What roles did Geoffrey Chaucer fulfill in life?
Julius S is not quite correct. Beowulf is actually the oldest written work we have in English, albeit Old English. Despite the imposition of Norman French on the highest levels of Church and State following the Norman conquest, English continued to be used a written language, and an immense corpus of Middle English documents survives. What sets Chaucer apart (in some people’s minds) is that he is credited with being the first to demonstate the *artistic credibility* of English for court poetry and prose. —– EDIT: I know you’re asking about Chaucer, but to address Julian’s response about Beowulf: “Anglo-Saxon” and “Old English” are synonyms; two names for the same language. Although Beowulf is set in Denmark, it was not written there. The internal evidence of the poem demonstrates this: First, the spellings are a mix of the Wessex and Anglian dialects (spoken only in England), not continental Saxon, Proto-Norse, or Ingvaeonic (the languages that would have been spoken in lower Scandi
