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Arsy-versy Argy-bargy: How Chaucer remade language

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As Mary Flannery argues in her authoritative and diverting monograph Geoffrey Chaucer: Unveiling the Merry Bard(Reaktion Books, 2024), the mercenary assets of “The Shipman’s Tale,” in which a merchant’s wife offloads a difficult financial situation by insisting she’ll repay her husband with sex (“By God, I wol nat paye yow but abedde!”) must come from Chaucer’s roving through “warehouses, docks and markets.” Works such as The Book of the Duchess(1368)—probably penned on the death of Blanche of Lancaster, the wife of John of Gaunt (it also circulated under the title “The Deth of Blaunche”)—could only be written by a man who’d worked in “palaces and great houses in England and on the Continent.” That Chaucer knows he is offering one fraction only of each story, one refraction—his own—of any character is made plainer by a question in the Wife of Bath’s Prologue: “Who peyntede the leon, tel me who?” refers to a depiction of a human gloriously killing a lion—an image which would take another tone, had the lion been holding the brush. True, the barmy archipelago I write from was considered, by the Continent in Chaucer’s time, the hic sunt leones of the written world, only rising in their estimations later on; and yes, he is the third most-quoted author in the Oxford English Dictionary, after Shakespeare and Walter Scott.

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