Spectator Books: Chaucer's European roots

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🗓️ 5 June 2019

⏱️ 36 minutes

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Summary

In this week’s books podcast we're talking about why the Father of English Poetry, Geoffrey Chaucer, at least half belongs in a French, Latin and Italian tradition. Marion Turner’s magnificently scholarly Chaucer: A European Life sets the great writer in his own times — one of a hinge between feudal and early modern ideas about selfhood, authorship and originality; and one in which our man travelled widely and with profit across the Europe of his day, learning from poets from France and Hainaut, from Dante and Boccaccio, and even possibly from the painter Giotto. Plus, she tells how the man we often think of as a merry, roly-poly little character on the road to Canterbury first enters the record as an adolescent fashion-plate in something that looked suspiciously like a miniskirt…

Presented by Sam Leith.

Spectator Books is a series of literary interviews and discussions on the latest releases in the world of publishing, from poetry through to physics. Presented by Sam Leith, The Spectator's Literary Editor. Hear past episodes of Spectator Books here.

Transcript

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0:00.0	This is Spectator Radio, the Spectator's curated podcast collection.
0:10.1	Hello and welcome to The Spectator Books podcast.
0:13.1	I'm Sam Leith, the literary editor of The Spectator.
0:15.4	This week I'm very pleased to be joined by Professor Marion Turner of Oxford University,
0:19.9	who is an expert on Chaucer and whose new
0:22.5	book is called Chaucer, a European life. Marion, welcome. We think of Chaucer as, you know,
0:29.4	the founding father of English poetry. So when you call your book a European life, is that a kind of
0:36.0	intended as a corrective? Yes, it is in many ways. So I think that we have
0:41.2	lots of ideas about Chaucer in the popular imagination. And most of them came about posthumously.
0:48.5	So in the 15th century after Chaucer's death, people started thinking of him as the father of
0:53.6	English literature, as
0:55.0	kind of sober, patriarchal figure. There's a little picture of him from a manuscript at that time
1:00.2	where he's an old man holding a rosary, looking very serious. And then in the 20th century,
1:06.2	people started thinking about him as Baudy Chaucer, genial man in the pub, telling rude stories, because those
1:12.5	were the Canterbury Tales that were most popular in the 20th century. But both of those images of
1:17.5	Chaucer are not correct and are not based on thinking about him as a whole person, about his whole
1:25.2	life, about his writings. Chaucer was very much a European figure.
1:31.1	And I mean that in a number of different ways. So he travelled a lot around Europe. People are
1:35.7	often very surprised to hear that he went repeatedly to Italy, he went to northern Spain, many
1:40.4	times to France. He was also reading a huge range of European literature. His main
1:47.0	influences were French, Latin and then most crucially Italian. And the writings of Dante and
1:53.2	Baccio in particular were formative on Chaucer and really changed what English poetry could do.
	...

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