Geoffrey Chaucer

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guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 22 July 2008 15.39 BST

c.1343-1400

"For out of the old fieldes, as men saithe, / Cometh al this new corne fro yere to yere; / And out of old bookes, in good faithe, / Cometh al this new science that men lere."

Birthplace

Probably London, England

Education

Possibly attended Oxford or Cambridge Universities.

Other jobs

Page, soldier, diplomat

Did you know?

He was captured in The Hundred Years' War and ransomed for £16 pounds, about £30,000 in today's money.

Critical verdict

Widely acclaimed in his lifetime as "the flower of eloquence" - love poet, philosopher and translator - Chaucer's Wessex dialect played a part in forming modern English and he's been in the pantheon ever since. Critics have found in him, as in Shakespeare, contradictory values: though some eras bowdlerised the bawdy, he's been celebrated as Christian thinker, pagan philosopher, worldly sensualist and even, with what could be termed unreliable narrators, the first postmodernist.

Recommended works

The Canterbury Tales and the hallucinatory Parliament of Fowls.

Influences

Much of his work is translation and adaptation of classical or French and Italian sources: Ovid, Boccaccio, Boethius, the Roman de la Rose.

Now read on

Dryden reimagined Chaucer in heroic couplets.

Adaptations

Pasolini filmed I Racconti di Canterbury in 1971.

Recommended biography

The Life of Geoffrey Chaucer: A Critical Biography by Derek Pearsall (Blackwell, 1992) is well-documented, short on biographical conjecture and strong on the works.