Chaucer's conversion

About this book

Starting point: the intriguing Vache, leeve in the envoy of Chaucer's peom "Truth". This is a pun on the French form of Chaucer's name, CHAVSIER, meaning shoemaker. This name, when reversed (an instance of the so-called palindrome), results in a medieval French phrase, reis vach{e]!, 'leave cow'. It suggests that Chaucer summoned himself to leave his "old wretchedness", namely his former sinful life. The poem is therefore dealing with Chaucer's conversion as a result of which he entered the Benedictine order and lived in a house within the precincts of Westminster Abbey at the end of his life. (He was buried in the Abbey at a place now referred to as the Poets' Corner.) The image of the cows leaving the country of the Philistines was by medieval Biblical exegetes believed to denote the Benedictine monk or men of religion on their way the Heavenly Jerusalem.