"From the award-winning biographer of Chaucer, the story of his most popular and scandalous character, from the Middle Ages to #MeToo Ever since her triumphant debut in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, the Wife of Bath, arguably the first ordinary and recognizably real woman in English literature, has obsessed readers-from Shakespeare to James Joyce, Voltaire to Pasolini, Dryden to Zadie Smith. Few literary characters have led such colourful lives or matched...

"Among the surviving records of fourteenth-century England, Geoffrey Chaucer's poetry is the most vivid. Chaucer wrote about everyday people outside the walls of the English court--men and women who spent days at the pedal of a loom, or maintaining the ledgers of an estate, or on the high seas. In Chaucer's People, Liza Picard transforms The Canterbury Tales into a masterful guide for a gloriously detailed tour of medieval England, from the mills...

Coulton's expedition into fourteenth-century England and the life of Chaucer, first published in 1908, remains an excellent resource for any reader interested in gaining an understanding of that great writer's world. Beautifully illustrated, the book details Chaucer's service as a squire, his ambassadorial career, his Canterbury pilgrimage and his writings, never omitting the social and political realities which shaped his life.

""A glorious example of romance in its most classic literary sense: exhilarating, exuberant, and rich with the jeweled tones of England in the 1300s." --Austin Chronicle Katherine is an epic novel of a love affair that changed history--that of Katherine Swynford and John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster, the ancestors of most of the British royal family. Set in the vibrant fourteenth century of Chaucer and the Black Death, the story features knights fighting...

The popular success of Lowell's Among My Books series encouraged him to publish this eclectic collection, which includes "My Garden Acquaintance," "A Good Word for Winter," "On a Certain Condescension in Foreigners," "A Great Public Character," "Abraham Lincoln," "Carlyle," and "Library of Old Authors."