Chaucer, Geoffrey

Chaucer, Geoffrey (c.1343–1400), was the son of John Chaucer (c.1312–68), a London vintner. In 1357 he served with Lionel, afterwards duke of Clarence. In 1359 he was in France with Edward III's invading army, was taken prisoner, and ransomed. He married, c.1366, Philippa, the daughter of Sir Paon Roet of Hainault and the sister of John of Gaunt's third wife, Katherine Swynford. Philippa died in 1387 and Chaucer enjoyed Gaunt's patronage throughout his life. He held a number of positions at court and in the king's service, and he travelled abroad on numerous occasions on diplomatic missions; as well as missions to France, he made a journey to Genoa and Florence in 1372–3 in the course of which he could theoretically have met Boccaccio and Petrarch. In 1374 he was appointed controller of customs in the port of London and leased his house over Aldgate. He was knight of the shire for Kent in 1386. His last official position was deputy forester in the King's Forest at Petherton in Somerset (1391–8 at least). He was buried in the Poets' Corner of Westminster Abbey where a monument was erected to him in 1555. His writings develop through his career from a period of French influence in the late 1360s (of which the culmination was The Book of the Duchess in about 1370), through his ‘middle period’ of both French and Italian influences (including The House of Fame in the 1370s and the mature Italian-influenced works of which the most important is Troilus and Criseyde, c.1385), to the last period of most of The Canterbury Tales and his short lyrics. His prose works include a translation of Boethius (Boece) and the complicated A Treatise on the Astrolabe, written to ‘little Lewis’, probably the poet's son. Portraits of Chaucer occur in three places: in the Ellesmere MSS (now in the Huntington Library and the basis of most modern editions); in the manuscript of Troilus and Criseyde in Corpus Christi College, Cambridge; and in Hoccleve's The Regement of Princes, beside lines 4,995–6.

For a good brief selection of the immense bibliography on Chaucer (up to 1972), see ‘Chaucer: a Select Bibliograpy’ by L. D. Benson in Geoffrey Chaucer, ed. D. S. Brewer (1974), pp. 352–72.