What type of writer was geoffrey chaucer

Here, Chaucer is standing, and in court rather than on a pilgrimage, although this depiction of Chaucer seems to borrow from the same tradition of portraiture as the Ellesmere image this Chaucer also has a beard, a similarly high forehead, and a head bowed slightly and purposefully.

What this Chaucer does not have, however, is a penner or pen. This Chaucer is not a writer but a declaimer or reciter and, given the location of the picture, as the frontispiece to this deluxe copy of Troilus and Criseyde , what he is almost certainly meant to be reciting is Troilus.

But the convention derived from practice that regularly mixed declaiming with writing since, even if these romances were written as if they were being recited, they were also often recited to the kind of audiences the Troilus frontispiece depicts.

One might say that the image of Chaucer in the Corpus Christi frontispiece is traditional, but it relies on a tradition in which the author of a text does not write it out so that it can be read, but, rather, recites it so that it can be written. But it would solve some problems. There are a number of key passages in Troilus and Criseyde itself that come and go in ways that cannot be easily accounted for as errors of copying: it is as if Chaucer recited the poem with some passages on one occasion but not on another.

You had to know French and Latin as well as English. But the world in which Chaucer moved, certainly, was very outward-looking. These queens brought their entourages and their cultures, which was key for Chaucer. His friends were all interested in high French culture and how it could be translated into an English environment. His trips to Italy in the s were particularly important because they let him observe very different ways of ordering society. He saw what it was like to live in a city-state run by an oligarchy rather than a monarchy, for instance.

He also went to Lombardy, which was run by the Visconti tyrants, whose appalling absolutist behaviour was notorious. Chaucer was very interested in these political models. But he also encountered Italian poetry, and devoured the work of Boccaccio, Petrarch and Dante. It was a crucial influence on him: a lot of the poetic forms that Chaucer developed derived from Italian poetic forms, for instance. It changed what he did in his own poetry, but also the wider English poetic form.

Chaucer was respected and admired during his lifetime. He had good connections, key among them was [statesman and military leader] John of Gaunt, who was the most important man in England for many years. The fact that he held positions at court and came from a mercantile background also meant that he had access to a wide range of important people who were reading his work.

John Chaucer was an affluent wine merchant and deputy to the king's butler. Through his father's connections, Geoffrey held several positions early in his life, serving as a noblewoman's page, a courtier, a diplomat, a civil servant, and a collector of scrap metal.

His early life and education were not strictly documented although it can be surmised from his works that he could read French, Latin, and Italian. In , Chaucer was given a life pension by the king, and began traveling abroad on diplomatic missions. During trips to Italy in and , he discovered the works of Dante , Boccaccio, and Petrarch —each of which greatly influenced Chaucer's own literary endeavors.

Chaucer's early work is heavily influenced by love poetry of the French tradition, including the Romaunt of the Rose c. Chaucer was named Controller of Customs on wools, skins, and hides for the port of London in , and continued in this post for twelve years. Around that time, Chaucer's period of Italian influence began, which includes transitional works such as Anelida and Arcite c.

Chaucer established residence in Kent, where he was elected a justice of the peace and a member of Parliament in His wife died the following year. His period of artistic maturity is considered to begin at this time, marked by the writing of the General Prologue of the Canterbury Tales , which Chaucer continued to work on for many years—most likely until his death in Then, at what appears the whim of his royal sponsors and their City counterparts, he was abruptly shifted to a nakedly partisan post in customs that entailed his daily presence on the waterfront, constant record-keeping and regular involvement with some of the shrewdest and most despised moneymen of the land.

The demanding character of his work meant that he accomplished most of his writing in his scant private time. It provided him with important prerequisites for literary work: a stable and rent-free place of residence, an income-stream from his political allies in court and City, and — most importantly — a loyal audience for his poems. His job as controller of customs was to certify honesty of the powerful and influential customs collectors — including the wealthy and imperious Nicholas Brembre, long-term mayor of London — and to ensure the proper collection of duties on all outgoing wool shipments.

This sounds routine enough, until we realise how much was at stake: in the 14th century, wool duties contributed one-third of the total revenues of the realm. Their wealth enabled them to become donors and lenders to the king, and to multiply their privileges and profits. As lone watchdog of customs revenues, Chaucer was hardly likely to bring them to heel.

His job was, essentially, to look the other way. Chaucer does not seem to have personally enriched himself in this post, even though fortunes were being amassed all around him, but passivity was not enough to save him. In October-November he was deprived of his City apartment, denounced — in his capacity, though not by name — in the parliament in which he was a sitting member, and pressed to resign his controllership. He chose several years of voluntary self-exile in Kent. In a short space of time, he found himself without a job, a city, a circle of friends, and a loyal audience for his poems.

The most wrenching adjustment of all would have been his separation from his customary audience. For a medieval poet, this matter of readers was far more important than it might now seem. In the middle ages, only a handful of highly ambitious and successful writers expected to circulate their works in manuscript form to absent readers.