Professor Marion Turner

In Troilus and Crusade 2, Chaucer changes the character of the heroine. In Boccaccio's Il Filostrato, Chaucer's Source, Crusade is a fickle, promiscuous betrayer. Chaucer, though, shows us the powerlessness and vulnerability of Crusade's situation, reveals the patterns of her thought and her constrained options, makes her a much more rounded and sympathetic character. He's interested in depicting character's complexity and interiority, especially women's.

Other authors sometimes disapproved of this. In the 15th century, Henriksen wrote a sequel to Troilus and Crusade, in which Crusade is punished by becoming a prostitute with a venereal disease. Later artists such as Pier Paolo Pasolini turned the wife of Bath into a monstrous stereotype. Chaucer's concern with depicting complex female characters is one of his great achievements and makes him stand out both from his contemporaries and from many of his successors.

Minulla on paikallinen vintner, joka kutsutaan Ion, ja hän on todella mahtava. No, Ion, joka on jonkin verran jonka nimi on John, joka on Chaucerin isä. Hyvää herraa.

In London, in Vintry Ward, so the ward which had lots of vintners in. So it was one of the areas of London that is right next to the Thames, which is appropriate because that's where the wine comes in. So Chaucer's born very near the river, and this is a huge time for mercantile trading. So he's born...

jossa hän voi nähdä sivuja tulossa, jotka ovat tuotettavissa maailman koko maailmassa, ja tuotettavissa rauhassa kuin Indoneesissa. Sitten hän meni ulos uudestaan, jossa oli englanninkielinen valli, joka oli Englannin yksi todellinen tuotantoprodukti. Hän elää merkintäläisen elämän keskellä, joten ajattelemme hänet puolustajana.

Chaucer was living in this very multilingual, cosmopolitan kind of area. People often think of the Middle Ages as people are kind of grubbing about. And of course, some people were. But life in London was really international. He was rubbing shoulders with people who spoke lots of different languages, were bringing in lots of luxury products.

Okay. Hit hard? It hit pretty hard. Family-wise and family and friends? Yeah, and to everyone. So the Black Death came to England about 1348, and it completely dwarfs the pandemic that we've been through. If you imagine a pandemic...

that wiped out maybe a third, maybe a half of the population really quickly. Of Europe. We're not just talking Britain here. And the Near East. It's hugely dramatic. And it also affected young people as much as the old. It wasn't only hitting the more vulnerable populations,

All sectors of society are hit, so extraordinary trauma, quite hard for us to imagine. And yes, Chaucer lost several relatives, but not his parents, not his immediate family. And what then happened to Chaucer's family is typical of what happened to the country as a whole. Because if you survived, although probably psychologically you might have been in a bad way, but materially things were quite good for you. It was quite good to be a plague survivor.

Because if you think about the country as a whole, you've got the same amount of land to farm, for example, but half the number of people to farm it. So what's going to happen? Wages go up. Is vintnering, is that sort of plague proof? Are people still getting on it? I mean, everything's affected, right? Because all over Europe you've got a much lower workforce. So everything is harder to do. But it means that people are then able to be paid more. So the wine still comes in and the Chaucer family are not only...

ekonomisesti siinä tasolla, mutta he myös käsittelevät paljon, koska toisaalta ihmiset, jotka eläivät, käsittelevät, joten sekä heidän perheensä käsittelevät maa, maa ja rahaa heidän perheensä, jotka eläivät plagiin. Joten on paljon sosiaalista mobiilisuutta plagiin jälkeen. Lopulta 14-vuotiaana on todella hieno aika sosiaalista mobiilisuudesta. Ihmiset voivat muuttaa töitä, jos työntekijä ei tarvitse tarpeeksi työtä, he voivat mennä toiseen työntekijään tai he voivat muuttaa kaupungin.

The government passed lots of laws to try and stop employees from asking for higher wages, but it didn't work. None of these statutes of labour did not work. It was very clear which side they were on. So we've got massive inflation and wage inflation. If you were alive, you were then doing well.

Sitten koulutuksellisesti, mitä on normaalia tällaiselle lapselle? Hän ei mene yhdellä raritsella... Ei ole koulutuksella, ajattelen. Hän olisi mennyt kouluun. Koulujen puolustajat menivät grammar-kouluun, ja se on se, mitä Chaucer teki. Meillä ei ole hänen koulutuksensa, mutta Londonissa oli monia kouluja, kuten St. Paulissa. Heillä oli paljon kirjoja. Hän olisi varmasti oppinut lukea ja kirjoittaa kotona, kun hän oli hyvin pieni, ja sitten hän meni grammar-kouluun.

Koulutukset olivat vain naisille, vaikka naiset olisivat hyvin opittuja, mutta naiset olisivat todennäköisesti opittuja englanniksi ja franskiksi, jolloin naiset olisivat trilinguaalisia, opittuja naiset, englanniksi, franskiksi ja latinsiksi. Joten kuten tänään, tämä oli multilinguaalinen opittu yhteiskunta tässä maassa. Ja suurin osa opetusta koulussa oli latinssa.

But people, again, they often tend to think of older style education as very much the students being very passive, receiving a lot of information. But that wasn't the case in medieval education. In schools, boys did a lot of performance, a lot of learning rhetoric. You might be given a fable and asked to invent different morals and then defend them or get up and give different sides of the debate. So it was a kind of theatre. That was amazing.

That's not what I had at all. It was completely didactic, just sort of rammed down our throats, basically. Yeah, I mean, it was strict often. You know, there's one great case of a schoolmaster getting injured because he was climbing up a tree trying to get lots of sticks to beat the school teacher. So it was strict, but...

Tämä tuntuu kuitenkin kohdallaan. Minun pitäisi sanoa, että se on tärkeä juttu, että äiti ei vahvista lapsia. Kyllä, se on kuitenkin kuitenkin kuitenkin.

He becomes a page boy in a great household. And this is a very desirable thing to get. Usually higher class boys would get this kind of job. So his father probably got him this job because his father had been a royal tax collector. So he had connections in the royal court. So Chaucer's first job is...

When he's just a teenager, about 14 or 15, he pops up in the accounts of Elisabeth de Boer, Countess of Ulster, who is the daughter-in-law of the king. So the daughter-in-law of Edward III. She was married to Prince Lionel. So a pageboy is, I mean, he would have done a bit of kind of errand running and things like that. But you're also simply a member of this lavish aristocratic household where you're also going to be doing some riding and

So you're not viewed as, you're working but you're not a servant class. Yes, exactly. So although you're doing some, as I say, relatively menial errand running, but you're mainly just kind of sitting about learning some poetry. You're there partly to make the heads of the household look good because they can have a retinue.