Geoffrey Chaucer

His youthful letters to Sutton are clotted with obscenities in a schoolboy manner, boring and embarrassing to a later generation: My tooth still aches. Balls & anus! I feel shat upon. The pained exaggeration...

The real new departure in this book is The Teacher's Tale. Cope's homage to Chaucer is clear in her fast-running, colloquial narrative and her clear moral scheme of enjoyment and freedom on one side...

JB 's true attitude to her own poetic vocation is hard to fathom. In An Expostulatory Epistle to Sir Richard Steele upon the Death of Mr. Addison she calls herself the meanest of the tuneful...

SL 's frame story delightfully introduces the series. Her narrator is a male poet, poverty-stricken but eager for fame. Having been driven out of his house by bailiffs, he goes sightseeing and is snowed in...

Believing strongly that no writer in English can be ignorant of English literature, JW told an interviewer that she reads or re-reads for about five hours a day, choosing sometiimes obscure authors from Chaucer to...

The reviewer for the Times Literary Supplement found this method of compiling stories (the method of Boccaccio , Marguerite de Navarre , and Chaucer ) effective for stringing together a number of diverse tales told...

Between then and 1898 it produced fifty-three books. WM 's The Story of the Glittering Plain (April 1891) was the first. The fortieth was the famous Chaucer (1896) containing eighty-seven wood-cuts by Edward Burne-Jones ...

The acclaim that Petrarch won in his lifetime shifted smoothly into a high reputation after his death. The first English author to refer to him was Chaucer . He was a vital inspiration to...

During her first marriage LAC was often alone. She had books read aloud to her while she sewed: history, theology, Montaigne 's Essays, Spenser 's Faerie Queene, Chaucer 's works, Sidney 's Arcadia...

Her needlework included doing Irish stitch, tent stitch, and purse-work, making bone lace and bodices, and knitting stockings, and she often gathered flowers in order to copy them in stitching. It is clear...

GB 's writings began with Filocolo, a retelling of the traditional Floris and Blanchefleur love-story written between 1338 and 1400. Other narratives were Ameto, a pastoral-allegorical novel, Teseida (which contains the story re-used...

WC is a late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century poet who treats everyday concerns, often in demanding forms, such as the sonnet or the villanelle. Her tone is colloquial and she makes these difficult forms look...

In 1924 Frederic and Bertha Goudy printed a limited edition of the title-poem Renascence at their Village Press , using the very hand press that William Morris had used for the Kelmscott Chaucer .

Christine de Pisan 's Proverbes moraulx, written in about 1400 for the education of her son, were reprinted in Richard Pynson 's edition of Chaucer as The Morall proverbes of Christyne.

The English edition appeared the following year. Her choice for inclusion is, as usual, idiosyncratic. She begins well before Chaucer , with anonymous early religious poems in which may be heard, she writes, the creaking...