1. Introduction

About this Lecture

Lecture

The course begins by looking at Chaucer himself. While he is often seen as a unique figure in the literary scene of Medieval England, Chaucer was in fact just one of many important writers who were active at this time – including people such as William Langland and John Gower in England, and Petrarch, Dante, and Boccaccio from Italy. That said, Chaucer does seem to have been a particularly popular poet at this time – a combination, it is argued, of his own personal popularity and his accessible East Midlands dialect.

Course

This course provides readers of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales with a broader context of Chaucer’s life and times as well as the kind of literature that was being written in the Medieval period that may have inspired Chaucer when it came to writing the Canterbury Tales. We begin by exploring the idea of the story collection, why Chaucer chose this form for his Canterbury Tales, and how Chaucer treated the format differently from his contemporaries Boccaccio and Gower. After that, we look at more detail at some of the story types that Chaucer drew on when compiling the Canterbury Tales – looking in particular at romance, drama, and the fabliau.

Lecturer

Dr. Carolyne Larrington teaches medieval English literature in the college, ranging from the earliest Old English to the beginning of the Renaissance period.

Dr Larrington's research interests are in Old Icelandic literature, medieval women's writing, European Arthurian literature, and, most recently, medieval emotion. She has published on Old English and Old Icelandic wisdom poetry, compiled "Women and Writing in Medieval Europe: A Sourcebook" and edited two collections of essays on the Old Norse "Poetic Edda". Her revised and expanded translation of the "Poetic Edda", just published, is the standard. Her most recent monograph is 'King Arthur's Enchantresses: Morgan and Her Sisters in Arthurian Tradition' which appeared from IB Tauris in June 2006. Her book on sibling relations in European medieval literature, and a new popular book on British folklore, "The Land of the Green Man" will be published in 2015; a BBC Radio 4 series based on the folklore book has also been commissioned. She is currently editing a collection of essays on emotion in Arthurian literature, and a Handbook to Eddic Poetry. She has been until recently editor-in-chief of the journal Viking and Medieval Scandinavia, and the President of the Viking Society for Northern Research, the British scholarly society for Old Norse study.