First we
should establish what the "Age of Chaucer" is. Chaucer lived during the second half of
the fourteenth century. His life spanned an extraordinarily tumultouous time in English and
European history, one which witnessed the Black Death and the Hundred Years War. Chaucer himself
served in the Hundred Years War.
More importantly, Chaucer represented a
growing trend throughout Europe to write in the vernacular. At a time when most scholarly
writing was done in Latin, and it was still a crime to translate the Bible into the vernacular,
as John Wycliffe did during Chaucer's life, this was an important stylistic choice that
connected Chaucer's work to a long tradition of vernacular poetry that included El
Cid and The Song of Roland. It is known that Chaucer read, and
translated a great deal of French poetry, and that he had also read the poetry of Dante,
Petrarch, and Boccaccio, all of whom wrote extensively in the vernacular. Some of his poems
explicitly draw from Italian themes. One of these themes is an interest in the secular (with the
notable exception, to some extent, of Dante's most famous work.) Chaucer too portrays a world
where actions have consequences, and people are driven to make choices by a combination of class
influence and individual free will.
Yet religion played a powerful role in
shaping the medieval worldview. His characters are, after all, on a religious pilgrimage. Just
as important, Chaucer's characters reflect a hierarchical chain, and indeed his contemporary
readers would have recognized the speech, manners and dress as stereotypical of the class to
which each character belonged. is best understood as a product of its own
time, and religion and class were as important in shaping his work as the influence of other
European poets.
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