ABSTRACT
The good of literature for Chaucer resides in its worldliness and its moral function. Chaucer had explored various ways of making and understanding this claim in every long poem of his career, but he presents it in its most complex and indirect form in the Canterbury Tales. There is some warrant in recent studies of Chaucer’s audience for applying the term “new men” to fourteenth-century figures, but it is perhaps more familiarly used in Tudor social and literary history, where it refers to those lower gentry and civil and legal professionals who attained office and privilege in significant numbers under the Tudors; by extension, it connotes as well a characteristic set of educational, literary, social, and civil ideals that seems to have attained cultural prominence with them. The Man of Law and the Franklin might seem like the most obvious examples of new men on the pilgrimage.
