A writer and her students step into Chaucer's medieval world

Course description for
Readings in Chaucer
Rebecca Godwin

We engage Chaucer’s work directly, in Middle English, reading his masterpieces, The Canterbury Tales and Troilus and Criseyde, honing our language skills and understanding of the 14th century as we go. Students will do plenty of reading aloud, discussing, and writing—at least two papers, in addition to presentations, OED [Oxford English Dictionary] sleuthing, and journal-keeping.

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Sneak into a typical session of Readings in Chaucer, and you’ll find Rebecca Godwin and her 11 students seated around a table, taking turns reading 600-year-old poetry, pausing for lengthy discussions—and having a seriously good time. “You enter this world,” Godwin tells her class, “and you feel that if you could find the key to this world, you might know the key to ours.”

The world Godwin is referring to is a cross section of fourteenth century England, as encapsulated in a motley group of travelers on a religious pilgrimage—the world of The Canterbury Tales. Chaucer’s pilgrims take turns swapping tales, alternately entertaining and infuriating each other, deceiving and exposing deceit. Godwin’s students take turns figuring it all out. Six centuries and an ocean separate the students from the characters, but with Chaucer’s keen eye for how humans behave, the tales are far from remote. And there’s certainly plenty to talk about.

“Chaucer is such a trickster,” Godwin says. “You have Chaucer the pilgrim, who’s the narrator, and then you have Chaucer the poet. So we try to parse the line between the pilgrim, who seems to admire everybody—yet tells us these grievous things about them—the poet, who seems to have different intentions altogether.... There have been 600 years of scholarship about "this. Almost immediately after his death people began arguing about Chaucer’s intentions, and that really makes it fun.”

If you're going to travel to another world, it helps to know the language.

When Godwin invites her students to “enter this world,” she isn’t using the phrase idly. If you’re going to travel to another world, it helps to know the language, and so students read Chaucer’s words as he wrote them: in the round, rolling cadences of Middle English. Through out-of-class practice sessions and audio clips of scholars reading aloud—Whan that Aprill, with his shoures soote/The droghte of March hath perced to the roote—Godwin began the course by teaching her students to read and pronounce the language.

“It was difficult at first, because it’s so different from the English we speak,” says Deva Jasheway ’09. “But by the second or third week we were all getting more comfortable with it, and we could see more in the tale. It really has to be read in Middle English to get how good it is. Everything about the way Chaucer uses language—the hidden messages about the characters, the double entendres—is just fascinating.”

“I’m really interested in voice,” says Godwin. Like all Bennington literature faculty, Godwin is a writer, and her own fiction is often driven by voice. (Her second novel, Keeper of the House, is narrated in the Gullah dialect of the American South.) “One of the real pleasures is to see the students discover a love for Chaucer’s language after being daunted by it….At some point, we’re all reading aloud and we all start to laugh. The wit doesn’t work the same in translation.”

"People were so invested in their pilgrims that we had really heated discussions."

As another doorway into Chaucer’s world, each student chose one of the Canterbury Tales pilgrims to follow and study in depth. Among other things, that meant giving a brief “thumbnail presentation” to the class on some bit of historical background that would elucidate the character’s tale for the rest of the class. The student who followed the Shipman, for instance, taught the class about piracy and lawlessness in the fourteenth century; the Miller, The Peasant Revolt; the Pardoner, the Black Death. “People were so invested in their pilgrims that we had really heated discussions,” Godwin says. “It’s a small enough class that there’s quite a sense of getting to know each other, getting associated with each other’s pilgrims.”

Dylan Sanders-Self ’08 chose the Monk, and found himself surprised at how much he began to relate to the character. It wasn’t the only surprise. “In my infant understanding of the subject, when I was just getting into the class,” he says, “I heard ‘Middle English medieval tales’ and I thought it would be a bunch of woe is me, woe is this, woe is that. It turns out Chaucer was the source of dramatic structure that motivated Swift and Shakespeare. He’s so influential, and if you didn’t seek that out, you’d never know. Becky let us discover that on our own, so as I was reading the tales, I just kept thinking, ‘Whoa, this is awesome—he invented this, and that, and this structure is totally his.’”

Hear Godwin's students reading excerpts from Chaucer in Middle English.

• Amanda Sullivan '09 reads lines 453-462 from the General Prologue of The Canterbury Tales.
• Noel Kanalley '08 reads lines 143-150 from the General Prologue of The Canterbury Tales.
• Angela Traficante '09 reads lines 331-338 from the General Prologue of The Canterbury Tales.

Read more:

• More Postcards from the Classroom
• Literature at Bennington
• The Plan Process: Designing your own education
• Read some of the Chaucer web resources used by Godwin's class here, here, and here.

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