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Book synopsis

Geoffrey Chaucer has traditionally been seen as indebted to the great male writers of medieval Europe (Dante, Boccaccio, Petrarch and Guillaume de Machaut). However, little has been written about the European woman who was Queen of England and his possible patron: Anne of Bohemia, daughter of Holy Roman Emperor Charles IV and wife of Richard II. Although Chaucer explicitly compliments the Queen in his work, scholars have been reluctant or unable to engage seriously with the question of her role in Chaucer's oeuvre. This book shows that Anne came from a long line of highly educated and multilingual royal women, and that Chaucer would have been fully aware of the fact. Even if she did not literally commission any of his works, Chaucer seems to have been writing for Anne as an imagined reader; and this awareness surely shaped the way he wrote and what he chose to write. The book rereads some of the famous stories from the Canterbury Tales alongside contemporaneous works in Czech, German and Latin - languages with which the Queen was familiar - in order to provide a European context for Chaucer's desire to become a European - not just an English - writer.

Book details

Book category Books in English Humanities History History: earliest times to present day

• Full title: Reading Women in Late Medieval Europe
• Subtitle: Anne of Bohemia and Chaucer's Female Audience
• Author: Alfred Thomas
• Language: English
• Binding: Hardback
• Number of pages: 251
• EAN: 9781137544193
• ISBN: 1137544198
• ID: 09238169
• Publisher: PALGRAVE MACMILLAN
• Weight: 474 g
• Dimensions: 148 × 223 × 20 mm
• Date of publishing: 07. September 2015

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