Chaucer and Wyclif: God’s Miracles Against the Clergy’s Magic

In the last two decades modern Chaucer scholarship has been coming to terms with substantive affinities between John Wyclif and the Chaucer of the Canterbury Tales. Paul Olson and Peggy Knapp have gone further than most in noting such affinities. Yet Olson, who recognizes a Wycliffite basis in the clerical portraits and tales containing Chaucer's critique of the Church, is careful to note fundamental distinctions, both theological and political, between Wyclif's and Chaucer's perspectives on the Church. In Chaucer and the Social Contest, Knapp declines to consider personal or direct influence of Wyclif on Chaucer, or "any connection between Chaucer and an organized sect," presumably Lollardy. Similarly, although Peter Brown and Andrew Butcher read Chaucer's Pardoner as a substantial embodiment of Church abuses attacked by the Wycliffites, they caution that "it would be a mistake to align Chaucer too closely with a Wycliffite position. . . . for he provides the Pardoner with material that also makes him a satirist of Wycliffite doctrine." ¹ Such caution rightly acknowledges issues too complex to be represented by simple labels or unqualified allegiances between the poet and the theologian, but it may also suggest a cognizance of earlier, ill-informed attempts to create a Protestant Chaucer for the English Reformation. One thinks, especially, of John Foxe, who sometimes approached history as an exercise in creative writing, arguing on the basis of literature mistakenly attributed to Chaucer that the poet was "a right Wicklevian, or else there was never any." ² Such ill-founded claims for a Wycliffite Chaucer, persisting through later centuries, have left modern scholars wary of reasserting the claims on the basis of more solid evidence, even though, as Linda Georgianna observes, the assumption of a "Protestant Chaucer" operates as an implicit premise in much modern criticism of Chaucer's religious tales. ³

Of course, Chaucerians have slighted Wyclif for other reasons. For one thing, the aesthetic implications of a Wycliffite Chaucer are discouraging in their potential for a reductive criticism written to a specific theological agenda. Nor does Wyclif's polemical voice ring with rhetorical artistry. By temperament a proto-Puritan, Wyclif held an aversion to the literary enterprise, much like Chaucer's Parson who would eschew the aesthetics of fiction for the "ascetics" of penitential prose. Small wonder that Chaucerians have hesitated to examine their poet's affinities to the theologian who would have thought the Retraction the best part of the Canterbury Tales.

It can also be argued that any educated contemporary might have arrived independently at Wyclif's conclusions about a blatantly corrupt Church. Witness the example of William Langland who, as evidence for the dates of the Piers Plowman A and B texts indicates, arrived at certain Wyclif-like conclusions independently of the Oxford don. ⁴ But, while Wyclif and Langland wrote concurrently, Chaucer of the Canterbury Tales followed the reformer by about a decade, when the theologian's notoriety was running high. The well-known Wycliffite agenda was there for expedient appropriation. Thus, it is difficult to imagine our poet—an informed public man and deft borrower from others' works—reiterating Wyclif's notorious criticisms of the Church without some cognizance of the theologian with whom he shared such acquaintances as John of Gaunt and Ralph Strode. ⁵

For still other scholars, the obviousness of certain similarities between Chaucer's and Wyclif's critiques of the contemporary Church discourages further examination. Nevertheless, such affinities are as significant as they are obvious: scathing assaults on ecclesiastical materialism, criticisms of the clergy as unworthy ministers of the sacraments, disparaging reflections on liturgy as a commodity, and skepticism about the efficacy of pilgrimage itself—to name a few.

Beyond their obvious anti-ecclesiastical perspectives, however, Wyclif and Chaucer also share less noted but equally significant positive images of the early Church, which they contrast with its decadent fourteenth-century descendant. That contrast is clearly underscored by Wyclif's and Chaucer's...