The <i>House of Fame</i> and Its Gossip Mill

ABSTRACT Scholars have puzzled over the form and function of the “hous”—the so-called House of Rumor—in Chaucer’s House of Fame. This article argues that the house was made to resemble a windmill, a machine with which Chaucer and his readers would have had firsthand experience. Reading the poem while supplying the knowledge of windmills that Chaucer and his readers would have possessed, the first half of the article shows how the house Chaucer constructed evokes a windmill visually, sonically, mechanically, and socially—grinding gossip like so much grain. The second half argues that the house is our earliest extant gossip mill, embodying the medieval proverb, “idle talk is like the clapping of a mill.” Chaucer’s gossip mill elucidates a question central to the House of Fame and the world in which it was written: what do machines do to and elicit from the human bodies around them?