Talking about Chaucer with School Teachers

Summary

What should we do about the fact that reading Chaucer is hard? The “immersion theory” of learning Middle English, rooted in nineteenth-century philological approaches, is no longer really functional or well-suited to attract our wider and more diverse contemporary audience of students; we might return, productively if paradoxically, to an earlier appreciation of textual difficulty (and reward), which we actually share with our Modernist colleagues. In this we can make translations our allies rather than our antagonists. Moreover, the stereotypes about the Middle Ages that we have traditionally railed against, from “dark-ages” dismissals to pre-Raphaelite romanticizations, may no longer be the ones our twenty-first-century students carry with them these days.