Credulity and the Rhetoric of Heterodoxy: From Averroes to Chaucer

Abstract

A recent study by Alcuin Blamires casts new light on the relationship between Chaucer's Wife of Bath's Prologue and Lollardy. Blamires demonstrates that such aspects of the Prologue as the Wife's insistence "on appealing directly to the Bible," her use of the the word "expres," her discussion of celibacy and marriage, the burning of Jankin's book, and even her contempt for the Friar, find their source in urgent Lollard concerns (or those of their opponents) in the late fourteenth century. It is Blamires' sense that the contentiousness and topicality of these issues in large part account for the way that Chaucer treats them, and thus for the difficulty of "decisively" proving a connection with Lollardy. He nonetheless urges that "we . . . reconsider the extent of Chaucer's involvement with, and response to, principles stridently advanced by this controversial pressure-group that gathered strength as his literary career developed." 1

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