This essay argues that an examination of Chaucer’s work reveals his indebtedness to the tradition of literary dialogue, understood as a work constructed in the form of an exchange between two or more persons, with characteristic concerns centred on questions of ethics, politics and religion. Critical to the form is its explicit engagement with different argumentative positions; a dialogue text may then, as in the Socratic tradition, leave the reader with a concluding aporia, or, as in Aquinas’ Summa, provide a resolution. After briefly reviewing the use of the dialogue form in classical and Late Antique writing, the essay goes on to explore the significant influence of dialogue in a number of Chaucer’s works, including The Book of the Duchess, The Parliament of Fowls and the Tale of Melibee, and argues that he is fully alive to the potentialities of the form for encouraging and indeed demanding readerly engagement.

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.