Reading Women in Late Medieval Europe : Anne of Bohemia and Chaucer’s Female Audience

Although Chaucer is typically labeled as the "Father of English Literature," evidence shows that his work appealed to Europe and specifically European women. Rereading the Canterbury Tales , Thomas argues that Chaucer imagined Anne of Bohemia, wife of famed Richard II, as an ideal reader, an aspect that came to greatly affect his writing.

Geoffrey Chaucer has traditionally been seen as indebted to the great male writers of medieval Europe: Dante, Boccaccio, Petrarch and Guillaume de Machaut. However, little has been written about the European woman who was Queen of England and his possible patron: Anne of Bohemia, daughter of Holy Roman Emperor Charles IV and wife of Richard II. Although Chaucer explicitly compliments the Queen in his work, scholars have been reluctant or unable to engage seriously with the question of her role in Chaucer''s oeuvre. This book shows that Anne came from a long line of highly educated and multilingual royal women and he book rereads some of the famous stories from the Canterbury Tales alongside contemporaneous works in Czech, German, and Latin - languages with which the Queen was familiar. Alfred Thomas argues that even if she did not literally commission any of his works, Chaucer seems to have been writing for Anne as an imagined reader and this awareness shaped the way he wrote and what he chose to write.