Word: gardners
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...JOHN GARDNER...
...born teacher will do when he is peddling a beloved subject that is thought to be impenetrable, Novelist and Medievalist John Gardner clowns a bit in this amiable biography of Chaucer. He includes a faker's guide to the pronunciation of Middle English, to which, after a discourse on the swampy places to be avoided in negotiating the letter e, he adds, "If this is too confusing, try to follow, in general, the pronunciation of the Cisco Kid: 'Boot hombray, thees ees nut yoor peesstol...
Although his manner is easy, Gardner has not written a slight book. He succeeds in counteracting the popular supposition that the medieval period was excessively religious and dull. As he demonstrates, the age was worldly, tumultuous and as bloody as could be wished. And Chaucer, who was born in about 1340, spent his life at the center of the commotion...
...Edward III and Richard II. He was at least briefly a soldier, and while fighting in France under the Black Prince, he was captured, then ransomed for ?16. The smallness of this sum is a favorite joke among Chaucerians, but it amounts to $3,840 in modern terms, by Gardner's computation, and probably was only part of the ransom paid. In a time of famine, plague, constant war, baronial feuding and serious peasant uprisings, the poet lived to be nearly 60 - which was old in the 14th century - and died peacefully...
...what is lost - details of Chaucer's personal history, shadings of his personality - Gardner relies on scholarly guesses and novelistic license. After all, he teaches medieval literature at Bennington and, as the author of Grendel, The Sunlight Dialogues and October Light, is one of the most enterprising American novelists...