Geographesis, or the Afterlife of Britain in Chaucer

Through a close reading of several of the Canterbury Tales (but especially the Franklin’s Tale), this chapter maps the glimmers of British (especially Welsh) history within Geoffrey Chaucer’s Anglocentric narrative ambit. The inquiry is framed through the use of postcolonial anthropology and ecomaterialism, and discussion returns repeatedly to how humans compose narratives with and on stone (menhirs, monoliths, Stonehenge), especially because stone’s duration is so vast. A major focus of the chapter is Chaucer’s unspoken debt to the twelfth-century British historian Geoffrey of Monmouth, who stands at the commencement of the Arthur myth that Chaucer so often dismisses as dead or long past. Stone ensures that this history endures.