WHAT NEW CAN BE SAID ABOUT A POET WHOS BEEN DEAD FOR SIX HUNDRED YEARS?
“Cullen’s Chaucer’s Pilgrims is a thought-provoking addition to literature on this well-studied classic.” –Library Journal, September 15, 2000 October 25, 2000, is officially the 600th anniversary of the death of Geoffrey Chaucer. It’s hard to imagine that any new insight could surface about a writer who’s been dead that long, particularly one who’s been read, studied, taught, and analyzed by the academic community for centuries. Geoffrey Chaucer, one of the first poets in what we now consider the English language, is admired and enjoyed to this day, and not only by the English majors. He is rightly considered a literary giant: an entertaining, wise, ribald, and reverent craftsman of poetry and the fine art of storytelling. Plenty has been “discovered” and written about Chaucer’s work by academics from medievalists to Freudians. Can anything more be said? According to Dolores L. Cullen, plenty remains to be said, and she has made it her business to say it. Unwilling to accept establis
