-A sensational book... will permanently affect and change the way we see the history of the book in England.- Professor Derek Pearsall, Harvard University. Geoffrey Chaucer is called the Father of English Literature not because he was the first author to write in English - he wasn't - but because his works were among those of his generation produced in sufficient numbers to reach a wider audience. He and his contemporaries wrote before the age of print, so the dissemination of his writings in such quantity depended upon scribes, who would manually copy works like The Canterbury Tales in...