Geoffrey Chaucer

Geoffrey Chaucer was an English poet, author, and civil servant active in the second half of the fourteenth century, widely regarded as the greatest English-language writer of the Middle Ages and often called the Father of English literature for helping legitimise the literary use of vernacular Middle English at a time when court and learned writing in England still gravitated toward French and Latin.

Born around 1340 in London to a prosperous wine-merchant family, Chaucer entered noble service as a teenager, was captured during the Hundred Years' War in 1359 and ransomed by King Edward III, and went on to a long career in royal administration that included diplomatic missions to France, Flanders, and Italy. His Italian travels in the 1370s exposed him to the work of Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio, all of which left a deep mark on his writing.

Chaucer held a series of substantial offices, including Controller of the Customs for the Port of London and, later, Clerk of the King's Works, while also serving as a Member of Parliament for Kent. These appointments funded his literary output and gave him intimate exposure to the merchants, pilgrims, clerics, and courtiers he would later put on the page.

His major works include the dream-vision The Book of the Duchess, the Trojan romance Troilus and Criseyde, and the unfinished masterpiece The Canterbury Tales, a frame narrative of pilgrims travelling from London to Canterbury whose voices range across virtually every social rank of fourteenth-century England. He died in October 1400 and was buried in Westminster Abbey, the first writer interred in what later became Poets' Corner.

The name Geoffrey is of Old French and Germanic origin, generally taken to mean peaceful district or peaceful traveller, and was carried to England by the Normans; he made it lastingly literary.