Chaucer and the Invention of Biblical Narrative

<b>Demonstrating how Chaucer uses the Bible in <i>The Canterbury Tales</i> as an authoritative literary source and model for his own literary production this book explores the ways in which the Bible was a key tool for Chaucer's self-definition and innovation as an author.</b><br/><br/>Chad Schrock unravels Chaucer's <i>Tales</i> in the light of topics important to biblical reception in 14th-century England: authority textuality interpretation translation rephrasing and marginalia. When the <i>Canterbury Tales</i> are summed up in this way they show the great extent to which Chaucer was drawing upon the Bible as a meta-poetical resource for his own poetry - its fictional tale-tellers and characters its quotations allusions and images its plots its imaginative engagement with an audience of listeners and readers and its hidden intentions.<br/><br/>Schrock demonstrates that the Bible is a uniquely potent literary source for Chaucer because it combines infinite authority and plenitude with unprecedented freedom of interpretive invention. As a world-making text the Bible's authority includes the literary as subcategory but surpasses and contextualizes it which gives Chaucer's deferential biblical invention a different kind of freedom and safety. Within Chaucer's tales a biblical image is often where a given narrative peaks and its plot comes clear but a biblical world also and without strain contains his biblical fictioneers and whatever they make from the Bible whether orthodoxy or heresy whether sin or worship.