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Geoffrey Chaucer
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...
Definition
The Canterbury Tales
The Canterbury Tales (written c. 1388-1400 CE) is a medieval literary work by the poet Geoffrey Chaucer (l. c. 1343-1400 CE) comprised of 24 tales related to a number of literary genres and touching on subjects ranging from fate to God's...
Article
Grief & Consolation in Chaucer's Book of the Duchess
In Geoffrey Chaucer's first major work, The Book of the Duchess (c. 1370 CE), two genres of medieval literature are combined – the French poetic convention of courtly love and the high medieval dream vision – to create a poem of enduring...
Article
Chaucer's The Book of the Duchess Full Text & Summary
The Book of the Duchess is the first major work of the English poet Geoffrey Chaucer (l. c. 1343-1400 CE), best known for his masterpiece The Canterbury Tales, composed in the last twelve years of his life and left unfinished at his death...
Definition
Astrolabe
The astrolabe is an astronomical instrument used from around the 6th century to measure time and position by determining the altitude of heavenly bodies like the Sun and certain stars. Measurements were taken in reference to the viewer's...
Definition
Medieval Literature
Medieval literature is defined broadly as any work written in Latin or the vernacular between c. 476-1500, including philosophy, religious treatises, legal texts, as well as works of the imagination. More narrowly, however, the term applies...
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Illustration of The Knight's Tale by Geoffrey Chaucer
A page from a 1542 edition of Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer (1343 - 1400 CE) featuring a woodcut illustration of "The Knight". This edition was edited by William Thynne (c. 16th Century - 1546 CE) and is one of the most valuable surviving...
Image
Portrait of Geoffrey Chaucer
A late 16th Century portrait of the English poet Geoffrey Chaucer (1343 - 1400 CE) by an unknown artist. This portrait is thought to be based on a contemporary portrait of Chaucer in the manuscript of Hoccleve's De Regimine Principum...
Definition
Marie de France
Marie de France (wrote c. 1160-1215 CE) was a multilingual poet and translator, the first female poet of France, and a highly influential literary voice of 12th-century CE Europe. She is credited with establishing the literary genre of chivalric...
Video
The Life of Geoffrey Chaucer
The great English poet, Geoffrey Chaucer, was born in 1342. When he was around fifteen years of age, he managed to gain a position as page to the Countess of Ulster, serving mainly as a servant and messenger. Two years later, in 1359, Chaucer...