Our Lady According to Geoffrey Chaucer: Translation and Collage

Chaucer addressed some of his best known poetry to the Virgin Mary. Whatever basis such poetry may have had in personal religion, this discussion is interested in the fact that Chaucer’s marian writings are in large part the result of translation, adaptation, quotation, and allusion. That observation is not meant to be iconoclastic, for literature of the time did not have the present-day obsession with novelty, and much mediaeval religious poetry is derivative. In writing about the Virgin Mary, Chaucer sometimes layered borrowed passages in a complex of sources themselves borrowed, leaving the reader with echoes — echoes of other great writers such as Bernard of Clairvaux and Dante, as well as of the Bible, the Church’s hymnody, and the liturgy. Most of this layering occurs in, or prefaces, folkloric works which are hagiography at least in their origins: the Second Nun’s tale of St Cecilia and the Prioress’s tale of the schoolboy murdered for singing Alma redemptor is mater in a ghetto. Less complex is the short poem known as Chaucer’s A B C , translated from Guillaume de Deguilleville’s Pèlerinage de la vie humaine. Even less so are the two marian verses uttered by the Man of Law’s Constance as she enters her rudderless ship (II. 841-854). These pieces by Chaucer are not uniformly excellent. Some are marian passages in other works not themselves marian.