Comic Medievalism: Laughing at the Middle Ages

Description: Chapter 2, "Scraping the Rust from the Joking Bard: Chaucer in the Age of Wit," explores the long eighteenth century's conflicted reception of Chaucerian wit. While Chaucer was perceived as an "originary figure" of the English language as well as an "identifiably English satirist," his diction was denigrated for its vulnerability to the uncouth vernacular of its age and to the mutability of the English language itself. Argues that the period's modernizations of Chaucer were often attempts either to rehabilitate Chaucerian comedy or to posit a comic continuum between the medieval and the Augustan, all the while rescuing the texts' "intrinsic worth" (or "essence," in a Platonic sense). Contends that the age's efforts to historicize and modernize Chaucer inevitably pointed up its similarities to and dependence upon the medieval.

Alternative Title: "Scraping the Rust from the Joking Bard: Chaucer in the Age of Wit."

Chaucer Subjects: Chaucer's Influence and Later Allusion; Facsimiles, Editions, and Translations; Language and Word Studies