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Chaucer: His Life, His Works, His World
An award-winning biography that recreates the public, private, and poetic life of Geoffrey Chaucer, the father of English poetry and a central man of his age
Chaucer was born in the latter half of the fourteenth century, an age of revolution and devastation when Europe was convulsed by the Hundred Years’ War, the Black Death, and the social and intellectual upheavals that marked the “autumn of Feudalism.” The son of a wealthy London vintner, he maneuvered his way into the turbulent courts of Edward III and Richard II, and thus, without holding noble rank himself, he was able to witness the violent drama of royal power. It was, as Howard demonstrates, the perfect vantage point for a poet. Chaucer’s own poetic development from the mannered medieval style of The Book of the Duchess to the rich, comic, human complexity of The Canterbury Tales reflects the transformation of his world. With The Canterbury Tales and the darker, more formal epic Troilus and Criseyde , Chaucer established English for all time as a language of literature.
“A thoughtful, thorough book that conjures up the living presence of England’s first great poet more concretely than anybody has ever done before.”— San Francisco Chronicle Book Review
Chaucer was born in the latter half of the fourteenth century, an age of revolution and devastation when Europe was convulsed by the Hundred Years’ War, the Black Death, and the social and intellectual upheavals that marked the “autumn of Feudalism.” The son of a wealthy London vintner, he maneuvered his way into the turbulent courts of Edward III and Richard II, and thus, without holding noble rank himself, he was able to witness the violent drama of royal power. It was, as Howard demonstrates, the perfect vantage point for a poet. Chaucer’s own poetic development from the mannered medieval style of The Book of the Duchess to the rich, comic, human complexity of The Canterbury Tales reflects the transformation of his world. With The Canterbury Tales and the darker, more formal epic Troilus and Criseyde , Chaucer established English for all time as a language of literature.
“A thoughtful, thorough book that conjures up the living presence of England’s first great poet more concretely than anybody has ever done before.”— San Francisco Chronicle Book Review
676 pages, Paperback
First published February 11, 1987
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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
December 18, 2009
This review appeared in the San Jose Mercury News in 1987:
IT doesn't surprise me that, according to one of those recent gloom-and-doom studies of American education, half of American high school seniors don't know who wrote "The Canterbury Tales." I'm just glad half of them do.
But I wonder how many of the people who did the survey and the editorial writers who agonized over its findings have actually read Chaucer. Or have read him since their English 101 survey courses.
I'm talking about Chaucer in his own language, Middle English. So-called translations don't work because maybe two- thirds of his language doesn't need translating. It's not grammar and syntax so much as vocabulary that makes reading Middle English laborious. Take the opening couplet of the "Canterbury Tales" prologue, for example:
Whan that Aprill with his shoures soote
The droghte of March hath perced to the roote . . .
A word-for-word translation would go:
When that April with his showers sweet
The drought of March hath pierced to the root . . .
But that messes up the meter and wrecks the rhyme. The syntax now sounds quaintly "poetic." But the translator who tries to render these lines in something resembling the original's metrical and rhyme schemes inevitably drives away some of their ease and spontaneity. And all this effort goes just to make sure a reader doesn't think those showers are sooty instead of sweet.
The reader of Chaucer has to put up with footnotes, not only to translate Middle English words, but also to explain the political, social and religious beliefs Chaucer took for granted. And the trouble with that is, as Samuel Johnson observed,"The mind is refrigerated by interruption."
So no wonder people are ignorant of Chaucer. Which is unfortunate, because he's probably the second-greatest English poet. The only other serious contender for best-after- Shakespeare is Milton. And for me, Chaucer is to Milton as Mozart is to Beethoven. Both are great, but the tie-breaker is which artist can both strike terror in your soul and make you laugh. Chaucer and Mozart can do that; Milton and Beethoven are long on terror, short on laughter.
A quarter-century after my own course in Chaucer, I still smile when I recall Alisoun's giggle in "The Miller's Tale," the eagle's bluster in "The House of Fame" or the barnyard fowls' banter in "The Nun's Priest's Tale." And thinking of Criseyde's despair and the fate of the rascals in "The Pardoner's Tale" gives me a frisson.
Much of the delight Chaucer has given me came rushing back as I read Donald R. Howard's biography of him. Actually, "biography" is too narrow a genre to stuff Howard's book into, for it's a work of history as well as of biography, and one built on imagination as well as scholarship. What we know for sure about Chaucer is mostly dry-as-dust stuff from official records of the 14th century English court, about the doings of a Geoffrey Chaucer who was first a page, then a soldier, then a diplomat and a civil servant. These records don't even tell us what year Chaucer was born or what day he died. We know he married one of the queen's attendants, but not how many children they had. We even know he was once accused of rape; we don't know whether that means abduction or sexual assault or whether he was guilty of the charge. We have only circumstantial evidence, in fact, that the Chaucer of these records is also Chaucer the poet.
Faced with not only such scanty evidence but also the webs of conjecture that scholars have woven about Chaucer over the centuries, Howard nevertheless puts together a coherent and convincing picture of Chaucer the man. And he also uses what we know of Chaucer's life and his poetry to shed light on his world.
That's quite an accomplishment, for the 14th century is almost as alien to ours as an imaginary civilization created by a sci-fi writer. Think, for example, of a world not only without television, movies or radio, but without print. Newspapers and magazines didn't exist; books were few and precious. It was a world not only without the internal combustion engine, but without road maps -- and there were precious few roads. As Howard points out, our word "travel" comes from the French travail, meaning "toil." To travel the distance from San Jose to San Francisco would take more than a day. A trip from England to Italy, such as the one Chaucer took in which he encountered Italian culture at the dawn of the Renaissance, took months, and was a trek through an uncharted wilderness in which one relied on strangers to point the way.
Before you get too swept away by the idea of a world without commuting and traffic jams, without talk shows and commercials, remember that it was also a world ignorant of microbiology, without antiseptics, with no clear sense of how disease was transmitted, let alone how it should be treated. Small wonder that the Black Death killed a third to a half of the population of England during Chaucer's lifetime.
It's tempting to compare Howard's book with Barbara Tuchman's best-selling "A Distant Mirror," another portrait of what Tuchman calls "The Calamitous 14th Century." Each book explores the age through the life of a representative man. Chaucer and Tuchman's central figure, Enguerrand de Coucy VII, lived at about the same time -- the last 60 years of the century. But I think, for us moderns, Chaucer is a better guide to the age than Tuchman's French nobleman. For Chaucer was not only a poet, he was also a professional man, a sort of medieval middle manager, born to the merchant class and educated into the service of the courts of Edward III and Richard II. He had the opportunity to explore not only England, France and Italy, but also several levels of society, and with Howard's help, we explore them with him.
Howard also crafts a full portrait of Chaucer himself, making us abundantly aware of Chaucer's achievements. He helped transform English culture by introducing to it what he had encountered in France and Italy. When the literature of pre- Norman Conquest Britain -- such as "Beowulf" and the Anglo-Saxon lyrics -- had been swept away, not to be recovered for centuries, Chaucer created works that are the fountainhead of English literature. Even the language of Chaucer's England was unsettled, as the Germanic stream of Anglo-Saxon crossed with the Romance stream of Norman French. The court stuck to French, and the language of learning was Latin, but Chaucer forged the vernacular, what we now call Middle English, into a powerful poetic instrument. Howard's book will probably be heavy going for the general reader only in its analysis of Chaucer's less-familiar works. Nobody but scholars spends much time with "The Book of the Duchess" or "The Parliament of Fowls" these days. Even "The House of Fame," which has wonderful sections, is too allegorical for the modern temperament. But Howard's commentary will be invaluable for anyone who wants to dust off the old anthology and read a few "Canterbury Tales," or to venture into Chaucer's greatest work, "Troilus and Criseyde."
Howard, a professor of English at Stanford, died last March of complications from AIDS, which it's too facile to call the Black Death of our age. This book is as fine a memorial as any writer could want, but there is an almost unbearable poignancy to its final sentence, in which Howard reflects on Chaucer's attitude toward death: "One must think of the world while one is in the world; facing eternity, our thoughts become closed within the self, our words become silence, and all our works upon this little spot of earth seem like the waves of the sea."
IT doesn't surprise me that, according to one of those recent gloom-and-doom studies of American education, half of American high school seniors don't know who wrote "The Canterbury Tales." I'm just glad half of them do.
But I wonder how many of the people who did the survey and the editorial writers who agonized over its findings have actually read Chaucer. Or have read him since their English 101 survey courses.
I'm talking about Chaucer in his own language, Middle English. So-called translations don't work because maybe two- thirds of his language doesn't need translating. It's not grammar and syntax so much as vocabulary that makes reading Middle English laborious. Take the opening couplet of the "Canterbury Tales" prologue, for example:
Whan that Aprill with his shoures soote
The droghte of March hath perced to the roote . . .
A word-for-word translation would go:
When that April with his showers sweet
The drought of March hath pierced to the root . . .
But that messes up the meter and wrecks the rhyme. The syntax now sounds quaintly "poetic." But the translator who tries to render these lines in something resembling the original's metrical and rhyme schemes inevitably drives away some of their ease and spontaneity. And all this effort goes just to make sure a reader doesn't think those showers are sooty instead of sweet.
The reader of Chaucer has to put up with footnotes, not only to translate Middle English words, but also to explain the political, social and religious beliefs Chaucer took for granted. And the trouble with that is, as Samuel Johnson observed,"The mind is refrigerated by interruption."
So no wonder people are ignorant of Chaucer. Which is unfortunate, because he's probably the second-greatest English poet. The only other serious contender for best-after- Shakespeare is Milton. And for me, Chaucer is to Milton as Mozart is to Beethoven. Both are great, but the tie-breaker is which artist can both strike terror in your soul and make you laugh. Chaucer and Mozart can do that; Milton and Beethoven are long on terror, short on laughter.
A quarter-century after my own course in Chaucer, I still smile when I recall Alisoun's giggle in "The Miller's Tale," the eagle's bluster in "The House of Fame" or the barnyard fowls' banter in "The Nun's Priest's Tale." And thinking of Criseyde's despair and the fate of the rascals in "The Pardoner's Tale" gives me a frisson.
Much of the delight Chaucer has given me came rushing back as I read Donald R. Howard's biography of him. Actually, "biography" is too narrow a genre to stuff Howard's book into, for it's a work of history as well as of biography, and one built on imagination as well as scholarship. What we know for sure about Chaucer is mostly dry-as-dust stuff from official records of the 14th century English court, about the doings of a Geoffrey Chaucer who was first a page, then a soldier, then a diplomat and a civil servant. These records don't even tell us what year Chaucer was born or what day he died. We know he married one of the queen's attendants, but not how many children they had. We even know he was once accused of rape; we don't know whether that means abduction or sexual assault or whether he was guilty of the charge. We have only circumstantial evidence, in fact, that the Chaucer of these records is also Chaucer the poet.
Faced with not only such scanty evidence but also the webs of conjecture that scholars have woven about Chaucer over the centuries, Howard nevertheless puts together a coherent and convincing picture of Chaucer the man. And he also uses what we know of Chaucer's life and his poetry to shed light on his world.
That's quite an accomplishment, for the 14th century is almost as alien to ours as an imaginary civilization created by a sci-fi writer. Think, for example, of a world not only without television, movies or radio, but without print. Newspapers and magazines didn't exist; books were few and precious. It was a world not only without the internal combustion engine, but without road maps -- and there were precious few roads. As Howard points out, our word "travel" comes from the French travail, meaning "toil." To travel the distance from San Jose to San Francisco would take more than a day. A trip from England to Italy, such as the one Chaucer took in which he encountered Italian culture at the dawn of the Renaissance, took months, and was a trek through an uncharted wilderness in which one relied on strangers to point the way.
Before you get too swept away by the idea of a world without commuting and traffic jams, without talk shows and commercials, remember that it was also a world ignorant of microbiology, without antiseptics, with no clear sense of how disease was transmitted, let alone how it should be treated. Small wonder that the Black Death killed a third to a half of the population of England during Chaucer's lifetime.
It's tempting to compare Howard's book with Barbara Tuchman's best-selling "A Distant Mirror," another portrait of what Tuchman calls "The Calamitous 14th Century." Each book explores the age through the life of a representative man. Chaucer and Tuchman's central figure, Enguerrand de Coucy VII, lived at about the same time -- the last 60 years of the century. But I think, for us moderns, Chaucer is a better guide to the age than Tuchman's French nobleman. For Chaucer was not only a poet, he was also a professional man, a sort of medieval middle manager, born to the merchant class and educated into the service of the courts of Edward III and Richard II. He had the opportunity to explore not only England, France and Italy, but also several levels of society, and with Howard's help, we explore them with him.
Howard also crafts a full portrait of Chaucer himself, making us abundantly aware of Chaucer's achievements. He helped transform English culture by introducing to it what he had encountered in France and Italy. When the literature of pre- Norman Conquest Britain -- such as "Beowulf" and the Anglo-Saxon lyrics -- had been swept away, not to be recovered for centuries, Chaucer created works that are the fountainhead of English literature. Even the language of Chaucer's England was unsettled, as the Germanic stream of Anglo-Saxon crossed with the Romance stream of Norman French. The court stuck to French, and the language of learning was Latin, but Chaucer forged the vernacular, what we now call Middle English, into a powerful poetic instrument. Howard's book will probably be heavy going for the general reader only in its analysis of Chaucer's less-familiar works. Nobody but scholars spends much time with "The Book of the Duchess" or "The Parliament of Fowls" these days. Even "The House of Fame," which has wonderful sections, is too allegorical for the modern temperament. But Howard's commentary will be invaluable for anyone who wants to dust off the old anthology and read a few "Canterbury Tales," or to venture into Chaucer's greatest work, "Troilus and Criseyde."
Howard, a professor of English at Stanford, died last March of complications from AIDS, which it's too facile to call the Black Death of our age. This book is as fine a memorial as any writer could want, but there is an almost unbearable poignancy to its final sentence, in which Howard reflects on Chaucer's attitude toward death: "One must think of the world while one is in the world; facing eternity, our thoughts become closed within the self, our words become silence, and all our works upon this little spot of earth seem like the waves of the sea."
May 8, 2025
A straggling and meditative outline of the fellow’s quite interesting life, this book is fairly readable despite being padded with a good deal of unimportant historical fluff.
October 27, 2007
I like this sort of work: both chatty and authoritative. If you want to avoid the lesser works such as the House of Fame or the Book of the Duchess, this gives succinct explanations of them with choice quotes. As he wades deeper into the Canterbury Tales, though, your mind will be blown wide open.
Interesting speculation about the rape charge against Chaucer while he was Comptroller of London too.
Interesting speculation about the rape charge against Chaucer while he was Comptroller of London too.
January 29, 2021
Somewhat unfocused & tries to include too much. When the author started going on about options for approaching the subject matter, I gave up. I mean, on p.35 he starts in on how so & so approached his biography about this other guy in such & such manner, but then this other author approached his biography about so & so in this other kind of manner, so in this book we could maybe approach Chaucer as.....etc., etc. I mean, make a decision & present the work, guy! Why, 35 pages in, am I reading about this deliberation & not about the subject matter of the book I picked up to read about?! Geez. This book has 502 pages & so far 25-30 pages of the 35 pages I managed to get through were mostly unnecessary. Enough already. I'm not doing this.
January 8, 2025
Exhaustively researched but still quite readable
I'm certainly no expert on Middle English literature but it's hard to imagine there's a more comprehensive biography of Geoffrey Chaucer than this. Of course his surviving writings are examined in detail but Howard also provides us with a thorough understanding of everything from 14th Century English politics to the pilgrimage routes to Rome. Even without his literary achievements Chaucer led a fascinating life and this is the biography he deserves.
I'm certainly no expert on Middle English literature but it's hard to imagine there's a more comprehensive biography of Geoffrey Chaucer than this. Of course his surviving writings are examined in detail but Howard also provides us with a thorough understanding of everything from 14th Century English politics to the pilgrimage routes to Rome. Even without his literary achievements Chaucer led a fascinating life and this is the biography he deserves.
February 15, 2024
I had this book on my "to read" shelf for literally years. I think I found it at a book sale but I actually don't remember. It seemed like rather a heavy commitment to get into it, and it was. But it was worth it. I can't say I knew much about Geoffrey Chaucer, beyond that he wrote "The Canterbury Tales." I know quite bit more now, as well as about the 14th century.
Chaucer came from a merchant family. His father was a wine merchant. They were well enough to do that they were able to get young Geoffrey a position as a page in the court of Countess Elizabeth, wife of Prince Lionel, King Edward III's second surviving son. Chaucer's "day job" through out his life was as one of the people who made the royal courts work. He served as a soldier in the wars in France, was captured and ransomed. He was sent to the Inns of Court to learn law and finance. He was appointed to various management positions of royal properties and served as controller of the wool customs. He was sent on missions for the king, most notably several trips to Italy.
In Italy Chaucer became familiar with Dant, Petrarch and Boccaccio, possibly meeting the later two. At any rate, he became familiar with their works and they affect Chaucer's later writing. Writers in Italy were experimenting with a new literary form, the novella, which Chaucer also probably became familiar with. Another new idea was rising, literature to be read for enjoyment. Through the Middle Ages reading for pleasure was looked on as something suspect and probably sinful, so that everything had to contain a moral lesson. With Petrarch, Boccaccio and Chaucer this idea began to fade away, though a certain amount of pretense remained.
Chaucer's background, rising from the merchant class, living and working in the court, travelling abroad, exposure to the literary currents in early renaissance Italy, gave him a perspective on the world that allowed him to craft tales depicting all levels of society and laying the groundwork for English literature.
Chaucer came from a merchant family. His father was a wine merchant. They were well enough to do that they were able to get young Geoffrey a position as a page in the court of Countess Elizabeth, wife of Prince Lionel, King Edward III's second surviving son. Chaucer's "day job" through out his life was as one of the people who made the royal courts work. He served as a soldier in the wars in France, was captured and ransomed. He was sent to the Inns of Court to learn law and finance. He was appointed to various management positions of royal properties and served as controller of the wool customs. He was sent on missions for the king, most notably several trips to Italy.
In Italy Chaucer became familiar with Dant, Petrarch and Boccaccio, possibly meeting the later two. At any rate, he became familiar with their works and they affect Chaucer's later writing. Writers in Italy were experimenting with a new literary form, the novella, which Chaucer also probably became familiar with. Another new idea was rising, literature to be read for enjoyment. Through the Middle Ages reading for pleasure was looked on as something suspect and probably sinful, so that everything had to contain a moral lesson. With Petrarch, Boccaccio and Chaucer this idea began to fade away, though a certain amount of pretense remained.
Chaucer's background, rising from the merchant class, living and working in the court, travelling abroad, exposure to the literary currents in early renaissance Italy, gave him a perspective on the world that allowed him to craft tales depicting all levels of society and laying the groundwork for English literature.
December 25, 2022
Wish there were more books out there like this. A nice blend of history and a look at Chaucer's writing, though I felt the second half really got bogged down a bit.
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