Monday 1 April 2019

and smale foweles maken melodye

Revisiting a perennial favourite—whan that Aprille—in literary criticism, we like indulging the conceit of high school English teachers that the preamble from Geoffrey Chaucer’s late fourteenth century Canterbury Tales, with minimal footnotes and intervention, is somehow immediately intelligible to contemporary ears. It’s a bit of fun nonetheless and recall having to recite the prologue from memory and we were instructed to dress-up as one of the twenty-four pilgrims in school. Of Engelond, to Caunterbury they wende.