By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
Geoffrey Chaucer (c. 1343-1400) is the most famous English writer of the Middle Ages. Although he was by no means the only celebrated poet of his time – we should mention William Langland, the Gawain poet, and John Gower, just for starters – Chaucer is the writer whose work had the broadest range, writing dream poems, long narrative poems about doomed love affairs, royal commissions, translations, and even early works of science writing (his ‘Treatise on the Astrolabe’, supposedly written for his son Lewis, is perhaps the first work of popular science written for children).
And then, of course, there’s the vast ragbag that is the unfinished Canterbury Tales.
Here are ten of Chaucer’s best works.