The Hight Style in Chaucer

(From: I cannot remember where on the internet)

An almost invariable mark of Chaucer's high style is the occupatio (or praeteritio) -- a refusal to describe or narrate (see note by Vincent Di Marco in Riverside Chaucer, n. 875-88, pp. 828-29). This is often used to supply a good deal of specification of a subject under cover of omitting it:

But it were al to longe for to devyse
The grete clamour and the waymentynge
That the ladyes made at the brennynge
Of the bodies, and the grete honour
That Theseus, the noble conquerour,
Dooth to the ladyes, whan they from hym wente;
But shortly for to telle is myn entente. (KnT I.994-1000).

It is also used as a simple "refusal to narrate":

His felawe wente and soughte hym doun in helle --
But of that storie list me nat to write. (KnT I.1200-01).

And it is sometimes combined with dubitatio -- doubting what to say or how to say it:

Who koude ryme in Englyssh proprely
His martirdom? For sothe it am nat I;
Therfore I passe as lightly as I may. (KnT I.1459-61).

This last example may be an instance of the "affected modesty" or "humility topos," the protestation that the author is unworthy or incapable of doing justice to his subject. For an extreme example see Benedict Burgh's Letter to Lydgate, where the protestation of ignorance of rhetoric is the occasion for an elaborate display of rhetorical devices. More briefly:

To smal is bothe my pen and eke my tonge,
For to descryven of this mariage. (MerT IV.1735-36).

Closely linked to the "humility topos" is the "inexpressibility topos" ("topos" means "commonplace"), the common protestation that no one could do justice to the wonders of which the narrator tells:

So fair a gardyn woot I nowher noon.
For, out of doute, I verraily suppose
That he that wroot the Romance of the Rose
Ne koude of it the beautee wel devyse;
Ne Priapus ne myghte nat suffise,
Though he be god of gardyns, for to telle
The beautee of the gardyn and the welle
That stood under a laurer alwey grene. (MerT IV.2030 -37)

Such devices seem to be means of compressing the narrative, but they serve rather as means of expanding statements, the dilation that that is the main aim of the rhetorician.

Among the methods the rhetoricians recommended for a dilating a narative is the chronographia, the specification of time by reference to the astronomical state of the sky. The opening lines of The Canterbury Tales provide the most famous example, one often imitated by Chaucer's followers. The fifteenth-century Scots poet, Robert Henryson, begins his Testament of Crisseid, a "continuation" of Chaucer's Troilus with an elaborate astrological specification of time:

A dismal sessoun to ane care-full ditty
Should correspond and be equivalent
Right so it was when I began to write,
When Aries, in middes of the Lent,
Showers of hail did from the north descend,
That scarsly from the cold I might defend.

Yit nevertheles within myne study
I stood, when Titan had his beams bright
Withdrawn down and sailed under cover,
And fair Venus, the beauty of the night,
Uprose and set unto the west full right
Her golden face, in opposition
Of God Phebus, direct descending down. (Test. Cr., translated)