Poetry and Authority

This study argues that the critical response to textual authority in Chaucer’s fables helped to negotiate scholastic poetics in fifteenth-century England. Drawing on a selection of late medieval sources, the book traces the re-assessment of textual authority in the face of the growing importance of an empowered vernacular readership.

This study argues that the vernacular fable constituted a productive site for negotiating scholastic poetics in late medieval England. On the basis of a close reading of Chaucers Nuns Priests Tale and Manciples Tale, the book analyses how the concept of textual authority came to be both challenged and vindicated in the face of the growing importance of an empowered vernacular readership. Thus, the fables of John Lydgate and the presentation of Chaucers texts in some of the earliest printed editions of the Canterbury Tales indicate the development of a Chaucerian poetics that was grounded in Chaucers own critical reflection on the scholastic account of poetic fiction.

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