Professor Marion Turner

This is fairly middle-aged Geoffrey Chaucer. He's kind of quite far along in his career. Yeah, I mean, The Book of the Duchess is the first poem that has survived. So he may have written earlier poems. He may have written poems in French when he was younger. That's what most people were writing in French. But the earliest poem that has survived, yeah, he's around 30, early 1370s. And then he was just prolific. He wrote so much. And today people have often only heard of The Canterbury Tales, but he wrote so much else. So from the...

Early 1370s to mid 1380s, he writes several dream poems, so the Book of the Duchess, the House of Fame, the Parliament of Fowls, the Legend of Good Women. He translates Boethius' Consolation of Philosophy from Latin into English. He translates parts of the Romance of the Rose. He writes lots of short poems and lyrics.

He writes some of the Canterbury Tales as stand-alone texts that then later he put into the Canterbury Tales. Like the Knight's Tale, for example. Yes, exactly. Most famously the Knight's Tale. So he's writing in English, whereas it would, although some people were writing in English, it would have been more normal, especially for a court poet, someone writing kind of courtly forms, you know, love visions, dreams. It would have been more normal to write in French. Yeah.

He's also very influenced by the world around him. There's this idea that you need both. You need to read the books. He's steeped in literary influences from all kinds of places. But he's also interested in contemporary society. And I think he does take a lot of inspiration from the things that are going on around him. So we can link things like his great interest in different voices, in the common voice world.

We might link that to things like the development of the speaker in parliament at the time. And then, you know, this is also the time when we see insurgent voices, which can be productive, but can also be really problematic. So the Great Revolt, usually known as the Peasants' Revolt, though it wasn't really mainly peasants, it was lots of different people. But that also happens during Chaucer's lifetime.

Kyllä, se on todella mielenkiintoinen asia. Se on myös todella mielenkiintoista, kun meiltä saa tietää, mitä on edelleen löydettävissä rekordissa. Tämä on asia, jossa Chaucer oli käytännössä syntynyt jotain nimeltä raptus, joka on erilaisissa tapauksissa, jos se on yllättäminen, jos se on rauha. Sessali Champagne jätti hänet lisäämään tehtäviinsä raptus-kysymyksiin.

But there was a lot of debate about what the word in the document meant, because in some documents it means abduction. But a couple of years ago, and this is how exciting the world of Chaucer studies is. So two scholars, Spassin Speckin, you and Roger, found some new documents. And what they found was that Cecily Champagne and Chaucer were on the same side of this law case. And they were both defendants together. And they employed the same lawyer.

Right. And then they found the writ, which was that someone called Thomas Stondon was making a lawsuit against the two of them. What had happened, according to Stondon, was that Cecily had been his servant and she had left before the end of her contract to go and be Chaucer's servant.

So this was a labour dispute. The reason then that Cecily would release him from any actions relating to a raptus would be that she was saying, no, I was not forcibly removed from my former employer. So we can uncancel Geoffrey Chaucer, that's good. I think it's time for us to move on to his most famous poem. It's time for us to get to the Canterbury Tales. Marian, can you give us an actual synopsis of what is the Canterbury Tales?

A group of people meet in the Tabard Inn, which was a real pub just south of the river in Southwark. They're all going off on pilgrimage to Canterbury. And they decide to make it less boring, so they don't just have to think about pilgrimage and God all the time. They're going to tell stories on the way there and on the way back. And they're going to compete for a free meal. And the innkeeper, Harry Bailey, is going to run this tale-telling competition. So you get this group of people together who are all going to tell stories. But it's really different from Boccaccios.

And the big difference is the nature of the tale tellers. So Boccaccios tale tellers are all of the same class, which is high class. Chaucers are not. So the highest class person is the knight, who's not that high. And there is a ploughman at the bottom. The vast majority are in between. So, you know, we have a summoner.

A friar, a merchant, a man of law, a lawyer, a sailor, a cook. The miller. Yeah, the miller, the reader. All of these kinds of people. 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.

Mielestäni kieltenä, Chaucer hyökkää ja koittaa paljon uusia kertoja. Tietysti joskus se on vain kuvattu, koska hänen työnsä on niin hyvin tunnettu, mutta hän tietenkin yhdistyi englannin kieltenä paljon, Kancho Patelesin ja muiden työnsä myös. Minun suositukseni on, että hän oli niin uudistunut, että hän teki sanan uudistunut.

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.

on kirjoitettu 1390-luvulla, jolloin hän kirjoittaa Treeties on the Astrolabe. Hän kirjoittaa uudestaan Prologue to Legend of Good Women. Hän kirjoittaa monia lyhyitä pohjoja. Hän työskentelee. Me näemme hänet työskentelemällä 90-luvun aikana. Lopulta elämänsä hän elää Westminster Abbeyin. Se ei ollut välttämättä religiallinen asia. Siinä oli paljon kaupoja ja rauhoja Westminster Abbeyin. Hän elää siellä. Siksi hän nousee siellä, koska hän elää siellä.

Not because Poets' Corner existed there. Yeah, there was no Poets' Corner at the time. It's just his local church. Yeah, I mean, it would have been more normal for him to have been buried in St. Margaret's Westminster. He must have had a good relationship with the monks for them to bury him there. But it's because he lives there and it's later his tomb gets moved and Poets' Corner gets started. But yeah, certainly in the last year of his life, we see him writing a poem to the new king asking for his money. Oh, great. Yeah.

It's time now for the nuance window. This is where Mike and I spend two minutes silently inspecting ditches, while Marian turns a new page and tells us something we need to know about Geoffrey Chaucer. So my stopwatch is ready. Take it away, Professor Marian. I'm going to talk about Chaucer and character. So when people think of Chaucer, they often think about his characters, the wife of Bath, the miller, the knight, the host. And Chaucer did two really significant things with literary character. First of all, he developed the idea of the unreliable narrator.

Joten monissa hänen pohjoissaan käsittely on vihattu ja käsittää osan kertaa, tai jätetään hänen vaikutuksiaan käsittelyyn, joten ne eivät ole tarkoitettuja. Ja se idea, että käsittely on epäonnistunut, oli todella tärkeä osa kertaa. Se näemme erityisesti modernissa kertoissa, kuten Lolitaan.

Chaucer näyttää, että se, mitä näemme, riippuu siitä, missä olemme. Tämän mielenkiintoisen näkökulman voi liittyä taiteelliseen näkökulmaan juuri tällä hetkellä. Chaucer olisi nähnyt Giottoa taiteen, kun hän käveli Italiassa. Hän on todella kiinnostunut käyttämään kirjallisuutta, jotta hän ymmärtäisi suhteellisuutta ja yksityisyyttä.

He made his characters much more 3D than previous characters in literature, especially his female characters. The Wife of Bath is based on characters from Latin and French texts who were stereotypes, cynical old prostitutes. Chaucer's version is far more nuanced. She's much funnier and more appealing. She has a memory and a sense of the future. She talks about domestic violence and she talks explicitly about the lack of female voices in literature.