ABSTRACT
Described by Dryden in 1700 as ‘the Father of English poetry’, Chaucer’s position as presiding genius of English literature has remained remarkably intact throughout the six hundred years since his death in 1400. To us he is primarily the author of The Canterbury Tales, praised for his variety of tone, his irony, his ability to sketch character and caricature and also, as we get to know more of him, for his fascination with books, with the origins and telling of stories and for his intellectual range. Historical records present a very different figure: a page and courtier; a civil servant and collector of taxes who travelled abroad on undisclosed royal business; a man accused of rape and frequently summoned for debt, who lived in London and Kent, was buried in Westminster Abbey and later moved to become the first poet in ‘Poet’s Corner’. He lived in the turbulent times of the Hundred Years War with France and the beginnings of the Wars of the Roses, the Peasants’ Revolt and the Black Death, yet little of this surfaces in his writing. To his contemporaries, he was an acclaimed translator, writer of lyrics and philosopher. This volume seeks to give some impression of all these aspects, while yet retaining a focus on his writings.
