Chaucer

Geoffrey Chaucer is a native English writer and poet from the Middle Ages. He used to be known as 'The Father of English verse', as he was the most widely read in recent times of all writers in Middle English, and the first well-known writer to use French verse forms while writing English poetry. His works were among the first to be printed in England (by William Caxton).

His most famous works are The Canterbury Tales, a collection of stories supposed to have been told in turn by a number of pilgrims travelling from London to Canterbury to pass the time. These stories were written between 1387 and 1400 (soon before he died), and Chaucer stopped before they were finished: indeed, he wrote a Retraction in which he spoke of his regret at having written what would now be called 'light fiction'. He also wrote The Book of the Duchess, The Parliament of Fowls and The Legend of Good Women. Troilus and Criseyde was written at around the same time as The Canterbury Tales. He wrote translations of Le Roman de la Rose (medieval French, ~ 'The Romance about the Rose') as The Romaunt of the Rose) an Boethius's De Consolatione Philosophiae (Latin 'on the Consolation of Philosophy' as Boece, as well as basing much of his own writing on classical and traditional models and authors.

Chaucer was probably born in London. "Since it wise not to be too specific about matters where there can be no certainty, the early 1340s would be the best estimate for the date of Chaucer's birth" (Pearsall, 1992). (Pearsall also writes the exemplary cautious academic sentence: "So 1343 emerges as the projected hypothetical date instead of c.1340 [the long-held date given in most reference books], which was just an honest guess and a round number.") The last known mention of Chaucer alive was on 5th June 1400, when he collected a pension payment. The traditional (but unprovable) date of his death is 25th October 1400.