Just received this thoughtful piece from a colleague and friend at Stanford (medievalists in the US are watching this shabby debacle with keen interest). It's by the author of the most recent, critically acclaimed biography of Chaucer, Marion Turner: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2021/01/21/chaucer-represents-things-dropped-favour/amp/

Here's some extracts for those of you who can't read it in full: 'Chaucer has been dropped by the English department at the University of Leicester in favour of a decolonised curriculum, with modules on race and sexuality ...

As a biographer of Chaucer, I am naturally saddened by the news - but more than anything, because I feel students are missing out. Chaucer is being misunderstood as some sort of fusty, old figure, when actually, he could teach students a lot about the world today –

including about issues connected to gender, race, and marginalised voices. Chaucer, a multilingual man and the son of a wine-merchant, lived in a globally-connected world that faced problems rather similar to those that we face today ...

He wrote his poetry in the wake of a catastrophic pandemic that killed around a third of the population - the Black Death. His first poem, The Book of the Duchess, was about the death of a young mother from the plague, and asked the question of how survivors can move on from ...

impenetrable grief. Later, he opened The Canterbury Tales with a paean to the cycles of fertility and decay, uniting the seasonal rhythms of change with the Christian cycle of Lent and Easter, death and resurrection ...

The Canterbury pilgrims represented a new post-plague world; they are a mixed, generally urban set of people, a group of chancers making their way in society. After the Black Death decimated the population, those who survived had new opportunities as wages surged ...

especially for those who left home and tried their luck in cities. Chaucer wrote in the aftermath of unprecedented disaster but it was also a time of social mobility and radical change. Indeed, when students read Chaucer, they are often struck by his modernity ...

The Wife of Bath, for instance, points out in her ‘Prologue,’ that all the stories have been written by men and women have lacked the opportunity to tell their own story. As a result, she argues, the canon is profoundly biased ...

Her own tale is about rape, and explores the possibility of educative punishment, of trying to teach a criminal to understand what they have done wrong rather than simply executing them ...

Of course, we read literature not merely for the content but for the form. But here, too, Chaucer’s poetic innovations changed what English poetry could do ... Chaucer, indeed, was so newfangled that he even invented the word ‘newfangled.’ ...

It is impossible to understand later writers in English without a deep knowledge of Chaucer. A Midsummer’s Night’s Dream, Troilus and Cressida, and The Two Noble Kinsmen demonstrate Shakespeare’s most obvious debts to Chaucer ...

Chaucer has influenced many of the modern writers young people value. This year, Zadie Smith’s play, The Wife of Willesden, based on the ‘Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale,’ is due to be published ...

Black American poet Marilyn Nelson’s Chaucer-inspired The Cachoeira Tales, for instance, positions itself as a ‘reverse diaspora,’ a ‘pilgrimage’ to somewhere ‘sanctified by the Negro soul.’ The Nigerian writer Karen King-Aribisala’s Kicking Tongues turns Chaucer’s pilgrimage ...

into a journey from Lagos to Abuja. Chaucer is not the only medieval writer worth reading. Margery Kempe dictated the first autobiography in English in the 1430s, detailing her extensive travels, failed business ventures, marital rape, and intimate encounters with Christ ...

There is no doubt that medieval literature is relevant to us today. But its radical strangeness also matters. To read about a time where ideas of the private and the public were quite different to our own, a time in which the rhythms of life were not controlled by clocks ...

a time in which confession had just begun to redraw the contours of the inner self, involves making an imaginative leap, forcing ourselves out of the comfort zone of simply reading texts that mirror our own experiences and ideas ...

This is one of the cornerstones of education, to think oneself into different mindsets, to be challenged to understand alien ways of living, thinking, and writing. Chaucer himself exhorts us not to remain stuck in a reassuring echo chamber of our own opinions ...

In The Canterbury Tales, he was pioneering in his idea that people of different social backgrounds should tell stories. After the initial hierarchical beginning – the Knight tells the first tale – the low-class, drunk Miller interrupts, pushes his way in ...

and tells his own, brilliant tale that parodies the Knight’s. After that, hierarchy is never resumed. In the Book of the Duchess Chaucer tells us that you have to see with someone else’s eyes to understand how they feel. Never quick to judgement, deeply suspicious of authority,

.... Chaucer was a poet who truly understood that there is more than one way of telling a story. We need that message more than ever today.'