Candace Barrington faced a dilemma. As a Chaucerian researcher she typically might have traveled to England to examine historical archives and manuscripts of Geoffrey Chaucer (c. 1343–1400)—the English author, poet, and courtier best remembered for The Canterbury Tales and for his use of vernacular English, rather than French or Latin. 

Barrington’s doctoral dissertation at Duke University had dealt with John Gower and legal history, and her first book was a collection of essays, The Letter of the Law: Legal Practice and Literary Production in Medieval England (co-edited with Emily Steiner, Cornell University Press, 2002). “Ideally I would have done legal research in England, but I couldn’t leave my two children for the period of time I would need,” says Dr. Barrington, an associate professor of English who joined CCSU in 2001.

Brainstorming, she struck on an idea closer to home. How, she wondered, was Chaucer read by the non-scholar in the U.S.? This as-yet unexamined

By studying American reconstructions of Chaucer and The Canterbury Tales from colonial to modern times, Barrington demonstrates how such re-packagings express uniquely American ideas. At Yale where she had been an instructor/tutor in the mid-’90s, Barrington researched 19th-century poetry anthologies—leather-bound and gilt-edged “cachet items” appealing to the “well-educated.” Fascinating, even droll, revelations came to light. “I discovered a few bizarre things,” says Barrington, who hails from Lubbock, Texas, shaking her head as if readying to recount tall tales of a many-sided Chaucer.
 

Chaucer as Imperialist

“Nineteenth-century editors sanitized the naughty parts in Chaucer, and they Americanized him to reflect such values as the primacy of the family,” she observes. “Although Chaucer was writing 120 years before the advent of Protestantism, they cast him as a Protestant. They made him seem to advocate expansionism and empire building. This is particularly far-fetched, because in the 1400s, England was a backwater, so the thought that he was campaigning for the English-speaking to take over the world—Chaucer would have gotten quite a belly-laugh from that.”

Chaucer as Anti-War Advocate

Barrington recounts how James Norman Hall (co-author of Mutiny on the Bounty) wrote a memoir describing his experiences as a World War I prisoner of war. While a POW, Hall read The Canterbury Tales, using it as a gateway to retelling his personal story. “What’s interesting is that Hall quotes from Chaucer—odd passages—so I argued that Hall re-contextualizes Chaucer in such a way that the reader understands the waste of war,” explains Barrington.
 

Chaucer as Woman   

A Connecticut woman, Katharine Gordon Brinley, fell in love with the writings of Chaucer at the end of World War I. “Her archives are at Trinity College, and I’m the first to have cracked them open,” declares Barrington. During the 1920s, with her new-found literary passion and her facility for reading Middle-English, Brinley, outfitted in a medieval brocade gown and tall headgear, took Chaucer on the road. To women’s groups and other gatherings hungry for culture, Brinley recited from The Canterbury Tales and from the long narrative poem Troilus & Criseyde.

“Brinley’s notes and letters indicate she thought she was ‘channeling’ Chaucer’s spirit,” states a bemused Barrington. “It was interesting to look at spiritualism literature of the 1920s and early 1930s, and Brinley certainly was eager to share her encounters.”
 

Chaucer in A Knight’s Tale

In the 2001 movie A Knight’s Tale, Chaucer is unveiled as a buck-naked, reckless gambler who must learn the lessons of appropriate risk taking. The wannabe knight, William Thatcher, exhibits enterprise and ambition. He convinces Chaucer to forge genealogy documents that will pass him off as a knight. “The attitude—that if you don’t take risks, you’ll end up being a lowly churl—is not medieval. It’s American,” states Barrington. “Ultimately, Chaucer learns how to be an appropriate risk taker, and he announces that he will no longer write courtly poetry, but poetry about the common man in English, not French or Latin.”

Lessons for Chaucerian Scholars

Barrington defies the notion that scholars exercise “a purity” in studying Chaucer, untainted by ideas imbedded in popular culture. For example, she demonstrates how Percy MacKaye in 1903 wrote a play, The Canterbury Pilgrims, which rather than stressing the tales themselves dramatized the relationship between the pilgrims journeying from Tabard Inn outside of London to Canterbury. Then in 1916 the foremost American Chaucerian, George Kittredge of Harvard, published a book promoting the idea that The Canterbury Tales, rather than being read as a collection of stories, should be seen as a drama of the pilgrims interacting. “Who informed whom is uncertain,” smiles Barrington, “but priority of publication falls to MacKaye, and his work would have been available when Kittredge was writing his seminal book.”

In her book, Barrington argues, “Just as popular depictions of Chaucer have been an outgrowth of contemporary culture, even today scholars examining Chaucer are influenced by their own times and cultural biases.”

As Barrington continues to write articles and reviews and to make presentations in her area of expertise—14th-, 15th-, and early 16th-century literature written in England—the Chaucerian scholar acknowledges the need for a certain set of skills. Medieval studies require a facility in such languages as Old and Middle English and Latin. It’s helpful to bring a religious perspective. And, she says, “Grappling with something so different and difficult to understand is particularly satisfying to me. I think it’s part of the Protestant work ethic into which I was born.”

— Geri Radacsi