Geoffrey Chaucer is the English Middle Ages’ most famous writer. Best known for The Canterbury Tales, a collection of stories in a variety of voices, he was also the author of several other well-known long works, multiple translations, numerous short poems, and even a widely-circulated treatise on the astrolabe (a tool for navigating while at sea). Often called the “Father of English poetry,” Chaucer’s verse introduces may characteristics that would come to define the English canon. His book The Legend of Good Women is one of the first English poems to employ iambic pentameter, famously Shakespeare’s preferred meter. He was a witty and sensitive writer of the English language whose complex poetry invites further analysis. He was even a central figure in the invention of the “author” as a profession—Chaucer frequently refers to himself in his writing, crafting a personality based around his body of work and his identity as a reader and writer.
The term “The Middle Ages” refers the period of time between approximately 500 and 1500 CE, after the fall of the Roman empire, and before the European Renaissance. Of course, as with all historical periods, The Middle Ages doesn’t actually begin and end in a particular year. Dates are useful for marking off a period of time with some similar characteristics, but its important to remember that there are many similarities between the late Middle Ages and the early Renaissance, and many differences between the early and late medieval period.
People often see the Middle Ages as a period defined by religious orthodoxy, political instability, and intellectual stagnation. It’s true that England in the later Middle Ages was a uniformly Catholic country, where explicit religious dissent could be punished by social expulsion or death. It’s also true that the Renaissance saw many radical changes in technology, art, and philosophy. However, we now know that the so-called Dark Ages were never all that dark. As in all periods in human history, there was innovation, art, and political dissent. Although culture was inextricably intertwined with religion, there was more than one way to be a medieval Catholic, and lots of secular art and literature.
Chaucer’s life and work puts to rest several myths about the Middle Ages. We sometimes imagine that back then, everyone was either a nobleman or a peasant. Chaucer’s family had generational wealth from their involvement in the spice trade. His father made his money as a wine merchant as well as a member of the King’s court. The family owned extensive property in the city. Chaucer himself was born in 1342 or 1343, in a London neighborhood populated by upper-middle class merchants and traders. Chaucer’s London was an economically, ethnically, and linguistically diverse place, populated by London natives, recent immigrants from the countryside, and merchants and traders from Europe, Africa, and Asia.
As a young man, Chaucer likely received an extensive education in Latin, within schools which emphasized skills in rhetoric and debate. He then worked in the great house of a merchant family in the countryside, before serving in the army, including in a number of diplomatic missions. His time as a diplomat led to him spending extensive time on the continent, especially in Italy. There, he encountered the work of Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio, all of which would have a profound effect on him.
In the Middle Ages, England was something of a cultural backwater. Aristocrats often spoke in French, and theology and philosophy were still usually written in Latin. Chaucer drew heavy inspiration from continental literature. For example, the influential 13th-century French poem Roman de la Rose led him to write his own take on the dream vision, and the structure of The Canterbury Tales (a series of stories told by a group of travelers) borrows from Boccaccio’s Decameron.
Yet despite his cultural and social connections to France and Italy, as well as his clear admiration for their literature, Chaucer always wrote in Middle English. He even translated many works into the language, including Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy and the Roman de la Rose. Chaucer’s long poem Troilus and Criseyde is also mostly translated from Boccaccio’s own version of the story, although Chaucer’s version begins earlier, and also includes more emotional detail. These translations prove that Chaucer knew multiple languages, and yet actively chose to write in Middle English. His decision is an important part of the history of English poetry, because it proved that English could express philosophical ideas and inspire novel poetic experimentation. Though he was hardly the first person to write poetry in English, he was so influential that critics refer to a “Chaucer tradition” made up of poets who based their work on his style.
In fact, Chaucer was part of a broader movement of English literary innovation during the end of the fourteenth century. His most famous contemporary is the religious poet William Langland, who wrote the first version of the dazzling (and famously difficult) dream vision poem Piers Plowman in approximately 1370. Julian of Norwich, a still-beloved mystical writer and fabulously innovative writer in English, wrote her Revelations of Divine Love in the late fourteenth century. We can think of the late fourteenth century in England as a period akin to the Elizabethan period: a high point of literary production, in which a combination of political, economic, and cultural factors contributed to a diverse, compelling, and inventive set of new writing.
Among these writers, Chaucer stands out for his remarkable versatility and his focus on daily life over extraordinary religious experience. Though he translated some religious texts, his most famous writings are all manifestly secular. In The Canterbury Tales, his virtuosic ability to adopt multiple voices gives us a unique look into the diversity of daily life in the English Middle Ages. Sure, we hear from a pious nun, but we also listen in on crude millers, greedy pardoners, and corrupt priests. Along the way, we see just how much the English language has to offer, from a wide range of poetic forms, to all sorts of clever puns and jokes, to moving rhetoric and serious philosophical questions. His other work, especially the long poems The House of Fame, The Book of the Duchess, and The Parliament of Fowls, similarly showcase Chaucer’s flexibility and creativity as a poet and a thinker.
