Digital resources in the Social Sciences and Humanities OpenEdition Our platforms OpenEdition Books OpenEdition Journals Hypotheses Calenda Libraries OpenEdition Freemium Follow us

“Chaucer Here and Now” at the Bodleian Libraries

“Misogynist. Feminist. Conservative. Radical. Respectful. Irreverent. Monocultural. Multicultural. Imperial. Domestic. English. European. Catholic. Protestant.” As we’ve explored in many ways throughout the COMMode project, Chaucer is all of these things—and we’d add that he’s (sometimes) obscene, too!

This past Saturday, April 27, marked the final weekend of the ‘Chaucer Here and Now‘ exhibition at the Bodleian Libraries in Oxford, which has been open to the public since December 2023. Our very own Kristen Haas Curtis was one of the exhibition’s featured artists, and stepping through the doors of the exhibition hall is a little like stepping into her comics diary. Here’s the road to Canterbury, there’s Chanticleer and Pertelote, and here’s the Wife of Bath, swooping in to confidently offer her thoughts!

As part of the exhibition’s closing weekend, Kristen led a comics workshop as part of Creating Chaucer. Visitors to the exhibition have also learned to draw their own Chaucerian pilgrims, thanks to her video tutorial (see below!).

It’s been an exciting four months for the whole COMMode team. Mary accompanied our colleague Professor Annette Kern-Stähler and her students on their trip to the exhibition, where they proudly bore witness to their UNIBE colleagues’ contributions to the items on display!

Not only was Kristen’s art featured in the ‘Chaucer Here and Now’ exhibition, but the exhibition also featured videos from Virtual Chaucer, for which Lucy was the lead writer, and careful visitors might even have caught a glimpse of a certain postdoc’s face in the “Women Reading Chaucer” case.

Spotted: Lucy spots herself reading a children’s Chaucer.

Lucy’s research on children’s Chaucers also contributed to the section on children’s books, in which Victorian and Edwardian children’s Chaucers were on view, many for the first time.

As The Guardian noted in its review, the children’s Chaucers on display in the exhibition censor “some of the more eye-popping details in Chaucer’s tales.” But elsewhere in the exhibition, we were pleased to note, Chaucer’s obscenity was front and centre, if not immediately legible to the untrained eye: the famous Hengwrt manuscript lay open to the notorious ending of the Cook’s Tale, in which a crafty wife “swyveth for hir sustenaunce.” In this early manuscript (likely the earliest of The Canterbury Tales), there is an additional note where the tale breaks off: “Of this Cokes tale maked Chaucer na moore.”

Though these were among the more obvious traces of Chaucerian obscenity in the exhibition, we were also struck by the less obvious traces. There was the entire case given over to the various postmedieval incarnations of the Wife of Bath, whose prologue John Dryden considered “too licentious” to translate for his own readers. Another case featured a brilliantly coloured pop-up version of The Miller’s Tale by Paul Johnson that included glimpses of buildings still visible today in Oxford, where the tale is set.

Obscenity notwithstanding, it’s been thrilling to see so much public enthusiasm for Chaucer and the many afterlives of his works and characters. Leaving the exhibition, attendees are asked to place a sticker on the word that describes what they think of Chaucer now: serious? funny? puzzling? patriotic? old-fashioned? even… relatable? After four months, so many stickers have been placed, the team at the Bodleian has had to change out this poster multiple times. The same is true of the “pilgrimage wall” designed by Kristen in the connecting corridor, where visitors were invited to create their own Canterbury pilgrim. Layer upon layer of paper pilgrims jostled towards Canterbury—as we’re sure readers too will continue to do, page by page, year after year, century after century.


Photo credits: Eleanor Baker (1), Kristen Haas Curtis (2–4), Mary C. Flannery (5–8), Felicity Brown (9).

Ready to draw your own Wife of Bath? Check out Kristen’s video tutorial:


OpenEdition suggests that you cite this post as follows:
Lucy Fleming (April 30, 2024). “Chaucer Here and Now” at the Bodleian Libraries. COMMode. Retrieved May 17, 2025 from https://doi.org/10.58079/10scm


You may also like...

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.