Geoffrey Chaucer: The Father of English Literature and the Pilgrims Who Never Arrived
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M. Muñoz · AI-narrated by Martin (from Google)
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In the autumn of 1374, a man named Geoffrey Chaucer began a new job counting bales of wool at the port of London. He would hold that job for twelve years. In his spare time, he was writing poetry that would change the English language forever. This is the paradox at the heart of one of literature's most extraordinary careers: the bureaucrat who invented English literature, the customs official who created the greatest portrait gallery of medieval society ever painted in any language. Geoffrey Chaucer. The Father of English Literature and the Pilgrims Who Never Arrived is a rich, accessible exploration of Chaucer's life and world, from the wine merchant's house where he was born around 1343 to the house in the garden of Westminster Abbey where he died in 1400, leaving behind him the most gloriously incomplete masterpiece in the English literary tradition. This book traces his years as a page in a noble household, his capture in France and subsequent ransom, his diplomatic missions to Italy where he encountered the works of Boccaccio, Dante, and Petrarch that transformed his literary ambitions, and his twelve years as controller of customs in the busiest port in England. It illuminates the world he inhabited: the devastating Black Death that killed a third of England's population, the interminable Hundred Years War, the Peasants' Revolt that shook the foundations of medieval social order. And it explores, with depth and pleasure, the Canterbury Tales themselves — the twenty-four stories told by twenty-nine pilgrims on the road to Canterbury that constitute one of the greatest works in any language. Meet the Knight and his tale of noble tragedy, the Miller and his gloriously indecent comedy, the Wife of Bath and her five marriages and her revolutionary arguments about the sovereignty of women, the Pardoner with his fake relics and his cheerful cynicism about the trade in salvation. Understand why Chaucer chose to write in English when French was the language of the court, why his Middle English looks foreign on the page but sounds surprisingly familiar when read aloud, and why Shakespeare, two centuries later, was still borrowing his plots. For anyone who wants to understand where English literature comes from, this book is the essential starting point.
In the autumn of 1374, a man named Geoffrey Chaucer began a new job counting bales of wool at the port of London. He would hold that job for twelve years. In his spare time, he was writing poetry that would change the English language forever. This is the paradox at the heart of one of literature...
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