Geoffrey Chaucer — "This goode wyf, that was so trewe and kynde, Hadde in hir lyf ful many a joly ty…"
This goode wyf, that was so trewe and kynde, Hadde in hir lyf ful many a joly tyde.
This goode wyf, that was so trewe and kynde, Hadde in hir lyf ful many a joly tyde.
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"For she was so charitable and so pitous She wolde wepe, if that she sawe a mous Caught in a trappe, if it were deed or bledde. Of smale houndes hadde she, that she fedde With rosted flessh, or milk an…"
"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."
"The firste vertu, sone, if thou wolt lere, Is to restreyne and kepe wel thy tonge."
"A clerk, that was of Oxenford also, / Unto the world as in a cloystre he go."
"As for to speke of innocence, I woot no man that may be exempt from it."
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.
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