ABSTRACT
This lecture has its origins in a number of occupations I have been engaged in and preoccupations I have had over the past few years. One is a talk I gave at a conference in Minnesota some years ago on ‘Strangers in Late Fourteenth-Century London’. 1 The conference topic was ‘Strangers in the Middle Ages’, and I found the idea of ‘the stranger’ a very fruitful one for thinking about concepts of community identity and national consciousness. Another influence has been my own life as an Englishman working in the United States for the last thirteen years, and living there for part of the year as a stranger (a ‘resident alien’), with the thoughts about Englishness that such an existence has been bound to provoke, whether out of a desire to exercise them or to exorcise them. And of course, since I am always ‘doing’ Chaucer, there was inevitably the desire to associate any thoughts about Englishness that came my way with the poet who occupied a large portion of my time, and to find out whether Englishness was in any way important in his writing.
