ABSTRACT
People use Middle Ages/Medieval period to characterise the entire post-Classical pre-Renaissance stretch. Many medieval narratives are powerfully moralistic, anatomising sin and illustrating its evil consequences. The social types and structures that Geoffrey Chaucer represents in the Canterbury Tales are medieval in the sense that they are still those that characterised Anglo-Norman society, going back to the eleventh century, and yet what we think of as a more modern sensibility, characterised by scepticism, irony, cosmopolitanism and individualism, is beginning to seep in. Moreover, simply by choosing to write in English, Chaucer opened possibilities for his compatriots to develop a new kind of articulate and self-reflexive culture possibilities that the coming of print subsequently magnified. Instead of Renaissance, many scholars now use the term early modern to denote post-medieval literature in English. Artistically and intellectually, it would be sensible to speak of medieval aspects of, or elements in, Chaucer texts, alongside precociously Renaissance or early modern ones.
