The Early Reception of Chaucer and Langland

Abstract

To compare the available evidence for the early reception of Chaucer and Langland is not without its challenges. On the one hand, for Chaucer there is a plethora of material that testifies to the swift, varied and widespread responses to Chaucer's works. On the other lie (in proportion to Chaucer) a few scattered, often rather tenuous, indications of the influence of Langland's poem. Even at such a crudely quantitative level we are conscious of the fundamental differences between the two rather than of any similarities in their reception histories, differences that relate to the very different biographical and literary patterns of their lives. In what follows, I want briefly to explore some of the more significant of these differences as they emerge in the earlier history of the reception of Chaucer and Langland, and to show something of the factors that shaped the ways they were first understood and the responses their works evoked. I will also try to suggest that reception history does reveal some connections between poets who never had a great deal in common, albeit connections largely of a somewhat curious and late-developing kind.

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