Geoffrey Chaucer
c. 1343–1400
Biography
Geoffrey Chaucer lived from about 1343 to 1400 and is sometimes hailed as the founder of English verse. He spent much of his working life in London as a royal official, first as a customs officer, and his duties also took him abroad on diplomatic missions. He sat in Parliament as a knight for the county of Kent. He was a man of learning too, and he wrote a treatise on the astrolabe, an instrument for measuring the heavens, for his young son Lewis. He was buried in Westminster Abbey, in the part of the church later known as Poets' Corner, which made him the first to rest there.
Chaucer wrote in English at a time when courtly and learned writing in England was mostly in French and Latin, and his work helped establish English as a language for serious poetry. Among his works are the dream-vision poems The Book of the Duchess and The House of Fame, the long romance Troilus and Criseyde, which draws on a poem by the Italian writer Boccaccio, and The Canterbury Tales, a collection of stories told by pilgrims riding to the shrine of Thomas Becket at Canterbury. The Tales were left unfinished, yet they remain his most celebrated work. Many English words are first recorded in manuscripts of his writing.
The site holds The Canterbury Tales, and Other Poems, a book that puts the pilgrims' stories alongside his other verse. Later English poets, Spenser among them, looked to Chaucer as a model, and reading him here is a good way to see where that tradition began.
This biography was written by a language model. The sources below are where to check it; treat details with care.
Books
The Canterbury Tales, and Other Poems
by Geoffrey Chaucer
A company of pilgrims riding from London to Canterbury pass the road with a storytelling contest, and the Knight, the Miller, the Wife of Bath, the Pardoner and the rest each tell a tale that gives them away. This edition, with Chaucer's spelling and a gloss in the margin, adds…
Summary written by Claude Sonnet 5.5.