Along with Shakespeare and the anonymous author of Beowulf, Geoffrey Chaucer (c1342-1400) is one of the true giants of English literature. All it took was a little sex.
Rude, bawdy, cynical and full of adventure, Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales are more than some obscure 14th century classic of Middle English. They have inspired generations of later writers. A recent updating of them to modern times on the BBC in the UK in 2003 boasted popular actors like Julie Walters, James Nesbitt, Jonny Lee Miller and Billie Piper.
Unlike this week's film review, the Canterbury Tales go far to show that the real obsession of the medieval mind was, not sports, but sex. Despite admonitions by church fathers from Augustine to Aquinas (or perhaps because of them), medieval people told bawdy stories long before Chaucer, most notably the coarse 13th century fabliaux. If you have ever read a story in Playboy with a medieval setting and a storyline in which a much younger wife cuckholds a much older husband (and gets away with it cold), you are probably reading a popularized translation of a fabliau. "Allas, allas, that evere love was synne!," cries Chaucer's most famous creation, the lusty, multiply married (and widowed) Wife of Bath.
But Chaucer had something special. His story frame, a pilgrimage to Thomas Becket's shrine in Canterbury, allows for a variety of characters to tell a variety of stories, ranging from the funny and gross to the sad and even disturbing. Pilgrimages were a strange mixture of piety and sin, of people doing penance and those taking a sort of vacation from their lives.
Each story is named after the character who tells it, not the subject matter. There are also frame stories (the prologues) that tell each narrator's history and reason for coming on the pilgrimage. Chaucer never finished the cycle of tales, which he began in the 1380s, though he did undertake, and complete, other works. He had a very lively career aside from being a writer. Born into a well-off merchant family in Ipswitch, Chaucer improved his family's position by marrying a woman of the royal court, Phillipa Roet. His family became increasingly involved in court politics until the death of his patron, Richard II.
Chaucer's greatest achievement is the place his Tales take at the beginning of the resurgence of Middle English as a significant literary language. English had gone into eclipse after the Norman Conquest in 1066 (though, obviously, it did not die out). Chaucer's creation of a bona fide classic in the newer version of the language showed that English had made a permanent comeback.
