Clerks and Courtiers

This study suggests that Chaucer's poetic consciousness was shaped largely by the state formation process and the concomitant transformation of the aristocracy and rise of a class of educated state functionaries, the 'clerks'. Belonging neither to the 'clerks' nor to the courtly aristocracy proper, Chaucer sought to create a realm of pure poetry, a realm that his 'clerky' fellow-poets Gower, Usk, Scogan and Hoccleve were determined to erase even as they celebrated Chaucer as England's principal poet. The struggle between Chaucer and the clerks attempting to appropriate him unfolds not only in contemporary literature but also in the pictorial images of the poet circulating after his death.