The racket of genius

摘要

This is an extremely good book. Oddly so, it might seem. It contains no new facts about Geoffrey Chaucer, author of "The Canterbury Tales", whose barely documented 14th-century life has long frustrated scholars: no more evidence about his strangely distant marriage to Phi-lippa or his dealings with "lytel Lowys my sone", or what books he read, or the cabal of venal, overweening London merchants he did business with. The works are cited sparingly. Paul Strohm does not even much indulge that useful biographer's trick, trawling through the oeuvre for little gleams of Chaucer's personality: a love, perhaps, of walking through dew-damp dawn meadows ("The Legend of Good Women"), or his delight in the sunshine through his new stained-glass window as he snuggled down in bed ("Troilus and Criseide").