Geoffrey Chaucer: Unveiling the Merry Bard

By Mary Flannery

Reaktion Books 2024

Despite the fact that only a tiny fraction of his output was racy or off-color, Geoffrey Chaucer has been known for centuries as a racy tale-teller, the “merry bard” in the subtitle of Royal Historical Society fellow Mary Flannery’s new book, Geoffrey Chaucer: Unveiling the Merry Bard. Ever since Daniel Defoe and maybe before, readers, critics, and teachers have been slapping verbal warning labels on Chaucer mainly on the strength of the Reeve’s Tale, the Miller’s Tale, and the Wife of Bath’s Tale in The Canterbury Tales, the only three slivers of Chaucer most people ever read. 

Flannery’s book, the most enjoyable 170 pages written about Chaucer since Chaucer’s Bawdy by Thomas Ross way back in the early 1970s, is thankfully about a great deal more than off-color jokes. With remarkably deft economy (Donald Howard’s standard biography of Chaucer is 700 pages long), Flannery not only outlines the poet’s life but traces the progression of his humor through a lifetime of work and centuries of posthumous interpretation. As Flannery puts it, Chaucer’s satire responds to the anxieties of his time with “an eye for both hypocrisy and incongruity on the one hand and unlikely consistencies on the other, consistencies that sometimes spanned social, political or religious boundaries.” 

She amply makes the unassuming point that Chaucer is often funny, and she interrogates not only how he does it but how he’s been perceived to be doing it by generations of later writers. He has such an insightful reader in Flannery that it’s almost disappointing in the end to come back to the naughty stuff. “For better or worse,” she writes, “Chaucer’s name has become synonymous with bawdy humour that is framed by disclaimers, tinged with irony and frequently attached to burlesque or satire.” 

Even so, “Unveiling the Merry Bard” is a sparkling, fleet performance, an excellent addition to the “Medieval Lives” series that’s also seen such standout volumes as Albertus Magnus and the World of Nature and especially the superb Bede and the Theory of Everything. Flannery does what’s always so much worth doing for every new generation: reminding us all just how good Chaucer is. 

Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Washington Post, The American Conservative, The Spectator, The Wall Street Journal, The National, and the Daily Star. He has written regularly for The Boston Globe, the Vineyard Gazette, and the Christian Science Monitor and is the Books editor of Georgia’s Big Canoe News