ABSTRACT
George Lyman Kittredge, one of the most important Chaucerians in the early decades of the twentieth century, in many ways exemplified the spread of English studies beyond the realm of Victorian "gentlemen scholars", since he was the son of a merchant. Clearly, Kittredge assumes a universal audience and a universal response, which, for the most part, coincides with his own response and reading of Chaucer. This universal audience extends beyond the "academic scholars" of Kittredge's day. Kittredge minimizes the distance between medieval and modern readers rather than emphasizing it. Kittredge's image of Chaucer's audience, therefore, is universalized. The responses of both modern and medieval readers are considered in developing the "audience function" which Kittredge uses but for the most part, he believes, medieval and modern people will have approximately the same response. Kittredge's humane, optimistic confidence in the universality of human nature would be starkly challenged by some later scholars, and robustly upheld by others.
