Geoffrey Chaucer Books

My teenage son is currently studying Chaucer for his English literature class and is having a blast learning the Middle English and even older English phrases used in Chaucer's original writings. I am impressed because he usually hates literature, so aces to Davis for creating such a great motivating helpmate. (I have been using it, too, and it makes the translations easy and comprehension much better - wish I had had this when I was in high school),

I purchased this book to help me with an assignment in my college British Literature class. The book was very, very helpful.

The following text is taken from the Clark University website (...).

Chaucer and Shakespeare: two giants of early English literature. Separating them, though, is a span of 250 years, years among the most turbulent in English history. Indeed--
1) the English political scene evolved from one characterized by bloody dynastic wars to a relatively stable monarchy;
2) epidemics of bubonic plague made labor scarce and valuable, helping to move men and women from the bonds of serfdom into guilds and an evolving middle class; and
3) the Protestant Reformation emerged as an influential force throughout northern Europe and England and challenged the power of the Catholic Church.
The 250 years between Chaucer and Shakespeare were years of transformation, but throughout all the changes, there were many strong traditions that nonetheless remained influential.

The literary scene, 1337-1580
English professor SunHee Kim Gertz explores the relations among literary traditions and innovations in her new book, Chaucer to Shakespeare: 1337-1580. In this study, Gertz avoids the neat chronological separation designated by the terms "Middle Ages" and the "Renaissance" or "Early Modern Europe." Instead, she examines tensions in the art, education, literature, writers, and literary audiences of the time. Some of these tensions were actually created by changes in the use of language and modes of communication. For example--
1) over time, English replaced French and Latin as the authoritative languages for literature and government;
2) the invention of the printing press gradually allowed more people access to an increasing volume of less expensive printed material; and
3) literacy was on the rise, as more members of the middle and aristocratic classes could now read for themselves.
Even with these changes, characteristics associated with medieval literary traditions nonetheless informed the literature, art, and education of this 250-year period.

Tools of literary analysis
Professor Gertz uses three analytical tools to explore particularly rich and varied texts: rhetorical theory, semiotic theory, and a tool she has coined, the "arc." Her literary analyses of "texts"--ranging from paintings to educational treatises to a variety of traditional and less traditional literary genres--allows her to characterize the period's artists, writers, readers, and messages. She is able to do so based on the premise that in order for artists and writers to communicate effectively, they must shape contexts, references, and symbols that audiences already know or understand.
1) Rhetorical theory focuses on how writers or artists structure contexts and conventions while shaping their narratives, which they hope will communicate a variety of messages effectively.
2) Semiotics is the study of how signs and symbols communicate simple or multiply layered meanings. The metaphor, a special case of signs, is Gertz's main area of concern within the field of semiotics.
3) Arc is a term Gertz uses to refer to cultural or political events or themes that may not seem connected at first, because their causal relations are not readily apparent. Not perceived as linearly connected, the arcs enable readers to see how very connected the late "Middle Ages" are to "Early Modern" Europe.

An example: Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
One of the many texts that Gertz examines using these tools is a 14th century, anonymous, long narrative poem entitled Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Set in the court of King Arthur, a mysterious knight intrudes upon Camelot to issue a challenge that Sir Gawain finally accepts. Arthur's best knight is to decapitate the green man, and in return, a year later, the Green Knight would do the same to Sir Gawain. To everyone's astonishment, the Green Knight survives, and after a year is almost up, Sir Gawain journeys to find him and receive the return blow. Just before he gives up hope of ever finding his adversary in time, Sir Gawain comes across Sir Bercilak, who claims to know where to find the Green Knight. So, Sir Gawain accepts his invitation to spend three relaxing days at Hautdesert. During those days, he is tempted to break his word, but in spite of the luxury and comforts offered him at Hautdesert, Sir Gawain rides off to meet the Green Knight-Sir Bercilak in disguise. Sir Gawain submits to having his head removed, only to be spared except for a small knick in his neck, for he had not completely passed the tests of courage and virtue set up at Hautdesert.

Rhetorical analysis
The most obvious narrative engine in the poem is the challenge, a device that ordinarily works in a literal fashion: a villain challenges a hero to a duel; the hero accepts; and after a long, hard battle, the hero wins. In this poem, however, the challenge is structured circularly, as an exchange. The exchange demands a return to an earlier point in time, to remember an oath taken a year prior. Further, one result of this exchange is that Sir Gawain returns to Arthur's court with a deeper understanding of what it means to be a hero: one who is courageous and virtuous in ferocious battles and dangerous encounters, but also in daily life. The circular structure of the poem is underscored by the exchange/challenge, but also by a variety of non-linear devices. Taken together, they allow the hero-and the reader-the space for self-reflection (itself a circularly structured activity) and a more complex portrait of virtue and courage.

Semiotic analysis
The test that Sir Gawain finally failed itself was set up in the structure of the exchange. On the three days that the hero was at Hautdesert, Sir Bercilak and Arthur's knight agreed to exchange their winnings of the day. Each day, Lady Bercilak attempted to seduce Sir Gawain, only, however, to be restricted to bestowing a kiss upon him (in increasing number) each day. Sir Gawain would "exchange" these kisses for the various animals Sir Bercilak succeeded in hunting down. But on the third day, Sir Gawain also accepted a green sash from the Lady, who at first presented it as a love token, but finally informed the knight that it would save him from all harm. Sir Gawain took and kept the sash, thereby breaking his part of the bargain.

Interesting from a semiotic point of view is how the green sash-itself heightened as significant by its color-changes in meaning and value. Arthur's knight didn't accept the sash when it represented love; but when its signification changed to salvation, he took it. Three times more its meaning changes, as the Green Knight reveals he's Sir Bercilak, whom Morgana La Fay sent to test Arthur's court. The green sash here comes to mean a test. Again, when Sir Gawain returns to Camelot, its meaning shifts, as it becomes his badge of shame, until Arthur proclaims all should wear it, thereby-finally-creating out of it a sign of community. Such tracking down of a complex sign frequently enables readers to understand what a narrative tries to communicate beyond simple action. In this case, it also illustrates how a metaphor works.

Arcs
Beyond showing how a metaphor can change meaning over time, the green sash has additional implications. At the end of the poem, the green sash becomes a sign of belonging to Camelot, of each member sharing another's burden. In ending the tale in this fashion, the Gawain-Poet also invites our participation in that community while also intimating yet another signification. At about the same time of the poem's composition, England's King Edward III had established the Order of the Garter, members of whom wore sashes inscribed with the motto, "Hony soit qui mal y pense" (Shame to him who thinks evil of it), almost exactly word-for-word the last words of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. If we "arc" forward in time, this literary echo helps make clear how Edward's political experiment created an elite community modeled on the Arthurian spirit and furthered the idea that membership in the Order is restricted to the best that nobility has to offer, thereby demonstrating how Arthurian traditions inspired not only the Gawain-Poet, but even kings.

In this manner, Gertz applies these analytical tools to a broad selection of religious and instructional treatises, plays, histories, and lyrical and narrative poetry. As renowned Shakespearean scholar Professor David Bevington puts it, Gertz "underscore[s] the cross-disciplinary commitment [with her] fresh approach to late medieval art of all genres."

Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, published by Barron's Educational Series, uses an interlinear translation format in which each line of Middle English is followed by a modern translation (in a literal form to make the comparison easier). I like this approach.

Sometimes Middle English is recognizable. This line describing the knight - Ful worthy was he in his lord's werre - is readily understood if you recognize that werre is war.

Contrastingly, this sentence about the prioress is less clear: And sikerly she was of greet disport. Or in modern usage: And indeed she was very diverting.

I initially used a 1948, yellowed first edition with 448 pages, but more recently I found a copy of the "new enlarged edition" with 530 pages. This 1970 edition is no longer new, but copies can still be found with little trouble. It has been reprinted many times; my copy is the fourteenth printing.

Both editions include The Prologue, The Knight's Tale, The Prioress's Prologue, The Prioress's Invocation, The Prioress's Tale, The Nun's Priest's Prologue, The Nun's Priest's Tale, The Nun's Priest's Epilogue, The Pardoner's Prologue, The Pardoner's Tale, The Wife of Bath's Prologue, The Wife of Bath's Tale, The Franklin's Prologue, and The Franklin's Tale.

The new enlarged edition includes four more sections: The Miller's Prologue, The Miller's Tale, The Reeve's Prologue, and The Reeve's Tale.

Both editions offer a short introduction and a short section of notes. The translator is Vincent F. Hopper.

Extensively detailed biography of this medieval great poet, of interest to anyone interested in the intricacies of medieval history and literature. Definitely not for the dilettante, though much of it is quite readable.
The book is approximately evenly divided between history and literary analysis. We learn of Chaucer's role as a soldier in the wars with France; of his role as appointed court poet and custom's officer; of the black death; of his travels to Italy; we are given a great deal of detail about his literary influences on the Continent and his major literary works, not limited to the Canterbury Tales. Really more for the literary medieval scholar, though anyone interested in history might like it. We learn that Chaucer was probably in London at the time of the Peasants' Revolt.

Dr. Fisher is the world's outstanding scholar on this subject. Fascinating stuff, demonstrating clearly how deliberate political decisions made centuries ago determine the language that we speak today.

This is certain to become a much consulted and frequently cited work. Wheatley's study of the manuscript tradition of the Latin Aesop of a twelfth-century poet known as "Walter of England," or (better) as the "Anonymus Neveleti," leads him to a number of important new insights into the use of the genre in later medieval vernacular English and Scots literature. The analysis offered here of Chaucer's Nun's Priest's Tale is destined to be a classic, providing richly suggestive readings of elements hitherto thought merely arbitrary or idiosyncratic. Less interesting, if still competent, are Wheatley's discussions of Lydgate and Henryson. Even those benighted scholars in fields other than English will find much inspiration here, and any literary historian who has not read this book should hasten to make good the omission.

A New Midrashic Reading Of Geoffrey Chaucer His Life And Works by Norman Toby Simms (Studies in British Literature: Edwin Mellen Press) Excerpt: After completing my study of Sir Gawain and the Knight of the Green Chapel, I feel there is a similar context in which Chaucer has to be fitted into if we are to appreciate more fully the uniqueness of his poetry, as well as the way his work relates to the traditions and precedents available to him during the fourteenth century in England and the rest of Western Europe. These other contexts, as I showed in that earlier book, are those of the Jewish heritage left behind after the formal expulsions in the late thirteenth century, as well as the Crypto-Jewish or Marrano context of those persons who remained hidden after 1290 or returned over the next generation or who came from elsewhere in Europe, nor just to flee prosecution but to live a strange new kind of concealed and non-institutional Judaism. Once it is noticed that while organised rabbinical life in England had been abolished and no one could perform all the formal mitzvot required of Talmudic (or rabbinic or halachic) Judaism, the question arises of what else there is: and that question has many answers, some of them to be found in private, public, and courtly literature, including the new religious plays-Mysteries, Moralities and Miracles-many of which deal with Jews in such an ambiguous and complex way that the old argument that there were no Jews in England at that time or that no one knew anything about Judaism other than what was in the Bible as the fathers no longer holds much water. There were Jews about, albeit of a very fuzzy kind, and those fuzzy Jews were there in England as much in the audience as in a creative role. The strongest aspect to the new perspective is therefore that probably most of these fuzzy Jews did not know who they were and, if they did not outright reject the overt implications of their depiction of Jews and Judaism, at least show that they felt very uncomfortable with those developments.
Does this mean that I believe Geoffrey Chaucer was himself a practicing Jew or at least a self-curious child of such halachic Jews-one or two generations from a forced or voluntary conversion by his parents or grandparents? In a way the answer is yes...but a "yes" with many qualifications. Before we can move towards any answers, and there are many different kinds of answer to be given, we have to move away from the simplistic dichotomy which assumes that either one is or one is not a Jew; and if one is a Jew, since the religion and the institutions of Judaism were outlawed in 1290, then there could have been no Jews in England at all, and so Chaucer could not have been a Jew: tout court. The whole history of the Sephardic persecutions and expulsions from the end of the fourteenth century onwards shows that such dichotomizing cannot work to trace the experiences of individuals and families. After the massacres of 1390 in Spain, a series of mass conversions followed, until almost half, at least, of all Sephardic Jews went into the baptismal fount. Given that at this time, too, the overwhelming majority of all Jews in the world were Sephardim, this was no isolated event, but one of the most profound demographic and cultural events before the twentieth century. Our task, though, is not so much to look at the repercussions of this traumatic transformation of world Jewry in the early modem period, but to see if there were specific antecedent events, small in their scope and impact, but nonetheless significant and paradigmatic of what was to follow.
Can we, however, justify applying the lessons of this somewhat later period about the New Christians, Marranos, and escaped and returning Jews from Spain and Portugal to the situation in England a century earlier? Not if we are going to be rigid about it, or trip ourselves up on quibbles over the meaning of specific words like converso and Crypto-Jew. I will argue that there are analogies and that, once alerted to kinds of subtle distinctions to be found in the Spanish and Portuguese cases, we can start to find similar evidence in the fourteenth century and in Britain: as long as we keep reminding ourselves that similarities are not exact replicas or foreshadowing. This also means that we risk dealing with essentialist concepts, as though there were something specifically, innately, inalterably Jewish, despite historical and social differences, something that outlasts conscious religious and psychological beliefs about oneself or one's family and friends, in other words, a sort of genetic inalterability that can be sustained for several generations despite conversion and then isolation from, with consequent ignorance of, Jewish ways of thinking, perceiving the world, evaluating experience, and feeling about oneself and one's children. I will not argue simply that "the proof is in the pudding": that because Chaucer looks and sounds like a Jew in some of the postures he assumes and the judgments he makes in the course of his poetry he must be a Jew, whether he likes it or not, and even whether he knows it or not. But I will argue that in a more complex, and I hope a more sophisticated way. I will argue that Geoffrey was not as isolated or as alienated from Jews and Jewishness-although he was very probably alienated completely from Judaism as an organized, institutionalized and coherent religious practice-as would first seem from the usual assumptions made about England in his life time.
The first qualification, then, is that, if Chaucer were such an offspring of English Marranos, he was in his beliefs and even in his heart a good Roman Catholic in the same way as the majority of the British men and women of the period, this majority consisting as much the aristocracy and the clergy as the crowds in the streets of towns and villages. The next qualification is that, despite his conscious beliefs as a Christian, he probably had reservations about the demonization and persecution of the Jews, taking a position closer to that of the high church officials who saw Jews as a necessary historical link to the Old Testament and the presence and events of the New Testament. Third, Chaucer-and a few others cosmopolitan intellectuals like himself in England-were aware that real Jews in Europe in the fourteenth century could not be unquestionably equated with either the Hebrews of the Old Testament or, in a somewhat more problematic sense, with the distorted caricatures in the New Testament, except perhaps in a sympathetic way with Jesus and the Holy Family and the band of the original disciples. Fourthly, thanks the journeys to and communications with Spain, Italy, France and other parts of Western Europe, Chaucer would have known at first hand about the real condition of Jews-their intellectual life centered on the Oral Torah and the performance of mitzvot, and the persecution at the hands of uneducated mobs, fanatical minor clergy, and cynical civil and royal officials. Fifth, not only does Chaucer in his poetry show a sympathy and understanding of the social difficulties of real Jews living in Western Europe under increasingly hostile conditions-the expulsion from England was just the beginning of the way cities and kingdom expelled the Jewish communities-but also demonstrates an understanding of peculiarly rabbinic ways of thinking and reading, including a familiarity with the mystical thought of systematic kabbalah being then written in Spain, Southern France, Italy, and parts of the Levant...
Excerpt: This book is divided into three sections. In the first section, composed of Chapters 1 to 3, which might be called "All To-Tore", from an expression the Canon's Yeoman uses, I will examine the notion of both Chaucer's life and his works being "composed" in a process of fragmentation and disguise, and introduce the idea of midrash as a modem tool of literary exegesis. It might be possible to call this approach a particular kind of rabbinical aesthetic deriving from the kabbalistic notion of the breaking of the vessels, but at this stage in our discussion we can only survey the biography of the man and then, midrashically, find new contexts for him as an individual and as a type of New
Christian living in England and serving his royal masters on the Continent. It is also important here to survey both the life of the author and the Chaucerian canon, searching for exemplary instances of the breaking apart of the text, the focus on gaps and non sequiturs, and the disappearance or displacement of themes, images, and structural elements within the various verse and prose documents. The primary text to be examined will be The Wyf of Bath's Prologue, Introduction and Tale from the Canterbury Tales, seeing it in relation to the concluding praise-poem to the Good Wife in the Book of Proverbs, credited to Lemuel rather than Solomon, and exploring its treatment of women, whether satirical social types or romantic ideals, or even figures of the biblical Queen Esther, later the precious saint of the Spanish and Portuguese Crypto-Jews, and the mystical figure of the Shekhina, the mystical shadow of God's presence and his consort whom he seeks while she lives with the Children of Israel in their long and painful exile. These first three chapters will also start to deal with a question of deafness, marked into the body and life of the Wyf of Bath as a physical injury, but evident throughout the author's life and throughout his works in several other senses: (1) a low-level defect in interpretation wherein what is heard is presumed to be all there is to know, with everything surrounding it fading into a kind of marginal static normally unperceived and unheard; (2) a higher degree of awareness that begins with a sense of gaps and lapses in the perceived and ordinarily experienced environment accompanied by attempts to fill in those points of silence and invisibility, holes and black-spots, through imaginative-symbolic, allusive and intuitive-insertions, supplements, displacements and recontextualizations; and (3) a very different order of interpretation, in which the earlier surface text, with its deformities and fragmentation, is understood as a texture composed of diverse languages simultaneously being played out and requiring new kinds of attention, intensities of focus, and coordination between logic and fantasy.
The next two chapters, 4 and 5, form a second section that confronts head-on the problematic of Chaucer's alleged anti-Jewishness, particularly exemplified in the Prioress's Prologue and Tale also from the Canterbury Tales. I could name section "The Little Clergeon's Song" and sub-title it "What They Heard and Didn't Hear" because of the way the Latin hymn Alma Redemptoris Mater brings to the surface questions related to children, language, ritual murder and retributive collective punishment. Here, too, we must take time to weigh up the evidence for the way in which Jews are thought of, depicted, and perhaps recollected in a supposedly Judenrein England, as well as on the Continent where the Black Plague and other natural disasters provokes wave on wave of persecution and slander against the Jews. Where and how could a Crypto-Jewish presence be found in England at this time, and how would it be related to the communities under pressure and in exile elsewhere in western Europe? The Prioress's Tale, rather than a manifestation of the hate literature common to Spain, France, Italy and elsewhere, appears instead as a very intense and confused statement of faith by the nun who calls herself Eglantine: the setting of her little martyr's legend is displaced to Asia, where both Christians and Jews live as minorities subject to an unnamed Muslim ruler, its vicious slanders against the Jews do not include charges of ritual murder or the blood libel, and it presents a confusion of authorities both within and outside the fictional narrative itself, so much so that there seems to be a rationalization of the crime committed against the poor little Clergeon as he walks through the Jewish quarter of the city. Then, as we fold back this discussion and the Prioress' two texts her confessional Prologue and her pious Tale back over the Wyf of Bath, as another variant of an articulate woman with an ax to grind, the discussion leads us into a deeper exploration of how the midrashic aesthetic functions both as a means of Chaucer's creativity and our own optic of analysis; and further, how it relates the three dimensions of deafness mentioned before can help us understand the various generic categories radiated through the major works of Chaucer : particularly parody, satire, grotesque and cynical diatribe.
Chapters 6-8 take as their central text is The Book of the Duchess-which may, by kabbalistic letter combinations, be termed the Sepher Chesed, a Book of Grace and Mercy. Thus this third section of the book could be entitled "Dreams and Fantasies". After examining the other dream vision poems and coordinating them towards a deepening understanding of midrashic analysis, we ford this courtly poem to be Chaucer's most kabbalistic enterprise. Long taken as his first major achievement, written as a young man in honour of his patron, John of Gaunt's grief for his beloved bride Blanche of Castile, The Book of the Duchess, I argue by internal and external evidence, is also one of Chaucer's last performative poems, in the sense that it was so popular over decades that it was re-performed and re-written for later memorial services to the Duke of Lancaster's wives and other great ladies of the court at their passing. It is thus a kind of palimpsest of the author's lengthy career as poet and trusted official of the court and state.
The book may also be approached as a secret document expressing the man Chaucer's concealed and unconscious beliefs and attitudes towards Jewishness and Judaism, insofar as he came to understand them during his travels and readings of rabbinical and kabbalistic texts that came his way in France, Italy and Spain. Finally, in the ninth chapter, we try to draw together some of the threads we have spun and at the same time point to further directions for study.
This present monograph could also be approached as another kind of secret book, in the sense that, as I went through the final stages of writing and editing, especially when inserting the various head and sub-heading texts, I realized that what was happening went beyond either historical or literary critical boundaries. The book was responding to the realities around me in the last years of the twentieth century and the earliest of the twenty-first, a time when dangers to the Jewish people became increasingly evident in words and actions not seen since the end of World War II. Even more, as I attempted to speak to friends and colleagues about the threats to Israel and the problems facing Jewish academics in the climate of fear and intimidation, many reacted in ways that at first seemed totally irrational and inexplicable-until it started to become clear that many of these erstwhile confidants and associates who drew back, turned away, or openly attacked Jews and Judaism in the contemporary world were behaving in terms that had been cautiously and hesitatingly opened up by this study of Chaucer (as well as the earlier book on Sir Gawain and the Green Chapel). For that reason, the large number of citations of apparently incongruous authors sets out the territory of literary, historical, social, and psychological themes this book actually comes to deal with. To a certain extent, therefore, I am asking my audience to study this book as they would an exegetical text in the midrashic mode. If that is too much to ask of a contemporary student of Chaucer, then I apologize.

An interesting side note about this book is how it reveals old English resources available in Los Angeles. Specifically for Chaucer. The book has several images taken from original Chaucer manuscripts. These are kept at UCLA and at the Huntington Memorial Library, in the suburb of San Marino. (Some other images are from manuscripts in other cities.) Rather surprising to some!

Actually, it turns out that the Huntington Library has quite an impressive collection of old texts. Many amassed by Henry Huntington himself. The library has helped in the production of several literary monographs, like Dane's book.

For the average reader ogf Chaucer, this is a suberb read...for ther schoilar there are better choices..but you can't go wrong with this one

If you want a modern english version that's funny and easy to read, this is the book for you. If you are looking for something scholarly and/or more difficult to read, get a different version.

If you're going to read the Canterbury Tales, read them in the original Middle English (which is alot more understandable than Old English and much closer to our own Modern English). You will surely miss out on the rhythm, poetry, and humor of these fabulous stories were you to read them in translation. I would recommend the Riverside Chaucer instead.

This is a retelling of the Canterbury Tales, very simplified...in some cases leaving out the best parts! I believe it may have been originally intended safe for children.

If you're looking for a translation into modern English, keep looking. I am.

Finally, help in getting children to comprehending and enjoy the art of Old English Ballads and the historical value of the storyteller.