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Chaucer: A European Life Paperback – September 22, 2020

by Marion Turner (Author)
4.5 4.5 out of 5 stars 168 ratings
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An acclaimed biography that recreates the cosmopolitan world in which a wine merchant’s son became one of the most celebrated of all English writers

Geoffrey Chaucer is often called the father of English literature, but this acclaimed biography reveals him as a great European writer and thinker. Uncovering important new information about Chaucer’s travels, private life, and the circulation of his writings, Marion Turner reconstructs in unprecedented detail the cosmopolitan world of Chaucer’s adventurous life, focusing on the places and spaces that fired his imagination. From the wharves of London to the frescoed chapels of Florence, the book recounts Chaucer’s experiences as a prisoner of war in France, as a father visiting his daughter’s nunnery, as a member of a chaotic Parliament, and as a diplomat in Milan. At the same time, the book offers a comprehensive exploration of Chaucer’s writings. The result is a landmark biography and a fresh account of the extraordinary story of how a wine merchant’s son became the poet of The Canterbury Tales.

Previous page
  1. Print length
    624 pages
  2. Language
    English
  3. Publisher
    Princeton University Press
  4. Publication date
    September 22, 2020
  5. Dimensions
    5.3 x 2 x 8 inches
  6. ISBN-10
    0691210152
  7. ISBN-13
    978-0691210155
  8. See all details
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Editorial Reviews

Review

"Winner of the Otto Gründler Book Prize, The Medieval Institute at Western Michigan University"

"Winner of the Beatrice White Prize, The English Association, University of Leicester"

"Winner of the Rose Mary Crawshay Prize, The British Academy"

"Shortlisted for the Wolfson History Prize, The Wolfson Foundation"

"Longlisted for the HWA Non-Fiction Crown, Historical Writers’ Association"

"Finalist for the PROSE Award in Biography and Autobiography, Association of American Publishers"

"One of The Times' Best Literary Non-Fiction Books of 2019"

"One of the Times Literary Supplement's Books of the Year 2019"

"One of the Sunday Times' Best Literary Books of 2019"

"A Choice Outstanding Academic Title of the Year"

"One of New Statesman's Books of the Year 2020"

Review

“An absolute triumph.”―A. N. Wilson, Times Literary Supplement

“A hugely illuminating book. . . . Turner's writing is never less than perspicacious, and often slyly humorous.”―Tim Smith-Laing, The Telegraph

“[A] wholly beguiling, original, vividly written appreciation of the hugely innovative author and his rich cultural and political European background.”―Robert Fox, Evening Standard

"A great swirl of a biography, one more capacious and more ranging than any of its predecessors."―Joe Stadolnik, Los Angeles Review of Books

“[Turner] has forged a new kind of biography. . . . Her work promises to be definitive for some time to come.”―Mary Wellesley, Times Higher Education

Product details

  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Princeton University Press (September 22, 2020)
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • Paperback ‏ : ‎ 624 pages
  • ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0691210152
  • ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0691210155
  • Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.3 pounds
  • Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.3 x 2 x 8 inches
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.5 4.5 out of 5 stars 168 ratings

About the author

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Marion Turner

Marion Turner

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Marion Turner is the J.R.R. Tolkien Professor of English Literature and Language at the University of Oxford, where she holds a Professorial Fellowship at Lady Margaret Hall.

Customer reviews

4.5 out of 5 stars
4.5 out of 5
168 global ratings
A Fantastic Literary Biography
5 Stars
A Fantastic Literary Biography
This book was such a wonderful read and I was so sad to finish it!Turner's writing is clear, wry, and gripping. She did such a great job on peeling back the layers of Chaucer and his multicultural world. I highly recommend this book for anyone who loves medieval literature/ biography!
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Top reviews from the United States

Glynn Young
5.0 out of 5 stars A big, important book about the great English poet
Reviewed in the United States on December 3, 2019
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After reading “Chaucer: A European Life” by Marion, I can confidently say it’s a major biographical work that significantly adds to understanding of his life, his writing, and, perhaps most of all, his greatest contribution to English literature, “The Canterbury Tales.”

Turner argues that, while Chaucer (1342-1400) is certainly the father of English literature, he was shaped and extraordinarily influenced by European life and thought. She also makes the case for Chaucer being an unconventional and almost edgy poet, by comparing and contrasting his work with what was happening in English and European literature and poetry at the time.

The research underpinning the work is enormous. Turner goes well beyond the basic facts of Chaucer’s life (including the so-called “missing years” of 1357-1366) to discuss the critical importance of neighborhoods in medieval London, what Chaucer did on his many diplomatic journeys, power politics among English royalty and aristocrats (which Chaucer had to move adroitly through), the Black Death, the rise of the merchant class, and the importance of relics, faith, and pilgrimages. We even learn what Chaucer would have been done in his years in the counting house, where he worked for a decade as a royal agent for the wool trade. Through it all, she connects this broad context and its individual elements to Chaucer’s writings.

Turner is an associate professor, tutorial fellow, and director of Undergraduate Studies in the Faculty of English at Jesus College, Oxford. She is the author of “Chaucerian Conflict: Languages of Antagonism in Late Fourteenth-Century London” (2007) and served as editor of “A Handbook of Middle English Studies” (2013). She’s also published numerous articles on Chaucer, medieval illness narratives, and Chaucer contemporaries Thomas Usk and Thomas Hoccleve.

“Chaucer: A European Life” is an important book and a big book about the life and work of a man who had such great influence on both English literature and the English language. It places him in both his English and European contexts and demonstrates the importance of both. The book is also a major work of scholarship that is interesting and engaging to read for non-academics.
3 people found this helpful
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De Charlus
5.0 out of 5 stars Fantastic!
Reviewed in the United States on July 27, 2020
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This is the best literary biography I have come across since Ellmann’s classic on Joyce. It is an ingenious, thoughtful and painstaking reconstruction of the spaces, both physical and metaphorical, that Chaucer inhabited as a poet, a bureaucrat, a diplomat, a city-dweller, a father, a husband and a protégée of powerful men. He may be the proverbial “father of the English literature,” but he was very much a cosmopolitan man of letters and a European traveller. Indeed, but for his travel to Italy and his encounter with the work of Boccaccio—who becomes the source of so many of Chaucer’s poems—the fatherhood might have looked very different, if it ever came to be at all.

Essential for any biography, the historical context that Turner supplies never feels obligatory, for all its density; similarly, the connections she identifies between historical events or relationships and Chaucer’s poetry are never strained or merely speculative (the curse of far too many Shakespeare biographies). So organic is her presentation of these connections, and so absorbing the narrative, that the “mere” context becomes indistinguishable from the “actual” content.

She is a terrific writer too: each chapter ends with a peroration, a summing-up that lingers in the mind long after the dates and the minutiae have vanished from memory. For anyone with about so much as a spark of affection for or curiosity about Chaucer, this will be a joy.
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Curious
4.0 out of 5 stars Dense, but useful
Reviewed in the United States on July 30, 2021
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The work is neither a simple biography nor an academic text. Perhaps rightfully, it leans to the latter. So foreign to our understanding is both the particulars of the Era and the language interchanges required of that Era in England that simple biography can hardly help the reader. One must understand the players both in Chaucer's life and in the leaders of the period, often here greatly overlapping. One must understand the conflicts both as a momentary situation and as a shifting setting over time. One must understand other literary influences of the moment and the recent past. One must understand the living conditions, greatly different from those of modern times and their variances. Lastly, one needs to know how both Chaucer and his contemporaries lived within and sometimes beyond the mores of the cultures they inhabited. In the case of literature created choices are altered by all of this, notably by subjects and treatment. Why Chaucer is among a first generation to write in Middle English rather than French I'd important. Why he might shade or even disemble in his writings is only to be assumed, but his motives cannot be understood to the extent that a deep comprehension of factors coloring such decisions are at least available to consider.
We will not fully understand Chaucer's life by this book or by his writings, bit the depth of the examination afforded by the author gives a good groundwork for confirming some ideas and eliminating others. I do wish that quoted verses were presented in an interlineal form [original lines alternating with indented translation lines] for more easy comparison. I would also hope that the debated translation of a word could be easy to present, where the period often had multiple meanings and yet offered varied options available to express the same thought. If not for the purpose of meter or rhyme, word selection was often the best hint of subliminal messages, double entendres and even shaded criticism. The work manages a good deal of this though at the cost of removing any quick answers or easy formulations of interpretation.
2 people found this helpful
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Top reviews from other countries

Beverly Fraser
5.0 out of 5 stars Very informative book.
Reviewed in Canada on December 28, 2019
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A fantastic book which gives so much detail o Chaucers life, his times and his work and those who influenced him.
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Fabour
5.0 out of 5 stars Absolutely BRILLIANT on the life AND the poems!
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on November 26, 2019
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I loved this biography. It shows you Chaucer in London and in places I never knew he went, in ways I never thought about before. And Marion Turner writes beautifully about Chaucer's amazing poems as well. She has an imaginative but totally convincing, modern historian's touch for biography plus a staggering ability to bring the poetry to life and clearly explain its depths. I read Chaucer at school and mainly got an idea that he was quite comic and a bit knockabout. So I've been delighted to read this book and discover how wonderful and complex Chaucer's poetry really was, within the Canterbury Tales and in poem after poem that I had no idea about and which Turner makes vivid and fascinating. You never feel she's dumbing down but I could follow everything with no scholarly background. And the idea of organising everything around different spaces in Chaucer's life (and mind) works superbly. I was always looking forward to reading chapters on places like the Tower and the Thames, but who knew that you could also write an exciting chapter in a book about a medieval poet on the Milky Way?!

Hugely recommended. From politicking worthy of The Wire to the biggest ideas you can think of, there's something surprising here for everyone.
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tim smart
5.0 out of 5 stars A very interesting aid to anyone studying the Canterbury Tales.
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on March 4, 2024
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Who knew that Chaucer was a diplomat, a tax collector, an MP, and was related by marriage to the Royal Family? If I'd have known that when I was studying the Pardoner's Tale and the Nun's Priest's Tale I might have got better grades.
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Clementi
3.0 out of 5 stars Did Not Finish - Became Very Boring
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on November 7, 2019
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I bought this book because I heard about it on Radio 4 where it was highly praised, and because I enjoy reading biographies and am interested in Chaucer (having studied The Canterbury Tales some years ago) it sounded just the kind of biography I would enjoy.

The first Chapter was great and found it quite engaging and interesting. The reader virtually smells and hears what 14th Century London was like - it was also educational: I never realised how cosmopolitan the city was back then, and it was fascinating to read how sophisticated life was for more wealthy people. I certainly got a vivid idea of the time and space Chaucer inhabited.

However from Chapter 2 onwards I struggled to keep interest. The book veers off Chaucer somewhat and describes intricate details about his contemporaries and seemingly rather drab histories involving other people - I lost track of who was who and what they were (also too many women called Blanche - Blanche was obviously a popular name in the 14th century, but I lost track of which Blanche was which). Also the author goes into great detail about 14th century people and events I have absolutely no interest in whatsoever, and the style of writing was factual and not interesting as recreational reading - it was hard going for me personally.

So I’ve abandoned reading the book unfortunately, I bought the Kindle version so can’t even sell it on unfortunately, I just lost the plot with it and have not got beyond Chapter 4 (and I glossed over quite a lot of chapters 2, 3 and 4 but found it didn't improve for me).

However there’s no doubt this book would be a marvellous resource for anyone seriously studying Chaucer . The author is clearly extremely knowledgeable and done enormous amounts of research, but for the lay person like myself this book is way to scholarly as a biography to read for pleasure.
11 people found this helpful
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MAC
5.0 out of 5 stars Engaging, absorbing, and academically impeccable
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on March 4, 2022
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Cleverly organised around the spaces and places in which Chaucer lived, the author illuminates Chaucer's life through these contexts and shows how his experiences and his reading informed his writing. Turner also uses Chaucer's life to animate our understanding of 14th century London and its links to the rest of England, and Europe. Absorbing, engaging, and academically sound. An outstanding book.
One person found this helpful
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