Chaucer’s Travels for the Court

Chaucer travelled extensively in Britain and abroad as a representative of the court. His reading and cosmopolitan life in London meant that mainland Europe was a vivid part of Chaucer’s cultural awareness even before his visits there. There are records of fourteen trips overseas of varying duration and level of importance. Most were to Flanders and France but others were to Spain and Italy. Their purposes included war, marriage negotiations and financial transactions. Chaucer was at best an ancillary but his travelling companions and contacts included the kind of people who formed the audience for his poetry. He appears to have narrowly missed meeting other writers such as Machaut, Deschamps, Petrarch, and Boccaccio. Nevertheless Chaucer’s visits to Italy in the 1370s coincide with the onset of his interest in Italian literature.