Abstract
As a member of Monty Python’s Flying Circus, Terry Jones was, is, and shall ever seem brilliantly silly. As a medievalist, however, Jones has taken Geoffrey Chaucer, the father of English comedy, most seriously. In Chaucer’s Knight,1 first published only seven years after Richard M. Nixon declared “peace with honor” in Vietnam, Jones challenged a longstanding critical consensus that Chaucer intended his portrayal of a worthy, perfect, and gentle Knight in the “General Prologue” to The Canterbury Tales (CT I, 43–78)2 to be taken sincerely. Instead, Jones argued that the historical details of Chaucer’s description (rather than its doting adjectives) represent the career of a brutal mercenary. Many Chaucerians did not immediately welcome Terry’s revisionist reading. So, with typical (and very Chaucer-like) self-effacement, he conceded in the introduction to his study’s second edition that, “We may not know for certain what Chaucer thought about war or crusading.”3 In light of subsequent scholarly developments, there seems little reason for him to have been so conciliatory.
et dissipabitur arcus belli et loquetur pacem gentibus
(And the bow for war shall be broken. And he shall speak peace to the Gentiles.)
Zaccharias 9:10
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
Terry Jones, Chaucer’s Knight: The Portrait of a Medieval Mercenary, rev. ed. (London: Methuen, 1994 [1st Ed., 1980]).
Chaucer, The Riverside Chaucer, 3rd ed., gen. ed. Larry D. Benson (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987).
See R. F. Yeager, ‘“Pax Poetica’: On the Pacifism of Chaucer and Gower,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 9 (1987): 97–121
Helen Barr, “Chaucer’s Knight: A Christian Killer?” English Review 12.2 (2001): 2–3
Nigel Saul, “A Farewell to Arms? Criticism of Warfare in Late Fourteenth-Century England,” Fourteenth Century England 2 (2002): 131–4
Kate L. Forhan, “Poets and Politics: Just War in Geoffrey Chaucer and Christine de Pizan,” in Ethics, Nationalism, and Just War: Medieval and Contemporary Perspectives, ed. Henrik Syse and Gregory M. Reichberg (Washington, DC: Catholic University Press, 2007), 99–116.
See Yeager, “Pax Poetica,” 98 n.7.
See too John H. Pratt, Chaucer and War (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2000).
Medieval elaborations of the Augustinian conception of “just war” are very nuanced in theory; in practice, however, every war has been thought “just” by all sides.
Terry Jones, et al., Who Murdered Chaucer? A Medieval Mystery (New York: Thomas Dunne Books/St. Martin’s Press, 2003), 182.
Terry Jones, Terry Jones’s War on the War on Terror (New York: Nation Books, 2005), a collection of “little outbursts of indignation” (xix) originally published from December 28, 2001, to July 7, 2004, in The Guardian, The Observer, and The Independent, and in Anna Kiernan, ed., Voices for Peace (London: Scribner, 2001).
Peggy A. Knapp, Chaucerian Aesthetics (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 146.
John Barnie, War in Medieval Society: Social Values and the Hundred Years’ War, 1377–99 (London: Weidenfield and Nicolson, 1974), 131.
See Hans Kurath and S. M. Kuhn, eds. Middle English Dictionary (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1952-) [MED] s.v. “fers,” adj., defs l(a) and 2(a).
See John A. Simpson and Edmund S.C. Weiner, eds., The Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989) [OED] s.v. “fierce,” adj., def 1. “Of formidably violent and intractable temper, like a wild beast; vehement and merciless in anger or hostility. Less emphatic, and less associated with the notion of wanton cruelty, than ferocious adj., which was never used, like this word, in a good sense.”
See Charlton T. Lewis and Charles Short, A Latin Dictionary Founded on [Ethan A.] Andrews’ Edition of Freund’s Latin Dictionary (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993 [1879]) s.w. “feras” and “ferox.” The adjective “ferox” is defined first “In a good sense” to mean “courageously, valorously, bravely,” but also “In a bad sense” to mean “fiercely, savagely, insolently.” However, the adjective“ferus,” meaning “wild, untamed,” applies literally to animals and plants and tropologically to “wild, rude, uncultivated; savage, barbarous, fierce, cruel” humans.
Alan T. Gaylord, “Chaucer’s Dainty ‘Doggerel’: The ‘Elvyssh’ Prosody of Sir Thopas,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer, I (1979): 83–104.
John M. Manly, “Sir Thopas, a Satire” in Essays and Studies by Members of the English Association, Vol. 113 (Oxford, 1928), 52–73.
See too William Askins, “All That Glisters: The Historical Setting of the Tale of Sir Thopas” in Reading Medieval Culture: Essays in Honor of Robert W. Manning, ed. Robert M. Stein and Sandra Pierson Prior (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2005), 271–89.
See Caroline Strong, “Sir Thopas and Sir Guy,” Modern Language Notes 23 (1908): 73–77 and 102–06
Laura Hibbard Loomis, “Chaucer and the Auchinleck MS: ‘Thopas’ and ‘Guy of Warwick,’” in [no ed.], Essays and Studies in Honor of Carleton Brown (New York: New York University Press, 1940), 111–28
and Laura Hibbard Loomis, “Sir Thopas” in Sources and Analogues of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, ed. William F. Bryan and Germaine Dempster (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1941), 486–559
John Finlayson, “Definitions of Middle English Romance: Part I,” Chaucer Review 15 (1980): 44–62
John A. Burrow, ‘“Listeth, Lordes’: Sir Thopas, 712 and 833,” Notes and Queries 15 (1968): 326–27
and “Chaucer’s Sir Thopas and La Prise de Nuevile,” in English Satire and the Satiric Tradition, ed. Claude Rawson and Alvin Kernan (Oxford: Blackwell, 1984), 44–55
Nancy Mason Bradbury, “Chaucerian Minstrelsy:’ sir Thopas,’ Troilus and Criseyde and English Metrical Romance,” in Tradition and Transformation in Medieval Romance, ed. Rosalind Field (Cambridge, UK: D. S. Brewer, 1999), 115–24.
The comic excess of “Sir Thopas” was evidently not evident to all postmedieval readers. See Joseph A. Dane, “Genre and Authority: The Eighteenth-Century Creation of Chaucerian Burlesque,” Huntington Library Quarterly 48 (1985): 345–62
John A. Burrow, “Sir Thopas in the Sixteenth Century,” in Middle English Studies Presented to Norman Davis in Honour of His Seventieth Birthday, ed. Douglas Gray and Eric G. Stanley (Oxford: Clarendon; 1983), 69–91
and Judith H. Anderson, ‘“A Gentle Knight Was Pricking on the Plaine’: The Chaucerian Connection,” English Literary Renaissance 15 (1985): 166–74. However, manuscript evidence suggests that Chaucer’s drasty rhyming was evident to his earliest readers; see Judith Tschann, “The Layout of’ sir Thopas’ in the Ellesmere, Hengwrt, Cambridge Dd.4.24, and Cambridge Gg.4.27 Manuscripts,” Chaucer Review 20 (1985): 1–13, and Rhiannon Purdie, “The Implications of Manuscript Layout in Chaucer’s ‘Tale of Sir Thopas,” Forum 41 (2005): 263–74.
Joanne A. Charbonneau, “Sir Thopas” in Sources and Analogues of The Canterbury Tales, Vol. II, ed, Robert M. Correale and Mary Hamel (Cambridge, UK: D. S. Brewer, 2005), 649–50 [649-714].
John A. Burrow, ‘“Worly Under Wede’ in Sir Thopas,” Chaucer Review 3 (1969): 170–173.
The military future of the Squire promises to be even worse than the Knight’s past because the insouciant son has already participated in a “chyvachie” within Christendom “In hope to stonden in his lady grace” (CT I, 85–88).
See Derek Brewer, “The Arming of the Warrior in European Literature and in Chaucer” in Edward Vasta and Zacharias P. Thundy, ed., Chaucerian Problems and Perspectives: Essays Presented to Paul E. Beichner, C. S. C. (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1979), 221–43
T. L. Burton, “Chaucer’s ‘Tale of Sir Thopas,’” Expiicator 40 (1982): 4
Mark DiCicco, “The Arming of Sir Thopas Reconsidered.,” Notes and Queries 244 (1999): 14–16.
See Lee Patterson, ‘“What Man Artow?’ Authorial Self-Definition in ‘The Tale of Sir Thopas” and “The Tale of Melibee,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 11 (1989): 117–75
and Ruth Waterhouse, “’sweete Wordes’ of Nonsense: The Deconstruction of the Moral ‘Melibee,”’ Chaucer Review 23 (1989): 53–63.
V. J. Scattergood, “Chaucer and the French War:’ sir Thopas’ and ‘Melibee,’” in Glyn S. Burgess et al., ed., Court and Poet (Liverpool: Cairns, 1981), 287–96.
Dana M. Symons compares and contrasts the “Miller’s Tale” and “Sir Thopas” in “Comic Pleasures: Chaucer and Popular Romance,” in Medieval English Comedy, ed. Sandra M. Hordis and Paul Hardwick (Turnhout: Brepols, 2007), 83–109.
Christopher E. Crane,“Superior Incongruity: Derisive and Sympathetic Comedy in Middle English Drama and Homiletic Exempla” in Medieval English Comedy, ed. Hordis and Hardwick, [31]-60 at 68.
Jones, Chaucer’s Knight, 223. See too Jones’s “The Monk’s Tale” for a Colloquium in Studies in the Age of Chaucer 22 (2000): 387–97.
Editor information
Copyright information
© 2012 R. F. Yeager and Toshiyuki Takamiya
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Quinn, W.A. (2012). The “Silly” Pacifism of Geoffrey Chaucer and Terry Jones. In: Yeager, R.F., Takamiya, T. (eds) The Medieval Python. The New Middle Ages. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137075055_14
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137075055_14
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-29459-6
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-07505-5
eBook Packages: Palgrave Literature CollectionLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)