The Authority of Text: Nicholas of Lyra's Judaeo-Christian Hermeneutic and The Canterbury Tales

The approach to Chaucer's narrative construct suggested by the title of my paper may appear some what indirect: what I seem to be attempting is to account for the structure of a fourteenth-century English poem, and an ostensibly "secular" one at that, from the exegetical principles of an early fourteenth-century French friar. In a general sense, this is my endeavour. I am not, however, attempting to demonstrate an unmediated or one-toone dependence by Chaucer upon the exegesis of Nicholas (though this is possible given the widespread popularity of Nicholas's Postillae).1 Instead, and more specifically, I wish to indicate certain aspects of a distinctive semiotic which undergirds Nicholas's exegesis and which also seems to be useful in understanding the structuring principles of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. Fundamentally a Hebraic sign system which streamlines the process of reference, Nicholas's unique semiotic directs the reader through verbal and physical appearances to the ultimate Truth underlying all texts. It also shapes his particular understanding of the sensus literalis, governing that in a text which may be appropriately included under "the literal sense." More comprehensive than conventional notions of the "literal," Nicholas encompasses typology and metaphor as well as all figurative language. Countering the simplistic understanding of a four-fold system of signification whereby any given text is a potential candidate for literal, moral, allegorical, and anagogical readings, Nicholas's articulation of the literal thus re-focusses contemporary critical attention on the text itself rather than on accumulated literary, spiritual, and intellectual traditions of interpretation (such as is represented by the Glossa ordinaria). Privileging issues of authority, reference, and response, it thereby alters the critical face of fourteenth-century reading by making available a uniquely alinear, associative, yet referential method of engaging (and being engaged by) texts. In the hands of the poets, most notably those of Chaucer, this hermeneutic may well have provided one pattern for not only the reading of but also the composition of texts as well.