Introduction

Colloquium: The Afterlife of Origins Introduction Arlyn Diamond University of Massachusetts Amherst Chaucer, with his trickster prescience, seems to have anticipated our fascination with his sources. The essential link between his life as a reader and his life as a poet is made for us over and over in his poetry. For example, in The Parliament of Fowls he tells his audience, Of usage—what for lust and what for lore— On bokes rede I ofte, as I yow tolde. . . . . . . . . . . . . For out of olde feldes, as men seyth, Cometh al this newe corn from yer to yere, And out of olde bokes, in good feyth, Cometh al this newe science that men lere. (lines 15–16, 22–25)1 Throughout the course of his career, he names the texts that matter to him: ‘‘Virgile, Ovide, Omer, Lucan and Stace’’ (TC V. 1792), or ‘‘Fraunceys Petrak, the lauriat poete . . . whos rethorike sweete/Enlumyned al Ytaille of poetrie’’ (CT IV.31–33). Being Chaucer, he also gives us false clues: ‘‘As writ myn auctour called Lollius’’ (TC, I. 394). He makes fun of pedants anxious to show off their education, like the monk with his hundred tedious tragedies, or Chauntecleer, wielding learned authorities like weapons. In significant part Chaucer’s characters , like the poet, are defined by their sources, their textual communi1 All quotations are from The Riverside Chaucer, gen. ed. Larry D. Benson (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987). PAGE 217 217 ................. 16094$ $CH8 11-01-10 14:04:21 PS STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER ties and the use they make of them. The Clerk reads Aristotle and his philosophy, the Wife of Bath is taught proverbial wisdom by her dame. For the cozening Friar of The Summoner’s Tale, or the Pardoner, old books are simply another means to profit. Our Chaucer too is shaped by our reading of his ‘‘essential texts’’ and the uses he has made of them, although we cannot always agree on what these are. We have had the courtly young French Chaucer, the serious and ambitious Italian Chaucer , the Augustinian Chaucer. A concern with origins, understood not as simple fact but as shifting literary history, is not anachronistic, or a sign of our distance from the poet, but is part of our complicated connection to him. When Nancy Bradbury and I proposed a symposium on Chaucer’s sources for the 2004 Glasgow Congress of the New Chaucer Society, we were in part inspired by the recent appearance of the first volume of the revised Sources and Analogues, and in part by the challenges we had encountered in our own efforts to understand the formation of the texts we studied.2 The title, ‘‘Afterlife of Origins,’’ was meant to suggest the malleability (or slipperiness) of the concept of ‘‘source,’’ as well as the centuries-old lure of the quest for a beginning, what Kenneth Bleeth refers to in his witty account of the history of Chaucerian scholarship as the search for ‘‘the fons et origo’’ of a passage. We began with a set of questions, not about particular sources, but about how to think of ‘‘source study’’ in an age of postmodern Chaucer studies. What constitutes a source, for us, for Chaucer, for earlier scholars? What epistemologies are involved in his and our understanding of the term? Is there a hierarchy of sources, privileging textual over visual, written over oral, Latin over English, ‘‘hard’’ over ‘‘soft’’? What does it mean, as Peter Beidler demonstrates, that we prefer a nonexistent French source to an available Dutch one? Does source study lead us to a more fractured, heterogeneous image of the Middle Ages, or does it help us build a more cohesive sense of Chaucer and his culture? What theoretical models help us understand our practice, and Chaucer’s? Looking for sources is a very conservative enterprise in many senses, which is perhaps why it has come to seem old-fashioned. It links us to those early modern scholars who first began annotating Chaucer, hoping 2 Sources and Analogues of the Canterbury Tales, ed. Robert M. Correale and Mary Hamel, vol. 1 (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2002). PAGE 218 218 ................. 16094$ $CH8 11-01-10 14:04:22...