Iterative Circulation in Chaucer: Medieval Contexts of Seriality

Abstract The idea of serial circulation is difficult to reconcile with the realities of medieval practices of text production before the advent of printing. Rather than dismissing the concept altogether, however, this article considers both seriality and circulation as productive categories for analyzing medieval literature. Focusing on Geoffrey Chaucer and the Canterbury Tales , I argue that medieval poets were attuned to ‘serial thinking’, which manifested itself in repetition as a key formal feature of medieval literature. I introduce the concept of ‘iterative circulation’ as an alternative approach to forms of seriality and circulation within and across medieval literary works. Using the “Knight’s Tale” and the “Franklin’s Tale” as my examples, I demonstrate the usefulness of iterative circulation, which brings to the fore the fraught relationship between causality and seriality in the “Knight’s Tale”, and the tension between different kinds of rhythm in the “Franklin’s Tale”.