Customer Reviews

Who Murdered Chaucer?: A Medieval Mystery

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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.

Like the recent "Will In The World" by Stephen Greenblatt, another 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.

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.

As a trained Chaucerian and devoted Python fan, I of course opened this book with high expectations for both historical accuracy and enjoyable, irreverent reading. Jones provides both in ample measure, but what really stands out about this book is how much more readable and engaging it is than anything written about Chaucer since the heyday of Furnivall and Skeat (that is, a century and a half ago).

Jones & Co. (I'm not sure exactly what the precise balance of authorial array is here) adroitly blend readable historical anecdotes, weaving a compelling account of the extraordinary tensions between church and state, and within the state itself, in the last decade of Chaucer's life. The struggle over the meaning and value of texts written in the vernacular is at the center of this drama, and Chaucer -- as we should have known -- was not above politics, but right in the middle of them.

I note that another reviewer has said that here we have *no* documentation -- that's true of Chaucer's death, but in fact we know ten times more about the details of Chaucer's life than Shakespeare's, and we may reasonably extrapolate a good deal more. In the past, such extrapolatin was done by people devoted to the idea of an ironic yet oddly toothless Chaucer who ultimately voted for the status quo -- here is an equally plausible but far more radical portrait, one that outshines all the others.

For those who doubt that Chaucer's writings could in fact be seen as subversive, I myself know an account of a certain man by the name of John Baron, who was arrested in 1471 for the crime of owning vernacular books; among the titles he confessed to possessing was 'a boke of the tales of Caunterbury.' So there.

Read this book and learn why.

The book takes place in the ill fated reign of King Richard II (1377-1400.) But 1400 was not only the year that Richard II was disposed by Henry Bolingbroke (Henry IV). It was also the same year that England's famous poet Geoffrey Chaucer, disappeared. No funeral...no written account...nothing. Doesn't it seem a bit odd that this poet who served both with King Edward III and Richard would suddenly just disappear?

Perhaps he was murdered!

This is the theory that this book lays out. Terry Jones does a superb of informing the reader of the opportunist and controversal politics of that time. Especially the conflict between church reformers and church conservatives; the "Lollards" vs the worldy bishops. And it's in this very conflict that Chaucer may have risked his life by writing the Canterbury Tales, which exposes the corruption of the worldy priest in those days.

Jones looks past the propaganda of that time and paints a more accurate picture of what was going on in England in that time. Who was really the bad guys of those times? The defeated or the conqueror? And to what great lengths would powerful individuals go to to stomp out unpopular opinion?

The book is far from just a boring romp through history. Their is a bit of humor added in and the book never tries to be too confusing for the reader.

Highly recommend!

The first half or so of this book, analyzing the tumultuous reign of Richard II and the usurpation of his throne, is an unqualified winner. Brisk, well-written and informative, it interprets the known facts and and offers some carefully composed hypotheses that ring quite true. It polishes Richard's unfortunate image and makes a plausible case that was fun to read. However, another half remained.

Under certain circumstances, I might be able to compose a review with a nearly comparable number of possibly hypothetical phrases that would, in some manner, approximate what the alleged authors may have quite likely intended in this book. While a slight exaggeration, the "mights" "could have" and "probablys" became tiring. Since we know nothing, it is indeed a detective story. But the authors' obvious distaste for religion turned their guilty party into a caricature of George W. Bush, where every bad thing that happened, or might have happened, was laid at his feet. It became rather silly, and I was tired by the time it finally ended.

I found the smarmy tone a bit tiring as well. The jokes mostly fell flat; I just wasn't amused. And while the illustrations were gorgeous, most were very small. So, a bit steep at the cover price, but as a bargain book, a worthy read.

Geoffrey Chaucer was justice of the peace, knight of the shire, friend of the king, and "greatest living poet." Abruptly, around 1400, this "public man of affairs" was never heard from again. Who Murdered Chaucer? stems from a coroner's inquest into Chaucer's disappearance staged at the Sorbonne in 1998 for the New Chaucer Society Congress. The resulting book is a smart, often irreverent layman's probe into the fate of the man who, through The Canterbury Tales and other works, helped to establish English as a literary language.

Even at a 600-year-old crime scene, context is everything, and the authors explore the efforts that Henry IV and his allies may have made to obscure Chaucer's memory. Painstakingly sifting through the clues that remain, they develop a convincing case that Chaucer was murdered for his political loyalties, religious leanings, and advocacy of the written English language.

The authors set the stage on which Chaucer played a number of roles, describing the progressive court of his patron, Richard II, and the turmoil that conflicting values and change invariably bring. On one side were John Wyclif and his followers, trying to make the Bible and God accessible to the people and to shame the church into reforming itself. On the other were the conservative barons and church leaders who stood to lose money and power in a world in which art and discourse might take the place of conflict, and the common man might be empowered to question age-old beliefs and practices. With the usurpation by Henry IV and the return of Thomas Arundel as Archbishop of Canterbury, Geoffrey Chaucer became a prominent man who suddenly stood on the wrong side of the important questions.

Much of the initial focus here is not on Chaucer, but on the history surrounding Richard II and the nature of his court, the barons' rebellion, and the Peasants' Revolt, and Henry's usurpation. Later, the authors examine Chaucer's surviving works, including The Canterbury Tales and illustrations, as well as the writings of his contemporaries, for clues as to how he may have antagonized the new regime and how he may have met his end. For example, they speculate that Hoccleve's eulogy hints at an end that is both untimely and violent: "Death was too hasty to run at you and rob you of your life." Puzzled by the discrepancies between Chaucer's text and the Ellesmere manuscript illuminations, the authors examined the art microscopically and discovered that some of it had been clumsily altered, then speculate why.

Academics and historians may chafe at such conjectures, but generally they make sense. Occasionally, though, they do not. According to the authors, the Peasants' Revolt "presented the royal faction with a tempting opportunity to eliminate the baronial opposition," but they offer no feasible explanation for why Richard II turned on the rebels after he "signed their pardons and granted their requests." Without understanding what happened and why Richard acted so treacherously and brutally, it's hard for the authors to make a solid case, as they try to do, that Richard was not the unpopular monarch portrayed by Henry's chroniclers. Later, they mention the "persistent rumours that Richard was still alive . . . the kind of rumour that would only gather round a figure who enjoyed strong support and even affection." Yet the same type of rumours surrounded Hitler, as much from fear as from "support and even affection." The case for Richard's popularity is weaker than the one for Chaucer's murder.

Although not addressed directly, one implied issue stands out--the importance of separation of church and state. Thomas Arundel and Henry IV need each other to usurp their respective positions, and their combined power, with no checks or balances, emboldens them to repress political foes and "heretics" with terror and torture, including burning alive. The danger of such of a broad spectrum of power concentrated in such ruthless, self-serving hands is clear--as Chaucer must have observed.

Well researched, engaging, and passionately and wittily written, Who Murdered Chaucer? shines a spotlight at a different and revealing angle on a turbulent time in English history and a definitive one in English literature. Whatever your interest in this period, Who Murdered Chaucer? will make you look at The Canterbury Tales and Geoffrey Chaucer in a more appreciative light as part of a greater story.

I just turned the last page of "Who Murdered Chaucer?" What a tour de force of literary detective work! The mountain of circumstantial evidence that Terry Jones, Terry Dolan, and the other co-authors have heaped on the suspect's head is enough to make one want to abolish the "innocent until proven guilty" standard. Would that we could dig the Archvillain up and make him face their charges! The authors have so beautifully combined their scholarship and writing that the reader has the impression of listening to the same voice throughout -- and what a charmingly erudite, humorous, and mischievous voice it is!
I will be teaching some of The Canterbury Tales to my 11th-graders this fall, and I'm sure my teaching of them will be greatly enriched for having read this outstanding book.

This is an absolutely amazing feat. Impeccable scholarship, daunting research of primary artifacts, and a brilliant distillation of available evidence all merge for this beautiful publication. The end result is remarkable on a multitude of levels.
The primary success is that this is a delightful read for anyone. The fact that it's title character is the father of English literature only adds to it's radiance. Those who dismiss this signature effort as little more than a well bound picture book, clearly failed to give it a read. It is exceptionally well presented because the work itself merits such attention.
Mr. Jones vivacious presentation of this monolithic probe of Chaucer and his environment breathes such life into his subject that he is all but resurrected. He and his colleagues may not have proven Chaucer's murder, but vastly more than reasonable doubt arises after their case is made.
Mr. Jones first work on Chaucer 25 years ago (Chaucer's Knight) was revolutionary. In that work, his exploration of Chaucer's intent insisted on reconsideration of the knight in The Canterbury Tales. He blew the dust off of the conventional interpretation of the knight's tale and revealed the actualities. In this regard, informed academia has never been the same since. Who Murdered Chaucer calls for another reassesment of this fourteenth century innovator. Those who wish to discount Mr. Jones authority because of his theatrical enterprises (which may well include the occaisional dubious historical stretch) are obviously unaware of his formidable expertise in this territory. He is one of the preeminent Chaucerian scholars of our day.
The crowning glory of this endeavor is the animation of Chaucer himself. He is no longer a distant stick figure poised against a diorama. He lives and breathes in his truculent era. We are all the richer for being drawn into his world with our eyes open to it and him.
You'll leave this treatise with an inkling that Chaucer might well be the hero in the end.
A fine, fine, book.

Although the central thesis of the book is completely up in the air, the resulting historical portrait that emerges of the period of Chaucer in the reign of Richard II makes this book very good reading. The result is an almost revisionist look behind the standard accounts which omit the anomlies hidden in Chaucer's sudden disappearance from the record. One tends to do a Shakespearean plug-in here, with the plays on Richard and Henry IV somehow stealing the show. But the portrait here of Henry is a disconcerting expose of his propaganda successfully rewriting history. Compelling read, and a nicely done book.