"And Countrefete the Speche of Every Man / He Koude, Whan He Sholde Telle a Tale": Toward a Lapsarian Poetics for "The Canterbury Tales."

Author/Editor
Hanning, R. W.

Title
"And Countrefete the Speche of Every Man / He Koude, Whan He Sholde Telle a Tale": Toward a Lapsarian Poetics for "The Canterbury Tales."

Published
Hanning, R. W. "'And Countrefete the Speche of Every Man / He Koude, Whan He Sholde Telle a Tale': Toward a Lapsarian Poetics for The Canterbury Tales." Studies in the Age of Chaucer 21 (1999): 29-58.

Review
Chaucer, in Hanning's view, invented a "lapsarian poetics" for the "Canterbury Tales"--a poetics of shared humanity and subversion of literary authority--by "[r]esponding resistantly" to the "discourse of penance" as thundered down on the sinful estates of society in the poetic voice of Gower (31). In his first section, Hanning quotes the author-persona of "Troilus and Criseyde"--"Myn auctour shal I folwen, if I konne"--to argue that pre-CT, Chaucer experienced a sense of "anxiety and shortfall" (32) as an author "following" the greats of the past in both senses of the term, as he is late in time and possibly not measuring up to their example. Chaucer, however, announces his liberation from previous "worries about following" (33) through his "implicit rebuke" of Gower in the "Man of Law's Prologue," (38), which Hanning understands as a signal that Chaucer has "fallen away" from the older poet as a model even while "following" him in time. The Man of Law appropriates "an oft-told tale," a work of no authority, which he will perform with embellishments to compete with his fellow story-tellers in serving an agenda of far more "social eloquence" (30) than moral reform. At times, appropriation may shade over into counterfeiting, a moral danger addressed through the villainous deceptions portrayed in the "Man of Law's Tale" (37-38). To define what Chaucer was reacting against in the CT Tales, Hanning proceeds to outline the "penitential poetic" (40) as he sees it practiced by Gower, beginning with the sacrament of penance as mandated by the Fourth Lateran Council and explained to priest and penitent in manuals of confession that were produced to support it. The priest was instructed to inquire about the personal circumstances of the sinner, which led to discussion on the besetting sins of particular estates of society, including women, and to the genre of estates satire in literature. Especially post-Lateran IV, the father-confessor functioned as a preacher and a "quasi-prophetic voice" of authority (42). In the "Mirour de l'Omme" and "Vox Clamantis," Gower assumed the role of preacher and prophet by calling for the sacrament of penance and aiming his estates criticism from a position of superiority and detachment, as seen in the famous manuscript illumination of the poet standing somewhere in space and shooting an arrow at the world (46). Gowerian discourse dealt in "binaries" (45): edenic past versus corrupt present; sins versus their opposing virtues. For example, as prescribed in the VC, the solution to wrath gone out of control in the Rising of 1381 is that the English people will practice caritas (44). In his final section, Hanning produces a series of examples from the CT to support his view on Chaucer's poetic of resistance to the "penitential poetic" of Gower. Instead of a binary past and present, we have a personal "then and now" of April pilgrimage and remembering some time later (47). In the "General Prologue," the poet describes his fellow pilgrims, including their estate-based vices, with a "synthesis of ideology and personal response" and from the perspective of a boon companion, not a preacher making judgment in binaries (48-50). Even the Parson must establish his "bona fides" as a fellow pilgrim and receive permission to preach a "tale" on penance (51). The Wife of Bath and the Pardoner appropriate the discourse of confession in their Prologues as they flaunt their subversion of Pauline and Fourth Lateran norms on priestly (male) authority and the penitential mandate for consistency in thought, word, and deed (52-56). Their "lapsarian" confessions serve to push back against an authoritative social discourse that would "marginalize them and punish them for who they are" (57). The Wife proves herself to be a potent literary begetter as other storytellers respond to her--"follow" her--in socially eloquent competition. By his resistant "following" of Gower's poetic with its fierce estates satire, Chaucer transformed the decorous, all upper-class storytellers of Boccaccio's "Decameron" with "wonderful innovation" in the CT (58). [LBB. Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 39.1]

Date
1999

Gower Subjects
Vox Clamantis
Mirour de l'Omme (Speculum Meditantis)
Influence and Later Allusion
Sources, Analogues, and Literary elations