Geoffrey Chaucer

An English poet, writer and civil servant, widely called the father of English literature, best known for The Canterbury Tales, a collection of stories set inside a frame narrative: a group of pilgrims travelling from Southwark to Canterbury tell tales to pass the time and compete for a free meal, a structure that places Chaucer's own work squarely in the frame tale collection tradition alongside Boccaccio's Decameron (already catalogued in this atlas), a work he is thought to have known. Left unfinished at his death, it is written mostly in Middle English verse and is credited with helping establish the English vernacular, rather than French or Latin, as a legitimate literary language.