Chaucer's Problem of Prose: Media, History, and The Canterbury Tales

In Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales, key structural moments arise when a speaker shifts from rhyming heroic couplets to address the reader in prose, as well as in instances where prose is mentioned but not employed. These interruptions may seem like glosses explaining Chaucer’s intentions, yet they occur during the most contradictory moments of the frame narrative, making his aims particularly elusive.
In Chaucer’s Problem of Prose, Stephen M. Yeager argues that the presence of prose...