Probably beginning with short love poems, he soon began composing more ambitious works, such as The Book of the Duchess (c. 1368-72), a poem expressing the grief of the duke of Lancaster for his dead wife, and Troilus and Criseyde (c. 1382-86), a romance-epic of the Trojan War. His last work (left unfinished at his death) was The Canterbury Tales. Most of these tales were composed relatively late in Chaucer’s life, but some were composed separately years before, and given a place in The Canterbury Tales simply by being assigned a pilgrim-narrator. Showing extraordinary variety in form and content, the tales are both a mirror of Chaucer’s wideranging experience as an unusually well-read poet and important royal official, and a uniquely complex representation of fourteenth-century life, literature, and ideas.
Estates satire. Much as a professional comedian now will have vast repertoires of doctor jokes, lawyer jokes, and so on, medieval satirists were wont to poke fun at various professions, attributing certain stereotypical qualities to each of these “estates” of society. Medieval estates satire was a flourishing genre, and Chaucer was its most noteworthy practitioner in fourteenth-century England.
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