Imperfect Knight

Gabriel Josipovici

  • Chaucer’s Knight: Portrait of a Medieval Mercenary by Terry Jones
    Weidenfeld, 319 pp, £8.95, January 1980, ISBN 0 297 77566 9
  • Chaucer, Langland and the Creative Imagination by David Aers
    Routledge, 236 pp, £9.75, January 1980, ISBN 0 7100 0351 X
  • The Golden Age: Manuscript Painting at the Time of Jean, Duc de Berry by Marcel Thomas
    Chatto, 120 pp, £12.50, January 1980, ISBN 0 7011 2471 7

The life of books is a mysterious thing. If an author is still read fifty years after his death there is a strong likelihood that he will be read five centuries from then. Chaucer, at any rate, has never been far from the consciousness of readers of English, and if the last twenty years have seen an amazing upsurge of interest in him in academic circles, this has fortunately not been balanced by his disappearance from the consciousness of the wider public.

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[*] Ralph Baldwin was, so far as I know, the first to stress this aspects of the poem. See his ‘The Unity of the Canterbury Tales’, Anglistica, V. On the ‘idea’ of the work see Donald Howard’s splendid The Idea of the Canterbury Tales (1976).