Medieval Literature – Interesting Literature

A Summary and Analysis of Geoffrey Chaucer’s ‘General Prologue’

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

The General Prologue to Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales is one of the jewels in the crown of medieval English literature. From its opening lines extolling the virtues of April showers through to Chaucer’s wonderfully descriptive introductions to the various pilgrims travelling from London to Canterbury, the General Prologue provides a window onto medieval culture while also reminding us that some features of human nature are timeless and common to all generations and ages.

10 of the Best Works by Geoffrey Chaucer

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.

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

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.

The Poetry of Richard the Lionheart

In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle examines the lyrics of a famous medieval English king

‘Richard the Lionheart’, or Coeur de Lion, has gone down in popular consciousness as one of England’s greatest and noblest kings. His statue stands outside the Houses of Parliament in London. He was viewed as the heroic warrior-king, riding off to the Holy Land to fight in the Crusades. In the early nineteenth century,

Cursor Mundi: The Forgotten Medieval Poem of the North

In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle discusses a little-known medieval poem

Here’s a question for you. Which single English text provides the Oxford English Dictionary with the most new words? By ‘new’ words I mean words which were unknown before they appeared in that particular text. So, what would you go for? One of Shakespeare’s plays, perhaps? Milton’s Paradise Lost? Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales?

The answer is none of these. Instead, it’s a little-known poem – indeed, more or less completely unknown outside of medievalist and lexicographical circles – called Cursor Mundi.