Chaucer’s Amoral Lyrics

Abstract Scholarship on Chaucer’s “Boethian lyrics” continues to show the discrepancy between their moral and political ambiguities on one hand and the fixed precepts of their source text, De consolatione philosophiae, by Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius (d. 524), on the other. While Chaucer’s “The Former Age,” “Fortune,” “Truth,” “Gentilesse,” and “Lak of Stedfastnesse” revive topics first raised in the sixth-century treatise, they trade philosophy’s universalist consolations for a contingent morality suitable for the political instability of Ricardian England. Recent treatments of the lyrics have read in the poems a resistance to the external and oppressive moral and political systems for which Philosophy and Fortune stand. Another option remains, however, for functioning within Fortune’s world order. This essay explores how the lyrics’ contradictions of form and content undermine their own calls for polite behavior and just rule. In doing so, they artfully imagine bolder subversions of Fortune’s regime by willfully embracing her tactics.