‘He that speaks, sows; he that hears, reaps.’

One of the central problems in the Middle Ages, according to Brian Stock, “is the relation of orality to a world making ever-increasing use of texts ” in both its social interactions and its ontological explorations (1990:35). Because a contemporary self-consciousness can be reconstructed, Stock observes, “[t]he coming of literacy heralds a new style of reflection. Individuals are aware of what is taking place, and this awareness influences the way they think about communication... ” (7). The subject of this essay is precisely some of the subjective reactions that the oral-literate interchange provokes in the mind of Geoffrey Chaucer. Working within both literate and oral poetic traditions, the English aureate-laureate also works between them, negotiating their interchange through his acute awareness of their strained fusion1 In arguing that an anxious ambivalence about writing operates as dynamic subtext in Beowulf, Michael Near (1993) suggests that tensions between orality and literacy lie at the heart of the Anglo-Saxon poem. Reading Middle English literature, produced in a time of steadily increasing literacy and in an age wherein written poetry supplants oral poetry, we discover tensions in the oral-literate continuum that are the inverse of those faced by the author and audience of Beowulf. In the fourteenth century, these latter-day tensions play themselves out in Chaucer’s dream vision, the House of Fame. 1 I borrow the notion of the aureate/laureate dual role from Lerer 1993