Chaucer Books

The book has the history of a Flemish Artist who shows insights into 16th century society but our lives now. This book is about travels the artist made all over Europe in a language that was easy to comprehend. I read it cover to cover. It is perfect for people who have an acquired taste for art.

Written by City University of New York professor Robert L. Bonn, Painting Life: The Art of Pieter Bruegel, The Elder is an extraordinary tour through the visual and social landscapes in thirty-six major paintings by Flemish Renaissance painter Pieter Bruegel, The Elder (1520/25-1569). Plates of the paintings themselves illustrate Painting Life in glorious full color, while chapters discuss Bruegel's genius in capturing the qualities of human life from work to play, foolishness, and conflict; expressions of Bruegel's anthropology and social philosophy in his creations; and stories of the influential cities where Bruegel's paintings hang today: Madrid, Vienna, Antwerp and Brussels, Rome and Naples, San Diego, Prague, and New York City. A seminal excursion into the timeless testimony of classical art.

I'll start with the good things about the book: the color plates of Bruegel's major works, the bibliography, and the information on where each of the paintings is. The book is also quite readable, and I finished it, although upon doing so I immediately sold it to a used bookstore, as I would have felt embarrassed to have it in my house. The book's main problem is that it has nothing to say and describes each of the paintings with utterly vacuous gibberish. One painting reveals the "moral complexity that is at the heart of our civilization" and "points us toward the future much as it captures the essence of our past." Another "shows an extraordinary grasp of the soul of a culture, indeed the essence of our social life." The book appears not to have been professionally edited, and I would have guessed that it was self-published, except that I saw it for sale in Borders. It puts numerous words in unnecessary quotation marks, which is a sure sign of amateurishness. It starts quotations with ellipses, which is never appropriate, and, at one point, if I recall, it has, in the middle of a quotation, ". . . [and] . . . ," which makes no sense. You will learn nothing about Bruegel from this book, other than what his major paintings look like and where they are.

After reading it, I think that It is really a good book that can be bring intoschools to teach the students the proceesing of the English literature.Though, it still has some problems on reading books for the old words, its value can not be quoted.

I used Chaucer A to Z in both my senior year of high school and my freshman year of college where I talked a professor into letting me into his upper-level English course on Chaucer. I found the book to be a tremendous help in understanding what was going on in Chaucer's early works, like the Book of the Duchess, as well as giving me a greater understanding of each of the Canterbury Tales. Since none of the classes covered ALL of the Canterbury Tales, I was able to use Ms. Rossignol's summaries to find out what I was missing in the tales we didn't read. The information about Chaucer's life was also very helpful. All in all, this is a first rate book, the most comprehensive guide to Chaucer I have seen.

As anyone who has shopped through Bellerophon's fascinating catalog has learned, their "coloring books" are often enough targeted at those older than the usual Crayola age. Just as their "Infamous Women" and "Early Composers" titles are text-heavy, delightful reading for older kids or even adults, their Chaucer is primarily text: an inexpensive version of the General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales in the original Middle English, with original woodcuts by Caxton and other medieval artists. What would you ever use it for? Bellerophon doesn't care; they just offer it as it is. I used it, accompanied by a good recording of the GP, for introducing my 8-year-old to Middle English. She listened, read along, colored the woodcuts with pencils, and in the course of things memorized several dozen lines of Chaucer and came to love medieval poetry.

Don't hate Bellerophon for doing what they do: which is, producing out-of-the-ordinary, inexpensive "coloring books" for all ages.

This is a great book if the words of Chaucer are important to you--the "coloring" book is filled with text. The pictures are neat in that they're similar to wood-block prints that are contemporary to the period, but they aren't much fun to color, being that they take up a quarter of each page, at best, and aren't very detailed. It would be a great study aid for someone reading The Canterbury Tales, and interesting from a historical enthusiast's viewpoint, but not much fun to color, definitely for an older reader/artist, not really a kids' book.

I bought this book as a challenge of my English understanding a couple of years back.
I have started reading it but lost the enthusiasm after about the third of the book, and I didn't continue. Its a hard read, and you have to constantly look up Middle English words (there is a dictionary at the back, but I didn't find out about it till much later).
In the future I plan to buy a translated version (either into modern English or Hungarian).

The Canterbury Tales is Geoffrey Chaucer's collection of stories, with the device used being a group of pilgrims telling each other tales as they journey towards Canterbury. The group of travellers include men and women of different types and different occupations, so produces quite a few amusing and interesting moments throughout.

Art books are expensive. This one is well worth the fifteen dollars. Plenty of informative text, and a good number of color reproductions. As someone wih a large collection of art books i recommend this book, especially for the price. It's fifteen dollars.... Can you find any other cheap books on Van der Weyden?

This book is a cheap mass-market art book as can be seen in the price, and the production values reflect this. Although the paintings are reproduced in colour, the images are not sharp, and this is immediately obvious. As long as you are aware of this, the book is a reasonable purchase. That said, the paintings are breathtaking, and the choices are commendable. The text is also very readable, and while I am prepared to pay a lot more for a more comprehensive and better produced book on Van Der Weyden, there does not appear to be one on the market, so this was better than nothing. I'm awaiting a catalogue raisonne where everything is full page and in colour!

While you claim to have read it in "old English" in school, you most likely were reading an updated version as well. The original was in MIDDLE ENGLISH not Old English. And looks a little something like this...

Heere bigynneth the knyghtes tale.

Whilom, as olde stories tellen us,
Ther was a duc that highte Theseus;
Of Atthenes he was lord and governour,
That gretter was ther noon under the sonne.
Ful many a riche contree hadde he wonne,
What with his wysdom and his chivalrie;

Very little like your "old English" of the KJV Bible...

I had no idea that this was not the original text, but a translation from old English to new. I read the old English in high school and didn't have a problem with it, perhaps because I was used to the King James bible. I certainly am not going to read this translation and will put it up for sale. I really enjoyed the original text and prefer to read that.

I want to correct an earlier reviewer.

Chaucer wrote "The Canterbury Tales" in Middle English, not Old English. The King James Bible is written in Modern English.

Thanks as always to Dover for publishing this inexpensive and unabridged version (yes, in Modern English) of Chaucer's Tales. Unabridged versions have been hard to find at any price.

Item arrived very quickly and in condition as described by the seller. Thanks and will do business again!

Despite the description on the cover, this volume does not contain Chaucer's original; instead it provides a very poor verse translation into Modern English, along with a prose synopsis. Don't be fooled; there are other parallel text versions that actually provide the Middle English original.

This book is full of all the facts and details that you receive from the other Canterbury Tales books you get. It is a very good book, and needs to be recommended to people of all ages.

THIS WAS WRITTEN IN THE 1970S AT A TIME WHEN SCHOLARSHIP IN THE MENIPPEA WAS NOT AT ITS BEST... IT SUFFERS FROM COMING TOO SOON, PARTICULARLY WITH REGARD TO KIRK'S NOW FAMOUS BIBLIOGRAPHY. ONE OF MANY INTERESTING POINTS IS HER FORMULATION OF THE IDEA OF "MENIPPEAN TRAGEDY" OF WHICH THE EXEMPLAR IS HAMLET. WORK ON BOETHIUS IS NOT TOO BAD, BUT USEFUL FOR A DIFFERENT PERSPECTIVE ON CHAUCER

As a guide this work does not really work. It does not provide the basic information required for the reader in a simple and clear way. This does not mean that the work is without value as it does contain important information and background. Most of all it does not have a parallel- text translation of the 'Middle English'. This is a major failing. After all students needing some kind of guide to the work, are not Chaucer scholars.