Chaucer rails against the Pope

How's this for an inaugural example of an early modern use of the mediaeval?

(Image from EEBO)

Does anyone know who this Sir Geoffrey Chaucer chap is? He must be rather a brave fellow, to be writing poems about how the Pope is the Antichrist at the time when the Canterbury Tales was written. Perhaps that's why we haven't heard of him - they silenced him! Possibly for plagiarising from Langland.

He doesn't seem very subtle. The poem starts:

They mowe by lawe, as they sayne

Us curse and dampne to helle brinke

Thus they putten us to payne

With candels queynte and belles clynke

And so it continues. Harry Bailey doesn't even make a dirty pun out of "queynte".

Still, it was kind of them to set it out nice and plain for the capacity and understanding of the simpler sort of readers.

So the specifically Catholic elements of the mediaeval were, natural, evil and "dampnable"; but Chaucer remains respected enough that a) he may be cited as evidence against Catholicism (and get knighted in the process) and b) he must be saved as a literary figure worthy of respect by attributing this opinion to him (with appropriately mediaeval-reminiscent script and spelling). Let's just hope no one asked to see a manuscript of it in Adam Pinkhurst's hand.