Book at Lunchtime: Chaucer: A European Life

TORCH Book at Lunchtime event on Chaucer: A European Life by
Professor Marion Turner. Book at Lunchtime is a series of
bite-sized book discussions held fortnightly during term-time, with
commentators from a range of disciplines. 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, she reconstructs in
unprecedented detail the cosmopolitan world of Chaucer’s
adventurous life, focusing on the places and spaces that fired his
imagination. Uncovering important new information about Chaucer’s
travels, private life, and the early circulation of his writings,
this innovative biography documents a series of vivid episodes,
moving from the commercial wharves of London to the frescoed
chapels of Florence and the kingdom of Navarre, where Christians,
Muslims, and Jews lived side by side. The narrative 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, where he encountered the
writings of Dante and Boccaccio. At the same time, the book offers
a comprehensive exploration of Chaucer’s writings, taking the
reader to the Troy of Troilus and Criseyde, the gardens of the
dream visions, and the peripheries and thresholds of The Canterbury
Tales. By exploring the places Chaucer visited, the buildings he
inhabited, the books he read, and the art and objects he saw, this
landmark biography tells the extraordinary story of how a wine
merchant’s son became the poet of The Canterbury Tales. Bart van Es
is Professor of English Literature at the University of Oxford,
focusing primarily on Spenser and Shakespeare. Bart is interested
in connections between history writing and poetry in early modern
England. In recent years his research has focused primarily on
Renaissance drama and the material realities of London’s theatre
world. The Cut Out Girl, his work of creative non-fiction on World
War II in the Netherlands, won the 2018 Costa Book of the Year
award. Marion Turner is Associate Professor and Tutorial Fellow in
English at Jesus College, University of Oxford. Marion’s research
interests lie in late medieval secular literature and history, and
she has published very widely on Chaucer, including two books and
many articles. Chaucer: A European Life, was her first foray into
biography, and she now teaches life-writing as well as medieval
literature. Her next book is going to be a global history – or
biography – of the Wife of Bath across time. Helen Swift is
Associate Professor of Medieval French at the University of Oxford.
Having focused for several years on fifteenth-century literary
defences of women, she now explores more broadly questions of
narrative voice and identity in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century
French literature. Her second book, Representing the Dead: Epitaph
Fictions in Late-Medieval France examines voices and bodies
speaking from beyond the grave and was runner-up for the Society
for French Studies R. Gapper Book Prize in 2017. John Watts is
Professor of Later Medieval History at the University of Oxford and
Chair of the History Faculty Board. John is interested in politics,
political culture and political structures in later medieval
England and Europe, between the 13th and the early 16th centuries.
Most of his published work deals with later medieval English
politics and political culture, but he has also written about
politics in later medieval Europe. Elleke Boehmer is Professor of
World Literature in English at the University of Oxford, Director
of the Oxford Centre for Life-Writing and was the Director of TORCH
from 2015 to 17. She is a founding figure in the field of colonial
and postcolonial studies, and internationally known for her
research in anglophone literatures of empire and anti-empire. She
is also a novelist and short story writer, most recently of The
Shouting in the Dark.