CHAUCER Chaucer (1343-1400) was born in London in 1343 from a family of wine merchants.

In 1357 he was in the service of Duke of Clarence, whom he served for many years. He's considered the father of english because he gave currency to the middle english, like did Dante for the italian. He gave currency to his own standard, the dialects of London that became the basis of Modern English. The main introduction of Chaucer is the heroic couplet in a iambic pentameter. Iambic pentameter is a line of 5 metrical feet, each foot of which consist of an unstressed sillable follow by a stressed one. Between 1368 and 1378 Chaucer went to Italy where became acquainted of Dante's, Petrarch's and Boccaccio's works. His works could be divided in 3 periods: -French period -Italian period -English period ITALIAN PERIOD It is called english period because it is modeled on Petrarch's and Boccaccio's works, in this period belongs: -the parlement of foubles: The poem is in the form of a dream vision in rhyme royal stanza and is interesting in that it is the first reference to the idea that St.Valentine's day was a special day for lovers. -House of fame: it dealing with the contemplation of the vanity of human wishes. -The legend of good woman: is a poem telling the story of nine women and it's the first Chaucer work in which is using the heroic couplet. -Troylus and Criseyde: based on the Boccaccio's work Filostrato. ENGLISH PERIOD English period include the Caneterbury tailes. CANTERBURY TALES The Canterbury Tales is a long narrative poem compose by a prologue and 24 tales, even if in he original idea the tales were 120. -The prologue introduced all the characters and the initial situation that is a group of thirty pilgrims, belonging to different classes ( knights, Church........) including Chaucer, going on a pilgrimage to Thomas Becket's shrine in Canterbury and they gather to the Tabar Inn in London. All the pilgrims should tell 2 story while going to Canterbury and 2 coming back. They belonged to all the classes but Chaucer doesn't show the low classes (because they couldn't pay the journey) and the highest (because they didn't want to mingle with the other classes). -The tales have a frame structure that Chaucer has borrow from Boccaccio and includes a variety of genres, they could speack about love, religion and marriage. The canterbury tales is a realistic picture, in fact he showed all the categories a part of the lowest and the highest classes. The realism of Caucher consist also in convention of exaggeration, caricature and grottesque. It's also an allegoric picture: the Inn rapresented the place of wordly pleasures while Canterbury is the symbol of celestian city so the journey that the charactes make is a journey of purification. And the pilgrims are a key metaphor for life, in the sense that er are all pilgrims and the journey is the symbol of the life of everyone. DESCRIPITION OF CHARACTER Pilgrims were rapresented for their position in the society and they first described physically and then morally. Chaucer doesn't follow the normal social herarchy of presentation of the time, he mixed male and female to underline the new importance of women in the middle classes; furthermore the new feature is the indivisulisation, the character exist because he is in movement. This type of descriction is unconventional for the medieval character portait that is generally static. DIFFERENCE BETWEEN CHAUCER AND ITALIAN WRITERS -in the Decameron the theme were decided the day before by the king or the queen of the day, insteand in

the Canterbury tales is the speaker that decide. -In Boccaccio the character were all boys and girls, in Chaucer they were pilgrims that belong to all the classes. Then Boccaccio didn't give a precise descriprion of the storyteller unlike Chaucer ithat had to rapresent the society of the time.