Joseph A. Dane examines the history of the books we now know as "Chaucer’s"—a history that includes printers and publishers, editors, antiquarians, libraria
The Book of the Duchess is a surreal poem that was presumably written as an elegy for Blanche, Duchess of Lancaster's (the wife of Geoffrey Chaucer's patron, th
Geoffrey Chaucer was a spy, a diplomat, and England's finest poet, and yet nothing is known of his death; after 1400, his name simply disappears from the record
"More than any other canonical English writer, Geoffrey Chaucer lived and worked at the centre of political life--yet his poems are anything but conventional. E