Sacred Texts: Legends and Sagas

The Canterbury Tales and Other Works of Chaucer (Middle E...

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"An ABC" is a Middle English devotional lyric by Geoffrey Chaucer, composed as an acrostic prayer in which each stanza opens with a successive letter of the alphabet. It belongs to the tradition of Marian devotion — a formal, liturgical genre of medieval Catholic piety — and was adapted from a French source by Guillaume de Deguileville. The poem is a sustained supplication to the Virgin Mary, addressed by a self-condemned sinner who catalogues his unworthiness and begs her to intercede with Christ and God the Father on his behalf. Its central theological argument is that divine justice is so severe that without Mary's mediation, no sinner could hope for salvation — she is presented not merely as a sympathetic figure but as God's appointed "vicaire and maistresse," the indispensable mechanism through which mercy reaches humanity. Chaucer reinforces this through a series of Old Testament typological allusions: Moses and the burning bush as a figure for Mary's virgin purity, Isaac's near-sacrifice as a type of Christ's passion. What is distinctive is the poem's extreme abasement of the speaker combined with an equally extreme confidence in Mary's willingness to help — he is "lost almost" by sin, yet certain she will not refuse, because her compassion is by divine design inexhaustible.

The Canterbury Tales and Other Works of Chaucer (Middle E...

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