Chaucer and the English Court

Abstract

Chaucer was born around 1343 and died in 1400. He was a prolific poet with a high reputation among his contemporaries. He probably started work on that vastly ambitious project, the Canterbury Tales, quite late in his literary career, in the 1380s, and was still working on it at the time of his death. Before then he had produced a variety of works. He had translated into English two of the most influential texts in the later Middle Ages: the Romance of the Rose, a thirteenth-century French love allegory, and Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy, written in the sixth century when its author was facing execution. Chaucer had also written a number of great poems in English, including Troilus and Criseyde, one of the most moving love stories in our language. Although he wrote in English for an audience which considered French to be the fashionable language for poetry he was acclaimed as a great writer, and used as a model by a number of poets in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Since then, important writers in every period have admired him, and many have felt him to be worth translating.