© 2000 by Oxford University Press
Chaucer the reactionary ideology and the general prologue to The Canterbury Tales
Goldsmiths College, London, UK
Chaucer's General Prologue is a more politically charged text than is usually supposed. It formulates post-Revolt ruling ideology through tactical distribution of blame for oppression among scapegoats, away from lordship (Knight) and judiciary (Franklin). It recognizes a source of manorial exploitation primarily at the level of the Reeve, a peasant foreman whose harsh managerial rigour contrasts with the distant benevolence of his own lord. While the anticlerical dimension of the Prologue's propagandist configuration is well known, readers have missed the full social implication of its uncompromising strategy (here termed 'displacement of oppression') because of the received myth of a socially unfixed Chaucer whose writing emanates from a classlessness straddling different social strata. Here it is argued that, on the contrary, a clear commitment to aristocratic ideology and disdain for peasant aspiration is visible in the General Prologue and persists in the tales, including the Summoner's Tale, as was apparent to a seventeenth-century pamphleteer.