Chaucer's Contemporary
- Author / Editor
- Bennett, J. A. W.
Chaucer's Contemporary
- Published
- J. A. W. Bennett. The Humane Medievalist (Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura; Wolfeboro, N.H.: Boydell & Brewer, 1982), pp. 13-29.
- Description
- Diffident comparisons point out the "Englishness" of both Chaucer and Langland (though Chaucer gives us little of London city life, his limits being Dartmouth, Strother, Oxford, and Cambridge). Bennett discusses the down-to-earth tones, association of trades and merchants with "covetise," and their attitudes toward the religious. In view of their similarities, it is time "to dismiss forever the false antithesis that represents Chaucer as new and adventurous, Langland as traditional and conservative." Reprint; first published in S. S. Hussey, ed. Piers Plowman: Critical Approaches (London: Methuen, 1969), pp. 310-24 and 352-53.
- Alternative Title
- The Humane Medievalist.
- Chaucer Subjects
- Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations
- Chaucer's Life