• Notes taken from The Norton Anthology of English Literature (7) Geoffrey Chaucer
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  • Geoffrey Chaucer:

 

  • the only classes known in medieval England :  the aristocrats and the Commons
  • the bridge that connected these two famous classes:  middle-class like Chaucer
  • Chaucer's father:  a well-to-do wine merchant
  • his social class :   middle-class
  • Chaucer's hometown:  London 
  • his boyhood:   education as well as being with commoners
  • his early teens:    as a page of Lionel of Antwerp, a son of the reigning monarch Edward the third
  • his relationship to King Edward's family: close association with the Lionel's brother John of Gaunt,  their father king Edward, their nephew Richard the second , John's son Henry the fourth
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  • Richard the second's coronation:   1377
  • Henry the fourth accession to the throne:  1399
  • his patrons:   John of Gaunt and his family
  • his wife, Philippa and their children:  of higher birth than himself, related to the queen's family, his son Thomas Chaucer and his granddaughter, Alice Chaucer, both important in their own times
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  • his different stages of life: as a page, a captured soldier, vallectus of Edward the third, his mission to Italy, his journey to France
  • his important jobs at court :   control of the Customs and Subsidies on Wool for the Port of London,  Justice of the Peace and Knight of the Shire -Member of Parliament, Clerk of the King's Works
  • his last days:  in a rented house in the garden of Westminster Abbey
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  • Chaucer's literary career
  • exact dates for his works:   not for certain
  • his first work :   Roman de la Rose, a translation, and its influence on his works
  • about Roman de la Rose :  13th century French poem, the first part an allegory by Guillaume de Lorris, in a dream tells the progress of a youthful love affair , the second part by Jean de Meun, discusses important issues by medieval intellectuals and shows that the young courtier wends his lady (the rose )
  • influence of the work on Chaucer :   its highly diverse elements , seen in Chaucer's love of variety using the courtly emotionalism of Guillaume and the philosophical often satiric detachment of Jean
  • Chaucer's share in the translation of the work:  the first 1700 lines, agreement of the scholars
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  • date of his work on the Roman: 1360's
  • his first major work:  the Book of the Duchess( 1370), 
  • the source of the work:  a translation of the French poets, Jean Froissart and Guillaume de Machaut,  but better than the original works
  • occasion of the poem: an elegy for John of Gaunt's first wife
  • form of the poem:  octosyllabic lines, with imaginative, daring and artistic plan
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  • his first poetic models:    French  
  • his knowledge of writings in Latin:  direct knowledge of the Aeneid and of Ovid , and other classical authors through French translations
  • his favorite Latin writer:  Boethius,  the sixth-century Roman ,
  • Boethius's  famous work:  Consolation of Philosophy,
  • influence of consolation of philosophy on the age :   influential in the whole Middle Ages because of its nobly stoic doctrine
  • Boethius's influence on Chaucer :  his philosophical attitude , living wholeheartedly in the world while remaining spiritually detached from it
  • his prose translation of the Consolation:  during the 70's
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  • his journey to Italy: 1372
  • the previous influences: French and Latin
  • Italian influence:   Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio
  • origin of  House of Fame :    The Divine Comedy
  • his appreciating the Comedy : because of its austere moral grandeur
  • the least influential Italian writer:  Petrarch
  • the most influential Italian writer: Boccaccio, responsible for Chaucer's finest poems like the Parliament of Fowls
  • his influence on The Canterbury Tales:  because of its form and the stories
  • the work that is an imitation of Boccaccio's Il Filostrto :  Troilus and Criseide (1385)  Chaucer's second great work:   Troilus and Criseide
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  • the old tripartite division of Chaucer's literary career: French(to 1372), Italian( 1372 - 85 ), English
  • his parody of Middle English romances: the Rhyme of Sir Thopas
  • similarities of John Gower's Confessio  Amantis to the Canterbury Tales and the Legend of Good Women: because of the structure and some similar tales
  • his purpose of writing the Legend of Good Women : to oppose the portrait of the unfaithful Criseide with the pictures of nine famous faithful women
  • the style of his narratives:   having a single formula, and the simple moralistic technique of conventional English poetry,
  • his English period:  no really English period, no significant role for the English writings of the time