Chaucer and the Invention of Biblical Narrative - (New Directions in Religion and Literature) by Chad Schrock (Hardcover)

About the Book

"This book demonstrates how Chaucer recognized the unsurpassable value of the Bible as an authoritative literary source and model for his own literary production, his self-definition as an author, and the invention of his audience. Chad Schrock unravels Chaucer's Tales in the light of topics important to biblical reception in 14th-century England: authority, textuality, interpretation, translation, rephrasing and marginalia. When the Canterbury Tales are summed up in this way, they show the great extent to which Chaucer was drawing upon the Bible as a meta-poetical resource for his own poetry"--

Book Synopsis

Demonstrating how Chaucer uses the Bible in The Canterbury Tales as an authoritative literary source and model for his own literary production, this book explores the ways in which the Bible was a key tool for Chaucer's self-definition and innovation as an author.

Chad Schrock unravels Chaucer's Tales in the light of topics important to biblical reception in 14th-century England: authority, textuality, interpretation, translation, rephrasing and marginalia. When the Canterbury Tales are summed up in this way, they show the great extent to which Chaucer was drawing upon the Bible as a meta-poetical resource for his own poetry - its fictional tale-tellers and characters, its quotations, allusions and images, its plots, its imaginative engagement with an audience of listeners and readers, and its hidden intentions.

Schrock demonstrates that the Bible is a uniquely potent literary source for Chaucer because it combines infinite authority and plenitude with unprecedented freedom of interpretive invention. As a world-making text, the Bible's authority includes the literary as subcategory but surpasses and contextualizes it, which gives Chaucer's deferential biblical invention a different kind of freedom and safety. Within Chaucer's tales, a biblical image is often where a given narrative peaks and its plot comes clear, but a biblical world also and without strain contains his biblical fictioneers and whatever they make from the Bible, whether orthodoxy or heresy, whether sin or worship.

Review Quotes

Although the many individual biblical allusions in Chaucer's Canterbury Taleshave been catalogued and have also often been discussed in treatments of the individual tales in which they occur, Chad D. Schrock is the first to notice their overall significance for Chaucer's ambition as a Middle English author. Schrock writes very well - his prose often dazzles. It's a joy to read his work.
Ann Astell, University of Notre Dame, USA

About the Author

Chad D. Schrock is Professor of English at Lee University, USA.