A Web-based Study Guide of

Geoffrey Chaucer and His Times:

An Overview of the History of the English Language

Essays for Close Reading, compiled from various online resources

This study guide was originally developed as the beginning of a unit about Geoffrey Chaucer for a co-op literature class I taught. Students read each of the essays/webpages referenced below, then answered critical thinking questions to prepare them for their taste of Chaucer and his Canterbury Tales. This unit is intended to give modern high school students a taste of Chaucer, so they are not completely ignorant about him. It is not intended to be exhaustive.

Time needed for unit: Varies. Can be completed in one week, should not take longer than two. Materials needed: Internet access Notebook paper Pen/Pencil
The Canterbury Tales in Middle English are available from various online and print sources. A very accessible, easily read version for high school students is available at: http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/webcore/murphy/canterbury/ Parents, please pre-read before turning your high school students loose on Chaucer! Many of the Tales are earthy, raunchy, bawdy, even explicit. You have been warned

Lesson One
Read the following webpage in its entirety: http://web.cn.edu/kwheeler/reading_basic.html Take notes as you read, paying attention to anything that is new to you, or that seems particularly interesting or challenging. Then download and print the PDF worksheet Critical Reading, a brief synopsis of the web page: http://web.cn.edu/kwheeler/documents/Critical_Reading_Outline.pdf . You will answer questions from the Critical Reading worksheet after reading the essays included in lessons two through four.

Lesson Two

Read the following essay then answer questions 3, 5, 6, 7, 10 and 11 from the Critical Reading worksheet, using a new page in your notebook. Geoffrey Chaucer (1342/43-1400) http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/chaucer.htm

Lesson Three

Read the following essay then answer questions 3, 5, 6, 7, 10 and 11 from the Critical Reading worksheet, using a new page in your notebook. A Brief History of the English Language http://www.anglik.net/englishlanguagehistory.htm

Lesson Four

Read the following essay then answer questions 3, 5, 6, 7, 10 and 11 from the Critical Reading worksheet, using a new page in your notebook. Start with: The English Language in the Fourteenth Century http://www.courses.fas.harvard.edu/~chaucer/language.html Continue on with: What is the Great Vowel Shift? http://facweb.furman.edu/~mmenzer/gvs/what.htm Click on the link for Dialogue: Conservative and Advanced to learn more about the GVS. (Not sure if the sounds are still working.) Then read: What is a long vowel? http://facweb.furman.edu/~mmenzer/gvs/terms.htm#long And here is a second reading about the GVS, saying the same things in a different way: 2

The Great Vowel Shift http://sites.fas.harvard.edu/~chaucer/vowels.html Be sure to click the links to hear the sounds!! Finally, read: English Literature and the GVS http://facweb.furman.edu/~mmenzer/gvs/lit.htm Be sure to click the links to hear the sounds!!

Lesson Five
Why is Chaucer important today?
Chaucers influence on literature and history

Read the following, noting the reasons (in bold) why Chaucer is important.

Main points of Chaucers influence through the centuries: 1. Chaucer popularized English as opposed to French or Latin poetry at court. Contrasting his writings with those of Gower (who wrote as much in French and Latin as in English), or any of several French-speaking poets of the day writing in Britain, would illustrate the low status of English writing compared with that of Latin and French. One could argue that every English book ever written owes Chaucer a debt for choosing his native tongue over the learned tongues as a medium for literary art. If not for Chaucer and other writers who insisted on writing in the vernacular, modern students might still be doing all their studies at school in Latin, as opposed to their native languages. 2. Chaucer is the first author to use many common English words in his writings, according to the Oxford English Dictionary. These words were probably frequently used in the language at the time but Chaucer, with his ear for common speech, is the earliest manuscript source. Acceptable, alkali, altercation, amble, angrily, annex, annoyance, approaching, arbitration, armless, army, arrogant, arsenic, arc, artillery and aspect are just some of those from the first letter of the alphabet. 3. Chaucer helped to popularize rhyming poetry. When we think poetry, many modern readers assume that must mean rhyme. Why do they assume this? The English tradition before the Norman Conquest of 1066 was primarily alliterative, and examples of that alliterative poetry show up in the fourteenth century as well. Rhyme was generally more of a continental phenomenon, so what social forces made it "win out" over alliteration? One can suggest that Chaucer (and to a lesser extent Gower and other poets in the 1300s) is responsible for the transplantation of rhyme into the alliterative tradition in English. Chaucer is known for metrical innovation, inventing the rhyme royal, and he was one of the first English poets to use the five-stress line the iambic pentameter in his work, with only a few anonymous short works using it before him. Most everyone else in the 1300s, like Gower, or the French poets, preferred the eight-syllable line. The Greek and Roman poets preferred hexameters. And the arrangement of the five-stress line into rhyming couplets was first seen in his The Legend of Good Women, was used in much of his later work and became one of the standard poetic forms in English. 4. Chaucer was an early satirist. The common humorous device, the funny accent of a regional dialect, seems to have made its first appearance in The Reeve's Tale. 3

5. He acts as historical evidence of that mysterious and unusual phenomenon, the Great Vowel Shift. Chaucer is not responsible for the vowel shift in any sense, since it occurred after his death, but some of the primary evidence of this astonishing transformation comes from his writings. Frequently, early studies of the Vowel Shift turned to Chaucer for examples to illustrate the way the language worked before the process advanced further. After all, there were no tape recorders to record the spoken word. If it wasn't for poets like Chaucer who linked words in meter and rhyme, it might have been much more difficult, or even impossible, to reproduce what the spoken equivalent to the written word was.
Preceding text adapted from http://listserv.linguistlist.org/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind0006&L=chaucer&D=1&P=5941 and http://www.experiencefestival.com/a/Geoffrey_Chaucer_-_Influence/id/1216839