Chaucer 1340-1400: The Life and Times of the First English Poet

by Richard West

Buoyantly blending biography with history and literary criticism, this engaging new life of Geoffrey Chaucer follows the career of a man whose courtly offices situated him at the center of cultural and political activity in medieval London and whose poetry, especially the masterwork The Canterbury Tales, became a primary force in the evolution of modern English.

Genres: Biography, History, Nonfiction, Medieval, Literary Criticism

320 pages, Paperback

First published July 30, 2000

About the author

There is more than one author with this name

Richard West was a British journalist and author best known for his reporting of the Vietnam War and Yugoslavia.

Born in London, West attended Marlborough College before his national service spell in Trieste awakened a lifelong interest in Yugoslavia.

Starting off his journalistic career at the Manchester Guardian, West became a foreign correspondent in Yugoslavia, Africa, Central America and Indochina. Described by Neal Ascherson as the "paragon of the independent journalist for his generation", he would spend much of the next two decades in Vietnam, Africa and eastern Europe, where he was codenamned Agent Friday by Communist Poland's secret police. Among his books are The Making of the Prime Minister (with Anthony Howard),[4] An English Journey (1981) and Tito and the Rise and Fall of Yugoslavia (1995). Along with Patrick Marnham and Auberon Waugh, West was one of three signatories to a letter to The Times that called for a British monument to honour those repatriated as a result of the Yalta Conference; it was eventually erected in 1986.

Reviews

[David]

I bought this today. Chaucer's English is like digging rich soil. I adore it! It's all about my beloved fourteenth century as well. Apropos:

Eleanor judged the poetry contests or 'courts of love' in which troubadors vied in singing devotion to their ladies, first as aspirants, then as suppliants and suitors, and finally as accepted lovers who got their reward of a hand to kiss, but nothing more, since the rules demanded chastity, or at any rate secrecy. The spectacle of a young man wasting away for love was agreeable for middle-aged ladies then as now, not least to Eleanor. Thirty years later she could still succumb to the flattery of a German student who strummed his harp and sang:

Were the world all mine
From the sea to the Rhine,
I'd give it all
If so be the Queen of the English
Were in my arms.

[Barbara Moss · Rating 3 out of 5]

Informative, both about Chaucer's own day and about how his works have been received. What a pity Shakespeare did not write Henry II! But I was really struggling at the end with his opinionated dismissal of various critics while ignoring his own biases. In particular, his obsession with Chaucer's religious views: good Catholic or Lollard sympathizer: "Perhaps we can best understand Chaucer's religion by thinking of him as Anglican, even before the creation of the Church of England."

[Taryn Wolf · Rating 2 out of 5]

Not really a biography, more of a literary analysis.

[C. Michael · Rating 3 out of 5]

Well-written and easy reading, but note the "Times" in the title: much of this book is spent talking about politics and other aspects of culture in 14th-century Europe rather than about details of Chaucer's life in particular. Obviously that's relevant, though. Also, the amount of quotations from Chaucer's works might seem excessive to some. Decent introduction overall.

[Sofia Ophelia 🍉]

A fascinating read. I agree with some other reviews - it’s not a biography, more like a literary analysis of all of Chaucer’s works. There’s a chapter dedicated to each of his works. Great for students and general Chaucer enthusiasts alike.

[Nathan Albright · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book leaves one with a somewhat ambivalent feeling about Chaucer, and it likely reflects some ambivalence on the part of the author himself.  Containing a great deal of quotation from the author's writings and translations--and with Chaucer, the line between the two is always challenging because of the way that he openly acknowledged his plagiarism [1] of earlier writers--the book also looks at some of the more unsavory aspects of the author's life.  While the author is in praise of Chaucer's sunniness and wit and his ability to always look at the bright side of life, the author also notes that Chaucer appears to have taken the anti-Semitic blood libel seriously and passed it along in one of his stories while also engaging in behavior with younger women that left him open to at least one public rape accusation.  Like many creative and talented people, Chaucer was a complicated one and wrestling with his life is more complicated than it would be for many, especially since he left his views implicit on some of the more notable political and social matters of his day that people want to enlist him as a backer for their own views today.

This biography follows a rather conventional course from the author's birth to his death and, as it promises in its subtitle, looks not only at Chaucer's life and times but also the context of those lives in the greater society.  In the case of Chaucer, that context includes a particularly rich one, from the quickly forgotten horrors of the Black Death during his childhood to the celebrated horrors of the Hundred Years' War and the conflict between the Papacy and its opponents in Italy that encouraged violence by mercenaries, to conflicts about feminism, about taxation without representation in war-torn England, and about the preaching of John Wycliffe and his supporters.  As Chaucer appears to have shared many of the concerns of the Lollards, and was a known and public supporter of ousted King Richard II and his loyal uncle John of Gaunt, towards the end of the life he was in considerable danger over high politics.  The author spends a great deal of time, though, looking at Chaucer as a landmark English writer, a poet whose personal reticence and complacent attitude towards life helped form the stereotypical view of English writers to the present day, including Wodehouse and the writers from Monty Python, one of whom is critiqued for his attempts to enlist Chaucer as a pacifist.

Someone who reads this book fairly will find much to enjoy and appreciate, but will likely find Chaucer to be a somewhat difficult figure to wholeheartedly cheer on.  To be sure, Chaucer was vital in the English language, not the least because his appropriation of Latin, French, and Italian writing into English for a literate audience that was rapidly growing less bilingual allowed English to have enough culture to develop as a respected language, eventually.  Chaucer's writing, precisely because it was not particularly original, allowed Middle English to appropriate much of the great literature of Europe and to set the stage for later English writers like Shakespeare to further increase the cultural capital of the language.  Chaucer's own personal life was full of drama and excitement as a diplomat, politician, soldier, and literary celebrity, and like our celebrities today this was not an unmixed blessing or a sign of a spotless personal life.  The author does a good job at reminding us of Chaucer's personal shortcomings and frailties while also pointing out why his writing remains so important for those of us who speak and write in the English language even today.

[1] See, for example:

https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2017...

https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2016...

https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2015...

https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2014...

https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2013...

https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2012...

[Mac Fenwick · Rating 2 out of 5]

While there are some genuinely interesting sections of historical background, the book as a whole provides neither a useful historical or social analysis of the times nor any particularly penetrating insights into (or even any real understanding of) Chaucer's works.

In a way, though, it's hard to know how to judge the book, as it's hard to know what it is trying to do. As a biography of Geoffrey Chaucer it fails utterly, as West flits from topic to topic according to no apparent logic, and without any real attempt to shape or meld that according to Chaucer's life, the barest outlines of which are only visible in this jumble. As a work of literary criticism it is appalling as he consistently rejects any and all the insights of twentieth century literary analysis (he dismissively casts aside what he calls "all isms" because, for reasons never divulged or--one suspects--even considered, they are somehow not relevant to works written in the fourteenth century because, well, everyone was religious back then) substituting instead endless sets of quotations from Chaucer's works (sometimes in the original Middle English and sometimes modernised, with no indication of why -- although I suspect this mirrors which editions West happened to read) along with declarations of what they reveal to the author.

Historians from the 19th century are cited often and authoritatively, very few sources of any sort seem to have been consulted let alone digested, and yet West presents his musings as authoritative and well-informed. As I said above, there is some interesting information about the years leading up to Chaucer's work as a poet (in particular about the Black Death, the One Hundred Years' War and the influence of Italian humanists on Chaucer) and this leads the attentive reader to an interesting understanding of Chaucer as a Humanist/Renaissance author himself rather than as the exemplar par excellence of "Medieval Literature" but this is not really a thesis of West's, or at least he is not presenting that idea--as Chaucer would have said, there is wheat amongst the chaff for readers willing to put in the effort of sifting for it.

[Anja Murez · Rating 1 out of 5]

Biased conservative journalist writing about Chaucer — curious, but not convincing.  Compares Troilus and Criseyde with Casablanca (yep, the movie).  Takes exception to the views of Terry Jones, "pacifist" (dixit West, scathingly) and liberal comedian. Fulminates against marxist, feminist and postmodernist theory. Irritatingly insists on attributing narrators' and characters' opinions to Chaucer. Sneers nastily at Chesterton: "Unlike Chesterton, who often wrote as though he had wine or something stronger in his veins, Chaucer was obviously an abstemious man." (p. 44)  And doesn't even try to hide his homophobe and misogynist feelings:  "By Henry II Eleanor bore and raised two disastrous English kings, Richard the the Lionheart and John, whose unstable bloodline continued throughout the fourteenth century with the homosexual Edward II and the still more neurotic Richard II [...]" (p. 13);  "Although Eleanor spent sixteen years confined in castles because of her part in young Henry's rebellion, she had already poisened the minds of her three remaining sons, Geoffrey, Richard and John.  It was Geoffrey who said that, in the Plantagenet family, sons always hated their fathers, and he too went to an early, embittered death.  But it was Richard, the brave and handsome Coeur de Lion or Lionheart, on whom Eleanor worked her most baleful corruption by love.  Their relationship has been the subject of a play and a film, The Lion in the Winter, and could serve as a Freudian psychological case-history on how a selfish woman can turn her son into a homosexual." (p. 16)

[Patricia · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wonderful chance to learn about how the history of his time affected Chaucer. Interesting review of the period.

[Doris Raines · Rating 3 out of 5]

A VERY INTERESTING TITLE.