The Portable Chaucer [antikvár]

fViii>o fVjiUt Introduction chaucer's times Geoffrey dhaucer lived in medieval England, which despite its outlying position was bound into the medieval culture of Europe by religion, war, commerce, poetry, philosophy, and science, and by the common institutions of feudalism. This turbulent world rubbed edges with the near and even the far East. "Tamerlane's life," as J. L. Lowes points out, "just overlapped Chaucer's at each end, and it was in the year in which Chaucer was appointed Justice of the Peace that the Great Turk boasted that he would make his horse eat oats on the high altar of St. Peter's." The peak of the Crusades had long passed, but, to quote Lowes again, "Chaucer's Knight had fought in Europe, Asia, and Africa against the Moors, the Turks, the Tartars and the heathen of the North— in Turkey, Spain, Prussia, Lithuania (then a Tartar outpost) and Russia, and also with 'that valorous champion of impossible conquests,' Pierre de Lusignan, king of Cyprus, at the taking of Alexandria, and at Lyeys and Satalye. And the Knight was a composite portrait of men whom Chaucer personally knew." England was engaged during Chaucer's lifetime and for some fifty years after his death in the Hundred Years' War with France. Chaucer was probably born somewhat later than 1340; he died in 1400. The first celebrated English victory in the war, Crecy, occurred in 1346, and the last, Agincourt, in 1415. Joan of Arc was martyred in 1431, and the final reversal of English fortunes in the struggle began.