Diary: Who was Chaucer?
Ardis Butterfield, 27 August 2015
To articulate what is past does not mean to recognise ‘how it really was’. It means to take control of a memory, as it flashes in a moment of danger.
Walter Benjamin, ‘On the Concept of History’ (1940)
I am finding it very hard to write a Chaucer biography. Commissioned an uncomfortably long time ago, I have delayed and fussed, despaired and dithered, and...