Geoffrey Chaucer — "If gold rusts, what then can iron do?"
If gold rusts, what then can iron do?
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More from Geoffrey Chaucer
"And if he foond owher a good felawe, / He wolde techen hym to have noon awe / In swich caas of the ercedekenes curs, / But if a man's purs were in his ers."
"She hadde passed many a straunge strem; / Hire hosen weren of fyn scarlet reed, / Ful streite yteyd, and shoes ful moyste and newe."
"And al was fals, but that I have herd say."
"Ful many a deyntee hors hadde he in stable, / And whan he rood, men myghte his brydel heere / Gynglen in a whistlynge wynd as cleere."
"Out of the olde feldes, as men seyth, Cometh al this newe corn from yeer to yeer; And out of olde bokes, in good feyth, Cometh al this newe science that men lere."
About Geoffrey Chaucer (c. 1343-1400)
English poet, civil servant, and the father of English literature; The Canterbury Tales (~1387-1400) is the founding text of English-language storytelling. Closely associated with Giovanni Boccaccio (his Italian predecessor; the Decameron preceded the Canterbury Tales by ~40 years). For an intellectual contrast, see John Wycliffe, English theologian and Lollard reform-movement leader — Wycliffe and Chaucer were near-contemporaries in the same English Christian world — Chaucer's Wife of Bath and Pardoner are the canonical literary defense of fleshly humanity against the Lollard moral austerity that would later become English Puritanism. Earthy storytelling vs proto-Protestant moralism.