Chaucer And His Times

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III Chaucer's Treatment Of His Sources The sin of plagiary is a development of modern civilisation. To medieval authors, as to Elizabethan, the interest of a story lay in the telling, and while plot was of first-rate importance the same plot could quite well be used indifferently by any number of writers. Indeed, they did not hesitate to go even further and to form a patchwork of scraps taken from different authors, so that the plot may be drawn from one poet, fragments of the dialogue from another, and descriptive or reflective passages from a third, and yet the whole may be justly reckoned the work of the compiler. In the Parlement of Foules, for instance, Chaucer takes the idea of the whole from a current fabliau, the first eighty- four lines from Cicero's Somnium Sdpionis, three distinct passag