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: the medieval father of English literature · 27 Feb 2026 podcast

You know, he'd met him when he was in service.

John of Gaunt gave him lots of jobs, but they stayed closely connected because of this sexual relationship between

Gaunt and Chaucer's sister-in-law.

And that probably encouraged John of Gaunt to help Chaucer.

He helped him get lots of jobs.

He was the one in charge when Chaucer got his apartment in London, his job at the customs office.

He kept on favouring him.

And things were very relaxed at this time in terms of kind of sexual mores.

So...

Chaucer's children were largely brought up in castles with Gaunt's legitimate children, his illegitimate children, Catherine's legitimate children that she had had with her husband.

They were all associating together.

And it meant that when Gaunt's son, Henry IV, later becomes king, he's favouring Chaucer's children as well as his illegitimate half-siblings.

Yeah, they're all hanging out.

Yeah, exactly.

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.

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