The Chaucer Review

"This Illumination and Gift of discerning Spirits was indeed kept from the Common people, by that execrable Policie of with-holding the Bible from our English translation": so said one Geoffrey Chaucer on "the sixteenth of Iune last 1626."¹ Chronology quickly alerts us that Chaucer never said this. Rather, it was "Sir Geoffery Chaucer," a character in William Vaughan's The Golden Fleece. The Golden Fleece is a predictable meld of predictable issues—English nationalism, Protestant cant, the Royalist aggrandizement of Charles I. What invests Vaughan's work with some literary value, however, is its array of cameos: in addition to "Chaucer," Thomas à Becket, Luther, Arminius, Zwingli, even "Doctor Wicliffe of Oxford" make appearances. The specter of Chaucer cropping up on such a list is surely more startling than the specter of Chaucer defending the Bible in English, since early modern readers valued Chaucer for his proto-Protestantism, his criticism of the Church, and his translating prowess. They also valued him for his English. Any of these reasons recommends him as a suitable spokesman for the vernacular Bible, though perhaps not as obvious a one as "Doctor Wicliffe." But Vaughan's "Chaucer" never revisits the linked subjects of the Bible and the vernacular, and, ultimately, this episode reveals more about Chaucer's reputation in Reformation rhetoric than it does about Chaucer's own interest in the Bible, English or otherwise.

Since the seventeenth century, critics have pursued a more systematic study of Chaucer and the Bible, often building on Grace Landrum's 1924 article "Chaucer's Use of the Vulgate."² Landrum convincingly establishes Chaucer's use of the Vulgate Bible, and, to most Chaucerians, her argument is rote. While she is corrected in a few areas, these disputations are merely matters of degree.³ In one of her central arguments, Landrum spends several pages discussing and then discounting the Wycliffite Bible: "It is almost impossible to conceive of Geoffrey Chaucer as feeling himself among the people in need of Wycliffe's vernacular version. Certainly it left no impress on his style."⁴ W. Meredith Thompson, Landrum's heir in the study of Chaucer's biblical translation, is even more dogmatic, [End Page 111] suggesting that a comparison of the Wycliffite Bible and Chaucer "does not produce a single clear-cut case of stylistic borrowing"; this does not surprise her since translations by "the greatest and most original of all English medieval writers" must obviously be "his own."⁵ In offering such emphatic judgments, both Landrum and Thompson imply that they have compared all of Chaucer's translations with the Wycliffite Bible. Later critics, it seems, rest comfortably on their shoulders. For example, in a study that is otherwise remarkably thorough, Dudley R. Johnson neglects the Wycliffite Bible, offering only one sentence to affirm the improbability "that Chaucer, a scholar and an orthodox churchman, would have consulted it."⁶

In questioning Landrum's and Thompson's dismissal of the Wycliffite Bible, I do not want to dismiss the many questions they answer. Chaucer likely read the Vulgate, and we can learn much from these critics. As these quotations reveal, however, past studies of Chaucer and the Wycliffite Bible operate from a highly specific—and, I would argue, highly ahistorical—perception. This perception places Chaucer anywhere on a continuum from "peerless originator" to "Father of English" and posits three loose principles: Chaucer was too intellectual, too orthodox, and too original to consider using the Wycliffite Bible.

I will argue against this critical tradition (for which I will use Landrum as a convenient shorthand), proposing first that Chaucer nowhere evinces the aloofness or orthodoxy supposed by Landrum; and second that Chaucer, even with his originality as a translator, evinces the influence of the Wycliffite Bible. To support this argument, I will compare translations from the Canterbury Tales, the Wycliffite Bible, and other contemporary works, especially Chaucer's Boece, within the context of the Wycliffite theory of "opin" translation (and, more importantly, within the context of Chaucer's understanding of this theory). But before turning to the texts, I must address the ideological assumptions that accompany Landrum's narrative of Chaucer and the...