Geoffrey Chaucer - World History Encyclopedia Geoffrey Chaucer (l. c. 1343-1400 CE) was a medieval English poet, writer, and philosopher best known for his work The Canterbury Tales, a masterpiece of world literature. The Canterbury Tales is a work of poetry featuring a group of pilgrims from different social classes on a journey to the shrine of St. Thomas Becket in Canterbury who agree to tell each other stories to pass the time. Chaucer was a prolific writer, creating many other fine works which have been overshadowed by The Canterbury Tales. The Book of the Duchess (c. 1370 CE) The House of Fame (c. 1378-1380 CE) Anelida and Arcite (c. 1380-1387 CE) The Parliament of Fowls (c. 1380-1382 CE) Troilus and Criseyde (c. 1382-1386 CE) The Legend of Good Women (c. 1380's CE) The Canterbury Tales (c. 1388-1400 CE) Early Life & Travels Geoffrey Chaucer was the son of John Chaucer, a wealthy vintner (winemaker and seller) and his wife Anne. Love History? Sign up for our free weekly email newsletter! Other Major Works The Canterbury Tales
The Great Vowel Shift -- brief note on language The main difference between Chaucer's language and our own is in the pronunciation of the "long" vowels. The consonants remain generally the same, though Chaucer rolled his r's, sometimes dropped his aitches, and pronounced both elements of consonant combinations, such as "kn," that were later simplified. And the short vowels are very similar in Middle and Modern English. But the "long" vowels are regularly and strikingly different. Beginning in the twelfth century and continuing until the eighteenth century (but with its main effects in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries) the sounds of the long stressed vowels in English changed their places of articulation (i.e., how the sounds are made). Old and Middle English were written in the Latin alphabet and the vowels were represented by the letters assigned to the sounds in Latin. This chart roughly represents the places where the "long vowels" are articulated: To hear the sounds Click here. To hear the sounds click here.
A Brief Chronology of Chaucer's Life and Times | Harvard's Geoffrey Chaucer Website 1300 Dante's Divine Comedy. 1300 Birth of Guillaume de Machaut, French musician and poet (died 1377). 1304 Birth of Francis Petrarch (died 1374). 1313 Birth of Giovanni Boccaccio (died 1375). 1321 Death of Dante Alighieri (born 1265). 1330 Birth of John Gower (died 1408). 1335 Boccaccio's Il Filostrato (source of Troilus). 1336-38 Boccaccio's Il Filocolo (possible source of The Franklin's Tale). 1337 Hundred Years War begins (ends 1453). 1339 Boccaccio begins Il Teseida delle Nozze d'Emilia (source of The Knight's Tale). 1340-45 Birth of Chaucer. 1346 Birth of Eustache Deschamps, French poet (died c. 1406). 1346 English victory at Crecy; see Jean Froissart on the Hundred Years War (1337-1453). 1348-50 The Black Death; see the chilling description of the Plague in Boccaccio's Decameron, the introduction to the First Day. 1349-51 Boccaccio's Decameron written. 1356 English victory at Poitiers; see Jean Froissart, on the Hundred Years War (1337-1453). 1359-60 Chaucer serves in the war in France.
Language and Linguistics: Language Change >> Path of Change NSF researcher Anthony Kroch of the University of Pennsylvania is trying to understand how language change spreads through populations. With collaborator Beatrice Santorini, he is compiling an electronic collection of Modern English texts covering the time period from 1700 to 1914 (the beginning of World War I). The completed “corpus,” as it is known, will complement three others created independently over the past decade by researchers from the University of Pennsylvania and the University of York, England. Linguist Donald Ringe of the University of Pennsylvania and computer scientist Tandy Warnow of the University of Texas at Austin teamed up in 1993 to build statistical models that help explain how languages evolve.
The General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales Organization: Alexa Crawls Starting in 1996, Alexa Internet has been donating their crawl data to the Internet Archive. Flowing in every day, these data are added to the Wayback Machine after an embargo period. this data is currently not publicly accessible. The Wayback Machine - The General Prologue The most popular part of the Canterbury Tales is the General Prologue, which has long been admired for the lively, individualized portraits it offers. It is the General Prologue that serves to establish firmly the framework for the entire story-collection: the pilgrimage that risks being turned into a tale-telling competition. Nothing indicates when Chaucer began to compose the General Prologue and there are no variations between manuscripts that might suggest that he revised it after making an initial version. From her, we pass to the most clearly idealized portrait in the Prologue, the Parson.
Teach yourself to read Chaucer's Middle English The best way to learn to read Chaucer's Middle English is to enroll in a course with a good and enthusiastic teacher (as most teachers of Chaucer are). Though students enrolled in Chaucer courses may find some parts of this page useful, it is intended primarily for those who, for a variety of reasons, cannot take such a course but nevertheless want to increase their enjoyment of Chaucer's works. The aim of this page is to provide the user with the means to learn to pronounce Chaucer's English and to acquire an elementary knowledge of Chaucer's grammar and vocabulary. It does not offer much on matters of style and versification and has almost nothing on the literary qualities of Chaucer's work. It is assumed that the user of the page has a printed text of The Canterbury Tales. The lessons begin with Chaucer's pronunciation, often illustrated with sound (therefore you must have a computer with sound capabilities in order to get the full benefit of this page).
The Works of Chaucer By Period by William J. Long Works of Chaucer, First Period. The works of Geoffrey Chaucer are roughly divided into three classes, corresponding to the three periods of his life. It should be remembered, however, that it is impossible to fix exact dates for most of his works. The best known, though not the best, poem of the first period is the Romaunt of the Rose, a translation from the French Roman de la Rose, the most popular poem of the Middle Ages,--a graceful but exceedingly tiresome allegory of the whole course of love. Perhaps the best poem of this period is the "Dethe of Blanche the Duchesse," better known, as the "Boke of the Duchesse," a poem of considerable dramatic and emotional power, written after the death of Blanche, wife of Chaucer's patron, John of Gaunt. Second Period. The "Hous of Fame" is one of Chaucer's unfinished poems, having the rare combination of lofty thought and simple, homely language, showing the influence of the great Italian master. Third Period.
Dictionary of Americanisms, by John Russell Bartlett (1848) Dictionary of Americanisms, by John Russell Bartlett. (NY: Bartlett and Welford, 1848) ----- [title page] DICTIONARY OF AMERICANISMS. __________ A GLOSSARY OF WORDS AND PHRASES. ----- [copyright page] Entered, According to Act of Congress, in the year 1848, by JOHN RUSSELL BARTLETT, In the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the United States for the Southern District of New York. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~EDWARD O. ----- [p. iii] In venturing to lay before the public a Vocabulary of the colloquial language of the United States, some explanation may be necessary for the broad ground I have been led to occupy. I began to make a list of such words as appeared to be, or at least such as had generally been called Americanisms, or peculiar to the United States, and, at the same time, made reference to the several authors in whose writings they appeared; not knowing whether, in reality, they were of native growth, or whether they had been introduced from England. ----- p. iv and accent.
Geoffrey Chaucer Biography While historians have been able to reconstruct much about the life of Geoffrey Chaucer (CHAW-sur) from the 493 documents, mostly office records, that mention him, these documents cast light only on the public life of a prominent civil servant; not one refers to him as an author. That is not to say that he was not recognized or appreciated as a poet by his contemporaries: In Chaucer’s day, poetry was considered to be a leisure pastime of talented men, a valuable skill, but not in itself a career. Chaucer, too, probably thought of himself primarily in terms of his public duties rather than his poetry. The exact date and even year of Chaucer’s birth are unknown; the year 1340 has become traditionally accepted, but 1343 may be a more accurate guess. He was probably born in London, where his parents, John and Agnes, held property. Despite his middle-class origins, he was to have a distinguished public career as a courtier, soldier, diplomat, and civil servant.
"What Man Artow?" The Narrator as Writer and Pilgrim Organization: Alexa Crawls Starting in 1996, Alexa Internet has been donating their crawl data to the Internet Archive. Flowing in every day, these data are added to the Wayback Machine after an embargo period. Crawl data donated by Alexa Internet. The Wayback Machine - "What Man Artow?" Katharine M. in Chaucer's Pilgrims: An Historical Guide to The Canterbury Tales, ed. I. The little narrator in the Canterbury Tales is an enigma. We know he's not just a talker who's telling a story once, but a writer who has produced a written copy of the story, and knows it may survive to be read by others. Besides being a poet who both recites his work and writes it down, the narrator is also a pilgrim. So we know the narrator not by his vocation, but by his avocations: writer and pilgrim. But while Chaucer's hearers may have conflated him with the narrator, we can't know exactly how.
Chaucer, Lucretius and the Prologue to "The Canterbury Tales" As we all know, Chaucer launched the Prologue to The Canterbury Tales with a reverdie or spring song. This served to funnel in a host of influences, some of which he may have consciously reworked, while others he might have admitted (unconsciously, so to speak) as part of the reverdie's generic baggage. F. N. Robinson's notes to the opening show how difficult it is to disengage the various skeins from a plait as densely woven from commonplace and allusion as this is: "Several passages have been pointed out as possible sources of the introductory lines on spring.... From any of these places Chaucer may have received suggestions. This passage contains an element absent, so far as I can tell, from the English tradition of the reverdie before Chaucer--viz., Spring as the sexual congress of heaven and earth. "Precision is impossible"--well might that stand as an epigraph for the suggestion I am making in this note. FOOTNOTES1 Geoffrey Chaucer, The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, ed.