Comment and Review
Chaucer's Triumph, including the case of Cecilia Chaumpaigne, the seduction of Katherine Swynford, the murder of her husband, the interment of John of Gaunt and other offices of the flesh in the year 1399.
What is the truth behind the mysterious case of Cecilia Chaumpaigne?
Geoffrey Chaucer has some claim to being the greatest of English poets, as well as the father of our language. Yet there has always lurked a dark secret in his life, a scandal or crime which, from evidence of two different legal documents of his time, has intrigued and mystified scholars for generations, dividing them into warring factions.
In the five days before Prince John of Gaunt's London funeral in March 1399, the body of the great Plantagenet prince is being brought from Leicester Castle for burial in St Paul's. Setting out with it are his family, royal mourners, Katherine Swynford, recently married to him and now his widow, Geoffrey Chaucer, and Adam Scriven, the poet's resentful scrivener or copyist. Not far away, in King's Langley, King Richard II, Gaunt's nephew, who has survived as king only under his protection, plans and manoeuvres to seize Gaunt's huge Lancastrian inheritance and even his body.
Scriven, who is engaged in copying the last Canterbury Tale, wants to use this final occasion to discover and test once and for all the truth about Chaucer's crime. But more is at stake than the poet's reputation: the future of England and Gaunt's royal line.
Garry O'Connor has written a riveting and humorous historical novel, which captures the passions of that paradoxically refined and savage age. It rekindles our fascination with the author of the bawdy and most erotic of the Canterbury Tales, as well as of the rarefied love allegories of mediaeval chivalry. Authentic in background and based on close research, Chaucer's Triumph, in its exploration of married love and the practice of adultery, shows how little has changed over six hundred years.
Did Geoffrey Chaucer commit the crime of which he was accused twenty years earlier?
I grant you life, if you can tell me straight
What thing it is that women most desire.
This is the challenge posed by the queen in The Wife of Bath's Tale to the guilty knight who is about to be executed.‘Absolutely splendid – vivid, dramatic, mysterious and totally involving…’
Sir Derek Jacobi
‘An intriguing, page-turning, enjoyable read of a story full of drama… . The characters sweep you along through plot after plot…’
John Tydeman
‘Very witty and highly relevant to the mimetic theory…’
Professor René Girard
‘Chaucer’s Triumph is Garry O’Connor’s triumph. A rollicking historical pageant in the colourful tradition of the great Anthony Burgess’s depiction of Shakespeare. Epic, comic, pastoral, tragical, and crammed with living energy…’
Roger Lewis