Re-writing the Classics: Geoffrey Chaucer and The House of Fame

Résumé En

A brief look at the literature of the past centuries shows how the conception of memory as an artefact and artifice was central in Antique and Medieval works of art. The idea of creation was, after all, highly problematic in societies where creating was first and foremost a divine prerogative. Religious teaching and cultural transmission thus became the shields yielded by generations of artists to protect their creations from being defined as empty rhetorical exercises or simple lies. This paper consequently analyses how Geoffrey Chaucer’s House of Fame tackles the necessity of using cultural transmission to legitimise an original creation. While many translated, adapted or invoked the great poems of Antiquity to guide and protect their work (see for instance Virgil’s presence in the Divine Comedy), Chaucer decided to show that this idealised literary past depended largely on men’s ability to remember events without altering them.