AT Geoffrey Chaucer’s ‘drasty rhyming is nat worth a toord’ (his ‘dirty rhyming isn’t worth a turd’), the Host’s pungent dismissal in Chaucer’s best-known, but incomplete poem , is a verdict that, with good reason, posterity has ignored. More than six centuries after his death in 1400, Chaucer remains the best-loved and most-read surviving voice of medieval England. His claim to be a ‘grete philosopher’, profound in his understanding of human nature, is as persuasive now as when first articulated by 15th-century printer William Caxton. He has consistently been celebrated for his trailblazing literary wizardry, assimilating and reinventing diverse storytelling traditions: the writer, Caxton marvelled, who outstripped all others and ‘enbelysshed, ornated, and made faire our englisshe’, supplementing the language with words borrowed from Latin and French. Within
