ABSTRACT
Geoffrey Chaucer and his contemporaries would have been intimately familiar with the narratives, diction, imagery, and themes of the Bible, even if they had not studied the Latin text itself. Continuity of Chaucer’s text, the relationship of the biblical allusions to Chaucer’s text and to one another, and clarity of presentation were the goal; but in some cases a different format might be equally valid. Reading Chaucer with the Bible always in mind, as some pious and biblically adept members of his original audience might have done, as certain single-minded modern critics do one can begin, like Mr. Dick with the head of Charles the First, to see the Bible everywhere. Chaucer’s “biblical poetics” and seemingly ‘tiblical” world view came to him in part by way of the writers and their works —or in reaction to and departure from, as much if not more than in emulation of their approaches to biblical form and content.
