Professor Marion Turner

speaker

759 appearances 2 recordings 1 series first heard Feb 2026 last heard 29 May

Professor Marion Turner’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 1.

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You're Dead to Me · Geoffrey Chaucer (Radio Edit) · 29 May 2026 podcast

That's really, really important.

The idea that a miller has just as much a right to tell a tale as a knight and might tell a better tale.

So it allows Chaucer to tell lots of different kinds of tales and lots of different genres, lots of different forms.

So you really do get this kind of sense that there's something for everyone.

I suppose in terms of language, Chaucer borrows and coins a lot of new words.

Now, of course, sometimes that's simply been recorded because his work is so well known.

But he certainly was expanding the English language a lot in the Canterbury Tales and in his other works as well.

You know, my favourite example is that he was so newfangled that he invented the word newfangled.

Oh, lovely.

He also changed what poetic forms were available in English.

So he was the first person to use the ten syllable line and to use an early form of the iambic pentameter.

So the five stress line that became the fundamental building block of English poetry.

Is he just constantly writing until the end of his life or is it a phase?

written in the 1390s, which is also when he writes his treatise on the astrolabe.

He rewrites the prologue, Legend of Good Women.

He writes lots of short poems.

And he's working, you know, so we see him working throughout the 90s.

Towards the end of his life, he's living in the precincts of Westminster Abbey, which was not necessarily a religious thing.

I mean, there were lots of shops and brothels and things like that in the precincts of Westminster Abbey.

But he's living there.

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