I was not a huge fan of Chaucer, until I ran across a book by Terry Jones (of Monty Python) about the Knight’s Tale. The standard view of the knight is that he was a paragon of virtue - the one character in the tales that was not ridiculed. Jones made the argument that he was a mercenary, and that the Knight’s Tale was just as much satire as all the others. He told the story of the sack of Alexandria, and the cowardly performance of English soldiers there, and noted that this was one of the places that the Knight in Chaucer fought. And so on, in scholarly detail.

After that, I rather got into it. The book was “Chaucer’s Knight: The Portrait of a Medieval Mercenary” which is available on Amazon for $118, or probably more cheaply from a good library.