Geoffrey Chaucer

Biography

Who Was Geoffrey Chaucer?

Geoffrey Chaucer was born around 1343 in London, the son of a prosperous wine merchant with connections to the royal court. As a young man he served in the household of the Countess of Ulster, was taken prisoner during a campaign in France in 1359 and ransomed by Edward III, and went on to spend most of his life as a courtier, diplomat, and civil servant under three successive kings – Edward III, Richard II, and Henry IV.

Chaucer's literary career proceeded alongside this public life. His early and middle works, including Troilus and Criseyde, were shaped by his reading of French and Italian poetry, including Boccaccio and Dante. His major undertaking, The Canterbury Tales, occupied much of his later years and was left unfinished at his death in 1400. The work imagines a company of pilgrims – a knight, a prioress, a miller, a pardoner, a parson, and many others – traveling together from London to the shrine of Thomas Becket at Canterbury, each agreeing to tell a tale to pass the journey, with the best storyteller to win a meal paid for by the rest.

Chaucer is significant for TLA because The Canterbury Tales places its enormous variety of human types – venal, devout, comic, corrupt – inside a single frame that is unambiguously religious: a pilgrimage to a martyr's shrine. Many of the pilgrims behave as though the storytelling competition is the only thing that matters, and several – the Pardoner most notoriously – treat the spiritual goods they are nominally traveling toward as commodities to be sold. Yet the frame itself, the pilgrimage, is never dismantled. The destination remains the destination, even for travelers who have largely forgotten why they set out.

Notable Quotes

In Their Own Words

Key Works

Selected Bibliography

• The Canterbury Tales – c. 1387–1400, unfinished
• Troilus and Criseyde – c. 1385
• The Parliament of Fowls – c. 1380
• The Book of the Duchess – c. 1368–72

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