A lively, accessible and wide-ranging introduction to the life and work of the fourteenth-century poet Geoffrey Chaucer.

Introduction: life and historical contexts; 1. Love and lore: the shorter poems; 2. Fictions of antiquity: Troilus and Criseyde and The Legend of Good Women; 3. The Canterbury Tales, I: war, love, laughter; 4. The Canterbury Tales, II: experience and authority; Afterword; Guide to further reading.

Alastair Minnis is the Douglas Tracy Smith Professor of English at Yale University, President of the New Chaucer Society (2012¿14), and a Fellow of the Medieval Academy of America. His most recent books are Fallible Authors: Chaucer's Pardoner and Wife of Bath (2007) and Translations of Authority in Medieval English Literature: Valuing the Vernacular (Cambridge University Press, 2009).