ABSTRACT
The first major landmark in the history of studies of Geoffrey Chaucer and the Bible appeared almost one hundred years ago in the pages of Thomas R. Lounsbury’s Studies in Chaucer. Lounsbury’s calling of Chaucer to account for the errors made by characters such as the Wife of Bath, the Monk, and the obtuse dreamer in the Book of the Duchess, and the ironic persona who writes under duress in the Legend of Good Women is to say the least highly questionable. Grace Warren Landrum’s Radcliffe College dissertation, “Chaucer’s Use of the Vulgate”, was the first comprehensive study of the biblical element in Chaucer’s works after Skeat’s notes and Index. In his 1941 Yale dissertation on “Chaucer and the Bible,” Dudley R. Johnson set out to reconsider Landrum’s data and reassess her conclusions. F. N. Robinson never makes a decisive statement on the matter of Chaucer’s uses of the Bible in his widely used The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer.
