Secular Consolation in Chaucer’s Complaint of Mars

The term “secular” is used frequently in Chaucer studies, both to describe the subject-matter of Chaucer’s poetry and to characterize his underlying poetic principles. Without disputing that the content of his poems tends to focus on the layperson’s perspective and the concerns of worldly life,¹ in this essay I wish to question the subtler and more pervasive kind of secularity that many critics have found at the level of Chaucer’s poetics. The claim that he strictly separates religious concerns from his thinking about the nature and purpose of poetry is most often defended with reference to the end of the Canterbury Tales, which is read as presenting poetry and tale-telling as incompatible with the Parson’s doctrinal truths.² This argument may be made in a number of ways, but there is a broad consensus that, as William Franke expresses it, “truth begins for Chaucer where poetry ends”—a statement that functions both as a literal description of the turn from fiction to doctrine at the start of Fragment X in the Tales and as a metaphorical description of a clear distinction in Chaucer’s mind between two realms, “truth” and “poetry.”³ That same distinction has been upheld in two book-length studies arguing for the influence of Christian textuality on Chaucer’s poetics, both of which maintain that Chaucer fully secularizes the concepts about language and interpretation that he borrows from religious traditions.⁴ The broad critical endorsement of a secular Chaucer must partly embody a reaction against D. W. Robertson’s thesis that all medieval literature directly or indirectly affirms Church doctrine, but the roots of this idea reach deeper.⁵ Linda Georgianna has examined how nineteenth-century scholars sought to cast Chaucer as a proto-Protestant and “liberal apostle of rationalism,” and this Protestant Chaucer is an ancestor of the secular one; much as the former reflects the Victorian distrust of Catholicism, so too the latter reflects the assumptions of contemporary academia.⁶ If, as Helen Cooper has suggested, “it remains almost part of our scholarly credentials not to treat religious conviction seriously,” then a secular Chaucer is inevitable –but Cooper’s observation, found in her introduction to Chaucer and Religion, is intended as a warning.⁷ The essays in that volume belong to a growing body of work that examines Chaucer’s creative engagement with religious beliefs and practices.⁸ This essay similarly seeks to challenge received views of Chaucer as a secular poet, but approaches that goal from the opposite angle. Understanding the place of religion in Chaucer’s poetry and poetics requires not only further work focusing on religion itself, but also a more careful look at his approach to the secular, and the latter is my project here.

The first step is to address definitions, because it can be easy to forget that the word “secular” did not mean in Middle English what it means in common usage today. The current sense of the term as denoting a space or attitude free of religious beliefs and practices dates only to the rise of the secularist movement in the mid-nineteenth century.⁹ The fact that neither Middle English nor medieval Latin had a word to express what we now mean by “secular” does not, in itself, make the modern notion of secularity unthinkable in Chaucer’s England, but it does present an obstacle to formulating such a concept. One fourteenth-century thinker who can be seen as developing a proto-modern idea of the secular is the nominalist philosopher William of Ockham, but although some critics have argued that Chaucer drew upon his ideas, there is no clear evidence of influence.¹⁰ The medieval concept of secularity that was familiar to Chaucer was considerably broader than the modern one, encompassing the whole domain of earthly life. As an adjective, the Middle English word “seculere” refers to anything “of or belonging to the world,” and as a noun, it may refer either to a layperson or to “a member of the clergy living in the world as opposed to living...