Winter Weekend 2007: chaucer
Chaucer begins The Canterbury Tales with his famous evocation of “Aprill with his shoures sote” and some general remarks on the English proclivity to “goon on pilgrimages,” but the author quickly gets down to business. I’m going to tell you what they were wearing, he announces—“and eek in what array that they were inne” (line 41)—as he starts gossiping about the peculiarities of each of his twenty-nine fellow pilgrims.
This (literally) material note, at the very beginning of literature in “modern” English, sets the pattern, if you will, for so very much of what follows. Big ideas, epic heroes, solutions to the problem of life—yes, they all appear now and then in British literature, but what British writers have really been good at is recording the teeming facticity of life. Empiricism has long roots. It starts with Chaucer’s noting the rust stains left by his armor on the worthy Knight’s fustian tunic. The Nun’s fastidious linen, the Monk’s fur-lined sleeves, the Franklin’s little purse of silk, even the tufted wart on the Miller’s nose—all these details of costume and countenance serve to flesh out Chaucer’s panorama of 14th-century English life and to give clues to the true nature of these chatty and often quarrelsome travelers.
Chaucer is a very funny writer, and the Tales often strike the festive note we thought appropriate for Winter Weekend in the Council’s 30th anniversary year. It will be the tenth such weekend, a public humanities program that to date has brought to Maine readers lively discussions of works by Homer, Dante, Melville, the anonymous Beowulf poet, Mary Shelley, Tolstoy, Mann, Cervantes, and Proust.
Held on the Bowdoin campus in Brunswick during the college’s spring break, Winter Weekend 2007 begins at 4 p.m. on Friday, March 9, and continues until late afternoon on March 10. The $200 fee includes a copy of the text (in modern English), background readings, lectures by specialists in Chaucer and in English history, performances, group discussions, and a banquet based on medieval English cookery books.
If you haven’t looked at any of the tales since high school, you may be in for some surprises. Chaucer isn’t just “bawdy”; he’s happily obscene. And Chaucer is not just a teller of jolly tales. There is much darkness in the narratives: “The Prioress’s Tale,” for example, is a classic tale of medieval anti-Semitism. Do the twenty-four tales express the author’s own world-view, or does he allow his characters to speak for themselves? After all, one of the characters Chaucer has invented turns on his creator and tells him that he—Chaucer—isn’t very good at telling stories. Moreover, a generation of feminist scholarship has not only re-vivified medieval studies in general, but has given new life to Chaucer’s proto-feminist, the Wife of Bath. Join us at the Tabard Inn on March 9 to learn more.
