sure. I was just at the Museum of the Bible where they show many codexes there. You mentioned MS Codex 902. Where is this located and what's its importance to Chaucer? Yeah, so MS Codex 902 is a manuscript that's held in the University of Pennsylvania's library. and it is a collection of French poems, French songs, some of which happen to have the letters CH written in the margin next to them.

30:54Now, one of the reasons that this is potentially significant is that it's very likely that Chaucer, at some point in his career, probably early on in his poetic career, would have written some poems in French. After all, as I've already mentioned, And this is very much kind of a key literary language, even in medieval England at this time. And so the fact that we have these letters next to these particular poems has really caught a lot of people's attention, partly because this is a manuscript that contains poems that would have been written by one of Chaucer's compatriots, or actually I would say companions, when he was over on the continent.

31:35And this is the Savoyard nobleman, Auton de Granson, who actually, I love the fact that I get to talk about him when I'm actually in Switzerland, since he was from around this region. You know, you can actually get a train to Granson not far from here. And so it's been posited that this is a manuscript that might even have been compiled by Auton de Granson or an associate. And so therefore, the fact that we have this kind of connection between this French manuscript and an associate of Chaucer's really has led people to wonder whether those poems that are accompanied by the little ch might have been written by Chaucer himself.

32:14Gotcha. Why was Chaucer's voice so quintessentially English? As you wrote in your book, quote, David Wallace has observed rather bluntly that his, quote, view from continental European perspectives, Chaucer's England and its poetry appear both eccentric and retarded, end quote. So I love that because, I mean, again, we're back to this idea of it's, you know, England is really on the edges of society. It's not the center point. Can you explain the cultural difference of, say, Paris or Florence, where obviously we're talking a little bit about where Chaucer went, compared to London? Yeah, absolutely.

32:59So, yeah, funnily enough, David Wallace, actually, who's long time been a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, we were just talking about. And he's someone that's done a lot of work on Chaucer in the broader context of the European Middle Ages. And so London, which I think many would agree today, is one of these great bastions of, you know, of civilization, Western civilization, certainly. Sure. And very much an important cultural center just wasn't at the time that we were that we're talking about right now in later 14th century England. Whereas by contrast, a city like Florence, which you've mentioned, really was, and for a long time already, for decades, had been a sort of leading light in what eventually would come to be called the Renaissance.

33:46You know, by the time we get into 16th century England, this is when we start to recognize the same kind of interest in classical roots and sort of classical style, classical modes of writing. and this is something that Florence and Florentine poets and writers had been engaged in for a long time already by the time that Chaucer was writing. And so I think that what we find throughout Chaucer's poetry is a kind of evidence of some sense on his part of the sort of comparative humility of his position, you might say, as a poet writing in English at this time. He is somebody who was very likely exposed to the work of poets like Dante and Boccaccio, Giovanni Boccaccio, who were really kind of, you know, the big literary celebrities in Florence at this time.

34:42And he makes use of their work. He alludes to their work. So he never mentions Boccaccio by name, which is interesting since it's Boccaccio that really seems to have inspired the structure, the format of the Canterbury Tales. but he really is never making the same kinds of claims to their prestige that we might find other poets making and we do find other poets making by the time we get to the 16th century even in English and so for example we do have one reference to Petrarch in I believe it's the prologue to the Clark's Tale, in which Chaucer describes him as this kind of laureate poet. This is, you know, an official, really an official status when we're talking about medieval, you know, medieval Italy, but such as it was, but it's not something that existed even as an idea in English, this notion of a poet who would have been a kind of martial cultural celebrity, if you like.

35:43And so I think that's one of the reasons why we find so much self-deprecation in Chaucer's writing, even when he's writing about his own work. Sure. When it makes me think, you know, to him, it might be interesting to a dinner party in aristocratic circles. It might be terribly interesting, but to most of the society, they don't even care nor know who that is, which is obviously, you know, we're, it's vastly different. We just, we know far more about the people that we look up to, or at least believe are above us, uh, than we ever have before, which creates, you know, its own host of problems.

36:21Um, speaking of social class is a big deal in Chaucer's England, as we've kind of discussed already. Um, you, you mentioned that the horse could tell you everything. Uh, what are examples of this in Chaucer's work? Yeah. So horses, funnily enough, quite a lot of work has been done on Chaucer's horses or depictions of Chaucer's horses in in works like the Canterbury Tales, for example. So very famously, at the beginning of the Canterbury Tales, we have this text that's come to be known as the general prologue. And this is almost always the text that's going to be assigned if you're in an undergraduate English class.

36:59My guess is that your daughter's read at least part of it. You know, this is essential reading, right? And one of the reasons for that is that it includes little sort of verse portraits of all the different pilgrims who are supposedly on the road to Canterbury together and about to sort of engage in a tale-telling competition to pass the time. And so these portraits, which in at least one surviving manuscript are accompanied by beautiful painted illuminated portraits of these different individuals include a lot of detail about their appearance, about the things that are important to them, but also, for example, about the kinds of horses that they are riding.

37:43And so we're told, for example, the monk seems to have a particularly impressive horse for someone whose calling supposedly obliges him to embrace the sort of value of poverty. You know, we're told that he has a wonderful sort of harness that's jingling all the time. And so this suggests that this is someone who is perhaps using a particular kind of horse that is really intended for specific purposes, something like hunting, for example. And it's certainly the kind of horse that would have been a sort of symbol of status, if you like. So I'm actually from originally from Los Angeles. And so if you're from Los Angeles, you're in car culture.

38:29This means that you look around you and you immediately take note of, okay, who's got the Mercedes? Oh my gosh, there's a Ferrari. And so you might think of the different horses in the general prologue of the Canterbury Tales as doing something very similar for the pilgrims who are riding them. Sure. Well, I live in Scottsdale, Arizona, so I can attest to the fact that people quickly connotate their cars with their status or their wealth. Or as I'll call it, I affectionately call it, we live in L.A. East. That's how I think about it. Um, so, you know, Chaucer goes to Florence in 1373. Uh, how do you get there?

39:06I mean, I was just thinking about going from London across to Calais to, you know, all the way down to Florence. You know, how do you actually get across the Alps at that time? Yeah. So at this point in time, you don't have a lot of options. You definitely don't have planes, uh, trains, anything, you know, mobile, uh, kind of mobilized like that. But you do have certain stations along the way. And so even though you might be making your way on foot, on horseback, potentially in a carriage, although interestingly enough, those carriage rides might not have been all that comfortable at the time.

39:41you don't have anything like suspension in those things you would have been able to count on along the way meeting or encountering various taverns or places where you might be able to seek a meal or spend the night at least if you were traveling along some of the sort of major either trade routes or indeed pilgrimage routes and so it seems likely that Chaucer might have you know after crossing the channel, might have even passed not too far from here in Switzerland, what's now Switzerland. And he might potentially have gone over the St. Bernard Pass. Now, this is something that would have been incredibly cold at the time of year that he was traveling.

40:24Really not an easy path to make. You know, if you've ever sort of climbed or gone walking in the Swiss mountains in wintertime, you know a lot about just how kind of how magnificent the views can be, but also how potentially treacherous the ground can be under your feet. And so if this is the crossing that Chaucer made, it wouldn't have been an easy one. Well, as someone who's skied in the Swiss Alps before, when the weather turns, the weather turns. So Chaucer takes a job in customs tied to the wing of wool. This was a real job for him. What was he typically doing in this kind of role versus his, you know, I'll call it his literary underlife?

41:11Yeah. So one thing that it's important to know about this job is that wool was a source of it was the most major source of England's wealth at this time. It was their major export. So to be in charge of something like this was really a pretty big responsibility. And in this role, he really would have been a kind of supervisor. He would have been someone who was confirming that boxes had been ticked, that measurements kind of added up properly, that tariffs had been paid, and that everything was generally going smoothly. and he would have had to sign off on pretty much everything to do with rule customs around the port of London at this time.

41:55So it would have been a really time-consuming job, a really busy job, and one that would have kept him very much based in that part of London at that time. So teach us about his home at Aldgate. Was there any significance to this home over time? There's a lot of times I think you note during the book that he's just not there. And then the other question I had is, you know, why do you think his wife never lived there? So, Aldgate is where he kind of moves into once he's taking up this position in customs in London. And it seems to have been some sort of lodgings that was over that gate. You know, there were several major sort of gates or entrances to London.

42:37This is one of them. and in fact it's during the the peasants revolt or the great uprising of 1381 that the peasants likely would have sort of burst into the city through this particular gate now there is no evidence that suggests he was present at that time you know working away in his study and then all of a sudden my gosh but you know it does mean that he would have already had a kind of sense of that space and what was going on in it at that time and during that uprising. Now, you mentioned, you know, you asked, why don't we have sort of a sense that his wife Philippa lived there? So there isn't any evidence that she lived there with him.

43:17And in fact, there is evidence that indicates that she was traveling around in England and perhaps attached to her sister's household. So if you remember that her, you know, her sister was at this time, the mistress of John of Gaunt, she would have been moving in some pretty glamorous circles at this time. And so the fact that she was absent from London, from Aldgate, has been taken by some scholars in the past as perhaps evidence that suggests that they didn't have a terribly happy marriage. You know, they weren't living together all the time, side by side. But at the same time, I think it's important to bear in mind just how important it would have been for Chaucer, especially during these incredibly turbulent times to have these kinds of important connections to powerful people.

44:05And so one could posit, for example, that Philippa's taking up residence alongside her sister or moving around in these great households was her way of really keeping a foot in that very glamorous world on behalf of the Chaucer family, while Chaucer is engaged in the much less sexy at that time, much less interesting work of all this kind of, you know, bureaucratic business down in London and Aldgate. You know, this is not where you would have found the really important and certainly not the culturally important people of medieval England around this part of London. You would have found them in those important households.

44:42Sure. And he did, you mentioned numerous times that he deputizes other people to fulfill his customs role while he plays, you know, what could be argued as a diplomatic role. And it seems to be that he played that role in both love and potential war. Is that fair? Yeah, I think that's fair to say. You know, among the life records that we have for Geoffrey Chaucer at this particular point in his life, so, you know, from the 13, in the 1370s and 1380s, there are quite a lot of them that are requests for time off or, as you say, requests for a deputy. And in fact, in 2023, one scholar claimed that he had found a document in the National Archives in the UK that might well have been written in Geoffrey Chaucer's hand.

45:30And it is, in fact, funnily enough, it is, in fact, a document in which Chaucer appears to be requesting time off of work. So I think it'd be kind of ironic if that was the only sample that we have today of Chaucer's handwriting was this kind of, you know, request for time off. But yeah, so he may well have been involved in negotiations, marriage negotiations on behalf of Richard II. There is evidence that suggests he might have been present in the courts of France. So for instance, the French-speaking chronicler Jean Froissart makes some mention of somebody with a name that sounds a bit like Chaucer, who would have been involved in these kinds of negotiations.

46:12But it's also likely that he was involved in negotiations pertaining to trade, for example. Now, this is something that one might imagine that his background would have really prepared him well for. You know, if he was negotiating with merchants from different cities around Italy, for example, to have certain kinds of ports built or access provided, this is something that Chaucer would have been well-placed to do. We hope you're enjoying the podcast. You know, we work hard putting together this show, but we work even harder for our investors at Smead Capital Management. At Smead, we believe in disciplined investing, which is why the Smead funds have a proven track record of long-term outperformance.

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47:30Yeah, that's a great question. There is no known manuscript of Chaucer's works that can be dated to his lifetime with any certainty. As I've mentioned, nothing apart from this potentially this one request for time off that might be in his handwriting. So a lot of the time, what has been used to date these works is stuff like internal evidence within the poem. So, for example, the fact that the Book of the Duchess is, you know, is written in such a way as to be a kind of commemoration of the death of Blanche, the Duchess of Lancaster. That's one thing that might kind of give us a point in time.

48:13But I think another important thing that's been used is the sort of shifts that we see in Chaucer's poetry in terms of the style and the content that he's most interested in. So whereas his earlier poetry seems to be very French-inflected, French-inspired, you might say, we do see after the times when he was clearly traveling in Italy, this is when we start to see a bit more interest in Italian authors and Italian styles and Italian works. And so it's really suggested that we see that because it was during those trips that he would have been most thoroughly exposed to that kind of literature on the continent.

48:57When I also think, if I think of the, I'll call it the anthology of Western thought, the ultimate test to most writing is do we have the original work? And if not, does it stand the test of time? Which obviously, like you're pointing out, Chaucer, he's showing up in everyone else's work, which says something about his own. Therefore, we don't need the original work to know that it was important. Did Chaucer create Valentine's Day in the Parliament of Fowls? So he didn't create it in the sense of coming up, you know, making up a saint who was martyred on that particular day. But it does seem likely that the Parliament of Fowls is among the earliest sort of moments in history when we see Valentine's Day connected with the celebration of love.

49:49And in fact, there were actually three days during the year in which medieval people were most likely to exchange kind of love letters or tokens of their love. Valentine's Day was one of them, but then you also have New Year's Day. And then finally you have May Day, May the 1st. And so, yeah, the Parliament of Fowles is, again, another one of Chaucer's dream poems. It seems to be, again, probably in the sort of earlier kind of chunk of his work. and it's this really charming poem in which we see a dreamer fall asleep and come upon a garden in which different kinds of birds are all sort of arguing and negotiating about who they're going to take as their mates for the rest of the year and they mentioned that this is specifically to celebrate saint valentine's day and so yes this is one of the very earliest um pieces of textual evidence for the sort of romantic celebration of Valentine's Day.

50:47Well, and also under like the heading of like body from earlier, I just I totally love this because I'm thinking, gosh, I mean, Chaucer is so Valentine's Day that you even refer to the saying that, you know, that a couple can say they're going to read some Chaucer as like an innuendo to the fact that they're going to be intimate. And I thought like that's my kids are like, oh, we're going to go to dinner. We typically do our Valentine's Day with our kids. I'll be like, yeah, your mom and I are going to go to dinner with you guys and then we're going to read some Chaucer after. It's like, I just, I think of that being like, it's so Chaucer.

51:18It's so funny. It's so apropos. I just can't help but laugh as I think about that. So I want to pivot to the wife of Bath because this is like very controversial for Chaucer because it is very in the trope of its day, anti-feminist. At the same time, if someone just kind of steps back and looks at the story of the wife of Bath, Couldn't they say that this woman is really manipulating men and wielding power over them at the same time? Is that kind of the paradox of Chaucer in a nutshell? all? I think that's actually a very nice way of putting it, Cole. I think that the Wife of Bath's prologue is fascinating for precisely those reasons.

52:01So this is, of course, the massive prologue that precedes the tale she goes on to tell later, which is about a knight in King Arthur's court. But the prologue is actually much, much longer than the tale. And in fact, whenever people refer to the Wife of Bath or the Wife of Bath's tale, they're in fact referring to her prologue. And it's in her prologue when we see her talking about her own experience as a married woman. And she has, in fact, been married five times. And she is already welcoming the sixth, wherever you might be. And she really is, in many respects, the embodiment of everything that medieval misogynists would have hated about women.

52:43You know, every possible anti-feminist stereotype is in there. Women talk too much. Women are manipulative. Women try to squeeze everything that they can get out of their lovers. They lie to their husbands, and they're sexually voracious. You know, these are among the sort of really big anti-feminist stereotypes of the Middle Ages, and they had a long history. But at the same time, what Chaucer achieves in The Wife of Bass' prologue is really quite extraordinary, because he takes these kinds of bits and pieces from anti-feminist literary tradition, And he kind of patches them together into a quilt, the result of which is much more complex and engaging than any sort of one of these little anti-feminist stereotypes.

53:27So much so that she's actually been set up as a kind of proto-feminist figure by a lot of readers. She's somebody who is really claiming a lot of agency as a woman. You know, this is a period of time in which women were incredibly vulnerable unless they were able to get married to someone who could take care of them. And the wife really has an incredibly pragmatic attitude towards that. In one of the sort of, you know, great lines of her prologue, she says that she considers a mouse a fool if it doesn't have more than one hole to run to. And this is, in fact, her justification for why a woman, yes, she might get married, that might be one sort of safe haven, but perhaps she should already be cultivating some admirers on the side just in case something happens, because this was how precarious women's situations could be in the Middle Ages.

54:18But I think the moments when we really see something behind the curtain of all these stereotypes, those are the moments when the wife of Bath steps back and reflects on who is telling all of these horrible stories about women. And of course, traditionally, it's men who are responsible for telling these stories. You know, men are, you know, they're the ones who are most likely to be literate, to be able to write, compose poetry. Their voices have a great deal more of authority. And so there are several moments in her prologue when she steps back and she says, by God, you know, if women were able to write stories about men the way that, you know, men write about women in their oratories, as she puts it, we would be able to really tell you some hair curling stories about men.

55:07And so it's those moments when it's really difficult to see precisely what Chaucer's doing. You know, he's giving us this kind of, you know, mixture of this mosaic of misogynist stereotypes on the one hand. And at the same time, he's really prompting us to reflect on who's responsible for circulating those stereotypes in the first place. Sure. You quickly touch on this and it's not a big part, but it just ties to the atmosphere at the time. You explained that there was a big labor shortage tied to the bubonic plague. I think you said that half the people in England died from the bubonic plague.

55:45uh you know so for in job in chocer's time this also leads to the peasants revolt um i i always find it really interesting to see economic problems spill over into the wider public because ultimately there just weren't enough people and if you're a wealthy person paying someone more because there's fewer people becomes this very odd situation to be in did chocer you know reflect on that much in his writing so what i and a lot of other chocer scholars find quite striking is that he really doesn't. Yeah. I was going to say, cause I didn't see it in your, and I was just trying to ask myself the question, you know, I'm thinking about this economic paradigm and Chaucer, he just, none of your writing on Chaucer strikes me as like he necessarily cared or, or maybe, you know, again, we can sit back now and kind of Monday morning quarterback these situations, but you know, you know, the idea of using an economic theory like that was not a common thing at that time.

56:44Yeah, I think that, you know, I think that one could say that at no point is there evidence in Chaucer's poetry that Chaucer is deeply invested in, you know, social or economic justice, let's say. But what's striking about the fact that there's not a mention of something like the Peasants' Revolt, first of all, you know, major events in his own lifetime. Secondly, it's something that's really centered right around the spaces in which he lived and worked. You know, as I already mentioned, it's through the gate, you know, Altgate, where his lodgings are, that the, oh gosh, my gosh, my English is already going through, the rebels burst in into London.

57:29And then finally, it affects quite a few people who were very close to him. John of Gaunt is one of these. Gaunt seems to have been away at the time that the revolt took place, but in his absence, his magnificent palace, the Savoy Palace, which is in fact roundabout there where the wonderful Savoy Hotel is currently based, was burned to the ground. So, you know, despite all of this, we really get almost no reference to this in Chaucer's poetry. What we do get is a very, very brief reference to the rebels who are sort of pursuing Flemings in the East London at this time during the revolt. And this is just, you know, a little kind of one or two line reference in the nun's priest tale.

58:16It's a moment when he's comparing the sort of noise of a barnyard chase to the noise of the rebels. And that's really all we get. It's certainly not a reference that's terribly sympathetic to the rebels' position. But really, considering how Chaucer was situated geographically, socially, you know, the circles in which he was moving, the activity, the historic activity that he would have witnessed been a part of, it's extraordinary that we don't see more reference to this kind of event. Hey, I want to give a big shout out to everyone who's been working so hard on the show. You know, we recently hit the top 10 investing podcasts on Apple Podcasts and even number one in the business category in several countries.

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59:34Read and consider it carefully before investing. Smead funds distributed by UMB Distribution Services, LLC, not affiliated. You talk about the estate satire was one of his really key successes as a poet. and you discuss how monks were really the perfect joke for all in society because of the idea of what virtue is or ideals are versus what's actually going on. I think the joke I've heard is that most people believe that, say, priests are supposed to take a vow of celibacy and poverty. Now, the poverty is actually not true. You can have wealthy priests. There's no vow tied to that. But the other joke is that, and, you know, they, they might take a vow of celibacy, but they don't hold that either.

1:00:21Um, that reminds me of what you talk about with monks in that, you know, there was the ideal of what they were supposed to be, but then you discuss how monks, I mean, they were just as likely to go out on a wealthy, uh, hunt as they were anything else. Absolutely. And they were also very likely to take on lovers. And sometimes those lovers were even themselves, people like nuns in different sort of nunneries. So what's interesting is that it's clear that this was considered inconsistent with the vows that they had taken, but it wasn't considered, you know, shockingly rare. You know, if people were going to complain about a local priest or a monk or a nun, the first complaint wasn't necessarily going to be, oh, and they're having affairs, you know, at the same time.

1:01:14And so, yeah, I would say that the clergy really are, that's one of the most popular satirical targets that you find in medieval literature. The big crowd pleasers, it's anti-clerical satire on the one hand, anti-feminist satire on the other. And so what I find striking about Chaucer's satire is that he really is most interested in these kinds of targets. These are very general targets. They're not targets that would have caused a great deal of offense, even though there are some points in his poetry where he suggests that perhaps some of his female readers were not happy with some of his anti-feminist writing.

1:01:56So there were kind of safe targets, you might say, as well as crowd pleasers. Sure. The other theme in Chaucer is the idea of love and or like we talked about before, lust. How much of this can you see as just directly tying to the people around him again? And, you know, there's I think of like the Parliament of Fowls where I think you tie it to the work he was doing to try to set up a royal marriage. And the idea being that, you know, the the wife to be ended up finding no one really that interesting. Hence the Parliament of Fowls saying, let's go for another year. You know, and then also there's, you know, there's there's Chaucer stories of, you know, a woman, you know, effectively having sex with another man and her husband being aware of this.

1:02:44And so there's this whole idea of cockaldry going on. I mean, this isn't like fanciful. This is just not like fantasy of his. He has to be seeing this fairly up close, whether it be in the households he's in or the households he's in contact with. Well, I mean, Cole, we've already been talking about the fact that his wife was the sister of John Agon's mistress. So, you know, he's already got that kind of familial tie, if you like, to this kind of illicit sexual activity. And it has been suggested that there are even moments in his verse where he kind of pokes fun at his sister-in-law for precisely this activity.

1:03:20And so an example of this is a passage in The Physician's Tale that kind of talks about how governesses are ideal guardians for young, you know, chaste women, because they themselves are so experienced, so sexually experienced, experienced in the dance of love, that they'll know, you know, what to warn their charges about. And it's been suggested that this was kind of his way of poking fun at his sister-in-law, who was not only John of God's mistress, but was in fact the kind of governess to his children. So if that's the case, I mean, it's first of all, it's striking that he felt comfortable and confident enough to make that kind of joke.

1:03:59But yeah, it's absolutely, again, it's evidence that he might have been really kind of witnessing this kind of activity firsthand. end. Well, then the other, the other idea that came to my mind as I was reading your work was, I mean, I, I, you know, obviously Trump's president here in the United States and, you know, what happened during his first political run, uh, and the video that came out and then I'm reading Chaucer and like Chaucer's writing very similar things as, you know, as our current president called at one point, male locker room talk. Um, is that, is that, you know, Because when we talk about body, body is not a feminine feeling to me.

1:04:41Body is a very male bravado, if you will. Do you think of that as like a male locker room talk, the kind of thing that when women are on their own, body is not a word that would fall into their ideas? Not because they can't, but because it's just not their typical way of life. Well, it probably depends on the woman, but I can say that there is a centuries-long tradition, you know, literary tradition, possibly historical tradition, that does frame bawdiness as very central to femininity and feminine gossip. So, for example, there is a Scottish poem, William Dunbar, a 15th century Scottish poem, very, very closely influenced by Chaucer's work.

1:05:26And one of his poems is called The Treatise of the Two Married Women and the Widow. And essentially, all it is, is the poet listening in through a garden hedge on three women who are sort of drinking and laughing together and talking about their sexual exploits in great detail. And so what's funny is that even though I think there are definitely circles in which bawdiness would not be considered natural to women, very frequently I'm sure it would not be considered appropriate to women, we do have centuries of evidence that suggests that this is something that women were believed to engage in and quite regularly.

1:06:08Sure. um retractions you touch on in your book for Chaucer uh it it reads more like a life disclaimer for Chaucer is how I took it you know I mean it's like hey by the way I know I've wrote all this stuff but um sorry but not sorry um it kind of like it's tied to the detachment he he used at times in his works where it's like he's present he's using these tropes and yet at the same time he's not part of the things going on around him. Is that a fair way of thinking about the retractions? Or really, I'll call it the paradox of Chaucer maybe is a better way, like I mentioned earlier. Yeah, I think that you're absolutely right in terms of thinking about the retractions as a kind of, you know, life retraction, right?

1:06:56I mean, he essentially, this is a short text, it's in prose, and it's appended to many manuscripts of the Canterbury Tales at the very end. So it follows what many would say is the longest and most boring of the Canterbury Tales, the Parsons' Tale, which is essentially a long penitential sort of treatise. And so this short prose text essentially seems to be Chaucer himself retracting everything that he's written that might be considered not spiritual or lecherous or a little too lighthearted. And so it's really been difficult to know how to read this. Is this something that we're supposed to take seriously?

1:07:41If so, does that mean it was potentially composed when Chaucer was on his deathbed, given that the Canterbury Tales were clearly still being worked on when he was nearing the end of his life? Is this kind of something that he was reflecting on then? It should be noted that it is also a very handy list of Chaucer's works. and even a kind of very handy way of categorizing them. So at the same time that we're seeing him, you know, ostensibly saying, oh, I apologize for these works. I reject them. I don't want to claim sort of ownership of them. He does seem to be providing readers with a list of, you know, perhaps those texts that might even contain some body material on the one hand.

1:08:24And then on the other hand, the texts that are a bit more elevated, more spiritually leaning and so um you know is that what chaucer's doing there too it's difficult to know sure because the the last thing that i think of with chaucer is that he's just tough to pin down right you you want to put him into the anti-feminist camp at times and then you look and say yeah but look how empowering he is to women um you know you just kind of go all over the board with chaucer and i just thought to myself as i finish your book is that just particular to his social position during his life. In other words, he was somewhere in between and therefore he had to be there even in terms of how he viewed the world and therefore how he wrote about the world.

1:09:06I think that's definitely one possibility. And I would say that, you know, what also would have made that a potential key factor in all this is the fact that he was in the middle at a time when there was a ton of upheaval. I mean, when you think about it, it's kind of remarkable that someone like Chaucer, who was so close in some ways to the people in power, managed to survive, you know, the rise and fall of several kings. You know, so he manages to survive Richard II's reign, and when Richard II is deposed in the final sort of months of Chaucer's life, there's no sign that he felt himself to be in any danger.

1:09:46I mean, he already had this, you know, almost familial tie to the new king, Henry IV, and clearly felt comfortable enough to compose a poem in which he sort of, you know, requests payment that is due to him from the new king. But I think that, you know, the fact that he was so close to those powerful figures, but the fact also that, you know, if you think about his work, his mercantile work, you know, his work with customs, his work as a diplomat, he is someone who's also very much in the middle of transactions that are being made, political kinds of situations in which there's a lot at stake.

1:10:29And so I think that that is also one potential reason for this sort of side of Chaucer that makes it very difficult to pin him down. But I would say that I think that if we attribute it just to those things, that we might be neglecting also Chaucer's perspective as an artist, as a writer. And I do think, as I was saying to you before we began recording, I do think that Chaucer is deeply interested in provocation and in what literature can do as a form of provocation. And so in some ways, I think that the way in which he situates himself kind of in the middle and makes it very difficult for us to pin him down is a part of the way that he's constantly sort of setting us up to force us to take a kind of position in relation to things that he himself perhaps only pretends to take a position on.

1:11:25Sure. I mentioned the MS Codex 902 as something that I'd really like to see up close. Can you give us kind of other landmarks for Chaucer? You mentioned where he's buried in the book. Are there other places that you visited that I always like experiencing history from a physical perspective. It's just kind of my, a little bit of my nuttiness. So, you know, where else can people go, uh, to really experience Chaucer in person? Well, for one thing, you'll want to go to Poets Corner in Westminster. Uh, you know, this is where Chaucer is believed to be buried. Uh, and then I would say that if you're someone who like me is obsessed with old books, then you absolutely have to go to the Huntington Library in San Marino, California, and see the Ellesmere Manuscript.

1:12:11This is the most famous manuscript of the Canterbury Tales. It's the one that I mentioned earlier, which has these beautiful little sort of painted portraits of the Canterbury Pilgrims alongside their sort of, you know, text portraits. And it's almost always on display. They sort of, because they want to make sure that they, you know, conserve the manuscript, they tend to sort of shift around which pages are displayed to the public. But if there's one manuscript that you want to see in relation to Chaucer's life and work, then that would be it. Awesome. Mary, this has been tons of fun. Where can people follow you going forward?

1:12:49Well, they can always look me up on my website, marycflannery.com. This is where I regularly post about my work, both academic and creative. I'm also easily found on social media. At the moment, I'm more active on Blue Sky, but that's partly just because I haven't been able to keep up with all the wonderful body memes that are on X at the moment. But that's definitely where you can find me. Nice. Well, thank you for your time. Your work on Chaucer reminds me that we all die, even Chaucer did, but we might as well have a good laugh. It may be someone's foolishness or as you point out, and I'll kind of leave a breadcrumb out there for our listeners, it might even be like my eight-year-old teaches me all the time a good fart that brings us to tears our listeners to go out and buy a copy of of Jeffrey Chaucer by Mary Flannery don't take yourself too seriously if you enjoyed this podcast go to Apple Spotify YouTube or wherever you listen to a book with legs give us a review and tell others about the books and great authors like Mary Flannery that we have the opportunity to understand and study the world with and through For our tribe, if you have a great book that you'd like to recommend, email podcast at smeedcap.com.

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