ABSTRACT
The last 35 years have seen a flowering of interest in medieval rhetoric,1 and in particular in Chaucer’s use of rhetoric. It was, famously, Chaucer’s rhetorical skills which appeared to have impressed his fifteenth-century critics more than any other aspect of his writing,2 but interest in this subsequently waned until Manly’s influential and provocative lecture and article ‘Chaucer and the Rhetoricians’ in 1926 revived the topic,3 and in recent years it has attracted much extensive and sensitive examination by critics such as Payne, Jordan, Copeland, Burnley and Murphy.4 However, analysis of Chaucer’s rhetoric has not been married with a sustained focus on Chaucer’s relationship with his source-texts, and this approach, as I will show in this chapter, is revealing not only about Chaucer’s practice, but also about his attitude to his sources.
