UC Berkeley

Far more than any other Middle English author, Chaucer makes frequent and explicit

claims about the intention - or "entente" - with which his works are composed. What Chaucer

means by proclaiming his intention, however, is not transparent. Voiced by parodic or

discursively compromised authorial personae, Chaucer at once asserts the hermeneutic salience

of his "entente," while pressing the term to serve in ways counter to the intentio auctoris of

scholastic commentaries, whereby the author's intention is circularly defined as identical to a

work's moral use. As the first account of intentional hermeneutics across Chaucer's career, this

dissertation shows Chaucer supplanting a rhetorical and linguistic conception of the author's

intention with one both psychologistic and legal in nature, whereby his works are viewed as

intentional acts judged in terms of the author's motives in composing them, rather than as written

artifacts whose "menynge," defined as their moral usefulness, is legible through the compiler's

arrangement (ordo) of exemplary narratives. Chaucer thus establishes the author's intention not

as his purpose legible in the arrangement of a text, but rather as a hermeneutic for explaining and justifying his works viewed as individual acts. My dissertation thus re-frames a longstanding

critical debate about the categories of medieval poetry conceived in terms of its fitness as vehicle

for ethical edification. I set out to define what Chaucer means by his "entente" by considering his

deployment of the term across his fictions, and thus to show how intention defines a category of

writing -- at once more ethical and more aesthetically autonomous -- that we know as his

literature.