Episode Details

Geoffrey Chaucer was a wine merchant's son who worked as a customs auditor, a diplomat, and a royal bureaucrat — and in his spare time wrote The Canterbury Tales, the work that established English as a literary language. Before Chaucer, serious literature in England was written in French or Latin. After Chaucer, English was a language capable of anything. He did not just write great literature — he proved that English could sustain it.

This episode traces Chaucer from his merchant-class childhood through the diplomatic missions, the customs house, and The Canterbury Tales that made English literature possible.

• Chaucer's merchant-class origins and the court positions that exposed him to French and Italian literature
• The diplomatic missions to Italy and the influence of Boccaccio and Petrarch on his work
• The Canterbury Tales — the pilgrimage frame, the social cross-section, and the vernacular revolution
• Why Chaucer's decision to write in Middle English rather than French changed literary history