Father Chaucer’s Heirs

In conclusion to this book, Chapter 6 looks at the Middle Ages’ model of reproductive perfection—fathers producing sons—to identify how even in the most ideal of circumstances, men cannot gain a true authority upon the earth. For from the Monk’s Tale to the Knight’s Tale to the Nun’s Priest’s Tale, Chaucer makes men confront how poorly they resemble the quality of their fathers. Each generation becomes a siring of loss, a gradual descent into something worse than its progenitor. And yet, Chaucer agues, there is nothing else for men within the world. To reproduce in the pursuit of authority is a doomed quest, one that he himself will repent of in the Retractions. But there is nothing more human than the desire to create something that will last beyond one’s death, to hope in a future posterity even knowing the odds against its realization.