The Portable Chaucer

“The most successful translations of Chaucer’s poetry that I have ever seen.”—Chicago Tribune

Geoffrey Chaucer was born in London, the son of a wine-merchant, in about 1342. He spent his life in royal government service, and his career is unusually well documented.

By 1357, Chaucer was a page to the wife of Prince Lionel, second son of Edward III. It was while in the prince’s service that Chaucer was ransomed when captured during the English campaign in France in 1359-60.

Chaucer’s wife Philippa, whom he married c. 1365, was the sister of Katherine Swynford. Swynford was the mistress (c. 1370) and third wife (1396) of John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster. John of Gaunt’s first wife Blanche (d. 1368) is commemorated in Chaucer’s earliest major poem, The Book of the Duchess.

From 1374, Chaucer worked as controller of customs on wool in the port of London. Between 1366 and 1378, he made a number of trips abroad on official business, including two trips to Italy in 1372-3 and 1378. The influence of Chaucer’s encounter with Italian literature is felt in the poems he wrote in the late 1370s and early 1380s – The House of Fame, The Parliament of Fowls, and a version of The Knight’s Tale. This influence finds its fullest expression in Troilus and Criseyde.

In 1386, Chaucer was a member of parliament for Kent. In the same year, he resigned his customs post. In 1389, he was appointed Clerk of the King’s Works, resigning in 1391. After finishing Troilus and his translation into English prose of Boethius’ De consolatione philosophiae, Chaucer started his Legend of Good Women.

In the 1390s, he worked on his most ambitious project, The Canterbury Tales, which remained unfinished at his death. In 1399, Chaucer leased a house in the precincts of Westminster Abbey. He died in 1400 and was buried in the Abbey.

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