The Life of Geoffrey Chaucer: A Critical Biography (Blackwell Critical Biographies)

About this book

This important new critical biography traces in carefully considered detail what is known of Geoffrey Chaucers personal life while exploring the fascinating relationship between the man of affairs who made so many improvisations and accommodations to ensure his own survival and the poet. He lived during that exciting and turbulent period in English history which saw not only the deposition of Richard II in 1399 but also the emergence of a new English poetry and a brilliant if short-lived English cultural renaissance. Close to the centre of government always identified with the kings affinity Chaucer undertook important and often secret diplomatic missions to France and Italy and bore financial and administrative responsibility for vital government offices at the Customs and the Kings Works. Derek Pearsall shows that Chaucers immersion in his troubled times was more intimately expressed in his work than is admitted by traditional accounts. The accommodations of his public life are seen as being of a piece with the habitual irony the studied elusiveness of the poetry in which almost everything that could be construed as comment on contemporary events is avoided. This major reexamination of Englands greatest narrative poet is supplemented with reproductions of Chaucers portraits and other illustrations including maps of medieval London.