Chaucer: A European Life

by Marion Turner

A groundbreaking biography that recreates the cosmopolitan world in which a wine merchant’s son became one of the most celebrated of all English poets

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.

Genres: History, Biography, Nonfiction, Medieval, Biography Memoir, Criticism, Literature

624 pages, Hardcover

First published April 9, 2019

About the author

Marion Turner is associate professor of English at Jesus College, University of Oxford.

Reviews

[Antonomasia · Rating 4 out of 5]

Would you be interested in material from a final year undergrad or masters history module on 'England After the Black Death'? That's what quite a lot of this biography is like. It gives serious weight to the historical background and context of Chaucer's life and writing, and assumes pre-existing knowledge. I'd have jumped at the chance to study this topic back when I was at university - it wasn't available - so I was delighted with the unexpected level of historical detail. However, for some general readers, this book won't be quite what they want or expect from an author biography. To read cover to cover, and especially on audio (as I listened to most of it), I would only recommend it to people with a reasonable grounding in late medieval English history, who are unfazed by, and preferably actively interested in, discussion of the wool staple, Lollardy and so forth. Some things, like the Good Parliament and John of Gaunt, get so much detail that it probably doesn't matter if they were only names to you at the beginning, though this is certainly a book where it helps to have existing scaffolding on which to put all the new stuff it will tell you. There is some excellent and detailed analysis of all of Chaucer's works - and instances of original and meticulous archival research, producing new dates for documents and new connections - but if it's just the literary angle you want, you'd be better simply dipping into Chaucer: A European Life.

For all the historical content, Chaucer himself, and his work, are viewed here through a very contemporary lens. At one point, Turner says that The Parlement of Foules only makes sense as a text that is post-Good Parliament (April-July 1376) but pre-Wonderful Parliament (Oct-Nov 1386). I reckon Chaucer: A European Life will make most sense in future as a text that is post-Brexit referendum (June 2016) but pre-Brexit (or some defining event or phase in the years shortly after Brexit)*. One UK Amazon reviewer describes Marion Turner's Chaucer as a "proto-Lib Dem Remain voter". Quite frankly, they're right, and the only way in which he differs noticeably from said political caricature is a genuine and deep interest in the English regions, and especially the voices of a wide range of ordinary people. He is from a middle-class family in the South of England. He travels to Europe for work. He is well-connected to top people and works as a senior civil servant. He does business with, and stands up for, European immigrants, at a time of increased populist xenophobia which is co-opted by other factions of powerful men for their own ends, and which has its roots in economic and employment issues and legislation that exacerbates them.

The angles on Chaucer's works are also very contemporary. From an academic book I'd hope for some really fresh, new ideas, but whilst there is one fairly novel and interesting approach - to examine how the work was shaped by the physical spaces the author inhabited, from changing domestic architecture, to commute, to libraries and royal courts visited - it often felt less present than other angles and attendant phrases very familiar from online culture wars discussion, e.g. 'who gets to have their voice heard', 'women's voices'. Although Turner never actually uses the phrase 'the single story' it's implied so strongly that it may as well appear in the book several times. Chaucer and Ovid are presented as authors who write, and who are interested in, multiple voices and women's voices; in the other, 'single story' camp are supporters of imperialism (imperialist language and iconography was growing at this time, and was used by, among others, Bernarbo Visconti and Richard II) and aristocratic power - Dante, Petrarch and Virgil. (It was interesting and, actually, surprising, to hear a positive mention of Ovid in this context, as 95% of discussion of Ovid I saw during the 2010s was in articles and social media posts about rape scenes and trigger warnings. I still can't quite compute recent material about him that makes no reference to that - Turner doesn't - and it was perplexing to find this, from a clearly social-justice minded writer, painting him as good at writing women, when almost everything else recently says he is one of the worst, without explaining where that fitted in.) There seems to be a subtext - again responding to a 2010s social media conversation - that yes, Chaucer was a middle to upper-middle class white man, but his representations of women and of other classes were so good, at a time from which relatively few literary works survive, that you should totally read him anyway.

Another count on which Petrarch is pitted against Chaucer is on that medieval binary opposition of otium versus negotium. Whilst Petrarch, as described here, did not advocate total hermitic isolation, Turner explains how he favoured a retreat to the country to write with one's books, and correspondence with a small circle of intellectual (male) friends. Many examples are given from Chaucer's poems in which he exhorts both the reader and fictional versions of himself (20th century postmodernists did *not* invent authorial insertion!) to get out of the study or the house and talk to other people. Reading and studying was then quite a new practice for laypeople, and whilst the tide of opinion seems to have been in favour of it, Chaucer seems to have felt there was more to be lost than to be gained from it. Thus one can see where Turner's Chaucer implicitly stands on some other contemporary media debates (in their most simplified and facile versions): stop sitting on your own with the internet and talk to people IRL; don't let yourself get into an echo chamber or bubble; be part of urban revitalisation rather than decamping to the countryside.

Most of the time this contemporary lens seemed to me like a reasonable way of looking at the politics of the 14th century, as it was always thoroughly reasoned and not glib (unlike countless introductions and asides in recent TV history documentaries, which sound like they are scoring cheap points, and which may alienate a percentage of viewers, among types of people that many of those working in television never meet). However, Turner's Chaucer, as a character portrait, suffers rather from being 'the only modern man', that trope of historical fiction. Also, I think the best history-writing is explicit about how interpretations are made in and affected by the present-day context, and how they follow those made in other times which had different contexts - that is where Turner fails big time. (The best example of this type of historiography I've ever read is in Ronald Hutton's Pagan Britain (2013).) Though Turner is, of course, primarily a literature scholar, and they operate somewhat differently; it seems rarer that they take a detached or longer perspective on the trends and conditions influencing their field in the present.

When I first started listening to Chaucer: A European Life in summer 2019, I was disappointed by its modernity and gave up. However looking back now I think this had a lot to do with my irritability in hot weather. I felt vindicated by this review in the Los Angeles Review of Books, with paragraphs like
This is a comfortable version of Chaucer, ready for easy and wide public consumption: he’s cosmopolitan, secular, broadminded, politically savvy yet independent. The book’s deliberate accessibility, and its evocation of a more relatable Chaucer, deserves some praise. But this approach runs a risk, that the same enthusiasm to make Chaucer more accessible will gloss over what makes him uneasily medieval, someone who thought and moved through the world in ways impossibly remote and alien to us.

I want that alienness and remoteness; I want my history - and translations - to be 'made strange' as the phrase goes. It's quite a lot of what I'm reading it for. It seemed as if this was a mirror image of books like Graham Robb's The Discovery of France, which greatly exaggerates how 'old fashioned' and 'primitive' things were.

But actually, as I realised when I started listening again in December Chaucer: A European Life could be a lot worse on this count. It is, per se, accurate. We do hear just how long it takes to travel across Europe on diplomatic missions (one of the things I always crave from history is hearing about details of life in a lower-technology world). We do hear about people who, surprisingly, continued to be treated as respectable members of society despite things that one would have thought (based on Victorian or 20th century morality) would bar them from that, and not just nobility, but men like an overseer of production standards for a guild near Chaucer's childhood home, who had multiple convictions for street violence, or scribes who were also brothel-keepers - among the earliest known owners of Chaucer manuscripts. (I suspect that as the population was much lower, there just weren't enough skilled people for it to make sense to boot someone out for things like this. It would be interesting to see if there were any difference before and after the Black Death - though compared with current population levels where most workers are replaceable, that would be a marginal difference.) We hear about the frequency of kidnappings for marriage: not just that this was one of the possibilities in the Cecily Chaumpaigne case - long a question over Chaucer's reputation, appearing in legal records as raptus, an ambiguous term at the time; since the publication of Turner's book, new evidence has appeared which lends a modicum of weight to the kidnapping argument - but also about how Chaucer's father, as a boy, was abducted by an aunt who wanted to marry him off to her female heir.

But the focus on implicit parallels with current politics, and on emphasising points about the works that chime with social media, means that these things often feel merely like occasional aberrations. Overall, it feels like we don't hear about that many of the things on which the 2016-2019 comfortably-off "Lib Dem Remain voter" type would disagree with Chaucer or find baffling or unrelatable about him or his world. (In particular, after the early chapters, there isn't enough sense of the precariousness of being alive, of memento mori imagery, usually seen to characterise the generations who survived, and lived just after, the Black Death, and of the psychological and practical effects of repeated onslaughts from a new and more virulent epidemic disease and how people responded to it.) Chaucer, both here and as more widely portrayed, is of a piece - and perhaps he really was - with Shakespeare and Dickens: not just a master wordsmith but an extrovert, politically canny, and financially astute to boot. These qualities are what seem to make a classic writer appeal to tub-thumping Englishness, not just to academics or avid readers or romantics. (Someone to go down the pub with, someone you'd take advice from.)

I am glad to have learnt so much more about the political history of later 14th century England - stuff I'm unlikely to have bothered with if it weren't sandwiched with more appealing social and cultural history like this, and I enjoyed Turner's interpretations of the texts. I hope to finally read The Canterbury Tales in full sooner rather than later to take advantage of the new ways of looking at it given here. For some reason, I'd been fascinated by the title 'The Parliament of Fowls' since I was a child - but a babysitter who was an Eng Lit student told me it was actually boring, and put me off trying to read it ever since; now I can replace that with Turner's explanation of it as a poem about a 1370s parliament, about representatives of those lower down the social scale asserting their voices, power and worth (though that just means gentry as opposed to aristocracy).
Sometimes, in Turner's biography, Chaucer's texts are texts, in a Barthian sense, but more often than not her interpretations are grounded in their historical context. The context for that interpretation, in its turn, has just been inadvertently provided by another LARB piece, 'Reading Shakespeare in the Anthropocene':
For the past 25 years, the dominant mood in scholarship on early modern literature has been New Historicist, and what this means is that a generation or two of scholars have been trained to see these old texts as documents of and about the past.
(I feel very 'seen' by this. Often New Historicism is mentioned casually as a thing of the past, even of the 1980s. But according to this take, I was at university around the beginning of this current/recent phase; most of my favourite courses were intellectual history, often using texts that, I see now from spending more time in the online book world, Literature thinks of as its property - sometimes disliking such 'anthropological' readings of texts. This study was, in part, the root of my approach to any literature, as a document of and about its and its author's time and place, though I always had seen it this way to an extent, as long as I had been aware of the publication dates of books I read.)

Possibly the audience for Chaucer: A European Life is limited by the depth with which it treats both history and literature - but there will also be some readers for whom it's a bonus to hear about each, and how they entwine.

If you are reading this post on desktop, there is lots more detail below in the status updates.

(Listened from June, but mostly Dec, 2019 to Jan 2020; reviewed Jan 2020)


* Note April 2020: So that would probably be pre coronavirus pandemic. I reckon the 14th century fear of disease and subsequent plague outbreaks would get more attention if this biography were still being written just now. We're yet to see much of how / to what extent the pandemic will alter political tribalism.

[Karen Brooks · Rating 5 out of 5]

This newest biography of Geoffrey Chaucer, the medieval poet, diplomat and court official is a tour de force. Whereas other biographies of the poet have examined what can be gleaned of this amazing man’s life from various contemporary documents, art, funeral effigies, family trees, etc. as well as his marvellous fictive works, Marion Turner starts with the premise that one writes what one knows, drawing on the familiar to compose fiction and fabliaux. Assuming this was also what Chaucer did, even when translating and appropriating other sources, she uses his works as a primary source (as well as many, many relevant contemporary documents and the work of chroniclers) to make sense of the various events in his life. Afterall, whether it was to whom he dedicated a piece of work or a character like the real-life Harry Baily owner of the Tabard Inn in Southwark who hosts the Canterbury Pilgrims, Chaucer wrote what and who he knew. As a consequence, this biography not only takes on a rich and new relevance as Turner invites us to examine everything Chaucer worked upon and rewrote and reworked, such as his tribute to the Duchess, Blanche Lancaster, The Book of the Duchess, or his translation and retelling of The Romance of the Rose or his unfinished and arguably greatest or best-known work, The Canterbury Tales, as a critique of both his own life and the times. Further, as Turner delves deeper into Chaucer’s works, she also deconstructs them and their meaning, providing another layer of denotation to not just Chaucer’s life, but his poetry. So this book is both biography and a wonderful literary analysis.
The title alludes to the fact that though Chaucer was a Londoner by birth and for most of his life, a man of the court, streets and castles and estates beyond, he was also very much a man of the world, traveling to various foreign ports for king and country, negotiating royal marriages, loans, fighting wars, able to speak other languages (naturally, French and Latin, but also Italian), meeting with despots, mercenaries and nobles. He also encountered the works of some of the greatest writers of the era and allowed them to influence his writings – Dante, Petrarch and Boccaccio among them. He was perceived as a man of worth – not because of his birth, but because of his formidable talents and skills and his ability to dine with princes and paupers. So much so, he was ransomed for the kingly sum of 16 pounds when he was captured by the French when still very young. He was a man of the world as much as he was of the kingdom of his birth.
Patronised by John of Gaunt and paid annuities by three kings, Chaucer bore witness to many great and tragic events of his age: royal ascensions, falls, death, births, the plague, wars, famine, riots and rebellions as well as unjust and just behaviour. Married to Philippa, the sister of John of Gant’s infamous mistress and later wife, Katherine Swynford, he was also close to the centre of power in more than physical ways. Chaucer witnessed the best and worst of human behaviour and relationships and among all walks of life – what love, war, power, avarice, lust etc can do to people, how it can bring out the best and worst - and never lost his fascination for writing about these and the people who experienced them.
Able to remain on the right side of the monarch and the powers surrounding him for most of his life, Chaucer, though famous within his own lifetime, also managed to fly under the sometimes very taut and tense radar surrounding his primary patron, Gaunt, who was variously accused of treason, plotting against the king and was, for an extended period, the most hated man in England as the peasants (and others) blamed him for all the country’s perceived ills. So bad did feelings run, that during the Peasants Revolt of 1381, and which it’s likely Chaucer witnessed from his rooms above Aldgate, Gaunt’s main residence, the palatial and beautiful Savoy, was utterly destroyed.
It’s testimony to Chaucer that, unlike other Lancastrian cronies during the 1380s and 1390s, he managed to stay in the king’s (Richard II’s) good graces and thus avoid punishment, exile or death when so many others failed. Turner beautifully extrapolates how and why this may have happened – in no small part due to Chaucer’s great understanding of human nature and ability to walk in others’ shoes regardless of birth, education, beliefs, and even sex – all of which we’re privy to through his works. Perhaps the greatest irony is that while Chaucer was able to describe in allegorical and rich detail the pathos, sadness and joy love can bring, and place in his character’s mouths all sorts of notions about amour and marriage, his own doesn’t appear to have been too successful.
Despite this, his children went on to accomplish things their middle-class father, the son of a vintner, could once have only dreamed and which Chaucer, with his focus throughout his works on “gentillesse” as a worthy quality, despite rank, would have nonetheless appreciated. Some of the greatest bloodlines, houses and nobles descend from Chaucer’s grand-children. But the greatest gift he left us, and which Turner mainly celebrates and helps us to appreciate even more, are his works. But it’s as the “father of English Literature” that he’s best remembered – the man who gave the English their own poetry and voice in their own language, with eloquence, imagination, humour and beauty.
This is a fabulous, erudite piece of scholarship that’s also beautifully written and easily understood. A wonderful addition to the Chaucer canon and a great read for anyone interested in history, poetry, literary analysis and, of course, the enigmatic, clever and always creative, Chaucer.

[Tim O'Neill · Rating 5 out of 5]

Reading Marion Turner's densely detailed and fascinating biographical analysis of Chaucer's works reminded me of the experience of reading Donald R. Howard's somewhat similar book Chaucer: His Life, His Works, His World (1987) as a student 30 years ago. Like Howard, Turner takes a historicist approach that sheds light on Chaucer and his work by examining what we know (and can surmise) about his life and its context. But while Howard took a more traditional biographical approach, Turner's work is arranged not just chronologically but with particular emphasis on the places and locations that Chaucer knew: his family's world of mercantile London, his youthful world of the court of Prince Lionel and the rest of the royal households, and then further afield to France and Italy. These explorations form the first section of the book - "Becoming" - and sets the context for the rest of Turner's examination of Chaucer's work.

The second section - "Being" - looks at Chaucer's career and his earlier works and influences, again by examining places as context, though in this part the places in question are as varied as the counting house at the Wool Staple on the London docks, which was Chaucer's work environment for many years, to the Milky Way, with an examination of his fascination with astronomy, his Treatise on the Astrolabe and his use of celestial journeys and the perspective they give in several of his poems.

The final section - "Approaching Canterbury" - examines the break with his former works that is evident in the maturity of his poetry found in the Canterbury Tales. The fact that the pilgrims are left always on the road to Canterbury but never quite arriving is shown as part of Chaucer's interest in peripheries and liminality; a deliberate artistic choice and not an accident of the work's unfinished or fragmentary nature.

This is a fine contribution to Chaucer scholarship and actually a fascinating book even for a general reader. Some knowledge of Chaucer's poetry would be very useful for the latter if they want to keep track of the literary analysis Turner presents, but she does not assume or require any deep knowledge of it or its attendant scholarship. Similarly, a good overview of the politics of the reign of Richard II may be helpful to keep track of the conflicts and clashes that punctuate Turner's narrative, but they too are generally explained sufficiently.

The political side to Chaucer's life is particularly interesting in this book and it reminds even those who are familiar with his biography how entangled he was with the great events of his day. Turner's work stands somewhat in contrast to the assessment of some other scholars like Paul Strohm, who in his recent book Chaucer's Tale: 1386 and the Road to Canterbury (2014) argued that the political upheavals of the "Wonderful Parliament" of 1386 left Chaucer "jobless, homeless, separated from his wife, exiled from his city, and isolated in the countryside of Kent". Turner does not agree, and presents Chaucer as actually highly adept at negotiating the political storms and thus able to always (literally) keep his head, unlike some of his friends and associates.

This is a lengthy, detailed and wide-ranging study which will be a key scholarly reference for many years to come.

[Paul Dembina · Rating 3 out of 5]

To be honest I found this to be rather a hard slog. Little is known about Chaucer outside of his written works so Marion Turner turns to the history of the period when Chaucer lived. Much of this seems to be about who did what to whom and complex relationships between various members of the aristocracy.

[R.L.S.D · Rating 5 out of 5]

A genuinely exciting look at how art crafts life, how physical space creates art, and how the places we inhabit invent us. History and literary analysis have rarely cooperated so well. In a Chaucerian vision in which "all perspective is partial and we need to hear as many voices as possible," Marion Turner's is a wonderful voice. Not your typical biography.

[J M-B · Rating 5 out of 5]

It would be unfortunate if the many who have marked this book as 'to read' are put off by the few negative reviews that it has attracted on this site. The life records of Chaucer are limited and are pretty much identical to those published by the Chaucer Society in the Nineteenth century. Inevitably, new biographers need to bring new perspectives and interpretive insights to both those life records and the works of Chaucer. This Marion Turner does really quite brilliantly. Her focus on localising his social and geographical settings provides a rich and productive frame for analysis of his development and the impact of place (social as well as spatial) on his work. This is particularly visible in her treatment of the antisemitism in the always problematic tale of the Prioress in The Canterbury Tales. Turner's book is not a work that is beyond the interested lay reader and it is one that well repays the effort of following her account of his life and her readings of his works.

[Sydney Young · Rating 5 out of 5]

How is it that I find myself enamored with this book? The structure, the subject, the characters, the world, the strange parallels to our times. I didn’t just read this, I studied it.

[Illiterate · Rating 3 out of 5]

Turner evokes places as contexts for Chaucer’s life and work. It’s a novel approach, and she uses it well.

[J.A. Ironside · Rating 5 out of 5]

As a writer of historical fiction, I’ve long held the opinion that to really take the pulse of an era, to capture its mindset, you need to read the poetry written at that time. Marion Turner seems to be proving that theory correct with her book. Chaucer – A European Life is a fascinating account of England’s second national poet and an essential resource for the Medieval historical fiction writer. More than merely a discussion of the Canterbury Tales, the book tracks Geoffrey Chaucer’s career, looking at his childhood in Vintryward, his time serving in great houses, and the number of other jobs he held.

We remember Chaucer as first and foremost, a poet, but he was also a soldier, a diplomat, a forester, a royal servant, a retainer of the royal household, a clerk in the Savoy Palace and Clerk of the Works. (Yes, fellow writers, even Chaucer had a day job!) He was a polymath, a multilingual common man who rose based on his own merits in an England and Europe which was only just emerging from the older Villeinage based feudal system into something more recognisable to today’s readers. Chaucer travelled widely and as a consequence his poetry reflected his change in awareness and perspective from being an art form reserved for the great and wealthy, to a form which poked fun at the world whilst still posing difficult questions. He never answered these questions but left the reader – or listener as it would have been in 14th C – to draw their own conclusions.

Nor does York shy away from some of Chaucer’s shadier dealings – the accusation of rape made against him by Cecily Champagne or whether he was so tied up in Lancastrian dealings that his loyalties to the realm were corrupted. As York points out, we cannot absolutely know Chaucer the man or what he thought or, where there is no evidence, what he did, but York lays out her case in a way which shows what conclusions are possible or even probable, leaving the reader to make up their own mind.

It’s an amazingly well researched and gripping book, with the added bonus of lots of details of Medieval life that most historical texts just don’t concern themselves with. If you’re writing histfic set around the 13th and 14th C or are interested in that period, this is an excellent starting point for those details that make up world building, mindset and politics. I read the audiobook, read by York herself. She’s an engaging narrator even with a few odd ways of pronouncing certain words. Highly recommend.

 

[Ed Eleazer · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book suffers from the problems inherent in most postmodern literary analyses. The insights are few and far between, and when they do come up, they are usually analyses of points obvious to even the uninitiated reader. Telling the story of Chaucer's life by analyzing / describing the spaces he inhabited is an interesting idea, but the result in this biography is a mashup of various historical texts with very little insight into Chaucer's character or work. Overall, the book does a fine job of re-emphasizing how Chaucer sought out and celebrated the many voices and their "authority" in determining what is truth for each individual. However, the book's pilgrimage is long and dry. I kept looking to see how many pages I had left, knowing I had to read to the bitter end since I had paid full price for this thing. Donald Howard's biography, or even John Gardner's, is more readable and insightful.

[William Bennett · Rating 4 out of 5]

The sheer level of detail, context, and analysis contained in this book is both captivating and daunting. I’ve always had a fascination for Chaucer and his tales, and picked up this biography after having heard the author speak at an online event. For all its interest to me, it was challenging to get through—the writing is dense and scholarly, and not exactly approachable. The history/context and the literary analysis could each be hefty tomes on their own. But the complete picture given by the author is compelling and persuasive.

[Ann Otto · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book is based on academic research with detailed notations at the bottom of each page. I had hoped for a Simon Schama-type work, well researched yet very readable and interesting to the lay reader. These 508 pages and 90 additional pages of bibliography and index are possibly excellent resources for researchers, but the narrative doesn't engage the lay reader or entice them to go further into Chaucer's works.

[Becky Loader · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not quite what I expected: a bio and a critique of the writings of Chaucer. A huge behemoth of a volume to read!

[Antonio Gallo · Rating 4 out of 5]

Geoffrey Chaucer fu più che uno scrittore inglese. Fu anche un grande poeta Europeo. E’ stato uno dei primi autori che ho dovuto conoscere agli inizi dei miei studi in lingua inglese. Questo recente libro pubblicato da una studiosa dell’Università di Oxford lo conferma sin da titolo che dà al suo libro: Chaucer: A European life. Si deve tenere bene in mente che stiamo parlando di uno scrittore vissuto tra il 1340 e il 1400. Secoli che fanno la differenza. Parlare di Europa può essere considerato da qualcuno quanto meno azzardato.

L’autrice del libro scrive in un articolo uscito sulla apprezzata rivista digitale internazionale AEON che l’inglese Chaucer, oltre che narratore, fu anche poeta e per giunta può essere considerato uno dei primi poeti e scrittori di risonanza europea. Per provare questa sua affermazione, legata anche alla sua modernità ed attualità, l’autrice cita un articolo apparso nella rivista mensile Prospect del 2013 in cui si paragona il partito di Nigel Farage, capo sostenitore dei fautori dell’uscita dall’Unione Europea, a quella colorita umanità di uomini e donne inglesi che appaiono nei famosi Racconti di Canterbury, veri e propri archetipi di chiara estrazione “inglese”, tanto di ieri, quanto di oggi.

E’ a questo proposito che la studiosa Marion Turner mette in scena la “inglesità” dei racconti di Canterbury e afferma la modernità di uno scrittore e poeta inglese che sarebbe diventato anche europeo. Ogni attento lettore ne può avere conferma leggendo le cronache che arrivano in questi giorni con tutti i media moderni dal Parlamento britannico. I suoi membri, rappresentanti della più antica democrazia del mondo, sono stati addirittura paragonati a degli scimpanzè. Tutto a causa di una lunga serie di circostanze e comportamenti legati alla politica ed ai sentimenti che gli inglesi hanno dimostrato di avere nei confronti della realtà europea. Isolani che hanno considerato sempre il Continente “isolato” a causa della … nebbia sulla Manica.

Questa identità va ritrovata, secondo le scrittrice, in quei racconti che costituiscono il libro e che hanno concorso a dargli la fama di “Padre della Letteratura Inglese”, oltre che rappresentante dell’intera nazione inglese. Questi racconti videro la luce nel 1387. Quando l’autore passò a miglior vita, venne sepolto nell’Abbazia di Westminster perchè era ivi residente. 150 anni dopo venne spostato nel cosiddetto angolo dei poeti. John Dryden lo nominò “father” della poesia inglese, con l’aggiunta che Chaucer rappresentava “l’intera nazione”.

Col passare del tempo anche i Vittoriani furono convinti della “Englishness” di Chaucer, “Inglese fino all’osso”, per così dire. Fu G. K Chesterton a portare il “figlio del vinaio” al massimo della “inglesità” quando ebbe modo di scrivere: “Chaucer fu il Padre del suo Paese, alla maniera di George Washington”. Lo scrittore e critico Peter Ackroyd, nel suo libro “Brief Lives” del 2004 descrive i “Canterbury Tales come una “epica di “Inglesità”, definendo Chaucer “geniale e sorridente emblema di “Inglesità”.

Forse questa veste di “Englishness” sarebbe apparsa strana allo stesso Chaucer. Egli infatti fu in grado di trasformare la poesia inglese proprio a causa del suo innato internazionalismo, in quanto, come tutte le persone istruite del suo tempo, egli conosceva diverse lingue, la filosofia antica, le traduzioni latine dei trattati scientifici arabi, la poesia d’amore francese. La sua buona conoscenza dell’italiano, i suoi viaggi in Italia, gli diedero l’opportunità di conoscere la poesia di Dante, Boccaccio e Petrarca. Per queste sue caratteristiche conoscenze può essere considerato un fenomeno europeo. Seppe trasferirle al meglio nella sua cultura, non dimentichiamolo, in un epoca che non aveva nulla di moderno con tutte le sue reti di comunicazione.

L’influenza di questi poeti italiani cambiò la poesia inglese. Lo sviluppo del pentametro, ad esempio, le dieci sillabe, i cinque accenti, il tutto divenne la forma del verso inglese ispirata dall’endecasillabo italiano. Fu lui a tradurre per primo il sonetto di Petrarca in inglese. Questo internazionalismo smentisce l’idea di “archetipi inglesi” dei pellegrini di Canterbury. Il personaggio della moglie di Bath è ben lontano dal prototipo iscritto al partito dell’UKIP. La “moglie di Bath” assomiglia di più a quella del “Roman de la Rose” francese e agli stereotipi latini di San Gerolamo nel Adversus Jovinian.

L’idea di un gruppo di persone che raccontano storie mentre sono in viaggio nacque da fonti diverse, tra le quali Boccaccio con il “Decamerone”. Molti dei racconti di Canterbury non hanno luogo in Inghilterra. L’ambientazione va dall’Asia Centrale alla Siria, al nord Italia, passando per le Fiandre. Poche sono le fonti inglesi. Il primo viaggio che Chaucer fece sul continente ebbe luogo nel 1359. Non aveva nemmeno 20 anni. Combattè nella “Guerra dei Cento anni”, venne fatto prigioniero a Reims, visitò la città di Navarre, oggi nella Spagna del Nord, allora un Paese indipendente, una comunità multiculturale dove Ebrei, Musulmani e Cristiani coesistevano in una realtà piuttosto pacifica. Fece due viaggi in Italia in missione diplomatica, visitò la Lombardia, Firenze e Genova. Fu spesso in Francia a negoziare trattati, favorire matrimoni di interesse, alleanze, territori di confine, allora sotto forte una forte influenza della politica inglese.

Gran parte della sua formazione sia mercantile, commerciale e diplomatica, che linguistica e culturale, la fece sul campo, in aree diverse, di spiccato carattere europeo. Apparteneva, inoltre, ad una famiglia che dei traffici e del commercio aveva fatto la sua ragion d’essere. Era nato in una zona di Londra dove, sul Tamigi, vedeva passare navi piene sia di mercanti che di immigranti, un andare e venire da tutto il mondo. Un sistema commerciale già molto avviato ed organizzato, collegato con l’Asia, l’Africa e il resto dell’Europa. Ebbe modo di crescere e formarsi in maniera autonoma e indipendente di quello che oggi chiameremmo economia ed interscambio globale.

Quando entrò al servizio prima dei figli e poi del Re stesso, potè prendere parte alle vita internazionale di Corte. Si sposò anche con una donna di Hainault di origine franco belga. Le sue idee politiche erano legate strettamente alla sua identità inglese, all’epoca monopolista ed anche xenofoba. Fu sempre, comunque, un internazionalista, anche se avanti lettera. Quando verso il 1370 i commercianti di Londra diffusero le voci che i concorrenti mercanti italiani lucravano nel commercio della lana e pretendevano il monopolio dal Parlamento, li denunziarono come sodomiti, ebrei e saraceni e li bandirono da questo commercio. In questo periodo Chaucer aveva lavorato e viaggiato verso Genova con mercanti italiani per negoziare la disputa insieme a John Gaunt uno degli coloro che si opponevano ai monopolisti.

Secondo l’autrice del libro la “inglesità” di Chaucer va trovata nella sua capacità di saper negoziare ed operare a livello europeo. Egli, oltre che un controllore doganale del commercio della lana, fu anche operatore in questo settore commerciale. Fu in contatto con operatori economici come l’italiano Matthew Janyn, noto finanziatore del Re. Richard Lyons, Jacobi Provan e John de Mari sono nomi noti in questo ambiente, sono a lui collegati in scambi economici e commerciali negli anni dal 1374 al 1385.

Geoffrey Chaucer ha poco a che vedere con la tranquilla immagine riprodotta sui molti libri scritti su di lui. Possiamo oggi immaginare la sua giovanile presenza per le strade affollate della Londra del tempo, oppure quando attraversava a piedi i Pirenei, maturo diplomatico conoscitore della poesia italiana a Pavia, ammiratore degli affreschi di Giotto a Firenze, cortigiano della Regina di Boemia, l’uomo diventato marito di una donna di Hainaut di nome Philippa.

Un poeta che oltre che occuparsi di storie e di poesia, seppe anche scrivere sui mercati di Bruges e Parigi, sui tiranni della Lombardia e sui cortigiani cinesi di Gengis Khan. Sognò, persino, di viaggiare nello spazio, si nutrì di letture di Ovidio, Boezio, Dante, Machaut e Boccaccio. Ebbe una immaginazione ed una fantasia oltre ogni limite. Chiamare Chaucer “padre della letteratura inglese” è certamente riduttivo. Egli fu uno dei più grandi uomini di cultura europea.

Avrebbe di certo compreso, anche se, forse, non accettato, le indecisioni sulla Brexit che tormentano oggi i suoi connazionali, a distanza di diversi secoli, nel loro atteggiamento nei confronti dell’Unione Europea. Il suo essere tanto inglese quanto europeo, in un tempo in cui non si poteva ancora parlare di Europa, evidenzia, a mio modesto parere, il senso di quello che si intende comunemente per “Englishness”: una insularità che non ha più nulla di isolazionismo o individualismo, come avrebbe potuto avere un tempo. Se mai, questo sentimento, ci sia davvero stato.

Si tratta, piuttosto, di una tendenza che spinge verso l’appartenenza. Un’isola con i suoi abitanti e le loro idee che spingono inevitabilmente verso “il continente” al quale, comunque, l’isola appartiene. Ogni isola, ed ogni isolano, soffre di queste tensioni. Non può essere diversamente con Britannia. Rileggere Geoffrey Chaucer a distanza di oltre mezzo secolo da quando lo conobbi sulle dispense universitarie del prof. Elio Chinol, al mio ritorno “a casa” sul continente, dopo oltre due anni di lavoro e di studio sull’isola di Amleto, ha avuto per me il significato di una vera e propria “riscoperta” in chiave moderna ed attuale del significato che siamo soliti dare a queste due parole: “Englishness” e “Europeanness”.

Un confronto, un dissidio, una sfida, un paragone, chiamatelo come volete, tutto in nome di un altro termine che è alla base di tutto: identità. Non poteva essere diversamente con l’isola sia di Albione che di Amleto. Geoffrey Chaucer possedeva sia l’una che l’altra: era inglese ed europeo. Non sarebbe potuto essere un inglese se non fosse stato europeo. Alla stessa maniera di come non sarebbe potuto essere europeo senza essere prima un inglese.

[Susan Davis · Rating 5 out of 5]

Chaucer: A European Life by Marion Turner
I’ve read a good number of Chaucer biographies and this is the most helpful of all of them. Turner goes through the known facts of Chaucer’s life by looking at a number of places such as the Vintry Ward, where Chaucer grew up, Reims and Calais, where England waged war when Chaucer was in the army, Genoa and Florence, where Chaucer was sent to negotiate for the King. What Turner adds to the bare facts is a plethora of detail about those places, their history, rulers, and economics. Similarly in chapters about Chaucer’s employment at the customs house, Turner gives the structure of the building, the taxation protocol and the politics surrounding the taxes. We learn about the Visconti in Milan, Charles of Navarre, William of Hainault, as well as about the English royal family from King Edward III to Richard II, and the relevant dukes and earls.
Each of the major poems is set in context of the tradition, the times in England and the time in Chaucer’s life. For instance for the Canterbury Tales, Turner looks at the reasons for its setting (from outside London in Southwark to not quite Canterbury), the qualities of the inn and of the host, both the real and imagined Harry Baily, as well as the other places mentioned in the Tales. Most of the individual tales are described also in terms of their sources and analogs.
The amount of information beyond the basic facts of Chaucer’s life is astounding, ranging from baptism rituals to furniture to battle plans to acquaintances and friends of Chaucer, John of Gaunt, Harry Baily and a host of others. Rather than using Chaucer’s poetry to make guesses about his life, as so many biographers do, Turner uses the facts about Chaucer’s world to inform us about his life and uses the context and the language of the poems to make incisive observations about their meaning. One reading of this book is not enough to do it justice.

[Sorrento · Rating 5 out of 5]

I thought that Marion Turner’s book about Geoffrey Chaucer was an amazing professionally researched biography of the great English poet. Before reading the book the only thing I knew about Chaucer was that he wrote The Canterbury Tales in a strange early version of the English language that we speak today. Marion Turner has filled in a huge gap in my knowledge by explaining who Chaucer was and how he was connected with not only the merchants around London but with the royal households, principally John of Gaunt, in the work that he did for the royal families, which took him to France, Spain and Italy.
Turner also explains how Chaucer developed his unique style and interest in giving voice to the ordinary folk of England rather than working in the previous styles of the romance courtly poetry. Chaucer was highly educated and could speak several languages including Italian and French as well as having a good understanding of Latin. He was very well read and as Turner explains the work that he did gave him access to a great many books so that his work is also influenced by writers such as Dante, Froissart.
Chaucer lived in turbulent times for the English royal family and he had to tread carefully around the politics following the death of Edward III and the succession of Richard II and his battles with Parliament and nobles eventually leading to his deposition and death all of this is carefully explained by Turner.
There is so much so much to enjoy about this brilliant book which has not only given me an understanding of Chaucer’s life but of the times and places where he lived.

[Sophie Ratcliffe · Rating 5 out of 5]

I’m an interesting test case as a reader, because I don't know much about Chaucer or his times! This is a fantastic, edgy, exciting, super-intelligent yet approachable book which manages to get under the skin of a canonical figure in European literature, one who remains part of our way of thinking about the world. I loved the way that Turner took us on a journey through life-writing, footstepping back in time and place. Astoundingly good, and completely original

[J.C. Corry · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fantastic biography, the best out there - eye-opening new research (Chaucer as a pretty boy for the courtiers? who knew), exhaustive research. An absolute must-have for any serious Chaucer scholar or writer.

[Michael Chandler · Rating 1 out of 5]

I have a personal distaste for literary criticism that applies modern concepts to historical texts and this work does it in spades.

[Caroline · Rating 4 out of 5]

So little is known about Chaucer personally that to tell his story you have to tell the story of the people and places he encountered in his life. That sets the expectation for what you can find in a book about Chaucer. This one is loosely organized around places, both literal and metaphorical.

This interesting if rather dense and academic book locates Chaucer in the orbit of the house of Lancaster and the royal family during some challenging years. His wife was sister to Katherine Swynford, third wife of the Duke of Lancaster, so their children seem to have all grown up in one large household. However, whether it was for personal reasons or because he carried out diplomatic missions all over Europe, he didn't live with his wife for very long.

Sometimes the excursions into court politics were interesting, sometimes they made even my eyes cross, and I've read a lot of English history. It also seemed unnecessarily confusing to me to sometimes refer to the future Henry IV as "Bolingbroke" for his birthplace (as Shakespeare did) and sometimes as "Derby" because he was the earl thereof. I knew who we were talking about but I imagine a lot of people who haven't read about this time period would not know.

While Richard II definitely set out to make himself an unchecked absolute monarch, I don't think you can say this was necessarily new. You couldn't call Henry II or Edward I less than absolute monarchs. Richard did some very alarming things that got him deposed twice, but I'm not sure those were out of line with previous kings.

But that's neither here nor there. Poetic analysis cropped up in almost random spots, as a poem Chaucer wrote was associated with a particular place Chaucer was, so discussion of the poetry was scattered throughout the book. I have never read the Canterbury Tales all the way through, so it was somewhat interesting to get a sense of how it's organized and how Chaucer developed his characters partly through their use or misuse of texts that educated people would have known in his time. I also didn't know he was the first to write in what we now call iambic pentameter. And I got a sense of how his vast experiences with people in all walks of life led him to create a cacophony of voices in his Tales, and how his early exposure to French and Italian poetry shaped his creations. Turner points out that while he took some structural aspects from Dante and Petrarch and Boccaccio (which I have never read), he also makes dramatic changes in those structures - Dante's characters journey to a destination, Chaucer's never arrive at Canterbury; Boccaccio and Petrarch wrote collections of tales but their tellers were aristocrats while Chaucer's are common people who argue with one another and step on one another's turn at the mike.

It's surprising really that an efficient and successful government functionary also became a poet. Having recently read A Distant Mirror, I already was exposed to some of the European political maneuverings of the time, which take up a lot of space here. This is not the life of this poet that I'd recommend to most people who are primarily interested in literature.

[Michael Reilly · Rating 4 out of 5]

First half.

This is a big academic biography of Chaucer. Turner organizes the story around the various places Chaucer spent time in. The first great English poet was a European. Chaucer traveled widely as an English soldier, diplomat and bureaucrat. He spoke French, Italian and Spanish. He read deeply in those languages.

Dante, who died when Chaucer was seven, and Boccaccio, who was thirty years older than Chaucer, both inspired Chaucer to write narrative poems about contemporary individuals, not holy stereotypes. Chaucer read them both in Italian. He also studied and learned from contemporary French poets.

Turner has written a analytical biography. She stops her narrative to explore questions like the lack of privacy in homes and its effect on domestic life or the connection between Chaucer's work as a Government bureaucrat and his writing.

As I said this is an academic biography. There is more theorizing than I need. We get a bunch on the theory of space. Sentences like; "The desire to understand, control and clearly represent space as an entity lies behind the the cartographic impulse, and that desire necessitates a denial of spatial complexity and unwieldiness, of the subjective lived experience." Which I think means; "People use maps to describe and understand places but a map is not a full description of a place."

Turner is also required to explain the insanely complicated Royal families and feuds. We get sentences like; "Blanche of Artois married Henry I of Navarre, by whom she had Joan of Navarre. Blanches' second husband was Edmund Crouchback, son of Henry III of England: their children included Henry, Earl of Lancaster" ( Two things. First, to be fair, that sentence is in a footnote, but the book is appropriately full of that type of detail. Second, "Edmund Crouchback"? They don't make nicknames like that anymore.)

This is a very good biography. Turner starts by making a startling concession. We have not found any Chaucer letters, diaries, personal correspondence, or records of correspondence so Turner explains that her goal is to explain his development as a writer, "as opposed to his emotional life--which I believe is beyond the biographer's reach". It is very refreshing to be spared the "Chaucer must have felt...." type explanations.

Chaucer played many roles in his life and Turner explains what they were like. When he was 14 or 15 he became a servant in the home of King Edward's younger son, Lionel and his wife Elizabeth de Burgh, a great heiress in her own rite. Turner explains that these great households "were centered around a person rather than around a particular building or place" The whole household moved around England from great home to great home. She explains that "a position in such an institution was not just a job, it was a whole way of life."

That position started Chaucer on a life of working in various roles for the top of English nobility. He seems to have been a very pleasing courtier who was trusted by his masters. Turner gives us a full picture of Chaucer's life as a soldier and a prisoner of war, as a diplomat in Italy and Spain and as a well paid bureaucrat in London.

At the same time , Chaucer is developing as a writer. His first recorded poems are derivative of European models and are in the higher grand style that was common. Turner follows him slowly developing his own style.

[Andrew Deakin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Oxford literature scholar Marion Turner's 2019 bio of Chaucer's life and times is an engagingly unacademic examination of the period that shaped what she reveals to be a remarkably well travelled and cosmopolitan author who was inspired by his continental influences to write for his contemporaries in their native tongue, developing while so doing the natural iambic pentameter that so suited English, and delivering narratives that provided a literary version of the emerging appreciation at the time of the insights multiple perspectives could offer, culminating in the remarkable Canterbury Tales, which continue to amaze with their narrative irony and powerful characterisations, and which survived their period to appeal universally because of their insights into humanity and their enduring artistic achievement.

Turner's is not a traditional chronological bio; rather, she examines the locales and circumstances that shaped him, the peripatetic diplomatic life that exposed him to so much of the best of European literature and art, and the literature he wrote which both reflects his life and times and endures beyond them.

Chaucer lived in interesting political times, beginning with the impressive rule of Edward 111, the chaotic autocratic reign of Richard 11 with the many parliamentary challenges to it, and culminating with Henry Bolingbroke's revolt and deposition of Richard (Shakespeare's Richard 11 & Henry IV).

Henry's father John of Gaunt was a dominant figure of the period, and a major patron of Chaucer. Turner captures this history well, which adds to her book's considerable appeal.

Chaucer: A European Life is a notable work, and Chaucer's time emerges as less late medieval and more preternaturally modern in its interest in multiple perspectives, its literary verve, and, surprisingly, the strong role played in Chaucer's life by substantially independent & accomplished women.

Turner's book is a major contribution to our understanding and appreciation of Chaucer's life and works.

[Richard · Rating 5 out of 5]

Chaucer's works cover a lot of ground - a huge variety of narrative voices, genres, subject-matter, locations - and Marion Turner chooses to organize this masterful academic account of his life not only by chronology, tracing her subject's life from his birth in the 1340s to his death in 1400, but also spatially, addressing key locations in that life. Some are geographical (Reims and Calais, the Tower of London, south of the Thames); some are conceptual (garden, peripheries, threshold); many are both. If this sounds like a gimmick... it isn't. All of the chosen spaces work as convincing frames into which both life and works can be fruitfully placed and understood; none seem forced. Some of the twenty chapters based on these spaces are (perhaps inevitably) a little dry, the result of a huge amount of historical spadework. There is a lot of historical detail here—this is no more a book for a newcomers to 14th-century England than it is a beginner's guide to Chaucer. But many more of those chapters are illuminating and almost exhilarating, especially those that deal with Chaucer's European travels and that contrast his poetry to that of Petrarch and Dante. All of them are clear and convincing.

What really makes this biography so enjoyable, though, is not just its scholarship, but also its evident enthusiasm for the extraordinary artistic achievements of Chaucer himself. It is unlikely, of course, that many people will approach as 500-page scholarly biography of a 14th-century poet without already having read a substantial amount of his work, but Chaucer: A European Life will certainly enhance many readers' appreciation of Chaucer and send them back to re-explore not only The Canterbury Tales but also the rest of his extraordinary and rewarding world.

[Ilya · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is the best literary biography I have come across since Ellmann’s classic on Joyce. It is an ingenious, thoughtful and painstaking reconstruction of the spaces, both physical and metaphorical, that Chaucer inhabited as a poet, a bureaucrat, a diplomat, a city-dweller, a father, a husband and a protégée of powerful men. He may be the proverbial “father of the English literature,” but he was very much a cosmopolitan man of letters and a European traveller. Indeed, but for his travel to Italy and his encounter with the work of Boccaccio—who becomes the source of so many of Chaucer’s poems—the fatherhood might have looked very different, if it ever came to be at all.

Essential for any biography, the historical context that Turner supplies never feels obligatory, for all its density; similarly, the connections she identifies between historical events or relationships and Chaucer’s poetry are never strained or merely speculative (the curse of far too many Shakespeare biographies). So organic is her presentation of these connections, and so absorbing the narrative, that the “mere” context becomes indistinguishable from the “actual” content.

She is a terrific writer too: each chapter ends with a peroration, a summing-up that lingers in the mind long after the dates and the minutiae have vanished from memory. For anyone with about so much as a spark of affection for or curiosity about Chaucer, this will be a joy.

[Todd · Rating 2 out of 5]

I want this to be the kindest possible 2 star review. The author, Marion Turner, is an English professor, and she clearly is not aiming this book at general audiences. The book is best understood and appreciated by English majors. This could be the textbook for one of Ms. Turner's classes at Oxford.

I DNFed at about 2/3 of the way through. It just got too English major wonky for me to continue. Unless you have a grounding in classical literature (I don't) many of Turner's references will fly quickly over your head. Chaucer was influenced by contemporaries such as Petrarch, Boethius and Boccaccio, as well as the ancients. If you're familiar with those guys, you're good to go.

That said, Chaucer lived at a very interesting juncture of English history. The 14th century was when Europe was transitioning from a feudal society into a modern economy. The Enlightenment had begun. Chaucer was a courtier and high ranking official during the reign of Richard II, a tumultuous moment in England. The Continent was also in turmoil. This was the time of two popes. Politics in Italy were messy and violent. The Holy Roman Empire was scuffling for credibility. And Chaucer was right in the middle of it all. He traveled extensively, was exposed to the great art and literature of the time, and was uniquely qualified to become the father of English literature. Turner nails this. It's a great yarn, and Turner tells it admirably. I definitely learned stuff about Chaucer that I didn't know.

I cannot fault the writer for the professorial tone of this book. She's a professor. For the generalist reader this book is a little dense.

[Brian Page · Rating 5 out of 5]

Chaucer: A European Life by Marion Turner is a work of breathtaking scholarship. Turner approaches Geoffrey Chaucer through a study of spaces: physical, organizational, and conceptual. In this, she succeeds brilliantly. Turner shows how Chaucer was immersed in these various communities and thus presents a detailed and intimate picture of Chaucer's environs and how each of these areas influenced his life & literature. And that’s where this work shines. Aside from simply mastering Chaucer’s work and whereabouts, Turner displays encyclopedic knowledge of these communities in which Chaucer moved – the world of merchants, member of a great household, civil servant, member of the royal court, international negotiator, and pan European intelligentsia. It is this scope of the context of Chaucer’s life that sets this work apart from mere biographies of the man and make this history appealing to medieval historians beyond those with a specific interest in Chaucer. The thirty-six pages of bibliography reflect the deep study that supports Turner’s views. And if you want to see an absolute classic put-down, check out footnote #4 on page 122 (in the paperback).

[Artie LeBlanc · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is far more than a biography - it is also a social and political history, and a tome of literary criticism.

I came to it seeking the biography, and stayed for the Social and political history. TBH, I skim-read much of the literary criticism.

Of course, there are few "facts" known about Chaucer, other than records of his name in various surviving documents. The author does a credible job of extrapolating a life from these - but what I enjoyed was the placing of him within his milieu.

I didn't enjoy so much the number of facts thrown at the reader about various very minor (almost mentioned en-passant) characters; this seems to be an increasing tend by authors .. "Here's something I know, so I'll put it in" .. without considering whether it actually contributes materially to the reader's understanding

[Susan · Rating 5 out of 5]

In this book, Turner places Geoffery Chaucer in various spaces: as a member of a royal household, as a clerk for the Tower of London living in sparse, solitary rooms, and as a diplomat travelling throughout the world to negotiate marriages and treaties. Turner also presents him as a caring father to his youngest son Louis and a politically savvy cosmopolitan. But the book is most interesting when Turner examines the ways in which Chaucer, as an artist, listened to the multiple voices emerging in late 14th century Europe and put them in his poetry with a focus on "inner worth, equity, and social estate."

[Mattschratz · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is the good stuff. I read this at the same time as the Tony Tulathimutte book and it made me jealous of people living in Chaucer time. I am aware that there would be problems in living in the Chaucer times, and that this may be a greener grass situation. But I hate my problems in a way that makes me sick and I guess I would trade "knowing about what Bret Stephens thinks" for "dealing with Richard II" eight days a dang week.

This is not a fair account of what is actually good about the book but what is good about the book is: a lot. The focus on place is super rich and interesting and, I think, effective. I recommend it!

[Michael · Rating 5 out of 5]

Superb. Illuminating about every aspect of Chaucer and his times. Beat book about the period I have read for ages. (Chaucer and Gower were my main research focus for several years.)

(One minor correction. The scholar who wrote this book reads it well. I enjoyed the short passages in Middle English as well as phrases in French. But she repeatedly says PAvia for the city of Lombardy. The accent is on the second syllable (VI). Winced to hear the same mistake made by the reader of The Borgias” by Christopher Hibbert.)