Sophie Gee
speaker
11,180 appearances
40 recordings
3 series
first heard Nov 2024
last heard 2d ago
Sophie Gee’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 36 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 7.
Appearances
He was writing in ordinary Middle English instead of in Latin or French or one of the other elevated kind of intercontinental languages that he would have known from his work.
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Because as we've said about Chaucer, he
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was extremely cosmopolitan and travelled frequently between England and the continent.
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But what we're now looking at is a painting by Ford Maddox Brown, who is connected to the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, but he's in some ways was thought of as the most Hogarthian of the Pre-Raphaelites.
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And you can really see it in this image.
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It's a painting called Chaucer at the Court of Edward III.
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So it's sort of the poet as the...
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inspiration and the great champion of the tradition of English monarchy.
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I think the idea that Ford Maddox Brown is getting at in this painting is that monarchy depends on poetry, that power depends on literature, and the court is a pretty sort of heegledy-piggledy, ragtail bunch.
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They're sitting around
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chatting, they're bored, they're kind of going to sleep, they're talking to one another, they're quite distracted.
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There's a little dog down here sitting in a kid's lap.
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There's some flirtation.
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There's some babies who are obviously sort of wanting their dinner.
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The king is paying attention, but he's sort of bored by it.
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here.
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And the friend, for some reason, is writing it down.
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So actually what it is, is an incredibly Chaucerian scene.
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And we're seeing this kind of tradition of painters who included William Blake, who also did a very famous painting of Chaucer and the Pilgrims.
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We're seeing this tradition of painters who think of literature as kind of giving them their subject matter, that it's English literature that elevates England to being of kind of, well, European reputation, Jonty, being of global importance, and that the painters are sort of bouncing off that.
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Showing 681–700 of 11,180 · page 35 of 559
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