For generations the conventional “roadside drama” reading of the General Prologue, despite or even because of its undeniable explanatory efficiency, has made it difficult for critics trying to view the Prologue as an object of analysis to view the whole of it. In its construction, Chaucer teases readers with the expectations evoked by the conventional genres of the dream-vision and the estates satire, dangling their promises but leaving them unfulfilled, and uses their features while rejecting their premises and withholding the normal modes of their action. Ultimately what is most distinct about the achievement of the General Prologue is how successfully it seems to ward off grasp of its artifice, organizing the experience of reading to make it seem an experience of something prior to reading.

This essay argues that Chaucer’s ‘English context’ cannot be divided from multiple other European and insular contexts. English as a language was the product of multiple waves of colonialism; England was a multilingual place; ‘English’ literature was heavily influenced by other literatures, especially literature written in Latin, French and Italian. It is traditional to assert that Chaucer mocked his English heritage through Sir Thopas, a pastiche of the popular ‘tail-rhyme’ genre. However, Chaucer was well aware of the variety and richness of English literary tradition. Manuscripts such as Auchinleck remind us of the many different things that English could do at this time, including estates satire, complaint and debate. Alliterative poems such as Pearl reveal contemporary poets’ ability to bring together diverse literary forms. Chaucer was exceptional not because he wrote in English but because of his unerring capacity to knit together multiple, interlinked, multilingual sources and traditions to create new things of wonder.

Thomas Hoccleve referred to Chaucer as the ‘firste fyndere of our faire langage’. The word fyndere is carefully chosen, as a modified translation of the first ‘canon’ of classical and medieval rhetoric, the ancestor of present-day English invention. Any assessment of Chaucer’s ‘poetic art’ requires us not just to identify the linguistic choices available to him, it also requires us to ask how those choices relate to his broader poetics. Chaucer’s use of ‘pronouns of power’, for example, do not only characterise particular choices from the linguistic resources of London Middle English, they are also a matter of style, a notion for which classical and medieval literary theoreticians had their own terminology, distinguishing high, middle and low styles, widely recognised as having distinct functions relating to social status and roles. It is conceivably as a metrist, however, that Chaucer’s skill as a ‘finder’ is perhaps most subtly demonstrated, as examples from his works show.