Fourteenth- and Fifteenth-Century Writers as Readers of Chaucer

Author / Editor
Strohm, Paul.

Title
Fourteenth- and Fifteenth-Century Writers as Readers of Chaucer

Published
Piero Boitani and Anna Torti, eds. Genres, Themes, and Images in English Literature from the Fourteenth to the Fifteenth Century (Tubingen: Gunter Narr Verlag, 1988): pp. 90-104.

Description
Chaucer's "multiplicity of competing voices" has encouraged modern critics to focus on his "openness." Strohm examines reader reception of Chaucer in contemporaries and followers: Clanvowe, Scogan, Lydgate, and Henryson. Clanvowe, like Chaucer, writing with "pragmatic freedom" and "unshaped by social expectation," adopted Chaucer's "multi-vocal" style.
Lacking such freedom, the fifteenth-century poets showed appreciation for Chaucer's complex perspectives but, in a "situation which encouraged ethically unequivocal verse," adopted a "single-voiced aesthetic."

Alternative Title
Genres, Themes, and Images in English Literature from the Fourteenth to the Fifteenth Century

Chaucer Subjects
Chaucer's Influence and Later Allusion.