Helen Castor: evaluation

Transcript context

…How is it that a Chaucer suddenly becomes possible? Because it seems quite hard to imagine there having been a Chaucer a hundred years earlier. What is it that has changed that enables a Chaucer? In Florence, of course, there’s Dante. What’s the delta, as we economists would ask? I have to say I’m no literary scholar, but the development of English as a language spoken across all classes of society really flexibly — because before the 14th century, of course, we go back to the Conquest, and we have a Norman French-speaking elite coming into an English-speaking country, and French and Latin — the lingua franca of medieval Europe — remain the languages of government until, if you like, the elite has bedded in sufficiently, and one of the things that helps the elite to bed in sufficiently is the war with France. It helps to draw, literally, battle lines between what’s happening over there, including culturally, and what’s happening over here. You can see that both in the French that’s spoken in England that by the late 14th and early 15th century, it’s not always easy for people who speak French in England to understand Parisians, for example. French has gone native, but at the same time, English has grown and developed into a language that is used throughout society from the bottom right to the top. That then gives the opportunity for that vernacular to feed into the growth of literature in the vernacular that is happening in various places across Europe. That’s my understanding of how, and of course, then a genius appears who wants to try his hand at writing poetry in his own language, and he’s not the only one. There’s John Gower and Langland and all sorts of anonymous poets, too. This is before Gutenberg, of course. Do you have a rough sense of what a copy of Canterbury Tales would have cost if you wanted to get one?…

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