Language, knowledge, and power: The politics of Chaucer's translation

This dissertation is a study of Chaucer's translations, seeking to situate them in political contexts. Spurred by the political roles of the Wycliffite Bible and Trevisa's translations, this dissertation attempts to suggest political implications of Chaucer's translations during his lifetime.;As the topoi of the translatio studii and the translatio imperii have long suggested, translation involves not only the transfer of language and knowledge from one culture to another but also reconfiguration of power relations. Living in an "Age of Translation" in the late fourteenth century, Chaucer was actively participating in contemporary cultural movements by translating The Romaunt of the Rose and The Boece. However, Chaucer's two prose translations were by no means politically neutral: they were his own responses to current political situations. What is more remarkable about his two translations are their changing fortunes: under specific historical conditions, the two translations could have had political implications directly opposite to those originally intended by their author. In translating The Romaunt of the Rose, Chaucer was not only a faithful student imitating French culture but also a resister of prevailing French culture and, by extension, France. However, during the last decade of the fourteenth century, when a quest for peace was undertaken in both England and France, Chaucer's translation may have served to promote peace between the two countries.;Chaucer's Boece may have been motivated by Chaucer's royalist concerns about king Richard's excessive attempts to empower himself. However, Chaucer's translation may have had resonance with the concerns of the magnates, about the possible misuse of royal power during their antagonistic confrontation with the king from the mid-1380s to the end of 1390s.;In the Clerk's Tale, Chaucer shows more directly the politics of translation: he exemplifies how translation could serve power by consolidating it. The motive and the process of Walter's creative translation of Griselda show that his translation, which includes the invention of a new Griselda, is performed for the purposes of political propaganda, aimed at strengthening his governing power over his land.