Tale for our times
As woke academics banish Chaucer from a ‘decolonised’ syllabus, a top historian says the poet’s stories of love, lust and greed are as relevant today as they were seven centuries ago
The poet W.h. Auden said that to understand your own country, you ought to have lived in at least two others. As a historian, I’ve taken a different tack: to show readers what life was like for people living in the 14th century; in elizabethan england; during the Restoration of 1660; and the Regency some 160 years later.
That way, I believe, we might be able to see our own lives and times in a different and revealing light.
When I was researching my ‘guide’ to medieval england, no writer brought to life that period as richly and vividly as Geoffrey Chaucer, father of english literature and the greatest poet of the Middle Ages.
Which is why I read with such dismay that a British university is now proposing to stop teaching Chaucer and his great medieval contemporaries to english literature students — indeed, to stop teaching all literature before 1500AD — in favour of modules on race and sexuality in a new, ‘decolonised’ curriculum.
If this goes ahead, out will go Chaucer’s magnificent Canterbury Tales, along with the epic poem Beowulf, Viking sagas and texts covering the legend of King Arthur.
They will be replaced with a ‘selection of employability modules’ and a ‘chronological literary history’, as outlined by the University of Leicester’s management.
Thank goodness that Shakespeare — born in 1564 — still makes the cut!
I find these proposals not only depressing but profoundly wrong — as well as incredibly short- sighted and counter-productive.
For no one understood both his own era and the human condition better than Geoffrey Chaucer.
his endlessly fertile imagination held up a light to his society — and, as anyone who reads him now discovers, it can still do the same today.
ChAUCeR — who led a fascinating life as MP, courtier, diplomat and civil servant — set in motion through his poetry a brilliant tradition.
Unlike most educated people, he wrote not in Latin or French, but proudly in english: the language spoken by ordinary people.
In doing so, he captured the voices of characters who, while seven centuries old, even now leap vividly from the page.
The Canterbury Tales, his greatest work, describes a group of pilgrims, of all social classes, who are travelling to the Kent town together and who tell stories to pass the time.
The best storyteller, they agree, will win a prize at the end.
These men and women may be pilgrims, but as Chaucer shows us, they are as much interested in the earthly as the celestial.
There’s scandalous extramarital sex (including, at one point, up a tree), prostitution (a monk is the procurer), scatology and other shocking vulgarity — but there’s plenty of nuance, too.
The unforgettable Wife of Bath holds her own among the bickering pilgrims and, insisting loudly on her independence, refuses to play along with the sexist customs of her society.
Like Dickens, Chaucer was a genius who could look at the people around him and capture their essence in a few short words.
The vivid historical details are compelling. From his Shipman’s Tale I learnt how high-ranking guests would tip their host’s lowliest servant.
From his Reeve’s Tale, I learnt even a mean-spirited miller would offer penniless students a bed for the night if they had nowhere else to go — even though it meant them sharing a room with the miller and his family.
But Chaucer also explores the timeless passions and foibles of men and women. how so? Well, those ungrateful students in The Reeve’s Tale go on to seduce the miller’s wife and daughter.
In The Knight’s Tale, two great men, heroes of their time, are drawn into a violent duel over a woman — a shared passion as old as humanity.
Quite simply, all human life is here — and it transcends time. What is that if not ‘diversity’?
Too many cultural commentators and young people — and university departments — seem to think diversity is a new phenomenon. But we’ve been diversifying since the dawn of time.
And what about the AngloSaxon epic poem Beowulf which has also fallen foul of the ‘decolonists’. Centuries before the Lord Of The Rings and Game Of Thrones caught our imagination, Beowulf explored the same bloody territory — and in far richer fashion.
Now, this world of wonder for literature students is to be abolished and replaced with contemporary ‘social’ concerns. It is deeply and fatally misguided.
how can we deny our undergraduates the opportunity to study this beautiful, enriching, funny, poignant — and often very rude — literary heritage, and insist modern societal controversies are more important?
I am all for taking a fresh look at the way english literature is taught, and I wholly endorse widening the ‘canon’ so that more writers from BAMe backgrounds are taught — not to mention more women authors.
But I cannot shake off the feeling that this latest announcement is a poorly thought-out attempt to appeal to the sensibilities of a generation raised on modern and often febrile debates over issues such as race and gender.
Why else would the staff of Leicester’s english department have been told that ‘students expect’ modules to be chosen not for their history, their significance or how much thought and feeling they might provoke — but how ‘diverse’ they are?
Is it really up to undergraduates to dictate academic syllabuses?
Isn’t the point of university that you learn something new — not have your prejudices, and we all have those, confirmed?
Little wonder that there is now real panic in academia — from the dreaming spires to the red-bricks — as dons fear being dragooned into introducing courses that conform ever more closely to modern preferences. Chaucer is just the latest victim. From race to gender and sexuality, we are increasingly failing to understand or even study the beliefs and attitudes of the past, however much we might disagree with them today. Instead, ideas, people and even history itself are being ‘cancelled’, banned from even being discussed as if they never existed at all. The truth is that it is only by embracing our literary heritage that we can see how much our human nature has in fact stayed much the same — from Beowulf to harry Potter.
OUR opinions on individual social issues might shift: the Regency, for example, was more drunken than the Victorian age that followed it, and some TV sitcoms from the 1970s would never be aired today.
But all human beings have loved, felt anger, jealousy, greed and fear, bickered with their families, suffered loss and wanted safety, health and prosperity for their children.
Chaucer underlines all this as well as anyone else — often as the first expressing it in written english.
Universities need to learn a lesson from history. Looking at society purely in the present moment is not enough.
You need to go back and hear the voices of the past. Though they may be very different from ours, they still have much to teach us.