Chaucer's 'Former Age' and the Fourteenth-Century Anthropology of Craft: The Social Logic of a Premodernist Lyric
- Author / Editor
- Galloway, Andrew.
Chaucer's 'Former Age' and the Fourteenth-Century Anthropology of Craft: The Social Logic of a Premodernist Lyric
- Published
- ELH 63 (1996): 535-53.
- Description
- "Former Age" emphasizes not so much former innocence as prelapsarian lack of technical knowledge. Though the speaker takes his stance between the first age and the present, he employs ironic diction, aligning himself with the latter. Besides recognized sources, Chaucer draws on Scholastic praise of technology, as well as reactions (especially Lollard) against it. The anti-Wycliffite Roger Dymmok turned anti Royalist by 1398, Norton-Smith's date for the poem.
- Chaucer Subjects
- Former Age.
- Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations.