“O sely preest, o sely innocent!”: The Rhetoric of Religious Feeling in Chaucer

ABSTRACT A study in the history of sentimentality. Chaucer’s interest in the language of the emotions is manifest throughout his career in his explorations of the rhetoric of affective piety, which he uses in a great variety of ways, as his serious early studies in this rhetoric later give way to more complicated experiments. In the religious prologues and stories of the Canterbury Tales, Chaucer’s sense of the power of affective religious language mingles with an acute sense of how that power can be abused. Critical responses to these texts have been more conflicted than in almost any other part of his work. However, in the Canterbury Tales, Chaucer also investigates the secular and social use of the rhetoric of religious sentimentality, turning it into matter for high comedy. This article argues that, in his later writings, including the religious Tales, Chaucer’s view of this rhetoric is always potentially disengaged and critical.