GradeSaver has ClassicNotes on Chaucer's most important works, including The Canterbury Tales, The House of Fame, The Legend of Good Women, The Book of the Duchess, Troilus and Criseyde, "To Rosamond," and "Truth."
Geoffrey Chaucer is widely considered the greatest poet of the English Middle Ages. He was born in London in 1342 or 1343 and died in 1400. Between that time, he wrote numerous works of literature that remain influential today. He is best known for The Canterbury Tales, a collection of stories told from a variety of voices. He also wrote four “dream vision” poems, or long poems framed as accounts of dreams: The Book of the Duchess, The Parliament of Fowls, The House of Fame, and The Legend of Good Women. He translated several important French and Latin works into Middle English, including the popular romance Roman de la Rose and the philosophical dream vision The Consolation of Philosophy, as well as writing his own take on Troilus and Criseyde largely translated from the Italian writer Boccaccio’s version of the story. Finally, he wrote a number of short poems, including “Truth” and “To Rosamond.”
The Canterbury Tales, his final work and his most famous, embodies many of the most iconic attributes of Chaucer’s writing. The book is structured as a collection of stories, told by a group of pilgrims traveling to Canterbury. In the Middle Ages, pilgrimage was a popular religious practice—those seeking divine forgiveness, or hoping for a miraculous cure, would travel to sacred destinations to secure the favor of a saint, who could then entreat God on their behalf. Most pilgrimage routes also included relics, or preserved parts of saints’s bodies. These objects were thought to have miraculous powers, and contact with them was rumored to cure illness, bring good fortune, and ensure divine favor in the afterlife.
Despite this religious frame, The Canterbury Tales, like most of Chaucer’s writing, is largely secular. Of course, many of the individual speakers have religious roles. The Parson and the Prioress both work hard to come off as pious and devout. Yet the combination of multiple voices shows a world governed much more by worldly concerns than religious mores. Many of the tales are pretty raunchy, even by contemporary standards—several, including the Miller and the Reeve, are tales of adultery, seduction, and sexual trickery. The Pardoner, who technically holds a religious role (selling tokens of God’s forgiveness to those willing to pay) plainly admits he is motivated only by money.
The Legend of Good Women, written before The Canterbury Tales, is another series of stories bound together by a frame narrative. In it, the narrator, a version of Geoffrey Chaucer himself, falls asleep and dreams that Cupid and his wife upbraid him for having neglected romantic love in his previous works. It is also a firmly secular work, largely uninterested in Christianity, and mostly mocking when it does turn to religion. The book tells the stories of women wronged in love, many of whom seduce men to whom they are not married, or kill themselves—two unforgivable sins in Christianity. Yet Chaucer labels those who die as “martyrs,” a word usually reserved for Christian saints who choose death over abandoning their faith.
The women in the Legend of Good Women are all drawn from Classical mythology. References to the classics abound in the text, with Chaucer especially showing off his knowledge of Ovid’s writing. Indeed, “intertextuality,” or writing in conversation with other literature, is a hallmark of Chaucer’s writing. The Canterbury Tales itself is inspired by Boccaccio’s Decameron, another series of tales told by a group of pilgrims fleeing the play. Similarly, much of Troilus and Criseyde, Chaucer’s version of a doomed romance from Greek mythology, is translated directly from Boccaccio's version of the story, and the rest draws heavily on Homer’s Iliad.
This doesn’t mean Chaucer was derivative. He drew on other writing and ran with it, showing off both his learning and his creativity. In Troilus and Criseyde, Chaucer adds new emotional detail, rendering the unfaithful Criseyde a far more sympathetic character, and thus challenging the reader to ask more nuanced moral questions. The Decameron only features aristocratic speakers, but The Canterbury Tales includes speakers from all walks of life. Chaucer is remarkably adept at adopting different voices—reading the poem, it’s easy to forget that the whole poem was written by one person. We get a better sense of the relationship between a story and its teller, as we see how very different people invent very different tales. Yet the inclusion of different speakers also lets Chaucer emphasize that people are more than their social position. Though the class status and economic role of each speaker clearly informs their stories, they also get to transform themself when they speak.
For example, the Wife of Bath, one of the book’s most distinctive speakers, has married many times, and we might expect her to be just the butt of the joke Instead, she delivers a story which outright states that women want to hold the power in their relationships, just as men do. Because Chaucer so completely embraces writing from within her voice, we feel that we have really heard from a different perspective, seen the world as she sees it, rather than just seeing her as broader society does.
The Canterbury Tales’s unique structure—a story of a walk, broken up into the many individual stories told during the journey—enables Chaucer’s virtuosic adaptation of many voices. That’s part of why he embraced frame narratives in nearly all his long works. The Legend of Good Women, The Parliament of Fowls, The House of Fame, and The Book of the Duchess are all dream vision poems. Dream vision poetry was one of the most popular genres in medieval literature. They begin with a narrator, usually a version of the author, who falls asleep and has a marvelous vision. At the end of the story, he wakes up and recounts this vision in poetry.
Chaucer was probably inspired to write dream vision poems by The Consolation of Philosophy and the Roman de la Rose, both of which he translated into Middle English. His dream visions are diverse and often surreal. For example, in The House of Fame, Chaucer falls asleep and finds himself in a vast desert, where an eagle finds him and carries him to a house full of personified words. It’s bizarre and disorienting, somewhere between magical realism and fantasy. It also allows Chaucer to get at some important philosophical topics, such as the essence of language and the value of memory. That remarkable flexibility is what makes Chaucer so special: his writing can be funny, thought-provoking, and moving. It’s always extraordinarily clever, connected to an extensive intellectual world, and yet completely his own.
