Auctoritas, granted by medieval interpretative communities to a host of Christian and classical writers, set in motion complex negotiations between the voices of the living and the dead. Alan of Lille had observed that authority has a ‘wax nose’, capable of being twisted in opposite directions. And in Chaucer’s lifetime, the exercise of authority was radically challenged in both ecclesiastical and sociopolitical spheres. Likewise, the emergence of writing in several European vernaculars provided new arenas in which to scrutinise and challenge both the workings of auctoritas and the ideologies that it could be made to serve. Accordingly, Chaucer dismantled and exposed both the inner contradictions of auctoritas and the price – the elisions, distortions and arbitrary privileging of some interpretations over others – at which it was achieved and preserved. That he was granted a measure of posthumous auctoritas is one of the paradoxes of English literary history.

Thomas Hoccleve referred to Chaucer as the ‘firste fyndere of our faire langage’. The word fyndere is carefully chosen, as a modified translation of the first ‘canon’ of classical and medieval rhetoric, the ancestor of present-day English invention. Any assessment of Chaucer’s ‘poetic art’ requires us not just to identify the linguistic choices available to him, it also requires us to ask how those choices relate to his broader poetics. Chaucer’s use of ‘pronouns of power’, for example, do not only characterise particular choices from the linguistic resources of London Middle English, they are also a matter of style, a notion for which classical and medieval literary theoreticians had their own terminology, distinguishing high, middle and low styles, widely recognised as having distinct functions relating to social status and roles. It is conceivably as a metrist, however, that Chaucer’s skill as a ‘finder’ is perhaps most subtly demonstrated, as examples from his works show.