Major social changes happen across the fourteenth century. What general shifts take place in society throughout Chaucer’s writing career? Many laws were passed to try to freeze wages at pre-plague levels, or to try to stop people who were born at a certain level in society from wearing smarter clothes (sumptuary laws). There was more literal movement and more social mobility. And if their local lord wouldn’t give them those wages, then the next-door lord would. Especially for the poor, because the same amount of land still needed to be worked on, but there were many fewer people to do the jobs. Essentially, for the people who survived, things got better-not psychologically, but financially. There’s a lot of interesting speculation about what kinds of psychological effects that might have had but, practically, it had enormous social effects. Perhaps a third of the population died, from all different levels. There’s been nothing like it before or since. The toll that it took on society was unprecedented. When Chaucer is about six or seven years old, the plague comes to England and completely changes European and Asian society. The really seismic, major event is that the plague hits in the 1340s. How does Chaucer get here? What changes take place in society throughout his writing career? The Canterbury Tales is Chaucer’s magnum opus, and comes at the end of his career. He was outward-facing, and he was involved in all kinds of broad international European, and also global, cultural currents. His sources were mainly not English, but in many other languages. And the poetry that he wrote was international, too.

So, right from his early childhood, he was in a very international world. At this time, you could buy spices in London that had come from an island in Indonesia, for instance. You could look into the city or out to the Thames, which was the place where all the ships came in, bringing products from all over the world.

When he was born, he was living in Vintry Ward in London on the river. But one thing that kept on recurring as a foundational aspect of everything that he did, which I think people don’t know much about, is a sense of how international Chaucer was. In my biography, I was interested in trying to think about the complete Chaucer, in thinking right across his life: thinking about what happened to him when he was a teenager working in his first jobs in the great household, what happened to him when he was a parent. Chaucer was a great internationalist and a cosmopolitan poet. He was multilingual, and he lived in all kinds of different environments. That life involved, for instance, being a prisoner of war in France it involved traveling multiple times to Italy it involved going to Spain. In his lifetime, no one thought of him in that way. He wasn’t staid he wasn’t patriarchal. But really, that image came about after his death. People who know a bit about Chaucer tend to think of him as the father of English literature-there’s a famous picture of him as an old patriarch, pointing with a rosary-or they think of him as a genial, middle-aged man telling slightly risqué stories in a pub. What would someone learn from your biography about Chaucer that they might not have known before? You’ve just written a biography of Geoffrey Chaucer.

Today we’re going to discuss the Canterbury Tales. Foreign Policy & International Relations.

Canterbury tales middle english audio