Medieval man of mystery
REVIEWS BY CAROLINE RICHARDSON
Spring Break is not a 20th-century invention, although we certainly set a new standard with the inventions of the airplane, beach cabana and papier-māché drink umbrella. Indeed, the concept of the spring road trip pre-dates the 14th century—except they called it a "pilgrimage," instead. This seasonal phenomenon inspired one of the most famous and well-loved works of English literature, The Canterbury Tales, and two different publishers anticipate the season with the release of new biographies of that most famous work's author.
Despite the many other roles he played—merchant, diplomat, public servant, spy—Chaucer will always be remembered as a poet. Beyond his innovation of language and theme and involvement with ancient literary and intellectual styles, it is Chaucer's reliance on the English vernacular that secured his position in our literary canon. Though English was gaining importance in other parts of the medieval world, Chaucer's nearly exclusive use of the vernacular was not only ambitious but also dangerous, considering that he wrote at a time when even publishing the Bible in English was on par with treason and could get you burned alive.
In the poet's corner
Peter Ackroyd is well known on both sides of the Atlantic as a master of both history and biography, for works such as London: The Biography and the novel The Clerkenwell Tales. Ackroyd's new project is a biography series entitled Ackroyd Brief Lives, appropriately beginning with
Chaucer. In this short biography, Ackroyd elucidates Chaucer's work and times and also reveals how significant a public figure Chaucer was, serving as a diplomat and courtier for a number of monarchs.
Chaucer is a small volume, the perfect size to keep at hand for quick and easy fact checking. This is the book you pick up when you need someone to simply and concisely explain exactly what Chaucer did (or rather, might have been doing) that summer in 1370 when he was sent by the king to Italy with special letters of protection against the Italian government. Chaucer is old-school biography, focusing on the deep religiosity of Chaucer's works and the years spent in the service of the Crown, only speculating outside the standard and academically approved facts of Chaucer's life when absolutely necessary to maintain the cherished image of a poet who is worldly yet innocent of the vices and human flaws he lambasted so successfully in his writing.
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Murder will out?
No one knows when Chaucer died (don't be fooled by the date on his tomb in Westminster Abbey). Despite the immense popularity of Chaucer's poetry during his lifetime and the important offices he held in the court of King Richard II, his name disappears from all public record in the year 1400, with no mention of his death at all. This is odd—imagine if Stephen King or John Grisham were to simply disappear without a trace today.
Who Murdered Chaucer? A Medieval Myster, written by Terry Jones with Robert Yeager, Terry Dolan, Alan Fletcher and Juliette Dor, explores Geoffrey Chaucer's mysterious disappearance.
Terry Jones, you ask? Wasn't he one of the guys in Monty Python? He was, but he also happens to be a famed expert on the Middle Ages whose academic work on the period has garnered significant critical acclaim. Who Murdered Chaucer? is not a biography; Jones describes it as "less of a whodunit? than a Wasitdunnatall?" Unlike Ackroyd, Jones delights, much as Chaucer himself did, in stirring the quiet pond of beliefs scholars have accepted for centuries. Jones explores Chaucer's relationship to King Richard II and his successor, Henry IV, as well as Chaucer's vitriolic criticism of the church in The Canterbury Tales, to examine and support the hypothesis that Chaucer's disappearance owes far more to dissident political opinions and a change in regime brought by a usurper king than the fault of time and incomplete record-keeping.
Jones is not unbiased; he has clear opinions of people such as Henry IV and Archbishop Arundel, yet these opinions and his controversial conclusions are supported with meticulous research of a myriad of texts from the Middle Ages, ultimately creating a terrific piece of revisionist history that offers a highly plausible explanation for the death of Geoffrey Chaucer. Who Murdered Chaucer? is a riveting and engrossing read for anyone from the medievalist to the average reader seeking entertainment.
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