WHAT NEW CAN BE SAID ABOUT A POET
WHO'S BEEN DEAD FOR SIX HUNDRED YEARS?
"Cullen's Chaucer's Pilgrims is a thought-provoking addition to literature
on this well-studied classic." --Library Journal, September 15, 2000
October 25, 2000, is officially the 600th anniversary of the death of Geoffrey Chaucer. It's hard to imagine that any new insight could surface about a writer who's been dead that long, particularly one who's been read, studied, taught, and analyzed by the academic community for centuries. Geoffrey Chaucer, one of the first poets in what we now consider the English language, is admired and enjoyed to this day, and not only by the English majors. He is rightly considered a literary giant: an entertaining, wise, ribald, and reverent craftsman of poetry and the fine art of storytelling. Plenty has been "discovered" and written about Chaucer's work by academics from medievalists to Freudians. Can anything more be said?
According to Dolores L. Cullen, plenty remains to be said, and she has made it her business to say it. Unwilling to accept established theories as the whole story, Cullen has read The Canterbury Tales with a fresh and inquiring eye and has seen things about the work that nobody has seen or written about before. Her new ideas are presented in a trilogy of new Chaucer scholarship published by Fithian Press.
Cullen's first book, Chaucer's Host-Up So Doun, argued that the host and moderator of The Canterbury Tales is the personification of Jesus Christ. The second book, Pilgrim Chaucer-Center Stage, demonstrated that one of the tales is Chaucer's confession, celebration, and atonement for his own sins. The third and final work, Chaucer's Pilgrims-The Allegory, whose publication date coincides with the anniversary of Chaucer's death, reveals the allegorical meaning of the full cast of pilgrims. Cullen has discovered, and she convincingly reveals, the startling relationship between these pilgrims-who show up at dusk-and the other nocturnal wanderers, the stars and planets.
It's not unusual that Chaucer would look to the heavens for inspiration. After all, astronomy and astrology were taken seriously in his day, as was theology. What is unusual is that no scholar has discovered this interpretation of Chaucer's pilgrims before. Perhaps it took a fresh and iconoclastic Chaucer enthusiast to come up with such revolutionary ideas. Perhaps it took a centennial anniversary to bring those ideas to the attention of Chaucer fans worldwide. |
