Geoffrey Chaucer (Authors in Context)

Chaucer lived through a period of extraordinary upheaval: a protracted war with France, devastating plague, the peasants' revolt, religious controversy, and the overthrow of the king. Compact and comprehensive, this book offers a wide-ranging account of the medieval society from which works such as The Canterbury Tales and Troilus and Criseyde sprang, and shows how these and other works manifest that society in fictional form. Significant aspects of the literary scene, such as patronage, audience, and performance, help to place Chaucer's practices in their historical framework, and his treatment of love, paganism, and reality are framed within their intellectual and philosophical contexts. The modern reception of Chaucer in film and television adaptations is also examined. Seen through the lens of his cultural experience, this is the perfect critical companion to Chaucer's life and poetry. The book includes a chronology of Chaucer's life and time, suggestions for further reading, websites, illustrations, and a comprehensive index. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

The Life of Geoffrey Chaucer; The Social Body; The Literary Scene; Society and Politics; Intellectual Ideas; Science and Technology; New Contexts

Peter Brown is Professor of Medieval English Literature at the University of Kent at Canterbury. He has taught at the Universities of Exeter, Connecticut, and California at Los Angeles, and at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University where he was a Fulbright Scholar. He has published widely on Chaucer and other aspects of medieval culture and has edited A Companion to Chaucer (Blackwell, 2000), Companion to Medieval English Literature and Culture 1350-1500 (Blackwell, 2007). His most recent book is Chaucer and the Making of Optical Space (Peter Lang, 2007).