Rob, trying to speak "like Chaucer" involves a lotta guess work but also a fair amount of deductive reasoning. You can make good headway just knowing that specific words are supposed to rhyme when spoken. Vowel shifts in languages over time tend to follow similar patterns too, so to an extent you can reverse the process. But it's still a best guess scenario overall. In my class reading the text aloud was great fun, which made slogging through it outside of class more bearable. 
-Dave-
Me as Belgian does not have a frigging clue about Chauser recitals. Flemish is basically Dutch with softer consonants and we also have poetry in Flemish in al here dialects and then there is the academically language that seems to need a kind of facial expression and intonation.
O yeah, and we have songs and poems in Old Flemish, only remembered by the nearly extinct old school Flemish nationalists.
