Chaucer, Intertextuality, and Academic Integrity: What Medieval Studies Can Teach Composition and Rhetoric

Scholars in the fields of medieval literary studies and composition and rhetoric are often separated from each other by their specialization. While knowledge of composition theory is necessary for many medievalists to thrive in English departments, if only with respect to pedagogy, the reverse is not often the case. Yet medieval studies, too, has much to teach critics of composition and rhetoric. In this essay, I describe a lesson on Chaucer’s House of Fame for a first-year composition course. Focusing on how students can look at the poem’s retelling of the story of Dido and Aeneas as an example of source use, I argue that medieval poetry can teach them how to combine sources with original material to create a new contribution to a critical conversation and teach us about our students’ anxieties about citation.