chaucer Flashcards
Info on Chaucer’s life is often frustrating because
much is known about his professional life, but little is “known” about his personal life and his career as a poet.
Chaucer’s parents were wine merchants and held minor court positions;
therefore, he maintained a role at court.
He was born into a “rising mercantile family,” part of a growing bourgeois class that brought much wealth to England,
while disrupting the old model of medieval social order (the three classes: aristocrats (fighting class); clergy (praying class); and peasants (working class)
He served under three (3) kings:
Edward III, Richard II, and Henry IV.
He was superbly but typically educated,
“probably” attending one of London’s fine grammar schools and later studying law at at one of the Inns of Court.
Chaucer’s poems reflect a vast reading in classical
Latin, French, and Italian (he was among the earliest English readers of these)
He traveled frequently to France during his lifetime
and made at least two trips to Italy.
He married “up” – a woman of a higher social status than he – Her name:
Philippa de Roet, a minor Flemish noblewoman whose sister later became mistress, then wife, of Chaucer’s great patron, John of Gaunt.
Chaucer wore different “hats”:
soldier, courtier, diplomat, and government official in a wide range of jobs, several of them lucrative.
His frequent work overseas extended his contacts
with French and Italian literature (great influences on his work).
His personal fortunes were affected by frequent struggles between
King Richard and his magnates.
Peasants Revolt of 1381 rocked English society.
(Peasants revolted for better pay and working/living conditions and were aided by some “renegade” priests. Of course, the king’s army put them down in short order, but they had “made a statement.”
1380: Chaucer was accused of X
1380: Chaucer was accused of raptus (rape in legal language—much “nervous” scholarship has resulted about this) by Cecilia Chaumpaigne, daughter of a London baker
What is known: the case was quickly
settled and hushed up at quite high levels of government.
He has been called a Janus-faced poet
: innovative at the levels of language and theme yet deeply involved with literary and intellectual styles that stretched back to Latin antiquity and 12th-13thcentury France. (foreign influences further evidenced)
Genres he perfected:
estates satire, dream visions, romance, fabliaux, exemplum (sermon), beast fable.
Specific foreign influences on Chaucer’s work:
Dante, Boccaccio, Petrarch (Italian) and Deschamps and Machaut (French).
With his reliance on the English vernacular,
he became a major literary figure with the likes of William Langland and the Pearl poet.
Chaucer’s New & Disruptive Perspectives: Role of Women and the emerging Middle Class (248)
important fact
CT are preserved on the famous
Ellesmere Manuscript
Literally about a pilgrimage
TRUE
Its greatness lies in its exploration of the variousness of the journey
and that journey’s reflection of a world pressured by spiritual and moral fractures.
Based loosely on Boccacio’s Decameron (tale of a pilgrimage of 10)
TRUE
Unlike Dante,
Chaucer is non-judgemental—at least he is not “openly” judgemental
