Naked Chaucer

Abstract

My title refers to the indelible first appearance—stark naked, shambling, emaciated, muttering to himself—of the character “Geoff Chaucer” in Brian Helgeland’s film A Knight’s Tale . 1 Allow me to set the scene: Three companions, William, Roland, and Wat, are traveling the road to Rouen when they are overtaken by a man walking briskly in the same direction. The man is naked. Who is he, they want to know. “ Lilium inter spinas ,” he tells them, lifting his dirty foot to his mouth in order to suck out the sharp object he has just stepped on: “the lily among the thorns.” No, really, who is he? “Geoffrey Chaucer’s the name,” says the man, trying to catch his breath, “writing’s the game.” They stare at him blankly. “Chaucer?” he repeats himself, a note of disbelief creeping into his voice. “Geoffrey Chaucer, the writer?… You’ve probably read my book, the Book of the Duchess ?” They have never heard of him, nor have they read his “book.” It turns out, however, that his talents as a writer can be of some use to them. And so a deal is struck, with “Geoff,” as his new companions derisively call him, promising to forge the “patents of nobility” needed to enter the lowborn William in an upcoming tournament in exchange for food and clothing and the chance to ride the friends’ horse for a bit. Their alliance thus sealed, it isn’t long before they are once again on their way. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 4 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.