Chaucer Here and Now: The Canterbury Tales author as you've never seen him before

An illustration of Chaucer from The Workes of our ancient and learned English poet, Geffrey Chaucer, 1602
An illustration of Chaucer from The Workes of our ancient and learned English poet, Geffrey Chaucer, 1602 - Bodleian Library

In an early edition of Geoffrey Chaucer’s works, the editor Thomas Speght included the 14th-century poet’s family-tree. One branch, winding down the right-hand-side of the page, seems straightforward: by the time Speght’s edition was published in 1598, Chaucer’s family had multiplied across generations. But the other side of the page, headed The Progeny of Chaucer, is harder to explain: Speght included the poet’s sister-in-law, Katherine Swynford, and her offspring, who became the ancestors of Henry VII. These children weren’t related by blood to Chaucer, so Speght’s intention is clear: Chaucer, readers are meant to believe, was not just the “father of English literature”, but the father of England’s kings.

This image of Chaucer as a fundamentally English and patriotic author is one that has proliferated across the centuries since his 1400 death. In 1932, GK Chesterton even made the fairly outrageous claim that the poet was “the Father of his Country, rather in the style of George Washington”. But it’s this oft-repeated, staid picture of a medieval writer that the Bodleian’s superb new exhibition, Chaucer Here and Now, wants to upend. Curated by Professor Marion Turner – author of a much-lauded biography of Chaucer, and a more recent “fictional” one of his greatest heroine, the Wife of Bath – the exhibition mixes reams of manuscript history with centuries of responses to the poet, from gold-leaf illuminations to 20th-century films and Zadie Smith’s 2021 play, The Wife of Wilsden.

Chaucer, this exhibition tells us, has not always been on a canonical pedestal. The show opens with a collection of early manuscripts of The Canterbury Tales (including the very earliest, the Hengwrt Chaucer, on loan from the National Library of Wales). Chaucer died with the Tales unfinished and, when copying them down, scribes had to choose whether to leave them incomplete, or fill them in themselves. Later, his work was edited further – made more Scottish; more Protestant; more applicable to whichever reader had it in their hands at the time.

Image of the Wife of Bath from Caxton’s second edition of The Canterbury Tales
Image of the Wife of Bath from Caxton’s second edition of The Canterbury Tales - Scriptura Limited

From the more cerebral questions of editing, the show moves onto the jewels of manuscript culture, including a dazzling illumination that shows Chaucer reading to a richly-dressed court group. We see how Chaucer was read in the 16th and 17th centuries, from ballads that stressed his raunchy content to translations that censored it, and explore the multilingual context to his writing, with manuscripts by Dante and Boccaccio.

Nor is Chaucer Here and Now limited to bygone centuries. With films, adaptations and projects such as the 2016 collection Refugee Tales (which uses the context of medieval pilgrimage to tell the stories of asylum seekers), and from an Esperanto translation of The Canterbury Tales to poet Jean “Binta” Breeze’s performance of The Wife of Bath in Brixton Market, the show brings Chaucer into the present day. His progeny has been more varied than that early family-tree could ever have imagined. And yet while the Chaucer shown here is mutable and ever-changing, there’s one constant: a delight in a good story.


Until April 28. Info: visit.bodleian.ox.ac.uk; 01865 277094