Chaucer and Wyclif: God's Miracles Against the Clergy's Magic

Abstract

In the last two decades modern Chaucer scholarship has been coming to terms with substantive affinities between John Wyclif and the Chaucer of the Canterbury Tales. Paul Olson and Peggy Knapp have gone further than most in noting such affinities. Yet Olson, who recognizes a Wycliffite basis in the clerical portraits and tales containing Chaucer's critique of the Church, is careful to note fundamental distinctions, both theological and political, between Wyclif's and Chaucer's perspectives on the Church. In Chaucer and the Social Contest, Knapp declines to consider personal or direct influence of Wyclif on Chaucer, or "any connection between Chaucer and an organized sect," presumably Lollardy. Similarly, although Peter Brown and Andrew Butcher read Chaucer's Pardoner as a substantial embodiment of Church abuses attacked by the Wycliffites, they caution that "it would be a mistake to align Chaucer too closely with a Wycliffite position. . . . for he provides the Pardoner with material that also makes him a satirist of Wycliffite doctrine." 1 Such caution rightly acknowledges issues too complex to be represented by simple labels or unqualified allegiances between the poet and the theologian, but it may also suggest a cognizance of earlier, ill-informed attempts to create a Protestant Chaucer for the English Reformation. One thinks, especially, of John Foxe, who sometimes approached history as an exercise in creative writing, arguing on the basis of literature mistakenly attributed to Chaucer that the poet was "a right Wicklevian, or else there was never any." 2 Such ill-founded claims for a Wycliffite Chaucer, persisting through later centuries, have left modern scholars wary of reasserting the claims on the basis of more solid evidence, even though, as Linda Georgianna observes, the assumption of a "Protestant Chaucer" operates as an implicit premise in much modern criticism of Chaucer's religious tales. 3

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