In 1556 Chaucer’s body was moved to a more prominent monument against the east wall of the south transept that later became known as Poets’ Corner. 1434), made member of the king’s council in 1424, whose daughter Alice became duchess of Suffolk and whose own grandson John, earl of Lincoln, was designated by Richard III as heir to the throne. More obvious wealth and political power seems to have come only to Chaucer’s descendents, starting with his prominent son, Thomas (d. As the son of a London merchant and a lifelong participant in the civil service and royal court, Chaucer’s social position was always relatively comfortable and seems by the end of his life to have been moderately prominent, although his initial burial in Saint Paul’s Cathedral, in a corner that was beginning to be used for graves of monastic officials, possibly reflects official recognition of his successful career as a civil servant and diplomat rather than as a literary authority. Chaucer also mentions his poem called “The Book of the Lion,” about which nothing is known and little confidently guessed, other than that it was possibly an adaptation or translation of a French poem, such as one of those with a similar name by Machaut or Deschamps, and just possibly dedicated (as the name suggests) to Duke Lionel, a son of King Edward III, under whom Chaucer briefly served (in 1359) as a soldier in France, and in the household of whose wife, the Countess of Ulster, he held a menial role early in life (1356–1359). Lost works by Chaucer include short love lyrics (presumed to be juvenalia, probably but not certainly in French, possibly the surviving set of poems marked as the work of “Ch”), an apparently full translation of the Roman de la Rose (thought to survive in part among a fragmentary set of extant and partial English verse translations of that work), a translation of Lotario dei Segni’s (Innocent III’s) De contemptu mundi, and a translation of the pseudo-Origen homily De Maria Magdalena. In addition, there are nearly two dozen short poems and lyrics a full prose translation of Boethius’s De consolatione philosophiae a prose translation (with original prologue) of a guide for using an astrolabe, A Treatise on the Astrolabe and, less securely attributed, another prose translation of a guide for constructing another instrument used for calculating planetary movements, The Equatorie of the Planetis. 1390, The Book of the Duchess, The House of Fame, The Parliament of Fowls, and The Legend of Good Women). 1390–1400), and his four dream visions ( c. His writing comprises over 33,000 lines of verse in his major works, Troilus and Criseyde ( c. ![]() By any measure, however, Chaucer was the most prolifically varied and lastingly influential English poet in the later 14th century, and most would agree he was one of the most vivid and original. ![]() In addition, he was surrounded by a number of other writers in London and Westminster who also showed new ambitions for literature in English, some of whom he knew personally, such as John Gower (b. Instead, he was a contemporary or near-contemporary of many important continental writers, French and Italian, who defined new ambitions for literature’s scope and prestige, such as Oton de Grandson, Jean Froissart, Guillaume de Machaut, Eustache Deschamps, Francesco Petrarch, and Giovanni Boccaccio, some of whom he knew and all of whom he read at least to some degree. In his own time, however, he was not an isolated innovator. Chaucer’s status among and influence on writers of the century following his is itself of historical and literary importance. 1400) has often been praised as the writer who most widely and momentously expanded both the range and the literary authority of English poetry in his own period and, in some views, of English literature in general. Since shortly after his death, Geoffrey Chaucer (b. Literary Afterlife and Reception History.Works Tentatively Attributed to Chaucer ( Romance of the Rose, Equatorie of the Planetis, and the French Poems by “Ch”). ![]()
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