Organ Music for Lent

Preface

“…I have thus approached Chaucer's work on the assumption that, as Pearsall puts it, 'no writer can withdraw himself from the social and cultural practices in which his existence as an individual and the language that he uses are embedded'. 4 However, in turn, this claim applies as much to historians and to literary critics as it does to the authors whom they study. My own political and religious prejudices will doubtless soon become apparent to the reader but, nevertheless, I have tried here to avoid either demonstrating that Chaucer was lucky enough to have anticipated the wisdom of my own views by six centuries or berating him for having failed to do so: 'the historian is not a judge, still less a hanging judge'.…”