A retelling of the medieval poem about a group of travelers on a pilgrimage to Canterbury and the tales they tell each other. With their astonishing diversity of tone and subject matter, The Canterbury Tales have become one of the touchstones of medieval literature. Translated here into modern English, these tales of a motley crowd of pilgrims drawn from all walks of life-from knight to nun, miller to monk-reveal a picture of English life in the fourteenth...

"More than any other canonical English writer, Geoffrey Chaucer lived and worked at the centre of political life--yet his poems are anything but conventional. Edgy, complicated, and often dark, they reflect a conflicted world, and their astonishing diversity and innovative language earned Chaucer renown as the father of English literature. Marion Turner, however, reveals him as a great European writer and thinker. To understand his accomplishment,...

What does it mean to contemplate? In the Middle Ages, more than merely thinking with intensity, it was a religious practice entailing utter receptiveness to the divine presence. Contemplation is widely considered by scholars today to have been the highest form of devotional prayer, a rarified means of experiencing God practiced only by the most devout of monks, nuns, and mystics.             Yet, in this groundbreaking new book, Eleanor...

Taken from the famous literary biography series English Men of Letters, this is a biography of the 14th century writer Geoffrey Chaucer, the author of The Canterbury Tales.

Anglo-Saxon Keywords presents a series of entries that reveal the links between modern ideas and scholarship and the central concepts of Anglo-Saxon literature, language, and material culture. • Reveals important links between central concepts of the Anglo-Saxon period and issues we think about today • Reveals how material culture-the history of labor, medicine, technology, identity, masculinity, sex, food, land use-is as important as the history...

Jean-Baptiste Poquelin, known popularly by his stage name Molière, is regarded as one of the masters of French comedic drama. When Molière began acting in Paris there were two well-established theatrical companies, those of the Hôtel de Bourgogne and the Marais. Joining these theatrical companies would have been impossible for a new member of the acting profession like Molière and thus he performed with traveling troupes of actors in the French...

Charles Robinson (1870-1937) was born into a family of illustrators - his younger brother was William Heath Robinson and his older brother was Thomas Heath Robinson - and rose to become one of the most fashionable book-illustrators of his era. At age twenty-five he illustrated his first full book, A Child's Garden of Verses, with over 100 images. These illustrations for Stevenson's most endearing and popular book bear the influence of the Art Nouveau...