Chaucerian Irony Revisited: A Rhetorical Perspective

The topic of my paper is a broad one, for it embraces a range of questions within its field, which is Chaucerian irony as seen from the perspective of mediaeval rhetoric. My excuse for speaking on so broad a topic — and one unlikely to appeal to modernists or post-modernists, and certainly not to post-contemporaries — is in some part, I must confess, the desire to share my reflections with an audience composed of a goodly number of teachers and scholars of my own generation. Those who are of a younger generation may well feel like the German mediaevalists who greeted me at Trier in 1987 with a question about the Schoeck of Schoeck and Taylor published many years ago: "But he's dead, isn't he?" After retirement one cannot avail oneself of too many opportunities to assure his contemporaries that in point of fact he is not dead.