18-) English Literature

18=) English   Literature  

Geoffrey Chaucer

Literary works

Chaucer’s great literary accomplishment of the 1390s was The Canterbury Tales. In it a group of about 30 pilgrims gather at the Tabard Inn in Southwark, across the Thames from London, and agree to engage in a storytelling contest as they travel on horseback to the shrine of Thomas à Becket in Canterbury, Kent, and back. Harry Bailly, host of the Tabard, serves as master of ceremonies for the contest. The pilgrims are introduced by vivid brief sketches in the General Prologue. Interspersed between the 24 tales told by the pilgrims are short dramatic scenes presenting lively exchanges, called links and usually involving the host and one or more of the pilgrims. Chaucer did not complete the full plan for his book: the return journey from Canterbury is not included, and some of the pilgrims do not tell stories. Further, the surviving manuscripts leave room for doubt at some points as to Chaucer’s intent for arranging the material. The work is nevertheless sufficiently complete to be considered a unified book rather than a collection of unfinished fragments. Use of a pilgrimage as a framing device for the collection of stories enabled Chaucer to bring together people from many walks of life: knight, prioress, monk; merchant, man of law, franklin, scholarly clerk; miller, reeve, pardoner; wife of Bath and many others. Also, the pilgrimage and the storytelling contest allowed presentation of a highly varied collection of literary genres: courtly romance, racy fabliau, saint’s life, allegorical tale, beast fable, medieval sermon, alchemical account, and, at times, mixtures of these genres. Because of this structure, the sketches, the links, and the tales all fuse as complex presentations of the pilgrims, while at the same time the tales present remarkable examples of short stories in verse, plus two expositions in prose. In addition, the pilgrimage, combining a fundamentally religious purpose with its secular aspect of vacation in the spring, made possible extended consideration of the relationship between the pleasures and vices of this world and the spiritual aspirations for the next, that seeming dichotomy with which Chaucer, like Boethius and many other medieval writers, was so steadily concerned.

For this crowning glory of his 30 years of literary composition, Chaucer used his wide and deep study of medieval books of many sorts and his acute observation of daily life at many levels. He also employed his detailed knowledge of medieval astrology and subsidiary sciences as they were thought to influence and dictate human behaviour. Over the whole expanse of this intricate dramatic narrative, he presides as Chaucer the poet, Chaucer the civil servant, and Chaucer the pilgrim: somewhat slow-witted in his pose and always intrigued by human frailty but always questioning the complexity of the human condition and always seeing both the humour and the tragedy in that condition. At the end, in the Retractation with which The Canterbury Tales closes, Chaucer as poet and pilgrim states his conclusion that the concern for this world fades into insignificance before the prospect for the next; in view of the admonitions in The Parson’s Tale, he asks forgiveness for his writings that concern “worldly vanities” and remembrance for his translation of the Consolation and his other works of morality and religious devotion. On that note he ends his finest work and his career as poet.

For Chaucer’s writings the subsequent record is clearer. His contemporaries praised his artistry, and a “school” of 15th-century Chaucerians imitated his poetry. Over the succeeding centuries, his poems, particularly The Canterbury Tales, have been widely read, translated into modern English, and, since about the middle of the 19th century, the number of scholars and critics who devote themselves to the study and teaching of his life and works has steadily increased.

Perhaps the chief characteristics of Chaucer’s works are their variety in subject matter, genre, tone, and style and in the complexities presented concerning the human pursuit of a sensible existence. Yet his writings also consistently reflect an all-pervasive humour combined with serious and tolerant consideration of important philosophical questions. From his writings Chaucer emerges as poet of love, both earthly and divine, whose presentations range from lustful cuckoldry to spiritual union with God. Thereby, they regularly lead the reader to speculation about man’s relation both to his fellows and to his Maker, while simultaneously providing delightfully entertaining views of the frailties and follies, as well as the nobility, of mankind.

Chaucer's first major work was The Book of the Duchess, an elegy for Blanche of Lancaster who died in 1368. Two other early works were Anelida and Arcite and The House of Fame. He wrote many of his major works in a prolific period when he held the job of customs comptroller for London (1374 to 1386). His Parlement of Foules, The Legend of Good Women, and Troilus and Criseyde all date from this time. It is believed that he started The Canterbury Tales in the 1380s.

Chaucer also translated Boethius' Consolation of Philosophy and The Romance of the Rose by Guillaume de Lorris (extended by Jean de Meun). Eustache Deschamps called himself a "nettle in Chaucer's garden of poetry". In 1385, Thomas Usk made glowing mention of Chaucer, and John Gower also lauded him.

Chaucer's Treatise on the Astrolabe describes the form and use of the astrolabe in detail and is sometimes cited as the first example of technical writing in the English language, and it indicates that Chaucer was versed in science in addition to his literary talents. The equatorie of the planetis is a scientific work similar to the Treatise and sometimes ascribed to Chaucer because of its language and handwriting, an identification which scholars no longer deem tenable.

Influence

Linguistic

Chaucer wrote in continental accentual-syllabic metre, a style which had developed in English literature since around the 12th century as an alternative to the alliterative Anglo-Saxon metre. Chaucer is known for metrical innovation, inventing the rhyme royal, and he was one of the first English poets to use the five-stress line, a decasyllabic cousin to the iambic pentametre, in his work, with only a few anonymous short works using it before him. The arrangement of these five-stress lines into rhyming couplets, first seen in his The Legend of Good Women, was used in much of his later work and became one of the standard poetic forms in English. His early influence as a satirist is also important, with the common humorous device, the funny accent of a regional dialect, apparently making its first appearance in The Reeve's Tale.

The poetry of Chaucer, along with other writers of the era, is credited with helping to standardise the London Dialect of the Middle English language from a combination of the Kentish and Midlands dialects. This is probably overstated; the influence of the court, chancery and bureaucracy – of which Chaucer was a part – remains a more probable influence on the development of Standard English.

Modern English is somewhat distanced from the language of Chaucer's poems owing to the effect of the Great Vowel Shift some time after his death. This change in the pronunciation of English, still not fully understood, makes the reading of Chaucer difficult for the modern audience.

The status of the final -e in Chaucer's verse is uncertain: it seems likely that during the period of Chaucer's writing the final -e was dropping out of colloquial English and that its use was somewhat irregular. It may have been a vestige of the Old English dative singular suffix -e attached to most nouns. Chaucer's versification suggests that the final -e is sometimes to be vocalized , and sometimes to be silent; however, this remains a point on which there is disagreement. When it is vocalized , most scholars pronounce it as a schwa.

Apart from the irregular spelling, much of the vocabulary is recognisable to the modern reader. Chaucer is also recorded in the Oxford English Dictionary as the first author to use many common English words in his writings. These words were probably frequently used in the language at the time but Chaucer, with his ear for common speech, is the earliest extant manuscript source. Acceptable, alkali, altercation, amble, angrily, annex, annoyance, approaching, arbitration, armless, army, arrogant, arsenic, arc, artillery and aspect are just some of almost two thousand English words first attested in Chaucer.

Literary

Widespread knowledge of Chaucer's works is attested by the many poets who imitated or responded to his writing. John Lydgate was one of the earliest poets to write continuations of Chaucer's unfinished Tales while Robert Henryson's Testament of Cresseid completes the story of Cressida left unfinished in his Troilus and Criseyde. Many of the manuscripts of Chaucer's works contain material from these poets and later appreciations by the Romantic era poets were shaped by their failure to distinguish the later "additions" from original Chaucer.

Writers of the 17th and 18th centuries, such as John Dryden, admired Chaucer for his stories, but not for his rhythm and rhyme, as few critics could then read Middle English and the text had been butchered by printers, leaving a somewhat unadmirable mess. It was not until the late 19th century that the official Chaucerian canon, accepted today, was decided upon, largely as a result of Walter William Skeat's work. Roughly seventy-five years after Chaucer's death, The Canterbury Tales was selected by William Caxton to be one of the first books to be printed in England.

English

Chaucer is sometimes considered the source of the English vernacular tradition. His achievement for the language can be seen as part of a general historical trend towards the creation of a vernacular literature, after the example of Dante, in many parts of Europe. A parallel trend in Chaucer's own lifetime was underway in Scotland through the work of his slightly earlier contemporary, John Barbour, and was likely to have been even more general, as is evidenced by the example of the Pearl Poet in the north of England.

Although Chaucer's language is much closer to Modern English than the text of Beowulf, such that (unlike that of Beowulf) a Modern English-speaker with a large vocabulary of archaic words may understand it, it differs enough that most publications modernise his idiom. The following is a sample from the prologue of The Summoner's Tale that compares Chaucer's text to a modern translation:

Original Text                                                    Modern Translation

This frere bosteth that he knoweth helle,   This friar boasts that he knows hell,

And God it woot, that it is litel wonder;     And God knows that it is little wonder;

Freres and feendes been but lyte asonder. Friars and fiends are seldom far apart.

For, pardee, ye han ofte tyme herd telle     For, by God, you have ofttimes heard tell

How that a frere ravyshed was to helle       How a friar was taken to hell

In spirit ones by a visioun;                           In spirit, once by a vision;

And as an angel ladde hym up and doun,  And as an angel led him up and                            ,                                                                         down

To shewen hym the peynes that the were,  To show him the pains that were    ,              there

In al the place saugh he nat a frere;           In all the place he saw not a friar;

Of oother folk he saugh ynowe in wo.        Of other folk he saw enough in woe.

Unto this angel spak the frere tho:             Unto this angel spoke the friar thus:

Now, sire, quod he, han freres swich a grace "Now sir", said he, "Have  friars such a grace

That noon of hem shal come to this place?       That none of them come to this  place?"

Yis, quod this aungel, many a millioun!               "Yes", said the angel, "many a million!"

And unto sathanas he ladde hym doun.     And unto Satan the angel led him down.

–And now hath sathanas, –seith he, –a tayl         "And now Satan has", he said, "a tail,

Brodder than of a carryk is the sayl.          Broader than a galleon's sail.

Hold up thy tayl, thou sathanas!–quod he; Hold up your tail, Satan!" said he.

–shewe forth thyn ers, and lat the frere se "Show forth your arse, and let the friar see

Where is the nest of freres in this place!–   Where the nest of friars is in this place!"

And er that half a furlong wey of space,     And before half a furlong of space,

Right so as bees out swarmen from an hyve,       Just as bees swarm out from a hive,

Out of the develes ers ther gonne dryve     Out of the devil's arse there were driven

Twenty thousand freres on a route,  Twenty thousand friars on a rout,

And thurghout helle swarmed al aboute,   And throughout hell swarmed all about,

And comen agayn as faste as they may gon,        And came again as fast as they could go,

And in his ers they crepten everychon.      And every one crept into his arse.

He clapte his tayl agayn and lay ful stille.  He shut his tail again and lay very still.

Valentine's Day and romance

The first recorded association of Valentine's Day with romantic love is believed to be in Chaucer's Parlement of Foules (1382), a dream vision portraying a parliament for birds to choose their mates. Honouring the first anniversary of the engagement of fifteen-year-old King Richard II of England to fifteen-year-old Anne of Bohemia:

For this was on seynt Volantynys day

Whan euery bryd comyth there to chese his make

Of euery kynde that men thinke may

And that so heuge a noyse gan they make

That erthe & eyr & tre & euery lake

So ful was that onethe was there space

For me to stonde, so ful was al the place.

Critical reception

Early criticism

The poet Thomas Hoccleve, who may have met Chaucer and considered him his role model, hailed Chaucer as "the firste fyndere of our fair langage".John Lydgate referred to Chaucer within his own text The Fall of Princes as the "lodesterre (guiding principle) … off our language".Around two centuries later, Sir Philip Sidney greatly praised Troilus and Criseyde in his own Defence of Poesie. During the nineteenth and early twentieth century, Chaucer came to be viewed as a symbol of the nation's poetic heritage.

In Charles Dickens' 1850 novel David Copperfield, the Victorian era author echoed Chaucer's use of Luke 23:34 from Troilus and Criseyde (Dickens held a copy in his library among other works of Chaucer), with G. K. Chesterton writing, "among the great canonical English authors, Chaucer and Dickens have the most in common."

Manuscripts and audience

The large number of surviving manuscripts of Chaucer's works is testimony to the enduring interest in his poetry prior to the arrival of the printing press. There are 83 surviving manuscripts of the Canterbury Tales (in whole or part) alone, along with sixteen of Troilus and Criseyde, including the personal copy of Henry IV. Given the ravages of time, it is likely that these surviving manuscripts represent hundreds since lost.

Chaucer's original audience was a courtly one, and would have included women as well as men of the upper social classes. Yet even before his death in 1400, Chaucer's audience had begun to include members of the rising literate, middle and merchant classes. This included many Lollard sympathisers who may well have been inclined to read Chaucer as one of their own.

Lollards were particularly attracted to Chaucer's satirical writings about friars, priests, and other church officials. In 1464, John Baron, a tenant farmer in Agmondesham (Amersham in Buckinghamshire), was brought before John Chadworth, the Bishop of Lincoln, on charges of being a Lollard heretic; he confessed to owning a "boke of the Tales of Caunterburie" among other suspect volumes.

Printed editions

The first English printer, William Caxton, was responsible for the first two folio editions of The Canterbury Tales which were published in 1478 and 1483. Caxton's second printing, by his own account, came about because a customer complained that the printed text differed from a manuscript he knew; Caxton obligingly used the man's manuscript as his source. Both Caxton editions carry the equivalent of manuscript authority. Caxton's edition was reprinted by his successor, Wynkyn de Worde, but this edition has no independent authority.

Richard Pynson, the King's Printer under Henry VIII for about twenty years, was the first to collect and sell something that resembled an edition of the collected works of Chaucer; however, in the process, he introduced five previously printed texts that are now known not to be Chaucer's. (The collection is actually three separately printed texts, or collections of texts, bound together as one volume.)

There is a likely connection between Pynson's product and William Thynne's a mere six years later. Thynne had a successful career from the 1520s until his death in 1546, as chief clerk of the kitchen of Henry VIII, one of the masters of the royal household. He spent years comparing various versions of Chaucer's works, and selected 41 pieces for publication. While there were questions over the authorship of some of the material, there is not doubt this was the first comprehensive view of Chaucer's work. The Workes of Geffray Chaucer, published in 1532, was the first edition of Chaucer's collected works. Thynne's editions of Chaucer's Works in 1532 and 1542 were the first major contributions to the existence of a widely recognised Chaucerian canon. Thynne represents his edition as a book sponsored by and supportive of the king who is praised in the preface by Sir Brian Tuke. Thynne's canon brought the number of apocryphal works associated with Chaucer to a total of 28, even if that was not his intention. As with Pynson, once included in the Works, pseudepigraphic texts stayed with those works, regardless of their first editor's intentions.

In the 16th and 17th centuries, Chaucer was printed more than any other English author, and he was the first author to have his works collected in comprehensive single-volume editions in which a Chaucer canon began to cohere. Some scholars contend that 16th-century editions of Chaucer's Works set the precedent for all other English authors in terms of presentation, prestige and success in print. These editions certainly established Chaucer's reputation, but they also began the complicated process of reconstructing and frequently inventing Chaucer's biography and the canonical list of works which were attributed to him.

Probably the most significant aspect of the growing apocrypha is that, beginning with Thynne's editions, it began to include medieval texts that made Chaucer appear as a proto-Protestant Lollard, primarily the Testament of Love and The Plowman's Tale. As "Chaucerian" works that were not considered apocryphal until the late 19th century, these medieval texts enjoyed a new life, with English Protestants carrying on the earlier Lollard project of appropriating existing texts and authors who seemed sympathetic—or malleable enough to be construed as sympathetic—to their cause. The official Chaucer of the early printed volumes of his Works was construed as a proto-Protestant as the same was done, concurrently, with William Langland and Piers Plowman.

The famous Plowman's Tale did not enter Thynne's Works until the second, 1542, edition. Its entry was surely facilitated by Thynne's inclusion of Thomas Usk's Testament of Love in the first edition. The Testament of Love imitates, borrows from, and thus resembles Usk's contemporary, Chaucer. (Testament of Love also appears to borrow from Piers Plowman.)

Since the Testament of Love mentions its author's part in a failed plot (book 1, chapter 6), his imprisonment, and (perhaps) a recantation of (possibly Lollard) heresy, all this was associated with Chaucer. (Usk himself was executed as a traitor in 1388.) John Foxe took this recantation of heresy as a defence of the true faith, calling Chaucer a "right Wiclevian" and (erroneously) identifying him as a schoolmate and close friend of John Wycliffe at Merton College, Oxford. (Thomas Speght is careful to highlight these facts in his editions and his "Life of Chaucer".) No other sources for the Testament of Love exist—there is only Thynne's construction of whatever manuscript sources he had.

John Stow (1525–1605) was an antiquarian and also a chronicler. His edition of Chaucer's Works in 1561brought the apocrypha to more than 50 titles. More were added in the 17th century, and they remained as late as 1810, well after Thomas Tyrwhitt pared the canon down in his 1775 edition. The compilation and printing of Chaucer's works was, from its beginning, a political enterprise, since it was intended to establish an English national identity and history that grounded and authorised the Tudor monarchy and church. What was added to Chaucer often helped represent him favourably to Protestant England.

In his 1598 edition of the Works, Speght (probably taking cues from Foxe) made good use of Usk's account of his political intrigue and imprisonment in the Testament of Love to assemble a largely fictional "Life of Our Learned English Poet, Geffrey Chaucer". Speght's "Life" presents readers with an erstwhile radical in troubled times much like their own, a proto-Protestant who eventually came round to the king's views on religion. Speght states, "In the second year of Richard the second, the King tooke Geffrey Chaucer and his lands into his protection. The occasion wherof no doubt was some daunger and trouble whereinto he was fallen by favouring some rash attempt of the common people." Under the discussion of Chaucer's friends, namely John of Gaunt, Speght further explains:

Yet it seemeth that [Chaucer] was in some trouble in the daies of King Richard the second, as it may appeare in the Testament of Loue: where hee doth greatly complaine of his owne rashnesse in following the multitude, and of their hatred against him for bewraying their purpose. And in that complaint which he maketh to his empty purse, I do find a written copy, which I had of Iohn Stow (whose library hath helped many writers) wherein ten times more is adioined, then is in print. Where he maketh great lamentation for his wrongfull imprisonment, wishing death to end his daies: which in my iudgement doth greatly accord with that in the Testament of Loue. Moreouer we find it thus in Record.

Later, in "The Argument" to the Testament of Love, Speght adds:

Chaucer did compile this booke as a comfort to himselfe after great griefs conceiued for some rash attempts of the commons, with whome he had ioyned, and thereby was in feare to loose the fauour of his best friends.

Speght is also the source of the famous tale of Chaucer being fined for beating a Franciscan friar in Fleet Street, as well as a fictitious coat of arms and family tree. Ironically – and perhaps consciously so – an introductory, apologetic letter in Speght's edition from Francis Beaumont defends the unseemly, "low", and bawdy bits in Chaucer from an elite, classicist position.

Francis Thynne noted some of these inconsistencies in his Animadversions, insisting that Chaucer was not a commoner, and he objected to the friar-beating story. Yet Thynne himself underscores Chaucer's support for popular religious reform, associating Chaucer's views with his father William Thynne's attempts to include The Plowman's Tale and The Pilgrim's Tale in the 1532 and 1542 Works.

The myth of the Protestant Chaucer continues to have a lasting impact on a large body of Chaucerian scholarship. Though it is extremely rare for a modern scholar to suggest Chaucer supported a religious movement that did not exist until more than a century after his death, the predominance of this thinking for so many centuries left it for granted that Chaucer was at least hostile toward Catholicism. This assumption forms a large part of many critical approaches to Chaucer's works, including neo-Marxism.

Alongside Chaucer's Works, the most impressive literary monument of the period is John Foxe's Acts and Monuments.... As with the Chaucer editions, it was critically significant to English Protestant identity and included Chaucer in its project. Foxe's Chaucer both derived from and contributed to the printed editions of Chaucer's Works, particularly the pseudepigrapha. Jack Upland was first printed in Foxe's Acts and Monuments, and then it appeared in Speght's edition of Chaucer's Works.

Speght's "Life of Chaucer" echoes Foxe's own account, which is itself dependent upon the earlier editions that added the Testament of Love and The Plowman's Tale to their pages. Like Speght's Chaucer, Foxe's Chaucer was also a shrewd (or lucky) political survivor. In his 1563 edition, Foxe "thought it not out of season … to couple … some mention of Geoffrey Chaucer" with a discussion of John Colet, a possible source for John Skelton's character Colin Clout.

Probably referring to the 1542 Act for the Advancement of True Religion, Foxe said that he "marvel[s] to consider … how the bishops, condemning and abolishing all manner of English books and treatises which might bring the people to any light of knowledge, did yet authorise the works of Chaucer to remain still and to be occupied; who, no doubt, saw into religion as much almost as even we do now, and uttereth in his works no less, and seemeth to be a right Wicklevian, or else there never was any. And that, all his works almost, if they be thoroughly advised, will testify (albeit done in mirth, and covertly); and especially the latter end of his third book of the Testament of Love … Wherein, except a man be altogether blind, he may espy him at the full: although in the same book (as in all others he useth to do), under shadows covertly, as under a visor, he suborneth truth in such sort, as both privily she may profit the godly-minded, and yet not be espied of the crafty adversary. And therefore the bishops, belike, taking his works but for jests and toys, in condemning other books, yet permitted his books to be read."

It is significant, too, that Foxe's discussion of Chaucer leads into his history of "The Reformation of the Church of Christ in the Time of Martin Luther" when "Printing, being opened, incontinently ministered unto the church the instruments and tools of learning and knowledge; which were good books and authors, which before lay hid and unknown. The science of printing being found, immediately followed the grace of God; which stirred up good wits aptly to conceive the light of knowledge and judgment: by which light darkness began to be espied, and ignorance to be detected; truth from error, religion from superstition, to be discerned."

Foxe downplays Chaucer's bawdy and amorous writing, insisting that it all testifies to his piety. Material that is troubling is deemed metaphoric, while the more forthright satire (which Foxe prefers) is taken literally.

John Urry produced the first edition of the complete works of Chaucer in a Latin font, published posthumously in 1721. Included were several tales, according to the editors, for the first time printed, a biography of Chaucer, a glossary of old English words, and testimonials of author writers concerning Chaucer dating back to the 16th century. According to A. S. G Edwards,

"This was the first collected edition of Chaucer to be printed in roman type. The life of Chaucer prefixed to the volume was the work of the Reverend John Dart, corrected and revised by Timothy Thomas. The glossary appended was also mainly compiled by Thomas. The text of Urry's edition has often been criticised by subsequent editors for its frequent conjectural emendations, mainly to make it conform to his sense of Chaucer's metre. The justice of such criticisms should not obscure his achievement. His is the first edition of Chaucer for nearly a hundred and fifty years to consult any manuscripts and is the first since that of William Thynne in 1534 to seek systematically to assemble a substantial number of manuscripts to establish his text. It is also the first edition to offer descriptions of the manuscripts of Chaucer's works, and the first to print texts of 'Gamelyn' and 'The Tale of Beryn', works ascribed to, but not by, Chaucer."

List of works

The following major works are in rough chronological order but scholars still debate the dating of most of Chaucer's output and works made up from a collection of stories may have been compiled over a long period.

Major works

The Book of the Duchess , The House of Fame , Anelida and Arcite , Parlement of Foules , Troilus and Criseyde , The Legend of Good Women , The Canterbury Tales , A Treatise on the Astrolabe

Translations

Translation of Roman de la Rose, possibly extant as The Romaunt of the Rose

Translation of Boethius' Consolation of Philosophy as Boece

Short poems

An ABC , Chaucers Wordes unto Adam, His Owne Scriveyn (disputed) , The Complaint unto Pity , The Complaint of Chaucer to his Purse , The Complaint of Mars , The Complaint of Venus , A Complaint to His Lady , The Former Age , Fortune , Gentilesse , Lak of Stedfastnesse ,Lenvoy de Chaucer a Scogan , Lenvoy de Chaucer a Bukton , Proverbs , Balade to Rosemounde, 1477 print

Balade to Rosemounde , Truth , Womanly Noblesse , Poems of doubtful authorship , Against Women Unconstant , A Balade of Complaint , Complaynt D'Amours , Merciles Beaute

The Equatorie of the Planets – A rough translation of a Latin work derived from an Arab work of the same title. It is a description of the construction and use of a planetary equatorium, which was used in calculating planetary orbits and positions (at the time it was believed the sun orbited the Earth). The similar Treatise on the Astrolabe, not usually doubted as Chaucer's work, in addition to Chaucer's name as a gloss to the manuscript are the main pieces of evidence for the ascription to Chaucer. However, the evidence Chaucer wrote such a work is questionable, and as such is not included in The Riverside Chaucer. If Chaucer did not compose this work, it was probably written by a contemporary.

Works presumed lost

Of the Wreched Engendrynge of Mankynde, possible translation of Innocent III's De miseria conditionis humanae

Origenes upon the Maudeleyne

The Book of the Leoun – "The Book of the Lion" is mentioned in Chaucer's retraction. It has been speculated that it may have been a redaction of Guillaume de Machaut's 'Dit dou lyon,' a story about courtly love (a subject about which Chaucer frequently wrote).

Spurious works

The Pilgrim's Tale – written in the 16th century with many Chaucerian allusions

The Plowman's Tale or The Complaint of the Ploughman – a Lollard satire later appropriated as a Protestant text

Pierce the Ploughman's Crede – a Lollard satire later appropriated by Protestants

The Ploughman's Tale – its body is largely a version of Thomas Hoccleve's "Item de Beata Virgine"

"La Belle Dame Sans Merci" – frequently attributed to Chaucer, but actually a translation by Richard Roos of Alain Chartier's poem

The Testament of Love – actually by Thomas Usk

Jack Upland – a Lollard satire

The Floure and the Leafe – a 15th-century allegory

Derived works

God Spede the Plough – Borrows twelve stanzas of Chaucer's Monk's Tale

In popular culture

Chaucer is one of the main characters in the 2001 film A Knight's Tale, and is portrayed by Paul Bettany.