Middle English Literature

Italian Period

Chaucer's second period (up to c.1387) is called his Italian period because during this time his works were modelled primarily on Dante and Boccaccio. It dates from his first visit to Italy in 1372-3, where at Padua he may perhaps have met the fluent Italian poet Petrarch, and where at any rate the revelation of Italian life and literature must have aroused his intense enthusiasm. From this time, and especially after his other visit to Italy, five years later, he made much direct use of the works of Petrarch and Boccaccio and to a less degree of those of their greater predecessor, Dante, whose severe spirit was too unlike Chaucer's for his thorough appreciation. The longest and finest of Chaucer's poems of this period,'Troilus and Crisside' is based on a work of Boccaccio. It’s one of the great love poems in the English language. Here Chaucer details with compelling power the sentiment and tragedy of love, and the psychology of the heroine who had become for the Middle Ages a central figure in the tale of Troy. Chaucer perfected the seven-line stanza later calledrhyme royal.

Major works of the second period include poems:The House of Fame , recounting the adventures of Aeneas after the fall of Troy;The Parliament of Fowls , which tells of the mating of fowls on St. Valentine's Day and is thought to celebrate the betrothal of Richard II to Anne of Bohemia; and a prose translation of Boethius'De consolatione philosophiae .

Chaucer's third period, covering his last fifteen years, is called his English period, because now at last his genius, mature and self-sufficient, worked in essential independence. Among the works of this period are the unfinished***'The Legend of Good*** Women ,'

• a series of romantic biographies of famous ladies and the prose fragmentThe Treatise on the Astrolabe, written for his son Lewis.

The Canterbury Tales - portrait of real people.

To Chaucer's final period, in which he achieved his fullest artistic power, belongs his masterpiece,The Canterbury Tales (written mostly after 1387) - a poetic collection of stories widely regarded as the beginning of English literature. This unfinished poem, about 17,000 lines, is one of the most brilliant works in all literature in which he draws us into a very down-to-earth world. The poem introduces a group of pilgrims journeying from London to the shrine of St. Thomas à Becket at Canterbury. To help pass the time they decide to tell stories which are bawdy, comical and pious.  Chaucer himself is among the pilgrims in the tales. Together, the pilgrims represent a wide cross section of 14th-century English life.

By chance, 29 other pilgrims come trooping into the tavern, also headed for Canterbury. Chaucer chats with all of them, becomes part of their group, and decides to leave with them early the next morning. Chaucer then tells us all about the group he's joined: who they are, what their station in life is, even what they're wearing.

He proceeds to give us detailed descriptions of almost all of them, starting with the Knight, the highest-ranking member of the group.

The Host has a plan - he proposes that each pilgrim should tell two tales on the way to Canterbury and two more on the way back. Whoever tells the best tale-the most morally instructive as well as the most amusing - gets treated to dinner by the rest of the gang on the return trip (at the Host's inn, of course). Chaucer's description of each character tells us something about the character's personality. We'll also learn something more about the character based on the story he or she tells. Chaucer tells us much about each pilgrim, not only by telling us what they do for a living, but also through description of their clothes, attitudes, even their bodies. Chaucer's list of attributes often parodies the standards set for a given rank, turning some descriptions into great comedy. Through Chaucer's superb powers of characterization the pilgrims—such as the earthy wife of Bath, the gentle knight, the worldly prioress, the evil summoner—come intensely alive.

This literary form--a collection of disconnected stories bound together in a fictitious framework--goes back almost to the beginning of literature itself; but Chaucer may well have been directly influenced by Boccaccio's famous book of prose tales,'The Decameron' (Ten Days of Story-Telling). Between the two works, however, there is a striking contrast, which has often been pointed out. While the Italian author represents his gentlemen and ladies as selfishly fleeing from the misery of a frightful plague in Florence to a charming villa and a holiday of unreflecting pleasure, the gaiety of Chaucer's pilgrims rests on a basis of serious purpose, however conventional it may be.

The pilgrims' tales include a variety of medieval genres from the humorous fabliau to the serious homily, and they vividly indicate medieval attitudes and customs in such areas as love, marriage, and religion. Chaucer was a master storyteller and craftsman, but because of a change in the language after 1400, his metrical technique was not fully appreciated until the 18th cent. Only in Scotland in the 15th and 16th cent. did his imitators understand his versification.

Chaucer was among the first to use English to create a great work of poetry, in an age when courtly languages like Latin and French were typically favoured for poetry and stories.