Marion Turner: Chaucer: A European Life. Princeton, NJ, and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2019.

• Peter Brown

This is an invigorating and refreshing book that is by no means a standard biography. Instead, Turner conducts the reader through some twenty places and spaces that Chaucer knew and that helped to frame his outlook and writing from cradle to grave, whether in Vintry Ward, Reims, Genoa, or the precincts of Westminster Abbey. Each is subjected to a thick description that gives depth and substance to the relevant life records and other archives. Within the hustle and bustle, the figure of Chaucer emerges as if newly minted, displaying aspects usually obscured, such as his familiarity with an England beyond London (Northumberland, Holderness), the political complexities that confronted him on his mission to Navarre, the importance of his children in maintaining connections to Lancastrian networks, his activities in Southwark and Kent while writing the Canterbury Tales, or the relevance of a new parliamentary role – that of the Speaker, who represented the will of the commons – to Chaucer’s own voice.