The Essential Chaucer Reader

by Geoffrey Chaucer, Gerard NeCastro (Translator)

Geoffrey Chaucer, known as “the father of English poetry,” wrote some of the most memorable stories in the English language. Timeless in the issues and ideas that they touch upon, filled with the joy, despair, kindness, and wickedness of the human soul, his works speak clearly to generation after generation.Gathered together here in a new modern prose translation are Chaucer’s early works, The Book of the Duchess and The Parliament of Fowls, selections from The Legend of Good Women and The House of Fame, the favorite works from The Canterbury Tales, and more.

339 pages, Kindle Edition

First published September 29, 2013

About the author

Geoffrey Chaucer (c. 1343 – 25 October 1400) was an English poet, author, and civil servant best known for The Canterbury Tales. He has been called the "father of English literature", or, alternatively, the "father of English poetry". He was the first writer to be buried in what has since come to be called Poets' Corner, in Westminster Abbey. Chaucer also gained fame as a philosopher and astronomer, composing the scientific A Treatise on the Astrolabe for his 10-year-old son, Lewis. He maintained a career in the civil service as a bureaucrat, courtier, diplomat, and member of parliament.
Among Chaucer's many other works are The Book of the Duchess, The House of Fame, The Legend of Good Women, and Troilus and Criseyde. He is seen as crucial in legitimising the literary use of Middle English when the dominant literary languages in England were still Anglo-Norman French and Latin. Chaucer's contemporary Thomas Hoccleve hailed him as "the firste fyndere of our fair langage" (i.e., the first one capable of finding poetic matter in English). Almost two thousand English words are first attested to in Chaucerian manuscripts. As scholar Bruce Holsinger has argued, charting Chaucer's life and work comes with many challenges related to the "difficult disjunction between the written record of his public and private life and the literary corpus he left behind". His recorded works and his life show many personas that are "ironic, mysterious, elusive [or] cagey" in nature, ever-changing with new discoveries.