The life of Geoffrey Chaucer (ca. 1340-1400), often labeled “the father of English poetry,” ought to be an open book: He is mentioned almost 500 times in contemporary records, far more than ...

Geoffrey Chaucer, often termed the father of English literature, began his career in an Irish household. And, while Chaucer had to work hard to establish English as a literary language in a context in ...

The poet W.H. Auden said that to understand your own country, you ought to have lived in at least two others. As a historian, I've taken a different tack: to show readers what life was like for people ...

Chaucer himself was a translator, people forget, his most important work along those lines being “The Romance of the Rose” and Boethius’ “The Consolation of Philosophy.” Some of the tales that appear ...

Margaret Shultz ’16 felt dissatisfied when she submitted her senior thesis in English this spring. The road to this moment hadn’t been an easy one: She’d begun to question the value of the English ...

Two scholars have made new conclusions about a sermon from the late 12th century, which reframes some confusing references, made by the 14th century English poet Geoffrey Chaucer. And now for a tale ...

Poets there were before Chaucer,— vixere fortes ante Agamemnona, — but search Rymer from cord to clasp and you shall find no documentary evidence of any one of them wearing the leaf or receiving the ...

Exclusive: Document was originally thought to be written by clerk on behalf of Canterbury Tales writer who worked as civil servant A 14th-century bureaucratic document requesting time off work for a ...