Do-Not-Miss Middle English Masterpiece #4

It Rhymes with Banterbury Snails

Dear bookish friend,

Today’s Do-Not-Miss Middle English masterpiece is funny, weird, transcendent, controversial, plain good poetry—it’s got it all. Today, let’s dive into Geoffrey Chaucer’s famous fourteenth-century Canterbury Tales. If you haven’t read it before, go get yourself a copy post-haste. It merits its fame.

Geoffrey Chaucer has been called “the father of English poetry.” This honorific emerged early on (from poets like fifteenth-century Thomas Hoccleve) because what he did for English was not totally dissimilar to what Dante had done for Italian—put a whole language on the map as suitable for weighty matters like philosophy and theology. What about the flourishing tradition of English alliterative poetry, like Beowulf and all the goodness of Old English poetry that survived into the fourteenth century in masterpieces like Sir Gawain and the Green Knight?