Discovering the medieval world through Chaucer

Chaucer’s literary output is extraordinarily diverse. His works offer a vivid account of medieval society with its material life, cultural practices and literary interests, and engage with religious controversy, scholarship and some of the most important philosophical ideas of the day. His interests were not limited to the depiction of contemporary society and he is just as famous for his portrayal of pagan antiquity, reworking stories by classical authors. His reading was exceptionally wide-ranging and his literary sources include works in French, Italian and Latin as well as English. Chaucer’s intellectual interests were equally diverse and recurrent themes in his works include freedom and predestination, knowledge and authority, reputation, fame and identity. Already to his earliest readers, however, he was known primarily as a poet of love and love is indeed a central and most persistent topic present in all his works.

Chaucer is also famous for the range of his literary technique. His output includes equally brilliant treatments of romance, epic, tragedy and comedy. Several of his works use the genre of the dream-vision, one of the most popular medieval literary forms with a long and illustrious history in England and Continental Europe. Mixing different traditions, Chaucer developed vernacular poetry in entirely new ways with unprecedented imagination and creativity. This course will offer students an opportunity to discover and explore all aspects of his literary achievement.