Product Description

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #858556 in Books
• Published on: 2005-01-05
• Released on: 2004-12-09
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 416 pages

Review

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Customer Reviews

A superb history
Up front, let me say that I am not a literature scholar. My only familiarity with Chaucer is that I read the Canterbury Tales when I was in the Marines, and again in College (I enjoyed my earlier introduction to Chaucer much more than the latter). My eye got caught by the title of the book. Having been drawn in on a potential "murder" of a poet, I was hooked as soon as I started reading.

I realized pretty quickly after starting the book that it was more an examination of the period of Richard II than it was a murder mystery. I wasn't disappointed. In fact, I now know there is not any evidence that Chaucer met with an evil end for political or other reasons. The fact that Chaucer just disappears from the public record is intriguing and it is this fact that Jones builds his story around.

Jones is a terrific author of history. I found Who Murdered Chaucer to be easy to read and engaging. I was reminded just a bit of Barbara Tuchman's A Distant Mirror in how the the book moved through its subject. Jones' writing style also reminds me of the french historian Fernand Braudel.

Terry Jones is obviously highly versed in his subject. The love of his topic becomes apparent on the lines of each page.

I highly recommend Who Murdered Chaucer by Terry Jones.

Was He Murdered ? -- Chaucer Imaged
Like the recent "Will In The World" by Stephen Greenblatt, another medieval scholar has written another brilliant research book searching for answers on the life of another English writer where no answers exists. Whereas Mr. Greenblatt was creating a life of William Shakespeare based on very meager documention, Terry Jones and his co-authors are speculating on the death of Geoffrey Chaucer where NO documentation exists at all of his death. Chaucer just disappears from the public record in 1400.

This book benefits from both Mr. Jones days as a Monty Python member and his prior research books on the Middle Ages. It is extremely readable and entertaining, regardless of the unprovable supposition that Chaucer was possibly murdered for political reasons.

This book should be called "Chaucer: His Life, His Works, His World" but Donald Howard had already claimed that title for his fine 1987 biography of Chaucer. Mr. Jones went for a more marketable title, suggesting a murder mystery where no proof exists even of the year of Chaucer's death. At 416 pages, it is 200+ pages shorter than Mr. Howard's work (who focused more attention upon an analysis "The Canterbury Tales").

Regardless of the alleged murder, this book is worth reading for its solid research, beautiful illustrations and readable writing style (the reader should see the Amazon excerpt via the Search Inside feature to see if they agree). It is a fun book to read.

Beautiful and intriguing
Normally, when I read a history book, I am most interested in the factual content and the bibliography and footnotes.

If I were to review this book based solely on academic content, I've got to be honest and say that the authors never really answer the question in the title or prove the thesis of the book. Instead they lay out the evidence for how and why Richard II was deposed and suggest what impact that may have had on Richard's servants and ministers like Geoffrey Chaucer. The footnotes and bilbiography are fairly thorough and add much to their description. I particularly liked how the original text is provided for all quotes along with modern English renderings of the Middle English and Late Latin citations. Moreover the sheer scope of materials consulted is impressive ranging from contemporary English and French chronicles to modern statistical studies and linguistic analysis.

However, the central thesis still eludes this painstaking effort. In fact, the book may do much to show that the central thesis can never be proved. For one thing, the tremendous breadth of the evidence consulted suggests that every stone has been turned over and that we may never be able to answer the question of how Chaucer died at all if we must rely on the sources we now have.

But the authors also admit as much.

They acknowledge that it is not even clear if Chaucer was murdered at all. Instead, they use the conceit that they are laying out a coroner's case.

As a lawyer, I find that description a little too generous. The prima facie case is still missing. But what they do lay out is a plausible motive and some evidence of opportunity. They describe the milieu Chaucer lived in near the time of his death and then suggest some areas where we might continue looking for clues to what happened to him in the end.

That's enough to make a good book. . . and a book I would read for its content alone.

But this book goes one better. The publisher has made an eye-catching package that I couldn't pass up. When I say the book is "beautiful" I'm not exaggerating. The entire book is illustrated like the finest manuscripts of the Middle Ages, --because the illustrations are from those manuscripts themselves. It is printed on sturdy white, glossy paper like a fine art book. Never have the late middle ages come so alive for me.

It is as if we are reading an alternative account of the end of Richard II written almost contemporaneously with our received histories of that era somehow miraculously . If there had been op-ed features in medieval manuscripts this would be the counterpoint to our received Lancastrian opinion of history.

It's more than just a deconstruction of history. It's a re-illumination of it.

I think it may be the best book of its kind I have ever read.