Geoffrey Chaucer's Retraction of his Canterbury Tales

The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer end on a rather strange note, namely 350 words (or thereabouts) under the heading “Heere taketh the makere of this book his leve”, which is usually referred to as “Chaucer’s Retraction”. This is both a revocation of all Chaucer’s works that might have caused offence and a dedication to God of those that have not. Chaucer thus appears to divide his works into two groups, those towards which he feels a degree of shame and those that he thinks are worthy of being dedicated to the praise of God.

The list for which an apology seems to be in order is particularly interesting. He groups them as “translacions and enditynges of worldly vanitees,” mentioning not only those Canterbury tales “that sownen into synne” but also some works that seem quite inoffensive. These include “The Book of the Duchess”, “The House of Fame”, “The Parliament of Fowls”, “The Legend of Good Women”, and “Troilus and Criseyde”, plus the unknown “Book of the Lion” which presumably was a work of which no manuscript has survived.

On the “good” side of the ledger are his translation of the “Consolations of Philosophy” by Boethius, “and othere bookes of legendes of seintes, and omelies and moralitee, and devocioun.” Chaucer seems to want to do a deal with Jesus, Mary and the saints of Heaven, to the effect that these works earn him sufficient grace to “biwayle my giltes” and undo the harm of those on the other side of the balance.

To our modern way of thinking, Chaucer seems to have got this all wrong. If the world had only been left with the “good” books, then it is highly unlikely that we would have heard of Geoffrey Chaucer at all. We can assume that the “sinful” Canterbury Tales would include those of the Miller and the Reeve, for starters, with their stories of bed-hopping, and of the Friar and the Summoner, with their coarse jibing at each other. However, the retraction is not just of downright sin but of all worldly vanities, and the common theme of the named “non-Canterbury” books is romantic love, in one guise or another. Take all these away from the Canterbury Tales, and nothing much is left apart from those of the Parson and Chaucer’s own “Tale of Melibee”, which are generally regarded as the two least readable of the Tales. We do not need such an apology.

However, this is to misread Chaucer’s intention. He was a highly moral person, indeed moralistic at times, but was also a great humourist and very human. He had a well developed sense of fun and mischief as well as a deep sense of respect for the foibles of his fellow travellers, not only on the Canterbury pilgrimage but on the journey of life. Many writers throughout history have combined these two aspects of personality, and some have been able to reconcile them better than others. I believe that this Retraction is Chaucer’s attempt to make this reconciliation.

Another possibility is that Chaucer underwent some sort of religious conversion towards the end of his life, possibly during the period of writing the Canterbury Tales, and that his growing sense of mortality (he died in 1400 at the age of about 60) had focused his mind on the fate of his immortal soul. This would not have been unusual for his age. Chaucer’s Italian near-contemporary Boccaccio, whose “Decameron” has much in common with the Canterbury Tales, renounced his frivolous and licentious works in middle life and wrote nothing but learned treatises in Latin in his later years. Can we put Chaucer in the same bracket?

If this is the case, and I am not convinced that it is, then surely Chaucer is being unduly hard on himself, certainly on the evidence of the Canterbury Tales. Agreed, there is vulgarity and indecency in places, but Chaucer is a realist, painting 14^th century life as he sees it, with all its earthiness, dirt and crudity. He is never morbid or unhealthy, and he sees life in a true perspective. He is always quick to point to the moral of a story, and those who do wrong usually get their comeuppance one way or another. There may be a few cases in which people who play cruel tricks get away with it, such as Alison in the Miller’s Tale, but Chaucer is happy to forgive the high-spirited deeds of a young woman who will doubtless settle down in later life. He is less sympathetic towards the Wife of Bath, for example, whose middle-aged feminist posturing stretches his liberalism just a little bit too far. As mentioned above, he is always a moralist as well as a humanist.

So was Chaucer right to “retract” or not? Did he really mean it? Or is this just a form of words designed to put him on the side of the sheep rather than the goats at the Day of Judgment? At a distance of 700 years, it is not easy to say. However, we can at least be grateful that Chaucer left us a body of work that we can still enjoy today, both “sinful” and otherwise.

© John Welford