‘Gaufred, deere maister soverain’

Abstract

Abstract This chapter briefly surveys and characterizes the rhetorical culture inherited by Chaucer. It then surveys and critiques twentieth-century scholarship on Chaucer and rhetoric. The body of the chapter argues that Chaucer’s understanding of rhetoric is directly derived from late twelfth-century Neoplatonic sources. Examples demonstrate Chaucer’s flexible familiarity with each branch of twelfth-century Neoplatonic rhetoric and poetics. Chaucer also modified the Neoplatonic rhetoric he received. The late twelfth-, early thirteenth-century rhetorician Geoffrey of Vinsauf might be Chaucer’s ‘dere mayster soverayn’, but among the many skills taught by rhetoric is that of only ostensibly following one’s master: Chaucer himself is the ‘maister soverain’ of a poetic-rhetoric.

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