Chaucer’s life, from birth as a vintner’s son in the 1340s to burial in Westminster Abbey in 1400, is visible not from literary genius but from his roles as civil servant and diplomat in a period of expanding bureaucracy.His intellectual range and ambitions were unusual for a layman, not only in Latin texts but also astronomy and French and Italian literature, amid other ‘literacies’ suitable for a tangential member of the courtly world.His associations, marriage, and release from a charge of rape can only be dimly and partly discerned.Clearer but still mysterious is his commitment to writing literature only in English, at a time when that lacked nationally identifying authority.Amid the several languages mingled around him in poetry and life, Chaucer’s literary monolinguism may not be simply social positioning but an aesthetic constraint, forcing innovation under formal limits as he did in other ways in poetry.

Readers of Chaucer’s poetry hear in it a distinctive and individual voice. More than any other medieval English poet, Chaucer seems to invite the question ‘what was he like?’. The many official records about him have no occasion to shed light on this question. Though Thomas Hoccleve arranged that a lifelike portrait of his dear master should appear in copies of his Regiment, this does not carry us too far into knowing what the poet was really like. Chaucer, for example, despite apparently always saying the best, seemed to have reserved his true opinions, leaving both contemporaries and readers alike to wonder what he really thought – be it about fellow-writers like Hoccleve and Lydgate, or Criseyde, or about his fictional Merchant. Moreover, not only does he persistently credit others with the best that can be said of them, he also discredits himself. It is perhaps appropriate, then, that the ironic Chaucer should represent himself as a reserved and private sort of person – one conceivably well equipped to cope with the many vicissitudes of his time, as the poet evidently did.