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- [00:02]
Jack Wilson
The History of Literature Podcast is a
- [00:03]
Marion Turner
member of the Podglomerate Network and LitHub Radio.
- [00:10]
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Jack Wilson (Host Introduction and Closing)
folks, it's Jack in 2026. Emma and I are busy packing our bags, about to leave for the History of Literature podcast tour, so we bring you this conversation From June of 2023 when we spoke with the great Marion Turner. We will be meeting Marion in person soon as part of our tour, and I could not be more thrilled. So here we go. Marion Turner on her specialty, the poet Geoffrey Chaucer. I hope you enjoy it. Okay, Joining me now is Marion Turner, the J.R.R.
- [02:21]
Jack Wilson
tolkien professor of English Language and Literature at the of Oxford. She was here before to discuss her book, the Wife of a Biography. She's here today to talk about her
- [02:32]
Co-host or Secondary Host
biography of Chaucer called Chaucer A European Life.
- [02:36]
Jack Wilson
Marion Turner, welcome back to the History of Literature.
- [02:39]
Marion Turner
Thank you so much for having me again.
- [02:42]
Jack Wilson
So let's start with chaucer. Born in 1342, died in 1400. Who was he? Where was he born? And maybe what did his parents do?
- [02:53]
Marion Turner
Yeah, so Chaucer was born in London, so in an area known as Vintry Ward, so that London was divided into different areas. And Vintry Ward was the area of the vintners, the wine merchants. So it was an area of London that bordered the river. The River Thames. And in fact, it was the area of London that had more immigrants living in it than any other area of London. So it was a place where people were speaking lots of different languages, different European languages. And. And he would have been, you know, mixing in the streets with all kinds of traders and bankers and merchants. He would have been watching the ships coming in and then going out again, you know, coming into London laden with products from all over the world, you know, fabrics, spices from Indonesia, and then going out laden with. With English wool. And so born in Finchley Ward, and his father was indeed a wine merchant. His mother was also a property owner. You know, she was a woman who was a woman of means, and she inherited more property in the plague that struck when Chaucer was just a few years old.
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Co-host or Secondary Host
Interesting.
- [03:59]
Jack Wilson
And there was. I read in your book that his grandmother's first husband was a pepperer, which I didn't even know that was a thing you could be. But apparently they were in the. The family was in the spice trade as well.
- [04:12]
Marion Turner
Yeah, exactly. And so. And if you were a pepperer, you didn't only sell pepper, you sold other spices as well. But I mean, I think that it's interesting to imagine Chaucer going into that area of London where all of these spices were being sold. And spine, the spice trade is so interesting because it reminds us of how globally connected the world was, even back in the 14th century, when it's easy to imagine that things were very insular and that people weren't aware of other parts of the world. But that's not true at all, especially for people in cities. You know, in an important city like London, people were very aware of the kinds of products that were, that you could only get through the import trade, for example, and certainly, you know, well off people, merchants as well as higher up aristocrats. Their lifestyles were really dependent on the import trade. So Chaucer was always part of this very connected kind of world.
- [05:06]
Jack Wilson
And do we know what kind of childhood he had? Was he educated formally and. Or were books and poetry available to him?
- [05:16]
Marion Turner
So a lot of what we know about Trauss's childhood is really extrapolated from what was the case for children of that time, if you know what I mean. So we don't have many specific records of his own childhood. We do have some records about things like what his parents were doing. So we know, for example, that his father worked in Southampton for a period of time. So we know something, you know, those kinds of things. But we have to work out what was likely, what was available. A child like Chaucer would have gone to school and where he lived, there were, you know, there were several good grammar schools locally, and there. There were many books available he would have been trained in, particularly in Latin, in classical texts, in fables, and had quite a reasonably regimented life at school. But then when he was a teenager, he got a position as a page boy in a great household. So he went to be a page boy to Elizabeth, Countess of Ulster, who was married to Lionel of Antwerp, one of the. The sons of Edward iii. So very important household. And in a great household like that, that was a place where young boys, young men would continue their education. You know, there were places of poetry and culture and also where people were riding and hunting and doing the kinds of things that the upper classes did at that time. So to get a boy like this, who. What we would think of as a middle class boy to get. For someone like that, to get into that household, they are continuing to have an education, a very privileged kind of education. He wasn't the kind of a lowly kind of servant, you know, a page boy would do some kind of errands and so on, but he was also there to continue, you know, to be part of that household, to be well dressed, to learn the arts of being a young man, really. So his education was partly formal, partly in the schoolroom, but then partly in the great household where there were tutors, there were people who would be teaching him poetry, and he spent time later in other great households as well. So. So while anyone in Chaucer's. In the kinds of positions that Chaucer was in would have a certain amount of education, you know, and anyone. All educated men at that time were trilingual. For example, you'd be expected to know a certain amount of courtly poetry and so on. But Chaucer was clearly extraordinary, was clearly also an autodidact. He picked up more languages than other people. He obviously was far, far better read, you know, and more widely read, as well as reading very, very deeply. So I think we can see simply from the out that he was much, much more interested in this kind of educated world than most people were.
- [07:57]
Jack Wilson
Right. So he was speaking English. But do we know if he had English books to read? Was everything that he would be studying or every example of poetry that he had?
- [08:09]
Co-host or Secondary Host
Would he have Old English to look
- [08:10]
Jack Wilson
at, or would he have strictly Latin? Or was there anything that was in the language that he was speaking at home and so on that made it into poetry, or did that come with him and after him?
- [08:22]
Marion Turner
Yeah, very good question. The literature and the text that he was reading were mainly Latin and French. So both those languages, really important languages of literature at this time. There was also English poetry. We've got an unbroken tradition of English poetry in the UK People, educated men in Chaucer's day were not reading Old English, as in, you know, pre Conquest Old English. They weren't reading that kind of thing. He would have been reading more recent examples of English. And so things like. There were popular romances and satires and things like that in English, but what there wasn't was the kind of courtly poetry. So Chaucer's first, you know, long poem, the Book of the Duchess, is very much in the French style of a poem, which in French was known as Edit Amoreus, a love song. And Chaucer and his audience would not, before Chaucer have had poems like that in English. So it's not that he's by any means the first to write in English. It's not that other people aren't writing in English at this time, but they aren't writing these kinds of poems in English.
- [09:28]
Jack Wilson
Right, okay. So let's talk a little bit about the sources that you're able to work with. You've hinted at this already, but do we have any letters or diaries from him or from his contemporaries who were describing encounters with him or anything like that? Or are we strictly limited to births and deaths and wills and court appearances and so forth? And then combined with his poetry, I guess we can kind of recreate some things that we think might have happened based on what he was writing about.
- [09:58]
Marion Turner
Right. So it's something in between those two. So, I mean, the great difficulty for a biographer when you're writing biography of someone from this era is that people weren't writing diaries, and they weren't writing kind of emotional, personal letters. So we don't have that kind of material. However, it's not the case that we just have very bald kind of documents. I mean, we actually have over 500 life records for Chaucer specifically. You know, as well as all the things that surround him, These are documents which are specifically about his life. So a huge amount. Much more than we have for Shakespeare, for example, Much, much more for Chaucer because he was a civil servant, because he had so many interesting jobs. You know, that he was working in the King's household. He was a diplomat, he was a prisoner of war, he was an mp, he was clerk of the King's work, in charge of the King's buildings for some time, he was a customs officer at the Port of London. So, you know, this huge range of positions and jobs. And so what some of the different records tell us are, it's a lot more than just the births and death. I write in my book about the fact that the, you know, the earliest life record that we have is about specific, very fashionable clothes being bought for him, for example, later on in his life. A record that might seem to be very bald, for example, is the record of his travel to Italy. But, you know, it tells us, because he's paid by the day, it tells us how long he was gone for. So we can imagine, you know, how long did it take to ride there, what did he do when he was there, all those kinds of things, you know, when we look into the kinds of gifts that he's given, for example, and when they're given to him, those things tell us a lot that the people that are the people he's associated with in documents, the kinds of things that the complex politics that he's involved in. So I think the. The documents do reveal a lot more than one might expect. But what I found when I was writing the biography was that I felt that it was much, much truer, I suppose, to the records to focus on thinking about his imagination than his emotions. Yeah. So I think, because we don't have those kinds of personal letters and diaries, you know, I found that I couldn't be true to what I wanted to do as a biographer if I tried to think about the kind of. But how did he really feel about his wife? Kind of questions. You know, I just didn't feel the evidence was there. Whereas, because we have so much evidence about, you know, what he was reading, where he was going, what kind of art he was seeing, what kind of structures he was living in, what kind of things he was reading, all those kinds of things. I felt that I could do a lot to explore his imagination, his imaginative world, the imaginative world of his readers.
- [12:36]
Jack Wilson
Right. And indeed, I mean, I started with his childhood, but you do less of a chronology and more of a story through spaces and places, pieces.
- [12:46]
Marion Turner
Yeah, absolutely. That was really important to me, the way that the book was structured. When I first started thinking about writing biography, I assumed it would be straightforward chronology. And, you know, I started to sketch it out, you know, beginning with his early years and going through the middle years and ending with the late years. And I really decided that that structure was not very interesting to me, and so probably wouldn't be very interesting to my readers either. There's been a lot of biographies of Chaucer, and I wanted to think, well, what can I do that's going to be. Be a very different kind of biography that's going to yield new insights? And I thought it needed to be through a different kind of structure.
- [13:24]
Jack Wilson (Host Introduction and Closing)
Right.
- [13:25]
Marion Turner
Although the biography, as you know, is roughly chronological, it's not strictly chronological, because I wanted to be able to take a particular story, you know, through rather than having to stop because something else happened at that moment that doesn't relate to the theme that I was talking about. And I found it very interesting to focus on spaces and places. So, as you know, each chapter is a place or a space. Some are real ones. Genoa, Navarre, Vintry, Ward, you know, places that mattered in his life. Some are structures, things like the great household or the inn, that aren't really the same today. We know what they are, but we don't really, because they meant something quite different in Chaucer's era. And then some are really very conceptual things, like the threshold, for example. And thinking about these places and spaces, I think, helped me to get inside the head, the. To an extent, the subjectivity of someone who lived in such a different world, you know, to think about what it meant to live in a world where the private and the public were thought about quite differently, you know, where rooms and structures and spaces to inhabit were different. And that. That inevitably affects your imagination, the way you see the world, the metaphors you use. And I also found it fascinating just to. To go to some of those actual places, you know, to try to follow in Chaucer's footsteps and see. I mean, you know, you can. In so much of Europe, you can still go to places which are still very medieval, you know, when you can still see what Chaucer saw, experience the places that he went to, and try to think about, you know, what it. What it might have felt like to see those particular works of art, to inhabit those particular buildings.
- [15:01]
Jack Wilson
I find it fascinating, and it really has made me feel. Think that there is an advantage to this. I mean, you've done it out of necessity, and it makes a lot of sense because you don't have access to the emotional life of Chaucer because we don't have his diaries or letters where he's pouring out his soul or anything like that. But to say well, he was in charge of the king's works.
- [15:23]
Co-host or Secondary Host
He was essentially the king's falconer for a while.
- [15:26]
Jack Wilson
And so he's working with the birds and he's got jurisdiction over the tower. And he's here. He is, like you said as a child in this world of ships coming and going and laden with products from far off lands and that kind of thing. And it kind of made me think, you know, the other way we do.
- [15:44]
Co-host or Secondary Host
Biography can be kind of reductive because
- [15:48]
Jack Wilson
we might say, well, this person had an unhappy childhood, but it wasn't unhappy all the time necessarily. You know, there might have been, you know, moments of unhappiness, but also lots of. Of moments of happiness and joy and excitement and learning and imagination. And in some ways we might say so and so grew up in a city, and it's more about the city than it is about their particular relationship. But the thumb is on the scale so heavily when we talk about their relationship with their parents or their peers and that kind of thing, that it drowns out just the exception experience that they had being where they were.
- [16:28]
Marion Turner
Yeah. And I think, as you say, that that idea of the thumb on the scale, if we focus too much on evidence that's come from, I suppose, one particular source, you know, the way that. The way that we maybe see our childhoods when we're 12 might be quite different from the way we see them later, you know, so if someone relies on our own diary from that time, it might give a very skewed perspective. Might.
- [16:49]
Jack Wilson
Yeah.
- [16:50]
Marion Turner
I think the examples you were giving just now, I mean, they really get across, I think, just what an example, incredible life Chaucer had, you know, that all the different kinds of jobs he did and experiences that he had, and by first taking him as a lens on those places and on that time, it's. I found it to try to get that balance, you know, how much when you're writing biography, you know, partly you're writing, of course, about this individual, but you're also using that individual as a window onto a broader world or many different overlapping worlds. And I think that maybe by. By putting that focus on the imagination rather than. And the emotions, that. That maybe makes that. That easier in a way.
- [17:28]
Jack Wilson
Right, okay. So as we're running through these places, I can't resist asking you about the subtitle, A European Life. So what made Chaucer's life European as opposed to English?
- [17:41]
Marion Turner
Yeah. And I suppose partly that title is a response to the common idea of Chaucer as father of English literature. Father of English poetry. Because I think that. So Brayquo does give a very. A very kind of false view, really, of who Chaucer was, both in terms of. As soon as people start thinking of him as the father, the patriarch, they get the very particular idea of him. And I think it takes away actually from the fact that he was varied across his life. You know, he was experimental, he was edgy. He was. You know, he wasn't always this kind of whatever. I think this.
- [18:15]
Jack Wilson
Yeah.
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Marion Turner
Sober patriarchal figure.
- [18:17]
Jack Wilson
He's locked in. He's probably into gardens and the publisher.
- [18:21]
Marion Turner
Yeah, exactly. And then the English literature, again, I think it's problematic, and I don't think it's true to the way that Chaucer would have thought about himself and his poetry. Chaucer reads very little English poetry. It was much less important and influential compared to Latin, French, Italian poetry. He's reading a whole swathe of Italian poetry before anyone else in this country. Huge amounts of Boccaccio, you know, Dante, Petrarch. So really rooted in European context. And I think he was placing his poetry in conversation with poetry by, you know, many people that he knew and other people he was reading people who were writing in French, in Italian. And he traveled a great deal. I mean, people are often really surprised if they see the extent of his travels. And they read about that in my book, you know, that he went to Italy at least twice. He went to Navarre in what is now northern Spain, but what was then an independent country which had substantial Jewish and Muslim populations, many times to France, to the Low Countries, you know, very well traveled, very European, had many friends from different countries. So he did all that travel, but also at home as well. England, the part of England that he lived in anyway, you know, that the courtly and the mercantile Englands rather than the kind of landed England. His Englands were very multilingual, multicultural in that there were. He was associating with people from many different countries. The courts were ruled over by queens from other countries. So first of all, Philippa of Hainault and Anne of Bohemia, who brought with them poets and friends and others in their trains, who brought over different kinds of European culture. And then in. In London as well, he was mixing with all kinds of people who were running the customs or the mint or the banks or involved in trading, who came from different places. So his milieu was cosmopolitan. And I think it's really important for people to think about that when they're thinking about how literature in English evolved at that time.
- [20:27]
Jack Wilson
Right. And he was in the royal household, but he was also a member of a chaotic parliament. And I've got here a father visiting his daughter's nunnery. So he was really exposed to a lot of different places that are just full of excitement and vitality, full of
- [20:45]
Marion Turner
excitement, full of vitality, full of voices. You know as well, I think when we think about Chaucer's literary interests, in thinking about lots of different voices, listening to people from different parts of society, writing in so many different forms and genres, he was very, very interested in foregrounding competing voices, voices that disagree with each other, voices that speak in different ways as well as about different things. And it's obviously fascinating to think about that really quite radical interest that he has in breaking down the idea of a hegemonic voice and listen to lots of different voices. To think about that in the context of these worlds, of the city of Parliament and so on, with which he was so familiar.
- [21:29]
Jack Wilson
Oh, that's a perfect segue. Let's take a quick break and then come back and turn to Chaucer's poetry.
- [21:53]
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Marion Turner
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- [24:54]
Jack Wilson
Okay, we are back. So, Marion Turner. What motivated him to write this verse that he did? Could he make money? Was it for prestige? Or was he attempting to bring English into a conversation with the other languages? Or was it just this? Was he wanted to be a poet and this was his native tongue and it just seemed natural for him to write in that tongue. Do we have a sense of why he decided to write the Canterbury Tales?
- [25:23]
Marion Turner
Well, that's a big question or many questions. So I guess to start with what it's not. There's no evidence that he ever made any money from his writing. He always had incomes from other sources. He had day jobs. He wasn't making money from his writing. He could have written in other languages. You know, his friend and contemporary Gower wrote three long poems, One in English, one in French, one in Latin. That's a more obvious thing for a poet to do at this particular historical moment. You know, English is coming up. More people are writing English, but it's by no means the dominant language. And particularly not for the more courtly kind of poetry with which Chaucer begins his poetic career. You know, the dream vision poems that he writes early on, the romance, that kind of thing. So I think that there's two questions, I suppose. Why does he write and then why does he write in English? And I think fundamentally he does. He writes because he can't not write. You know, you think about this man who's working all day and he describes this in the house of Fame. He's talking about kind of avatar of himself, a clear version of himself, a poet called Geoffrey, who has writer's block, who's working as an accountant all day and then trudging home to his apartment in the evening, which is exactly how Chauce was living at that time. And you imagine this person, you know, working all day, doing accounts, going home, it's dark, he's living in a room over the city walls, he's lighting the candles and he's writing his extraordinary poetry. It can only really have been because he was absolutely driven to do that. You know, he was utterly passionate about reading, about writing, about shaping verse and ideas.
- [27:03]
Jack Wilson
Wow. So his creativity needed an outlet. That was one thing that I didn't present as an option.
- [27:10]
Marion Turner
Yeah. But then I think. But you're also asking why in English? And. And I think that this has to be speculative. You know, of course, I think that partly he was responding to the rise of the Italian vernacular. So in Italy, lots of poets had been writing in Italian. And so that partly writing in English is not just a national. It's also an international gesture. Because he's kind of saying, well, can I do this in English as they have done in Tuscan? What about it? And it's also, I think it's a way for him to be innovative because English verse was still a very, I suppose, a very plastic sort of verse because it was rougher, less formed than say, French verse at this time. And so Chaucer then is able to innovate and he takes some of the Italian innovations in terms of what some of the Italian poets were doing with the poetic line with diverse forms, and he adapts them to invent his own poetic forms. He is the first person in English to write in what was to become the iambic pentameter, the 10 syllable, 5 stress line. He invents rhyme forms such as rhyme royal, which is a seven line stanza, which is rhymed A B, A bcc, for example. So this is a way for him to take this first form that'd be more rudimentary and to be innovative, to do new things. And I think that really matters to him. You know, he wants to new things. You know, a line that I like to emphasize is that Chaucer was so newfangled that he invented the word newfangled.
- [28:49]
Jack Wilson
Right. Well, it does make me glad that he wasn't writing for the market, that he wasn't thinking, I'm going to write a bestseller or anything like that, because he might have been quite a ways ahead of the audience or ahead of any publishers or printers conception of the audience. And they might have forced him or steered him toward writing in Latin or writing in French or not doing as much innovation as he did.
- [29:15]
Marion Turner
Yeah, I mean, it's, it's interesting when you think about what happens once print comes in. So Chaucer, of course, is writing 70, 80 years before the advent of print.
- [29:25]
Jack Wilson
I didn't even realize that. So there wouldn't have been what we would sort of understand as a publisher relationship that would have even been possible.
- [29:33]
Marion Turner
Exactly. And we do exactly see that once print comes in, which is later in the 15th century, once Caxton sets up the first English printing press at Westminster, he is choosing to publish certain kinds of texts at that point is English texts, but it's texts in particular dialects, it's certain kinds of genres. It's things that he thinks will please the public. And interestingly, in a way, we talk much more about the very obvious advantages of prints in terms of much, much bigger circulation. We maybe think less about those downsides that you were just indicating, which is a growing commercialization and therefore often narrowing.
- [30:10]
Jack Wilson
Right, okay, so what did he have in mind for the Canterbury Tales? My recollection was he had a much bigger version in mind, or he had a big scheme. And then what we have is kind of like the partial completion of it. So what do we know about what he wanted to do and what he ended up getting done?
- [30:31]
Marion Turner
Yeah. So. Well, it's interesting as to what he thought he was going to do and what Harry Bailey, the character in the Canterbury Tales, said is going to happen.
- [30:41]
Jack Wilson
That might be the bigger vision.
- [30:43]
Marion Turner
Yeah. So when Chaucer sets up the Canterbury Tales, I mean, what he's, what he's trying to do here is put together a tale collection. Right. So a group of different kinds of tales and the tale collection. So you, you have some kind of concept seat where you gather together a group of people, then they all tell different tales. It's a brilliant genre because it allows an author to show off lots of different skills and interests and voices and other people had written tale collections. So Boccaccio, one of Chaucer's great influences, had written the Decameron, which is a tale collection he has now his is complete. He has 10 tellers who each tell a tale of a tailor day for 10 days. You end up with a hundred. You know, it's a perfect kind of number, perfect collection. Chauces is much less complete than that. You know, he has his group of pilgrims, 20 something pilgrims. And Harry Bailey, the host of The Tabardian, where they meet in the general prologue, he says, well, everyone's going to tell two tales on the way to Canterbury, and then everyone's going to tell two tales on the way back. Was that ever Chaucer's plan? I mean, it's hard to imagine a Canterbury Tales more than four times the length of what we have now. So who knows? Because, I mean, Chaucer is a master of incompletion. You know, many, many of his texts are incomplete or they're stagily incomplete. You know, they seem to be incomplete, but are they really? You know, he likes leaving texts open, I think, you know, leaving a big space for readers to go in and intervene. So the Canterbury Tales, the pilgrims don't get to Canterbury, for instance. They don't all get to tell one tale. Even some tales are interrupted, you know, deliberately interrupted by other pilgrims who don't like them. You know, the tale seems take on their own energy once they get going. And you get all these interruptions, contradictions, people saying, well, this tells a bit boring. I don't want to hear any more of that. You know, why don't you tell something? Different things, just some tales just kind of peter out. Would they have been finished if Chaucer had lived? Or had he just lost interest? Or did he want them to be unfinished? You know, these are all questions which are not just unanswerable, but in many cases, I think, you know, deliberately unanswerable. That the text has been left open. Right, right, yes. But I think key thing that he's trying to do in the Canterbury Tales is to make us listen to lots of different kinds of points of view. You know, at the beginning, the knight, the person of greatest social importance, he tells the first tale. And after that, the host says, okay, well, now the monk, the most socially important cleric, he should tell the next tale. But instead, the drunken miller interrupts and says, no, no, no. You know, I wanted Eleanor, we've all had people like this in the pub, you know, I want to tell the next tale. I'm going to counter quite the Knight's Tale. And he's allowed to tell the story, and he tells this brilliant, funny, parodic story. But the key thing is that that's not just one moment after that. We never go back to a social hierarchical way of. Of telling tales. There is this sense that, you know, people butt in, people interrupt, people say, I've got a good tale. I'm going to counter that one. Sometimes people are asked to tell a tale, sometimes they refuse you know, all kinds of different things happen, but we enter into what we would think of as a much more democratic rather than hierarchical way of thinking about who should speak, who should be listened to.
- [34:04]
Jack Wilson
I love that. I love the idea that it's kind of capturing how life works and that life kind of crowds into whatever the best laid plans are. And you never know when someone's going to knock on the door and interrupt your plans for the day. And when you're in a group, there's always somebody who steps up to the mic, so to speak, and holds forth. You're not going in order and taking turns. But I also love what they. What it says about Chaucer as an artist. The example I was thinking of is a contemporary one where we have this program Saturday Night Live in the States, with these sketch comic who put together these little sketches. And it's sort of famous for. It'll have an idea and then it'll peter out. But the sketch keeps going. And it's five minutes, and maybe you got the point in the first minute or two. And everybody compares it with Monty Python, where they would just end a sketch and just say, okay, this is going nowhere. Time for the next one now for something completely different and just move on and not subject the audience to, well, we started this, so it better have a beginning, a middle, and an end. And in the end, you maybe are not getting these stories of most interest if you feel like you have to carry through and go in a particular order. But if Chaucer is just saying, okay, I've got something even more interesting that could come out right now right here, and here's this other voice that maybe it's time to give him or her a turn.
- [35:30]
Marion Turner
Yeah. So you really focus that on a kind of audience response, don't you? When people kind of say, well, we don't want to hear any more of that. We want to hear something like this. We want to hear something different. And that's also interesting because, you know, one of the models for the Canterbury Tales is kind of poetry competitions that were held in various European towns. They were called Puis, and they were mercantile competitions. And that idea that, you know, you'll. You'll get shouted down, you know, you know, different things. You're in that kind of performance space.
- [36:00]
Jack Wilson
Yeah.
- [36:00]
Marion Turner
And the. So I think that sense of this is a performance, and people in Chaucer's time, they were not usually sitting on their own silently reading Chaucer's poetry. You know, it would have been being read out sometimes, perhaps in an inn, sometimes in a courtly setting or a household, even if it's just a small group, you know, someone reading with a group of friends and discussing it. But it was an oral form, a form to be spoken, to be listened to, to be talked about. You know, I think that also goes back to. I mean, I. I love the example you gave just now about, you know, you have your plans for the day and then someone kind of knocks on the door and something happens. In Charles dream poem, the Houses of Fame, he's talking about the fact that he, the Jeffrey figure, can't write poems. He can't think about what to write about. And he's being berated by this guide figure, the eagle. And the eagle says to him, you know, your problem is that you go home and you just sit there, dumb as any stone, looking at your books. But of your very neighbors that dwell in almost at your door, you hear neither this neigh that, you know, you're not listening, listening to your neighbours. You're not going to the doorway and talking to them and getting inspiration from the world around you. So Chaucer kind of juxtaposes this idea of just sitting silently with your books and going into a kind of communal space and listening to stories. Now, of course, Chaucer doesn't think that you shouldn't read books. He's saying this in a poem that's fundamentally rooted in Virgil, in Ovid, in Dante. But I think he's saying that you need both. You know, it's not enough just to read the old authors, you know, you also have to be rooted in the contemporary and in. And in voices that you actually hear around you.
- [37:42]
Jack Wilson
Right. So that brings me to sort of the next question I wanted to ask, which is about his attitudes towards sex and his attitudes just in general toward. I guess I'll call it earthiness, bodily functions and death and disease. And in some ways, it seems like it's a perfect reflection of his era. They're living among horses and pigs and so on, and you see them giving birth and being slaughtered and this sort of teeming life that is all around. Also, of course, the diseases. And you're just sort of living a less sanitized version of what we might expect to in our own world. Was that. But how innovative was that? Was he sort of a bad boy of literature, so to speak, or was he introducing this into poetry? I'm imagining that he maybe was a lot earthier than what a member of the royal household might be expected to produce.
- [38:43]
Marion Turner
No, I actually don't Think so. People in the Middle Ages were really open about talking about sex, writing about sex, hearing about sexual. I think. I mean, it's interesting when you look at Chaucer's texts, they get censored in later centuries. You know, once you get into, say, the 18th century, a lot of people are very uncomfortable the way that some of his characters are talking openly about genitalia, about the body, about having sex in trees and farting out windows, and the wife of Bath talking about her own genitals a lot, all that kind of thing was really not very controversial in the Middle Ages. But as I say, in later centuries, people don't like that even, you know. So the. The same people that are reading romances, you know, Roman texts that elevate love and make it idealized, those people are also reading Fablio, which are very bawdy stories. They were particularly a French form. There's also lots of Italian ones, but. But there's lots of those kinds of texts. So I think that in a way, because Chaucer is so famous, you know, once you get into the 20th century, people were fascinated by particularly the bawdy stories. And that's really inflected how people think about Chaucer today. So they focus more on that aspect of Chaucer. You know, when a lot of people say at school, for example, they'll know that Chaucer wrote a text in which people have sex in a tree, or they'll know that. Or they'll know the farting out of the window in the miller's tail, or those kinds of things. But they won't know that Chaucer wrote a saint's life tale, the Second Nun's Tale. They won't know that he translated Boethius's Consolation of Philosophy. They won't know that he wrote the Parson's Tale, which is a translation of a penitential tract about sin. They won't know that he wrote a scientific work, the Treatise on the Astrolabe. So I think there's more focus. There's a fake focus on. On sex, as if it took up more of his oeuvre than it actually did. And so you get things like Pasolini's film of the Canterbury tales in the 1970s, you know, which only focuses on sex. It's an absolute contrasty of Chaucer's aesthetic vision, which is all about variety. But I think it's also interesting that when you were talking about just that, that sense of earthiness and the body and so on, you also mentioned death. And disease. And, you know, we haven't talked about the fact that Chaucer is writing in the wake of the Black Death. Yeah, so a slightly different point, but I think just a really important thing to remember that he was writing at a time when people were thinking about death in a very specific way. That. So when chauce was about 6, the Black Death hit, wiped out maybe a third, maybe a half of the population, equally affecting the young as well as the old. So this is a pandemic on a scale that we cannot imagine. You know, I mean, absolutely horrific. And Chaucer, he talks a bit about the plague, specifically, for example, in the. In the Pardoner's Tale. He doesn't talk about, you know, an enormous amount compared to some of his contemporaries, but the effect of the plague certainly was very important in his life. You know, so after the plague, we do get a lot more social mobility because, you know, jobs were so plentiful, labour was scarce. So there's all kinds of interesting kind of background effects of the plague on 14th century life.
- [42:04]
Jack Wilson
I wonder about the extent to which we've done Chaucer a disservice by focusing on the bawdy and the naughty. And I was reading an interview with Paul McCartney where he said, yeah, I had this teacher who was giving us Chaucer and he would show us all the naughty parts. And, you know, Chaucer was my man. And it kind of. I wonder if teachers were doing that, because here's Chaucer. The language is going to be a little bit difficult for you, but it's on the curriculum. But guess what I can keep the students interested by. They'll be surprised by the farting out the window and the sex that's in here and that kind of thing. And it's great that it opens this door to a discussion of, well, what were the mores of his time and what do we restrict today and so on. But a lot of what I'm interested in reading of Chaucer is the stuff that you described after that, the other things that he wrote about. Because for me, it is kind of a little bit juvenile to sort of say, well, I'm going to read a poet and going to be all about being transgressive and breaking some rules and so on. But I'm interested in what he wrote about religion or what he wrote about the other topics of his day.
- [43:17]
Marion Turner
Yeah, I mean, I absolutely agree. And I think that. I mean, teachers just. They have a hard job, you know, and I think it's ever harder these days. When there's always lots of kids who love books, but there's also, there's a lot of kids that it's harder to get into any books these days because, you know, the power of the screen, the power of social media, the attention, all those kinds of things. So anything that teachers can do to interest students, you know, I am right behind them.
- [43:46]
Jack Wilson
Yeah, right.
- [43:47]
Marion Turner
And I think, you know, what you ideally want is you use whatever you have to use as a hook, right? To hook people in, you know, look, and to surprise them, you know, to say, look, you might not think this is in this old text, but there's this kind of stuff. This isn't what you're expecting. It's interesting, it's funny. And then, of course, once you've hooked them in, you try and say, and look at this other amazing thing that he wrote and look at what he's doing with poetic form and look at actually the, the complexity of what he's suggesting, you know, that this is a small part of a much more complex idea that he's trying to develop. So I think you can take any part and lead people on, but it is on to different things. But it is a real shame if people get a one note view of Chaucer because he's so varied, so diverse in what he can do.
- [44:32]
Jack Wilson
So here's a big question as we head toward the end here. Can you identify what he means to the English language or English literature? But I guess maybe. Let's start with the language. Is there a but for scenario? Can we say that he permanently altered the language in some way? Did he give it credibility along the, along the lines of Dante, giving the vernacular a credibility as a language that was worth this worthy epic. Could be using the language of Italian instead of Latin.
- [45:08]
Marion Turner
I mean, I think it's. I think we have to be careful about making the two great claims for, for one individual in that he's part of a movement. So that when you look at what's happening in the late 14th century, you start to get an upsurge of, say, scientific medical texts in English. You start to get English being used more in the law court, in the civil service, and you also get more poets writing in English. So as well as Chaucer, you've got Gower, you've got Langland's Piers Plowman, you've got Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and the other poems by that amazing anonymous poet. You have tamed women, starting to write in English. Julian of Norwich, then to the 15th century, Marjorie Kemp, I mean. I mean, so there's a whole lot of people contributing to the development of English. And I think, you know, I mean, Chesterton ridiculously wrote in the early 20th century. You know, we'd all be speaking in French if it weren't for Chaucer. And so I think that, you know, that's just not at all true. English was starting to march on, and it was. We start to see the beginning of its kind of colonial journeys as well, you know, so in Chaucer's lifetime in Ireland, the English language starts to be privileged, for example, in 1366. So I think there's. I think he's part of a movement. I think that, you know, my own view is that he is the best and most prolific poet at that time, and he's certainly become. Becomes the most influential, you know, so that the kind of poems that he writes are then imitated, developed by many 15th century poets. And then in the 16th century, he goes on being extraordinarily influential on all the writers across that century, including Shakespeare and his. And his contemporaries. So I think that I wouldn't make a claim of, you know, without Chaucer, English poetry wouldn't have been great. I wouldn't say that, but I suppose I would say that he wrote so much and he was so influential that I think it would be true to say it had more credibility as a varied poetic language. Certainly he did that. He gave it a much more solid basis. But I think we do also have to give credit to his contemporaries, too.
- [47:13]
Jack Wilson
Right. So I was planning to do an episode on Chaucer years ago. And I mean, the history of literature podcasts, it's sort of an embarrassment that. And it's taken me this long to do an episode on Chaucer. But one of the reasons that I stopped was I didn't know exactly what to make of the sexual assault allegations. And I couldn't separate the possibles from the probables. And I felt like it was important to discuss it. I know it's been an important topic recently especially, and I'm glad to have an expert here. So what do we know about the allegations against him and facts underneath them?
- [47:50]
Marion Turner
Yeah, so a woman called Cecily Champagne released Chaucer from further actions pertaining to her Raptors. That's the word that she. That is used in the document. And so for a long time, until last year, there was a lot of debate about what this meant. So there was, you know, not recently, but there was an older kind of group of critics who said essentially he couldn't have committed rape because was. He was such a good guy, you know, said things like, well, look at all the important friends who supported him, who were his witnesses. Look, all the nice things he said about women. You know, he couldn't possibly have been. Have been a rapist. And there were also people who said, you know, perfectly understandably, well, let's look at what this word means and looked at the context in which it means abduction rather than sexual rape, for example. And then there were other scholars who were looking at that and were saying, yes, but in this context, if it was. If it was sexual rape. And there were also some scholars who were saying, well, we just shouldn't read his work because he was a rapist. This proves he was a rapist. So you get there were extreme views, and there were also a range of views in between. And then last year, some further documents were found in the National Archives by Sebastian Sebecki and Ewan Roger. And these documents show that Cecily Champagne and Trossa were on the same side side in this case and that this was a labor dispute. So what seems to have happened is that Cecily Champagne left her employer to go and work for Chaucer and was saying they were on the same side, working with the same solicitor, saying to her employer, I was not forcibly taken away from your service. So it does seem now, it does seem that this case is not a case of sexual rape. It's a case in which it's a labor dispute. And Chaucer was not the antagonist of Cecily Champagne. So there's obviously all kinds of interesting things about that. And certainly the people who found those documents are looking for more documents, you know, that to. To find out, you know, more about this case. I mean, I would say a couple of just further comments that, I mean, first of all, I think it's really important that this doesn't stop us thinking about issues to do with rape. I mean, Chaucer, as I've Chaucer wrote an extraordinarily interesting story about rape. The Wife of Bath's Tale, as I've talked about before. And it's really important still to think about that crucial issue and power imbalances in his society and in all societies. I also think that it's really interesting that this case then shines a light on female service, female domestic service, you know, that what the kinds of women that were in his household were in different households, what were their lives like, and also offers a window thinking about that aspect of female. A female experience. And I suppose, finally, this is A great example of how extremely exciting the world of Chaucer and 14th century studies still is in that we are making new discoveries all the time. You know, there are. There are new things to find. There's a lot of things in the archives which have not been read, which is, you know, is great.
- [50:59]
Jack Wilson
Right. So often when I'm talking to a biographer, I'll ask whether they wound up liking their subject more or less after spending so much time with studying him or her. But I'm not sure it's fair to ask you whether you liked Chaucer or not, because you're not talking about his emotional life. But I'm wondering, did you like his poetry more after scrutinizing his life and times? Did you find that the poetry was enriched and capable of giving you new insights, or does learning so much about him and his era reduce the mystery and shrink the poetry somewhat?
- [51:35]
Marion Turner
Oh, absolutely, the former. I mean, it just enhances it and enhances it. You know, once. Once I was reading those, you know, the. The images of caged birds and thinking about what he'd read in Boethius and about the nunnery as a cage and about his own daughter as a nun. I mean, and just the expansive way in which I felt I was then able to think about these poems in all aspects of his. Of his thought worlds and to place them into these different imaginative contexts. To imagine him looking at Giottos and looking at experiments and artistic perspective and think about how that might have connected with the way he was thinking about depicting perspective in literature. I mean, I. I just found. I mean, every time I read anything of Chaucer's, you know, many. Those poems I've read hundreds of times, there's always more things because they are extraordinarily rich.
- [52:27]
Jack Wilson
So the poetry keeps up. You see something that he was exposed to and you learn more about it, and then you realize that he was incorporating that into his poetry or it was sort of influencing or coloring it somehow.
- [52:40]
Marion Turner
Yeah, I mean, that. And just. I think he's doing so many things that you keep spotting more connections, more resonances. Because this is. And that's the case with all really great literature, isn't it, that you do. You keep seeing more. It keeps speaking to you in different ways.
- [52:58]
Jack Wilson
The book is Chaucer A European Life. Marion Turner, thank you so much for joining me on the history of literature.
- [53:05]
Marion Turner
Oh, it's been an absolute pleasure. Thank you so much.
- [53:13]
Jack Wilson
Okay.
- [53:14]
Jack Wilson (Host Introduction and Closing)
That was my conversation with Marion Turner from back in June of 2023. We will be meeting Marion soon as part of our History of Literature podcast tour. I am looking forward to it. My thanks to Marion for joining me for that conversation, which I hope you enjoyed. Next week we'll have more from additional special tour guests. We'll have some episodes on the Bard with Emma Smith and then we'll have longtime friend of the show Laurie Frankel here for Mother's Day. And then episode 800 which is a brand new episode and a fun one. I'm Jack Wilson. Thank you for listening and we'll see you next time.
- [54:06]
Jack Wilson
Sam.
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