Geoffrey Chaucer’s “House of Fame,” …

Years: 1372 - 1383

Geoffrey Chaucer’s “House of Fame,” written, like “The Book of the Duchess,” in eight-syllable lines rhymed in couplets, contains some overt parody of Dante's “Divine Comedy” (and thus is usually dated after Chaucer's Italian mission in 1372—73, when a familiarity with the Italian language enables him to read the works of Petrarch, Dante, and Boccaccio; the last whom he is said to have met in Florence.)

King Edward III on June 8, 1374, appoints Chaucer controller of the customs and subsidies on wool, skins, and hides for the port of London.

The ambassadorial missions undertaken by Chaucer, who is evidently an exceptionally able and trusted civil servant,  frequently take him to France—once, in 1377, to negotiate a marriage between Princess Marie of France and Prince Richard, who in that year becomes Richard II—and at least once more to Italy, in 1378.

Chaucer around 1380 translates several meditative Latin works whose terms had been important in his own artistic terminology: Boethius's “Consolation of Philosophy;” Pope Innocent III's “On the Misery of the Human Condition,”(the translation of which is lost but survives in part in his later “Canterbury Tales” in the "Man of Law's Tale"); and a “Life of Saint Cecilia” from the “Golden Legend.”

He also (possibly) translates an abbreviated French version of part of the “Book of Consolation and Counsel” by Albertanus of Brescia (which appears as the "Tale of Melibeus" in "The Canterbury Tales”).

Chaucer writes or begins to write a satirical dream-vision,“The Parliament of Fowls,” the “Legend of Good Women,” an unfinished series of nine so-called lives of Cupid's saints like Cleopatra and Dido, in about 1382, the year that Richard makes him controller of petty customs.

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North Europe (1372 - 1383)
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Northwest Europe (1372 - 1383)

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