Geoffrey Chaucer

10 of the Best Works by Geoffrey Chaucer

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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.

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A Summary and Analysis of Geoffrey Chaucer’s ‘The Miller’s Tale’

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By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

‘The Miller’s Tale’ is one of the most technically accomplished, and perhaps the funniest, of Geoffrey Chaucer’s completed Canterbury Tales.

An example of a French literary form known as the fabliau, ‘The Miller’s Tale’ appears to have been Chaucer’s invention (many of the other tales told in The Canterbury Tales were translations, or retellings, of stories found in earlier literary sources): Chaucer’s genius appears to have been in bringing together three well-known features of the traditional fabliau.

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‘The General Prologue’: The Very Beginning of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales

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By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

The opening lines of the General Prologue to Geoffrey Chaucer’s great fourteenth-century literary work The Canterbury Tales are among the most powerful and evocative pieces of writing about spring in all of English literature, from the first reference to the rejuvenating qualities of April showers through to the zodiacal allusions to Aries (the Ram). Here it is, in the original Middle English: a time machine taking us back to a spring more than six centuries ago.

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Five Fascinating Facts about John Lydgate

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A short biography of a medieval poet

1. John Lydgate wrote one of the first true epic poems in the English language. Lydgate’s Troy Book runs to a whopping 30,000 lines, making it one of the longest poems in the English literature (as well as one of the earliest Lydgate was born in around 1370 and died in about 1451). To put that in perspective, Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, itself not exactly a short work, is just over 17,000 lines. In other words, Lydgate’s Troy Book is big. (Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene is 35,000 lines long, and so beats Lydgate’s poem. And The Faerie Queene is a gargantuan epic.)

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