Chaucerian Afterlives: Reception and Eschatology

The claim of this essai is that Chaucer is eschatological. I use this rather specific term first in order to indicate the apocalyptic aspect of Chaucer’s late-medieval theological context of the four last things (eschata) — death, judgment, hell and heaven — and secondly to illumine a dynamic of textual dispossession at work in Chaucer’s anticipations of reader response, and of his and his texts’ interconnected ‘afterlives.’ These dense formulations will require some unpacking, but at this point it suffices to say that an orientation to the prospect of future evaluation conditions in advance the “dark” moments explored below.Any discussion of eschatology seems for us moderns (even modern medievalists) to be something of a dark topic, and in at least two ways. One is the popular darkness associated with divine judgment, an anxiety nowadays often stripped of any theological reference whatsoever. Another sense is that analogous to the Pauline “we see now in a mirror but darkly,” or videmus nunc per speculum in enigmate (1 Cor. 13:12), simply the fact that we cannot see beyond the mortal bounds of this life, except obscurely in figures. And that kind of obscurity makes the prospect of judgment sometimes hard to bear. The Cloud-author alludes to our limits in just these terms:For when I sey derknes, I mene a lackyng of knowyng; as alle thing that thou knowest not, or elles that thou hast forgetyn, it is derk to thee, for thou seest it not with thi goostly ighe. And for this skile it is not clepid a cloude of the eire, bot a cloude of unknowyng, that is bitwix thee and thi God.