CHAUCER, Geoffrey
£12,000 · Offered by Sokol Books
.A good copy of Speght s second definitive edition of the complete works of Chaucer, with a handsome engraved full-length portrait of the poet and woodcut of a mounted knight at the start of the Canterbury Tales. This volume improves upon and adds to previous editions of Chaucer s works, published since 1542. It is the earliest edition in which thorough punctuation was attempted, and in many other ways it is a distinct improvement upon Speght s first edition . Included is an expanded biography, a newly edited version of the texts and two additional works, printed for the first time: La Priere de nostre Dame , an A.B.C. poem with alphabetically arranged verses, and the Treatise called Jacke Upland against the Friers , a polemic attacking mendicant orders, which was not by Chaucer. This volume is dedicated to Robert Cecil (1563-1612), the 1.st. Earl of Salisbury and chief minister of Queen Elizabeth I, but it retains the dedication to King Henry VIII present in earlier versions.. . ..Lauded by his contemporary Hoccleve (1368-1426) as the father of English literature , Chaucer (c.1340-1400) is one of the most influential names in English literary history, praised both for his eloquence and the way he 'illumined' the English language and for his 'sentence' (DNB). He transformed verse composition by writing in Middle English, the language of court, which had not often been employed in poetry, and using European decasyllabic meter, which developed into iambic pentameter, the meter
- Binding: Hardcover
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