"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.

A lively, accessible and wide-ranging introduction to the life and work of the fourteenth-century poet Geoffrey Chaucer.

This book addresses portrayals of children in a wide array of Chaucerian works. Situated within a larger discourse on childhood, Ages of Man theories, and debates about the status of the child in the late fourteenth century, Chaucer’s literary children—from infant to adolescent—offer a means by which to hear the voices of youth not prominently treated in social history. The readings in this study urge our attention to literary children, encouraging us to think more thoroughly about the Chaucerian collection from their perspectives. Eve Salisbury argues that the child is neither missing in the late Middle Ages nor in Chaucer’s work, but is,rather, fundamental to the institutions of the time and central to the poet’s concerns.

Chaucer's Comic Providence presents readings of five of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales that dramatize sexual division and the lack of rapport between the sexes. These readings are founded on the psychoanalytic thinking of Jacques Lacan in his rereading of Freud and are motivated by Thormann's conviction that Chaucer understood what psychoanalysis would come to study as an unconscious operating in the subject that is independent of conscious control and desire. For psychoanalysis, the subject is interminably engaged with unconscious sexual difference and with what Lacan saw as the absence of sexual rapport. Chaucer's Comic Providence analyzes Chaucer's plots of sexual adventures, mishaps, and surprise to show how the five tales dramatize the lack of symmetry and absence of accord between the sexes. Ultimately, Thormann's interest here is in the ways these five narratives represent and deal with sexual division, in their means of handling what, in any case, cannot be avoided or mastered. Consequently, the resolutions of the narratives sponsor an ethics of desire: they affirm sexual pleasure and acknowledge misprision and limitation, but they do not compromise, close down, or finish with incompatibility, contraction, and limitation. Her reading, then, claims that Chaucer's poetry already reveals the unconscious that Freud is credited with discovering. As well, Chaucer not only anticipates Lacan's pronouncement that "the unconscious is structured like a language," but also his emphasis on unconscious sexual difference and the absence of rapport between the sexes. With few exceptions, while there has been much consideration of gender in Chaucer's stories, contemporary criticism of Chaucer has remained inimical or, at the least, largely indifferent, to psychoanalysis, yet because it considers both difference and continuity, change and perpetuation, and because it incorporates psychic processes, motives, functions, and dynamics operating outside of conscious awareness, psychoanalysis offers a wider range for analysis of Chaucer's tales than does gender theory alone. Chaucer's Comic Providence also addresses the unexpected, surprising, and providentially comic resolutions of Chaucer's tales, the concomitant abeyance of sexual conflicts, and the links between emergence and abeyance, which issue in the hope of a beneficent future.

The Logic of Love in The Canterbury Tales argues that Geoffrey Chaucer’s magnum opus draws inventively on the resources of late medieval logic to conceive of love as an "insoluble." Philosophers of the fourteenth century expended great effort to solve insolubilia, like the notorious Liar paradox, in order to decide upon their truth or falsity. For Chaucer, however, and in keeping with Christ’s admonition from the Sermon on the Mount, the lover does not judge – does not decide on – the beloved. Through a series of detailed and rigorously "non-judgmental" readings, Manish Sharma provides new insight into each of the prologues and tales and intervenes into scholarly debates about their collective import. In so doing, The Logic of Love in The Canterbury Tales deploys Chaucer’s understanding of charity to consider the limitations of modern critical approaches to The Canterbury Tales, including deconstruction, psychoanalysis, and gender theory. In the course of the analysis, Sharma shows not only how love and medieval philosophy together inform Chaucerian composition, but also how Chaucer could serve as a resource for contemporary theoretical reflections on love and ethics.

A lively and accessible introduction to the variety, depth, and wonder of Chaucer's best-known poem.

Two features distinguish the Canterbury Tales from other medieval collections of stories: the interplay among the pilgrims and the manner in which the stories fit their narrators. In his new book, Warren Ginsberg argues that Chaucer often linked tellers and tales by recasting a coordinating idea or set of concerns in each of the blocks of text that make up a 'Canterbury' performance. For the Clerk, the idea is transition, for the Merchant it is revision and reticence, for the Miller it is repetition, for the Franklin it is interruption and elision, for the Wife of Bath it is self-authorship, for the Pardoner it is misdirection and subversion. The parts connect because they translate one another. By expressing the same concept differently, the portraits of the pilgrims in the "General Prologue," the introductions and epilogues to the tales they tell, and the tales themselves become intra-lingual translations that begin to act like metaphors. When brought together by readers, they give the ensemble its inner cohesiveness and reveal what Walter Benjamin called modes of meaning. Chaucer also restaged events across his poem. They too become intra-lingual translations. Together with the linking passages that precede and follow a story, these episodes are the ligaments that stabilize the Tales and underwrite its remarkable elasticity. As much as the conceits that frame the work, the pilgrimage and the tale-telling contest, Chaucer's internal translations guided the construction of his masterpiece and the way his audiences have continued to read it.