ABSTRACT
D. W. Robertson was one of the most important and most controversial Chaucer scholars of the twentieth century. His most important premise, when it comes to studying literature, is that works should be read in the way that their original audience would have read them. Robertson's vision of Chaucer's medieval audience is largely dependent upon his image of medieval society as a whole. He believed that medieval men and women were almost all orthodox, conservative, and content in their places in the "quiet hierarchies" which made up medieval society. Robertson believes that medieval people would have read literature in accordance with both Christian "methods" of reading and in accordance with Christian values and doctrine. In this sense of the term "audience", Robertson's concept of audience broadens to include not just Chaucer's actual audience, but to include the characters within Chaucer's works, as well. Although Robertson treats his allegorical/ironic method of reading as undifferentiated, his concept of irony is actually two-fold.
