Obscenity and Chaucer: the COMMode project tells us more

Mary Flannery and Kristen Curtis introduce the COMMode project, which explores the making of the modern Chaucer (from 1700 to 2020), canonicity and obscenity. Chaucer is seen, they tell us, both as a great writer and also as someone into jokes about sex and bodily functions, and they ask how those things do (or don’t) go together.

This project combines research and creative work, with Kristen creating modern cartoons adapting Chaucer’s work. ‘I like drawing birds’, Kristen tells us, and we discuss the pragmatics of depicting chicken sex, both for Kristen and for Geoff Chaucer himself.

The conversation encompasses Chaucer as ultimate English poetry dad, a kind of father figure for Englishness as seen by later readers like John Dryden, and we also touch on the ethics of obscenity and readerly joy.