Welcome to Twenty Bookes

Twenty Bookes takes its name from a line of Geoffrey Chaucer's magnum opus, The Canterbury Tales. One of the stories, The Clerk's Tale, features a character called (somewhat unsurprisingly) 'The Clerk', a student at 'Oxenford' (no prizes for guessing what we call that university today).

The relevant lines from the main prologue are as follows:

...For hym was levere have at his beddes heed,

Twenty bookes, clad in blak or reed,

Of Aristotle and his philosophie...

Now I'm no expert in Middle-English, but it basically translates to:

...For he would rather have at the head of his bed,

Twenty books, clad in black or red,

On Aristotle and his philosophy...

It's a pretty fair description of the bedroom of your typical Oxford student, although of course, some of the books might be colours other than black and red. And there would probably be more than twenty.

In this blog, I hope to give you an insight into the fascinating, exhausting and almost completely unique world that undergraduates inhabit here at Oxford, while at the same time trying to introduce you to some of the material and knowledge I encounter while studying here.