Gone Medieval - Geoffrey Chaucer: Father of English Literature

Episode Date: February 1, 2024

Geoffrey Chaucer is perhaps medieval England’s most famous writer and poet. Now a new exhibition at the Bodleian Library in Oxford is setting out to give him greater breadth and depth than just The Canterbury Tales. To talk more about the ‘Father of English Literature’ with Matt Lewis is its curator Professor Marion Turner.This episode was produced by Rob Weinberg.Enjoy unlimited access to award-winning original documentaries that are released weekly and AD-FREE podcasts. Get a subscription for £1 per month for 3 months with code MEDIEVAL - sign up here.You can take part in our listener survey here. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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with a brand-new release every week exploring everything from the ancient world, to World War II. Just visit history hit.com forward slash subscribe. Welcome to this episode of Gone Medieval. I'm Matt Lewis. Geoffrey Chaucer is perhaps the most famous English writer and poet of the medieval period. His Canterbury Tales is a series of stories told by pilgrims reflecting their experiences as different members of society. He's been framed as the father of English literature, but a new exhibition is setting out to give him greater breadth and depth. Chaucer, and now is open at the Bodleian Library in Oxford until the 28th of April 2024.

Entry is free, what could be better. What could be better is that there is a book to go along with the exhibition too, which is edited by my guest today. I'm delighted to be joined to talk about Chaucer and the exhibition by its curator, Professor Marion Turner, who is the J.R.R. Tolkien Professor of English Literature and Language at the University of Oxford, which is very, very cool for a Lord of the Rings nerd like me. So welcome to the podcast, Marion. Thank you very much for inviting me. It's nice to be here.

Pleasure to have you on. Chaucer is someone who's escaped the podcast so far. We don't seem to have managed to have covered him. So it's great to be able to talk a little bit about him and his influence, both over his own period. And ever since, I guess. The exhibition really focuses on his legacy and his lasting influences over literature and things like that. And the exhibition starts off with a collection of medieval manuscripts. What can they in particular tell us about Chaucer's work? I think what's really interesting,

about going back to those early manuscripts is for us to realize that right from the first moment of Chaucer's texts being read, people were adapting and changing those texts. If you read one manuscript, you're not reading the same thing. You're not reading the same poem as if you're reading a different manuscript. So in the first part of the exhibition, we've got three different manuscripts open at the same tale, for example, the Cook's Tale, which Chaucer didn't finish. And one of those manuscripts, the very earliest Canterbury Tales manuscript, the Hengwet Chaucer, which we're very lucky to have borrowed for the exhibition. On that one, the scribe, who may be someone who knew Chaucer, he just writes on it, of this cook's tale, made Chaucer no more. He didn't finish it. But in another manuscript that we've got displayed

next to it, someone did finish off that tale. They just added a chunk of more lines to finish it off. And in another manuscript, people added a completely different tale. So the scribe added a different story altogether and said that was the Cook's tale, the tale of Gamalan, which was not by Chaucer. And lots of other people in other manuscripts then copied that tale as well. So it's not like today when if you're, say, reading the Canterbury Tales with a class of students, they've all got the same edition. They're all looking at the same text. It wasn't like that. And people felt free to adapt and to respond creatively to Chaucer's texts. So in some ways, we see things that for many of us, they annoy us. We think that person, they're pretending something was written by Chaucer and it wasn't.

But on the other hand, we also see this textual freedom, this idea that people can be co-creators of texts, so that some of it is quite liberating because I think, for instance, today a lot of people, you know, they look down on, say, fan fiction and it's seen as, oh, that's something that young people do. And there's a kind of establishment, boring, middle-aged attitude often, you know, probably often from people like me who are saying to young people fanfiction is all a bit silly. But actually, of course it's not. It's a positive thing if people are responding creatively to texts. And it has a really long history.

Chaucer himself is responding creatively to other texts. And that's what we see in medieval manuscripts. So I suppose I think on the one hand, it is important for us to be aware, to think, okay, these things that I'm reading, they may have been changed by other people. and they have been changed by other people. But on the other hand, not always to think that's something terrible,

but to think this is really interesting that readers felt free to do different things with the texts. And there's such a range of things because in some manuscripts, people censoring the text. So again, in that Cook's Tale example, the unfinished bit finishes by saying

that the woman in the tale swived had sex for a living. But in one manuscript, that word swived has been changed to played. She played. So it's kind of censored. of the text. And we also see scribes writing lots and lots of comments often next to the wife of birth in particular. I've written another book all about the wife of bath called the wife of

Barth of biography, which is partly about how people have tried to mansplain the wife of bath across time. We see that happening in the 15th century with scribes arguing with the wife of bath on the manuscript page. So those manuscripts are just incredibly rich for us in trying to reconstruct how different medieval readers were responding to these texts in the generations immediately after Chaucer's death. I always tried to claim that everything good is medieval, but occasionally we have to let some bad things in. It's slightly disappointed to learn that mansplaining is medieval as well. And it's really interesting that you mentioned fan fiction, because as you were describing it, that was what was popping into my head, that this is the equivalent of fan fiction around a franchise or something like

that today. And I guess it also plays into that idea. We've talked on the podcast before about Beowulf, being very much like the insect trapped in the amber, that that is the version of Beowulf we have because that's the one version that someone wrote down, but there would have been multiple versions that changed over time and over location. And is there a sense that Chaucer is the same? And I guess it shows that there was a lack of interest or proprietorial care over authorship during the period. But is there also the potential that Chaucer is simply writing these ideas down for stories that were already in circulation, that he's not necessarily the originator of these stories. What do we think he was?

Oh, so many different things there. First of all, insect in the amber is absolutely lovely. beautiful. Things have changed from the time of Beowulf over those several hundred years before we get to the time of Chaucer. If we're thinking about a text such as Beowulf, which is using lots of formulae is being performed in a more freeform way than Chaucer. Chaucer's texts, yes, they are being read out loud, read in groups, but they are very much the intellectual property of Chaucer. At the same time, what we can see in manuscripts is Chaucer's own process as well. So what we do see in manuscripts is, for instance, we can see the traces of when he changed his mind sometimes about things like who's going to tell a particular tale, what order the tales were going to go in.

So he clearly changed his mind about that. But also there's lots of things that he just hadn't decided, because with the Canterbury Tales in particular, he died leaving it unfinished. So there were things that people had to make up. You've got to put them in some kind of order if you're putting a manuscript together. He didn't leave them in a finished order and he didn't complete the text. So there has to be intervention from other people. And I think for any medieval author, it's a time when I think there's a lot of interest in the idea of authorship. And that's something that Chaucer writes about extensively. So particularly in a dream poem such as the House of Fame, which is a lot about the problem of authorship.

Where do authors get their inspiration? The kinds of issues that he's interested in, many people today would think of as extremely contemporary, even postmodern, because he's writing about the canon, about the problem of texts being preserved as authoritative, of people feeling like they have to respect them and it's hard to write new things. And it's a poem about someone with writer's block trying to find inspiration. And eventually find that inspiration not only in old books, but also in gossip, in stories that he's hearing in this crazy space called The House of Rumour. So when you were asking about him as the originator or not of texts,

I think that we think about originality. in a very particular post-enlightenment way. And certainly medieval writers and readers didn't think in the same way about originality. But that doesn't mean that they weren't profoundly innovative. So people didn't think they had to make up their own plots, for example. And Chaucer certainly in general was not making up his own plots. We can see his sources very clearly.

So something like Troilus and Crusade is based on Boccaccio's Ilferostrato. he also uses Boethius' consolation philosophy a great deal in that text. Most of the Canterbury Tales, we can point to specific sources. But Chaucer's treatment of those sources makes them entirely new things. The poetry that he writes, the way he changes characters, the imagery he uses, the poetic forms that he develops make him a profoundly innovative, experimental writing. This is the person who invents the iambic pentameter. so the 10-syllable five-stress line that became the building block of English poetry.

This is the person who invents lots of other verse forms. And his treatment of these sources does make his texts really original. Chaucer certainly was interested in and worried about the ways in which his texts might be mistreated. He writes a little poem to his scribe where he worries about the idea of things being got wrong. And I'm sure that they certainly were got wrong. in manuscripts where you can see that things have been misunderstood and the wrong words have been put in that don't make sense, for example. But at the same time, he certainly was aware of the importance of collaborating in terms of taking things from other people, circulating

things, getting feedback. We see with all kinds of medieval poets, people writing many versions of their texts. And again, when things aren't being printed, that gives you more freedom in a way to keep circulating new manuscript versions. You don't have to think it's published, that's it. Which also means that you get someone like Langland, Chaucer's contemporary, who seems to spend his entire life just writing Piers Plowman in different versions. Why do we see Chaucer writing in the vernacular? Was he leading a new movement there,

or was he part of a larger developing feel for the vernacular? So part of a larger developing feel for the vernacular. And one thing that I think is particularly interesting, about Chaucer using the vernacular is that this was an international rather than a national trend. So one of the most important things about Chaucer's intellectual development is his use of Italian. So back in 2019, I wrote a biography of Chaucer called Chaucer a European life. And I wrote a lot there about his extensive travels, his multilingual background, the fact that he not only traveled a great deal, but also when he was in England,

He lived in a very multicultural, multilingual part of London. He came from a mercantile background. His father was a wine merchant. He himself worked in the wool trade, watching ships come in, bring products from all over the world from as far away as Indonesia, and then going away loaded with English wool. So he lived this very international life,

both at home and abroad. And while all educated men at this time in England were trilingual in English, French and Latin, he also had Italian. And that meant that he had Italian. he was the person then chosen to go on missions to Italy, and he went at least twice to Italy in 1373 and 1378. And that's probably where he picked up Italian manuscripts.

And his reading of Dante and Baccio and Petrarch was crucial for him. And people such as Dante and Petrarch were saying, we don't have to write in Latin. We can write in Tuscan. And Tuscan can be a great literary language. And so that is, I think, a model for people like Chaucer, to think, okay, English can also be a literary language. This is a really interesting way to reach a different kind of audience.

So if you're writing in Latin or in French, you're reaching a more international audience, but it's more limited in terms of educational background, class, and to a certain extent, gender. If you're writing in English in England, it's going to be easier to reach more women, a more mixed audience, and also a greater social range. At the time that Chaucer is doing this, we've also got Gower, Langland, the Gawain poet. So lots of really great poets writing in English. There had always been poets writing in English, but also a lot of poets in England writing in French and in Latin. And now there's a real upsurge of English poetry writing, particularly in the last quarter of the 14th century.

There's also a lot more writing in English in legal texts, in parliamentary texts, in those kinds of things at this time, and science, medicine, all those things, the vernacular is rising. So Chaucer's part of that movement rather than being the one person who starts writing in English. But at the same time, he's, of course, a very important example, because he's so prolific, his poetry is so good, it becomes so well known immediately after his death. And he is borrowing a lot of words and developing the English language as well. Which all makes it sound like we've got him very wrong when we think of him as this quintessentially English writer. Yeah. Because he was clearly much more connected than that. Yeah, exactly. And I think the idea of the father of English,

literature really gives the wrong impression of Chaucer, and it's a posthumous invention. But it makes him sound like he is a little Englander. For many people, they then think of him as nationalistic. And he was a really international man. He was not reading much English poetry. He was mainly reading poetry and other writings in French, Latin and Italian. But also things like he translated, attract treatise on the astrolabe from Latin, which had itself come from the Arabic, and it had been written by a Persian Jewish writer. And he knew that. He knew that was where it came from.

So he has this very wide international understanding of his own intellectual heritage. And it's really later that he starts to be thought of as patriarchal, fatherly, but also as English and as this nationalistic figure. And that gets going a bit in the 15th, a lot in the 16th century, and then is really solidified in the Victorian period as well.

How does Chaucer, become linked to the royal family and then how important are those links for his work and then his later reputation? Yeah, that's really important. In his actual lifetime, Chaucer did work for the king. He was a diplomat. He was a member of the king's household in his customs officer role and so on. That was a royal appointment. And he was particularly closely connected to John of Gaunt. Although his first job was actually as a page boy for Elizabeth DeBur, who was the wife of Lionel of Antwerp, who was one of the sons of Edward III, but then he became much more closely connected with John of Gaunt, another one of the sons of Edward III. So he did have that kind of professional

connection in his lifetime, but the connection that was more important, and you have to bear with me a bit here, because it's slightly complex, but it's worth bearing with me, that Chaucer's sister-in-law, so his wife was called Philippa, his sister-in-law was called Catherine Swinford, and she became the long-term mistress of John of Gaunt, and they had four illegitimate. children. She was much less important than John of Gaunt. But then after his two more important wives had died, he then married Catherine Swinford. And this was a huge scandal in the late 1390s, for him this most important man in England to marry this relative nobody. And then he had the children retrospectively legitimated by Act of Parliament and by the Pope. But a clause was then inserted

into legislation saying that this wouldn't give these children the Beauforts any claim to the throne. However, every monarch since Henry the 7th has been descended from the Beauforts. That was where Henry the 7th got his claim from. His mother was a Beaufort a few generations on. So Chaucer did have real connections to the royal family, but then his family connections were not by blood but were by marriage. So what then happens is when later printers, editors were trying to emphasise this idea of the father of English literature,

they really emphasized this connection. And one of the things that I've got in the exhibition is we've got a lovely case of early print. We've got the earliest editions of Chaucer, so Kaxson's first edition and second edition. And then we've got lots of really well-known printers, Spate, Thin, Pinson, who are the most important early modern printers.

Now, what we see in Spate's edition is this extraordinary portrait where there's a big, iconic picture of Chaucer. And there's a family tree on I. the side of him. And at the top, covering both family trees, there's a heading, the progeny of Geoffrey Chaucer, the children or the descendants of Geoffrey Chaucer. But what's actually shown is, so next to this giant patriarchal Chaucer, on the right, you've got his actual family tree going down to his great-grandchildren. And they were quite important because his granddaughter

became a duchess. But on the left, you've got the royal family tree. So Chaucer is then connected at the top across to his sister-in-law and Gaunt, and then it goes down to Henry the 7th. And so under this umbrella, the children of Geoffrey Chaucer, you've got not only his own descendants, but the actual royal family. So there he's really being created as

not only the father of his own descendants, the father of English literature, but also the father of the nation, as if he is somehow standing behind the Tudor monarchy. So it's a really interesting example of how Chaucer came to be viewed in those centuries after his death. Why has Chaucer endured for so long? You know, we often talk about Shakespeare having this timeless connection to the human

condition. Is that something Chaucer ought to be credited with as well? Yeah, this really is how long have you got for me who spent my life writing books about Chaucer to tell you why he's so good? In ask that specific last question, I think that is true. I think he does write about emotions. and relationships and power and humor and all kinds of things that people connect with across time. And so often people go to these texts and they do say, I recognize that.

I've felt that or I can't believe people were already seeing this kind of prejudice or oppression or problem or rivalry back in the 14th century and it's still going on today. So I think that is true. It's also the case that, and this is ludicrously glib, but this is true of Shakespeare and of Chaucer, that they do write very well. But partly, there is a quality issue that this isn't only about the theme, but also that the style of this poetry, the quality of the imagery and the metaphors are beautiful. And they speak to people across time. I think that does really matter. And I think that one of the key reasons that Chaucer has remained. so popular right across the centuries and in different ways across the centuries and around the world. It's because he's so varied. Chaucer wrote an extraordinary range of things. When you look at

his output, you've got comic Fablio Tales, romances, saints' lives, philosophy, dream poems, short lyrics, penitential sermon tracts, all kinds of things. So a really extraordinary generic range in the kinds of things that he did. And Chaucer himself, he does tend to, and this is similar to Shakespeare, though, in different genres, but he steps back and he doesn't tend to give you a clear opinion. Chaucer never gives you a viewpoint, even what he claims is his own viewpoint or opinion. So his texts are radically open, and that's probably most obvious in the Canterbury Tales, and that's why the genre of the tale collection is such a good genre, because the point of it is to show lots of different points of view. People giving different versions of the same story, people telling opposing

stories, people with different ideas about the world telling stories. So he can also remain popular because many readers will say that they think they know what the real Chaucer is and they'll pick the bit that suits them. There's this famous quote from Dryden where he says, as soon as I read Chaucer, I felt that I had a soul congenial to his. And almost everyone thinks that. They read Chaucer, they go, yeah, that bit. But they don't always think congenial in the same way. So there are some phases in English history where the popular texts were the didactic, serious texts, the saints' lives, the stories about women being passive and suffering. There are other phases where the popular texts are the texts about adultery, one-upmanship, patriarchs being dethroned, sex in trees,

farting, those kinds of stories. And so people in different eras where different things are fashionable and popular, can always find the Chaucer that suits them. That must have felt quite innovative at the time when people are used to what they read, being closed and constructed in a way to give you a message, to deliver some kind of moral or instructional message to tell you how to live your life, whereas Chaucer is saying, you know, I'm just telling you a story, do what you like with it. That must have felt quite different to what people are used to. There certainly are plenty of texts at the time that give fixed morals or purport to give fixed morals, particularly religious texts, and a lot of people were accustomed to reading texts

with that didactic goal. At the same time, the way that a lot of schoolboys were trained, for example, was very much in debate. They'd be given a fable which seemed to have a moral, but they would be debating it, they would be constructing different morals. So there was a lot of training in interpretation, in hermeneutics, for example. I think that does underlie reading expectations. at this time. But Chaucer takes that many steps further where he will very often give fake morals. That's something that he does a lot and particularly in something like the Canterbury Tales. What he'll often do is after one of the tales, someone, often the host, will say, oh gosh, this is what the tale is about. And it's really obviously not what the tale's been about. And so as a reader, they're made to read actively.

Because you immediately think, no, no, this is what I think the tale's about. It's not that. end a tale with a question, so the end of the Franklin's tale, who was the most fray, who was the most generous, encouraging people, and people would often have been reading in a group at the time, then to discuss it, to debate, to think about what's going on. But as well as making the tales open in that way, what's also really innovative about Chaucer is his promotion of voices of different kinds of people in society. So one of his principal sources is Bacchatio's Cameron, which is a tale collection, a brilliant tale collection, but all the tale tellers are of the same social class. They're all gentles. Chaucer really changes the idea of what literature is, I think,

by saying, let's not just have relatively important people and hegemonic voices. I'm going to have a miller and the wife of Bath and a lawyer and a merchant and all these different kinds of people and listen to all their points of view. The idea isn't that you're supposed to like them all. or agree with them all. It's precisely to set up radical debate. And one of the things that I've thought about a lot in recent years is how much we today are controlled by algorithms, which absolutely try to make us only read the same kind of thing, to read things that we already agree with. And we all see this all the time, that we are fed stories that will back up our preconceived points of view. And we have to make an active effort, which I do sometimes.

I go and I look at the pages of newspapers that I don't want to read, to try to get out of that comfort zone of always reading things by people that I largely are more likely to agree with. And so I think that Chaucer, therefore, is so relevant today when that's something that we're so concerned about, because he's really saying, look, these perspectives are different. They're not all right. They don't all agree with each other.

But it's really important to listen to these different points of view. And so the fact that he's modelling that, I think then makes the way that people have radically interpreted him across time in some ways really appropriate to what he was doing. So in the exhibition, we've got things like these ballads that people wrote in the 16th, 17th century that are about the kind of afterlife of the wife of birth. So it was another kind of fan fiction example. What happens after she's died? We've got the animated Canterbury Tales from the BBC where you can watch some of those in the

exhibition where his texts have been taken and put into a completely different genre. We've got modern poems. We've got Zadie Smith's wife of Wilsden or Lavinia Greenlaws, a double sorrow based on troilus. We've got modern cartoons and puppets. Children's versions of Chaucer. All these things which are creative responses and saying different people will think about things in different ways, which really ties in with what Chaucer himself said. Diverse folk, diversely they said. Absolutely key line in the Canterbury hails. Let's celebrate diversity and variety. I think that's something else I'm going to claim as medieval then, the notion of getting out of your own echo chamber. Absolutely. And engaging with

contraria opinions and viewpoints and things like that. Yeah. That sounds like what Chaucer was doing. I imagine he'd be mortified by some people's Twitter feed, which is just constantly reinforcing what you already think you know and people don't get outside of that echo chamber. Exactly. I think it's really Chaucerian. And what he's interested in is perspective. And one of the things that when I was researching my biography of Chaucer a few years ago, and I went to places like Florence where he'd been and looked at the art that he'd seen, the early experiments in perspective by people like Giotto. And in his writing, he was doing something similar. He was saying, what is dependent on where you are standing? And he tries to think, what's it like to be standing in a woman's shoes? What's it like to be

standing in the shoes of someone from a different social class and background? Now, we can't do that perfectly. But I think that sense of trying to make those empathetic leaps, those imaginative leaps, is so important. Has Chaucer's reputation been universally, and particularly over the centuries, positive? Or has he had his detractors too? Oh, he's absolutely had his detractors as well. And what you quite often see is people who like some things that he does, but don't like other bits. And that's often when you get the censorship. You know, so you get someone like Alexander Pope, in the early 18th century translating the wife of Buzz prologue, but saying, well, lots of it's terrible.

So he misses out all the bits about sex and the bits about the body and the bits about genitals and so on and just produces this quite different version. So he likes Chaucer, kind of, but he doesn't like the whole of Chaucer. And there's these very interesting children's versions in the 19th century where the translators will say a lot of it is really vulgar and boredy, and he lived in a time where that kind of stuff was okay, but it's not okay for us.

So we've taken all that out and we've just put in the bits that we like. So people will patronisingly you say, we're superior so we can just take the bits that we know are suitable and leave out all that kind of rough medieval stuff. So that's one example of where people do like him

but only insofar as they accept aspects of him. And that sounds like a kind of really anti-chaucerian view of it. It's kind of moulding his work to fit the sensibilities of a time, in particular, I guess the 19th century Victorian sensibilities, without allowing those extra perspectives and different viewpoints, everything else. Almost like they're constructing an echo chamber around Chaucer while he's desperately trying to smash his way out of it. Yeah, and we see that a lot.

So people who would just focus on one aspect of Chaucer. Another way in which we see that in a kind of opposite attitude is Pasolini's film in the 1970s, so his Canterbury Tales film, because Pasolini was only interested in sex and the body. So he only tells Canterbury Tales that are about sex and the body. Some of the tales he depicts in the film are not about sex in the original, but he just puts in all these extra graphic sex scenes. And that is equally skewed as a way of reading Chaucer

as the way that only focuses on the Clark's tale and the Man of Law's tale and Sack and Dunstale. So the tales of female passivity and serious didactic intent. What Pasolini is doing, he has a different emphasis, but it's equally problematic and equally a travesty of Chaucer's aesthetic and social vision. I should want to go back to your question, though, also about people who haven't approved or liked Chaucer, because the examples that I gave were those people who were still trying to promote Chaucer while censoring or at least ignoring aspects of Chaucer. But we also see people who are understandably disturbed by other aspects of Chaucer.

So the fact that there's a tale which is anti-Semitic, there's a tale which is Islamophobic, there's all kinds of issues around sex and gender as well. And debate has really raged across the centuries about how we read these different tales. Do they show Chaucer's attitudes? Do they show him trying to depict and perhaps criticise the attitude of the tellers of those stories? But these are things that make people, again, understandably, uncomfortable. And as you might guess, my response would always be that we should read and talk and think about the uncomfortable aspects of texts, not ignore them. But often that has led to people

not wanting to engage with those stories. So he's sometimes too successful at the things that he tries to do in terms of getting different viewpoints out there because some of them are perhaps just too challenging and too in your face and too easy to set aside. And perhaps we should resist doing that. Yeah, I mean, I think we have to take the texts as they are as a whole and talk about what makes us uncomfortable and how that might reflect either medieval attitudes, but also how it reflects our own attitude. So when we're thinking about something like anti-Semitism or Islamophobia, we can't sweep that under the carpet. We have to think about it and talk about it and historicize it, not in terms of saying, oh, it was okay historically or anything like that,

but think about what was going on historically. How were these people treated historically and in texts at the time, what kinds of pressures might be being put on those traditions by Chaucer, how have people read these texts across time? And I remember seeing a really brilliant RSC production about 20 years ago of the Canterbury Tales, where they did deal with the prioress's tale and really showed the horrors of anti-Semitism, whereas many versions of Chaucer simply won't engage with the prior Ress's tale at all, for example. And do you think that we can still see Chaucer's influence around us today. Do you see him inspiring new works even today? Yes, absolutely, all the time. It's really exciting. So in the Chaucer here and now exhibition,

we've got a lot of contemporary and current art of all forms. For example, Zadie Smith, one of the most famous of our current writers, wrote her play, The Wife of Wilsden, which was premiered in 2021. and that's a quite direct translation and adaptation of the wife of Bath's prologue and tale. Transferred from Arthurian Britain to 18th century Jamaica. The wife of Bath becomes a 21st century woman of Caribbean heritage in northwest London. But there's lots of other contemporary writers as well. Jean Bintabrese was another Caribbean British poet who wrote a version of the wife of Bath. Patience like Bargby, a Nigerian British poet who's written telling tales,

a full version of the Canterbury Tales, in all different poetic forms. There's many poetic adaptations, also lots of plays and films. So in the accompanying book, Chaucas here and now, there's a chapter about film and TV adaptations that I wrote,

and there's also another chapter about 21st century adaptations. So in the exhibition, we've got lots of wonderful posters and programs and things, as well as little excerpts that you can watch of some of these things. But if you think about just the last 20 or so years,

There's been the animated Canterbury Tales, there's been the BBC individual Canterbury Tales. We've got a great big poster of Julie Walters in our exhibition. So there's all kinds of really interesting audiovisual adaptations. There's also lots of really interesting contemporary art being made. So not only word-based art, but also in the exhibition we've got cartoons, we've got beautiful images, we've got puppets that have been made. And in the exhibition, we also have.

actually have these enormous graphics and little tutorials and templates where people can make their own Chaucer pilgrim cartoons or puppets and stick them up on this big graphic. So we're hoping to end up with a really beautiful big pilgrimage wall with lots and lots of different images there. So we are really wanting to encourage everyone to feel that they can respond creatively to Chaucer, whether by writing a poem or by drawing a cartoon or something. But yeah, right across culture, there's so much interest still in Chaucer and not only in the UK. So some of the other poets that I foreground in the exhibition include Marilyn Nelson, for example, who's an American poet who's written the Cachoera Tales, which links the travels of slavery to the Canterbury Tales.

There's also in the last few years in the UK been the Refugee Tales project, so based here, but drawing on the experiences of refugees from all over the world. he's really still inspirational for many different artists, poets, filmmakers. And that global aspect is also a key part of the Chaucer Here and Now exhibition and the book, because just as Chaucer came from a multilingual environment, he's also gone on to be a global poet. And we've got this wonderful case in the exhibition, so it faces a medieval case where you can see Dante manuscripts and Chaucer's multilingual background.

And then facing that, we have this case of transatlantic. translations of Chaucer into other languages. So the first time that Chaucer was translated into another language was into Latin in the 17th century, because for many people, Latin was more accessible than Middle English. He then went to France in the 18th century, Voltaire translated Chaucer, for example. Then in this case, we've got Ukrainian translations, German translations, Esperanto, Hebrew, Russian, Iranian, all kinds of different languages. So it's really interesting to think about the fact that in the early 20th century Chaucer was being translated into Chinese

and the kinds of bits of Chaucer that were seen as interesting in communist China, really fascinating to think of him as a global author in that way. Yeah, it's incredible. I often wonder what he would make, you know, if he was to come back 600 years later and realise how influential his work still is and there's a great exhibition about him in Oxford, what would he possibly make of that?

Maybe he was convinced by his own genius, I don't know. It would be very surprising, I think, because the kinds of media that we have available to us today are so radically different. I think he did know that he was a good poet, but he's writing at a time when the greatest ambition you could have for the circulation of your texts was so limited. So although he was being read abroad, he was being read by a certain number of people. But this was a manuscript culture. He couldn't have imagined this kind of global reach or things like film, for instance. I imagine he would be pretty delighted. Of course, he was writing at a time where he was reading texts that had survived for over

a thousand years. He was reading a lot of classical texts. So I guess it wouldn't be amazing to him that the texts had survived. But the kinds of spin-offs that we have would be, I think, unimaginable to him in his own day. Well, thank you so much for joining us, Marion. It's been absolutely fascinating to get to know Chaucer a little bit better. Oh, my pleasure. And I really hope you get a chance to come to the exhibition soon, Matt.

So the Chaucer here and now exhibition is running at the Bodleian Library in Oxford from the 8th of December 2023 until the 28th of April 2024 with free entry. So it's a great chance to find out even more about Geoffrey Chaucer from Marion and her team and to see his influence at work over the centuries. There are new episodes of Gone Medieval every Tuesday and Friday, so please join us next time for more from the greatest millennium in human history. Don't forget to also subscribe or follow us wherever you get your podcast from and to tell all of your friends and family that you've gone Medieval.

If you get a moment, please do drop us a review or rate us anywhere that you listen to your podcasts. It really does help new audiences to find us. Anyway, I'd better let you go. I've been Matt Lewis, and we've just gone medieval with history hit.