Presenting essays exploring Chaucer's identity as a London poet, and the urban context for his writings, this volume addresses the centrality of the city in Chaucer's work, and the importance of Chaucer to a literature and a language of the city.

"Eleven essays that explore how modern scholarship interprets Chaucer's writings"--Provided by publisher.

"A lively microbiography of Geoffrey Chaucer, the "father of English literature", focusing on the surprising and fascinating story of the tumultuous year that led to the creation of the Canterbury Tales"--Provided by publisher.

"More than any other canonical English writer, Geoffrey Chaucer lived and worked at the centre of political life--yet his poems are anything but conventional. Edgy, complicated, and often dark, they reflect a conflicted world, and their astonishing diversity and innovative language earned Chaucer renown as the father of English literature. Marion Turner, however, reveals him as a great European writer and thinker. To understand his accomplishment, she reconstructs in unprecedented detail the cosmopolitan world of Chaucer's adventurous life, focusing on the places and spaces that fired his imagination. Uncovering important new information about Chaucer's travels, private life, and the early circulation of his writings, this innovative biography documents a series of vivid episodes, moving from the commercial wharves of London to the frescoed chapels of Florence and the kingdom of Navarre, where Christians, Muslims, and Jews lived side by side. The narrative recounts Chaucer's experiences as a prisoner of war in France, as a father visiting his daughter's nunnery, as a member of a chaotic Parliament, and as a diplomat in Milan, where he encountered the writings of Dante and Boccaccio. At the same time, the book offers a comprehensive exploration of Chaucer's writings, taking the reader to the Troy of Troilus and Criseyde, the gardens of the dream visions, and the peripheries and thresholds of The Canterbury Tales. By exploring the places Chaucer visited, the buildings he inhabited, the books he read, and the art and objects he saw, this landmark biography tells the extraordinary story of how a wine merchant's son became the poet of The Canterbury Tales." -- Publisher's description.

One of the most comprehensive collections of primary source material available for the study of Chaucer's works: selections from a large number of writers regarded by Chaucer and his contemporaries as authorities in matters ranging from reading to romantic love, chivalric ideals to antifeminist charges, marriage to human destiny. The selections are drawn from works which Chaucer is known to have used, as well as other works representing significant medieval attitudes towards matters with which he, like many other authors of his day, concerned himself.

Represents the first time that disciples of history and English literature have joined forces to present new interpretations of late fourteenth-century English society.

Chaucer's masterpiece and one of the greatest narrative poems in English, the story of the lovers Troilus and Criseyde is renowned for its deep humanity and penetrating psychological insight. This new translation into modern English by a major Chaucerian scholar includes an index of the names relating to the Trojan War and an Index of Proverbs.