Chaucer: Sources and Backgrounds

Professor Miller has provided one of the most comprehensive collections of primary source material available for the study of Chaucer’s works. He has brought together selections from a large number of writers regarded by Chaucer and his contemporaries as authorities in matters ranging from reading to romantic love, chivalric ideals to anti-feminist charges, marriage to human destiny. The selections are drawn from works which Chaucer is known to have used, as well as other works representing significant medieval attitudes toward matters with which he, like many other authors of his day, concerned himself. These include excerpts from de Voragine’s ‘The Golden Legend’, Saint Augustine’s ‘The City of God’, and Boccaccio’s ‘Filostrato’; also from the Bible, Ovid, Macrobius, Dante, John Gower, and Deschamps, among others. Altogether, these actual texts and ceremonies, with Professor Miller’s accompanying notes, help define conventional medieval beliefs and attitudes and provide an excellent introduction to the tradition of literary authority within which Chaucer wrote. In general, the texts are of sufficient length to provide the context within which particular points may appear. A number of the selections appear in English for the first time. Brief head-notes introduce each author and indicate the particular importance of his text. Numerous cross-references have been provided to lead interested students to related materials within this anthology, and, in the annotations, to direct their attention to the literary tradition within which the authors deliberately worked. Designed as a course text for students of Chaucer and medieval literature, this anthology also serves as an excellent scholarly reference.