ABSTRACT
C HAUCER’S legacy to fifteenth-century vernacular writers was manifold and includes the decasyllabic line, a distinctive poetic persona, vivid characterization, and, perhaps most importantly, what A. C. Spearing has called an “idea of English poetry.”1 As a vernacular writer working within cultural constraints which typically reserved “auctor” as an honorific for select ancient and Christian Latin writers, Chaucer often explored this idea in his comments on the relations between his own compositions and the literary traditions to which they respond. Such relations are examined in the extra-dream frame, windows, and tapestries of the Book o f the Duchess, in the description of “Fames halle” in the House o f Fame, in the account of the “Dream of Scipio” in the Parliament o f Fowls, and in the discussion of experience and authority in the prologue to the Legend o f Good Women. In these instances, in various ways, Chaucer explicitly juxtaposes his compositions (and himself) with the prior texts which enable and inform his works. By medieval standards, it is these prior texts of classical poets and learned commentators which are typically judged the only authoritative texts both in the sense of being original creations and in the sense of having the unimpeachable “auctoritas” of an “auctor.” But if Chaucer’s affirmation of such authoritative intertextual fields legitimizes his work as a vernacular writer, his self-conscious confrontation of these writers and texts bespeaks an awareness of the complex and potentially problematic nature of concepts like textual authority and authorship.
