Chaucer's Jobs

by D. Carlson

Overview

Geoffrey Chaucer was not a writer, primarily, but a privileged official place-holder. Prone to violence, including rape, assault, and extortion, the poet was employed first at domestic personal service and subsequently at policework of various sorts, protecting the established order during a period of massive social upset. Chaucer's Jobs shows that the servile and disciplinary nature of the daily work Chaucer did was repeated in his poetry, which by turns flatters his aristocratic betters and deals out discipline to malcontent others. Carlson contends that it was this social and political quality of Chaucer's writings, rathen than artistic merit, that made him the "Father of English Poetry."

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780230602434
Publisher:	Palgrave Macmillan US
Publication date:	06/14/2008
Series:	The New Middle Ages
Edition description:	2004
Pages:	168
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.60(d)

About the Author

DAVID R. CARLSON is Professor of English and Adjunct Professor of Classical Studies at the University of Ottawa, Canada. He is the author of English Humanist Books: Writers and Patrons, Manuscript and Print, 1475-1525 and has published various monographs and papers on topics in early English and European literary history.

Table of Contents

Work     1
Domestic Service     1
The Customs Work     5
Justice of the Peace     15
Clerk of the King's Works     26
Writing     33
The Complaints     33
Troilus and Criseyde     44
The Canterbury Tales     54
Reception     65
Eustache Deschamps     69
Thomas Usk's Testament of Love     74
Gower, Clanvowe, and Scogan     82
Thomas Hoccleve     89
Notes     101
Bibliography     147
Index     165

Editorial Reviews

"In this imaginative book, David Carlson invites us to read Chaucer's poetry through his professional careers. As servant to the aristocracy, official for the court, Member of Parliament, Clerk of the King's Works, tax-gatherer, justice of the peace, and so on, Chaucer was, in Carlson's words, everything from a 'lackey' to an 'official of the repressive apparatus of the state.' Chaucer's poetry, Carlson argues, did the same kind of work as the poet did throughout his life: it flattered patrons and disciplined political unrest. Chaucer's Jobs reveals how Chaucer became the 'father' of English poetry, not so much because he was a great poet, but because his poetry served to affirm the dominant social interests of his age. Carlson has written a book that will provoke us to see a social Chaucer in new and productive ways, and it will also provoke debates about the poet's place in both his historical period and our modern classrooms." - Seth Lerer, Avalon Foundation Professor in the Humanities and Professor of English and Comparative Literature, Stanford University

From the Publisher