Chaucer's Works, Volume 1 — Romaunt of the Rose Minor Poems

Geoffrey ChaucerProject Gutenberg · United StatesDec 2019

Rating 4.2
Word count
1.4M words
Chapters
144

Tags

English Originals Classical Literature Literary MasterLove AllegoryComplex HumanitySpiritual ComfortPoetry ClassicPopular ExplanationMedieval LiteratureTraditional AestheticsAncient StyleMusical Rhythm

Summary

Project Gutenberg was the first provider of free electronic books, or eBooks. Michael Hart, founder of Project Gutenberg, invented eBooks in 1971 and his memory continues to inspire the creation of eBooks and related technologies today.Chaucer's Works, Volume 1 (of 7) — Romaunt of the Rose; Minor Poems by ChaucerAuthor: Chaucer, Geoffrey, 1343?-1400,Language: English, Class: PR: Language and Literatures: English literature, Release Date: Jul 3, 2013

Editor's review

This is the first of seven volumes of Chaucer's works, containing the translation of the Romaunt of the Rose and minor poems, released by Project Gutenberg as a public-domain eBook. For students of English literary origins, the value of this volume lies in showing Chaucer's translational and lyrical practice before he completed The Canterbury Tales: the Middle English rendering of the Romaunt displays his handling of the French allegorical tradition, while the minor poems reveal the early shape of courtly love and religious themes in his hands. The electronic edition is free and easily available, suited as a primary text for comparative reading rather than an introductory guide. Readers should note Middle English spelling and textual variants, and would do best to use it alongside an annotated edition or scholarly introduction. Overall, this is a documentary work aimed at researchers and serious literary readers, whose significance lies in the text itself rather than in popular readability.

Who it's for

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Reading tips

  1. Begin with a modern English introduction to the plot framework of the Romaunt of the Rose, then move to the original text to reduce difficulty.
  2. Read the minor poems alongside Chaucer's later works, noting continuities and changes in subject matter and rhetoric.
  3. Prepare a Middle English glossary or online annotations and read slowly passage by passage rather than aiming to finish quickly.
  4. Use the electronic edition for searching and excerpting, and check key passages against a collated edition for variant readings.

About the publisher

Project Gutenberg United States · Founded in 1971

Project Gutenberg is a digital publishing project focused on public-domain ebooks. Its publishing direction centers on classic literary works whose copyright has expired, covering genres such as poetry, drama, fiction, and epic. Representative books include Lyrical Ballads by Wordsworth and Coleridge, Proust's Du côté de chez Swann, Shakespeare's Macbeth and The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, Homer's The Iliad, Dante's La Divina Comèdia: Purgatòri, Cervantes's The History of Don Quixote, Volume 2, and Grahame's The Wind in the Willows. Its author resources consist mainly of classic Western writers such as Wordsworth, Proust, Shakespeare, Homer, Dante, Cervantes, Grahame, and Tolstoy. Its publishing feature is the provision of freely accessible ebooks in EPUB and Kindle formats; it is not a traditional publisher, and publicly available information is limited.

Contents

  1. 1
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FAQ

What does this book contain? According to the source, this is the first of seven volumes of Chaucer's works, containing the translation of the Romaunt of the Rose and minor poems, in English, as a public-domain eBook. It is not a complete works and does not include The Canterbury Tales; readers should be clear about its scope beforehand.
Can I read it without any Middle English? It will be fairly difficult. The spelling and grammar differ markedly from modern English, and the minor poems are densely allusive. It is advisable to first become familiar with the content through a modern English translation or annotated edition, then return to the original for comparison; otherwise it is easy to remain at the literal level and fail to enter the text.
Is the electronic edition suitable for scholarly citation? It can serve as a convenient source for text searching and preliminary reading, but scholarly citation should be checked against authoritative collated editions, bearing in mind the source of the electronic edition's copy text and the absence of page numbers. For discussions of variant readings and editions, conclusions should not rest on this edition alone.

This site is an index: you start “Search all sources” in your browser, and the entries it lists all point to third-party sites; please judge their availability yourself.

About the author

Geoffrey Chaucer Author · English · 1343–1400

Geoffrey Chaucer (1343?–1400) was an English medieval poet born in London. Besides writing poetry, he served as a courtier, diplomat and civil servant, and enjoyed the trust of three English kings. His masterpiece The Canterbury Tales is regarded as a treasure of English literature; his other works include Troilus and Criseyde and The Book of the Duchess. Ten of his works are held here, including various versions of The Canterbury Tales as well as The House of Fame, The Legend of Good Women, Romaunt of the Rose and minor poems. Their subjects range from love and dream visions to religion and worldly satire, and their style combines narrative, lyric and humour. He laid the foundation of the English literary language and is honoured as the greatest English poet before Shakespeare.