The Life of the Author: Geoffrey Chaucer

Explores how generations of biographers shaped, reinvented, and fabricated the life of Geoffrey Chaucer Very little is known with certainty about Geoffrey Chaucer’s life, yet he has long been enshrined as the “Father of English Poetry.” Over six centuries, biographers have sought to craft a version of Chaucer that meets the needs of their own time, culture, and readers.In doing so, they have often blurred the boundaries between evidence and invention.In Life of the Author: Geoffrey Chaucer, Simone Celine Marshall takes a distinctive approach that examines not just Chaucer himself, but the ways in which his life story has been repeatedly fabricated and reshaped to reflect broader social, cultural, and literary currents.By analyzing over two dozen biographies, Marshall demonstrates that each one is less a faithful record of Chaucer’s life than a mirror of its own era’s priorities and prejudices.Marshall situates Chaucer within a 625-year tradition of biography-making, showing how the ima