'Chaucer Here and Now' at the Bodleian Libraries

Chaucer is often remembered as 'a fundamentally English author' but he has 'not always been on a canonical pedestal'

(Image credit: : Lebrecht Music & Arts / Alamy Stock Photo)

published 19 January 2024

Few figures in our culture are regarded with as much reverence as Geoffrey Chaucer, said Francesca Peacock in The Daily Telegraph. The author of "The Canterbury Tales" is remembered "as a fundamentally English and patriotic author", whose decision to write in his own vernacular firmly established him as "the father of English literature". Yet as this "superb" exhibition at Oxford's Bodleian Libraries attests, Chaucer (c.1340-1400) was an unconventional figure in his own day, who "has not always been on a canonical pedestal". And while we might assume that his original words have been consistently preserved as sacrosanct, they have in fact been endlessly modified to suit "whichever reader had it in their hands at the time". The show brings together "reams" of manuscript history, along with exhibits that testify to more recent responses to Chaucer's work, "from gold-leaf illuminations to 20th century films and Zadie Smith's 2021 play, 'The Wife of Willesden'".

The medieval exhibits here are particularly fascinating, said Susie Goldsbrough in The Times. While the "Hengwrt Chaucer", the earliest surviving copy of his writing, is "warped and almost rotten with age", a copy of his "twisted, tragic love poem" "Troilus and Criseyde" comes complete with a "gloriously bright frontispiece" depicting "a Chaucer-ish figure" clad in "turquoise and raspberry pink". There is even a copy of "The Canterbury Tales" owned by the printer William Caxton, "deliciously edged in strawberries". The exhibition shows how, ever since his death in 1400, people have been "mucking around" with Chaucer's work. The first medieval scribes to copy out "The Canterbury Tales" "were working from a mess of half-finished fragments" – and some of them "took their editorial licence a little far". In one manuscript here, dating from the mid-15th century, a scribe "boldly" adds an entire new adventure to the end of "The Cook's Tale". Another adds "furious rebuttals" into the margins of "The Wife of Bath"'s prologue. All in all, this is a "small but special" show.

The 19th century gave us some particularly egregious reinterpretations of Chaucer, said Donna Ferguson in The Observer. Victorian educators saw his writing as a vehicle for "religious and moral lessons" and thus chose to suppress the "more eye-popping details". In their versions, "no one ever has sex in a tree or accidentally kisses someone else's hairy bottom". A number of these censored retellings are displayed here, including one by Charles Cowden Clarke, who explicitly warned that some stories were "of so coarse and indelicate a character as to be unfit for perusal". The show is curated by Prof Marion Turner, author of a much-praised biography of the poet, who has written a book, "Chaucer Here and Now", to accompany it.