A productive way of approaching Chaucer’s sustained, innovative, often enigmatic engagement with romance can be to entertain the proposition that for him romance was as much a received literary form, predicated on its protagonists’ engagement with adventure and marvel, as it was a model for authorial adventurousness that invited him to compose new and counterintuitive literary marvels. In this, Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale shares something of the Gawain-poet’s grave subversion of and experimentation with existing romance form. However, Chaucer’s knowledge of the scholastic impossibilium (as articulated, for instance, through the Franklin and the Wife of Bath), points to a further experimental underpinning, such that we see in his romances the marvel of the marvel-made-empirical.

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.