Related Authors and Works

• The Douay-Rheims Bible is as close as we can come in modern English to the Bible Chaucer would have read.
• Boethius, 480-52, author of the Consolation of Philosophy, a Platonic dialogue which had an enormous impact on Medieval thought. Chaucer translated it into Middle English, as Boece. Follow this link to James J. O'Donnell's Boethius page, which provides a complete translation.
• Andreas Cappellanus wrote a book in the late 12th century called De Amore (Of Love, although it is often translated as "The Art of Courtly Love"); the book was enormously popular, and has often been taken at face value, as a description of the way the aristocracy conducted love affairs. Recently, scholars have objected to taking the text quite so literally. To see what all the fuss is about, try the De Amore site linked to Harvard's Chaucer page, or the web page by our own Scott Watson.
• Giovanni Boccaccio, 1313-1375, Italian author of a great many works; the Decameron and the Teseida are especially relevant to the study of the Canterbury Tales. This link will take you to the Decameron Web, which describes itself as "an interactive hypermedia project designed to make the text . . . available to the widest possible audience."
• Dante, 1265-1321, author of the Divine Comedy. You can find this and other texts by Dante at Columbia University's Digital Dante site, where you can also "play" Dante.
• John Gower, 1325-1408, was Chaucer's fellow poet, sometime friend and rival, the author of several poems in English and Latin. You can read some of these at a site linked to Harvard's Chaucer page.
• Fabliaux (singular: fabliau) are rude-- sometimes very rude!-- stories popular in Chaucer's period. There are texts of several which seem to have inspired Chaucer's pilgrims to flights of obscenity at Harvard's page.