The Canterbury Tales

Geoffrey Chaucer began The Canterbury Tales around 1387 and was still working on it when he died in 1400. It was never finished — the framing device calls for 120 stories (two from each pilgrim going and two coming back) and Chaucer completed 24. What he did complete is the most vivid and socially comprehensive portrait of medieval English society in any literary form, and a collection of stories that ranges from courtly romance to bawdy fabliaux to moral allegory to a saint's life, without losing the thread of who is telling what and why.

The setup is architectural genius: a group of pilgrims traveling from London to the shrine of Thomas Becket at Canterbury agree to a storytelling competition. The host of the Tabard Inn will judge; the winner gets dinner on the house. The frame allows Chaucer to juxtapose genres and voices that would be impossible in a single-authored narrative — a dirty miller's tale immediately follows the Knight's courtly romance because the Miller is drunk and pushes his way to the front, and the collision of those two stories is exactly the point.

What Chaucer does that no contemporary in English was doing is render character through voice. Each pilgrim tells a story that reflects their own preoccupations, desires, and blind spots. The Wife of Bath's Prologue — a long, aggressive defense of her five marriages and her dominance over her husbands — is not just a character study but one of the most remarkable performances of self-revelation in pre-modern literature. The Pardoner confesses his own cynicism before preaching against it. The Knight tells a high romance; the Knight's son, the Squire, tells an unfinished romance that breaks off in elaborate complication, which may be Chaucer's joke about his own situation.

The Knight — First and most honored pilgrim, returned from three decades of crusading. His tale is The Knight's Tale, an elevated romance borrowed from Boccaccio about two Athenian princes competing for the same woman. He represents the ideals of his class without irony — which is itself somewhat ironic in a collection where everyone else's ideals are being gently dismantled.

The Wife of Bath (Alisoun) — The collection's most famous and most modern voice. She has had five husbands, is currently on her sixth pilgrimage, and uses her prologue to mount a sustained argument — from her own experience rather than authority — for women's sovereignty in marriage. Her tale is a wish-fulfillment Arthurian story about a knight who has to learn what women really want. She is among the most fully realized characters in medieval literature.

The Miller (Robin) — Drunk, physical, aggressive, and apparently determined to undercut the Knight by immediately telling a bawdy tale about a carpenter cuckolded by a student. His tale (The Miller's Tale) is a comic masterpiece in a completely different register from the Knight's, and the juxtaposition — elegant courtly romance, then slapstick adultery — is the Canterbury Tales' argument in miniature.

The Pardoner — The collection's most psychologically complex figure. He sells false relics and indulgences; in his prologue he explains exactly how he does it and how cynical he is; then he preaches his standard sermon against avarice anyway, and tries to sell the pilgrims his relics at the end. The performance of manipulation performed for an audience that knows it's being manipulated is one of Chaucer's most daring moves.

No. 1 · The General Prologue. Chaucer's portraits of the twenty-nine pilgrims — their dress, habits, physical appearance, professional tricks — are the collection's greatest sustained achievement. Each portrait is thirty to fifty lines and tells you everything about the person and their class position through specific, non-allegorical detail: the Monk's love of hunting, the Prioress's careful table manners, the Franklin's perpetually stocked table. The portraits work as social satire and as human affection simultaneously.

No. 2 · The Wife of Bath's Prologue. At 856 lines, it is nearly twice as long as many of the tales. The Wife of Bath uses her prologue to argue, from experience rather than authority, for a woman's right to control her own body and her marriages. She cites scripture, refutes it with counter-examples, describes in detail how she managed each of her five husbands, and acknowledges without apology that she married some of them for money and that she misses what youth gave her. Her voice is unlike anything in medieval literature.

No. 3 · The Miller's Tale. A carpenter, his young wife, and two students: one student (Nicholas) schemes to sleep with the wife; another (Absolon) courts her with songs beneath her window and gets a different reception than he expected. The tale is a fabliau — a genre of bawdy French comic stories — executed with perfect timing and considerable physical comedy. Coming directly after the Knight's Tale, its deliberate vulgarity is Chaucer's structural joke about the gap between ideal and real.

Nevill Coghill translation (Penguin Classics, 1951) — a modern English verse translation that preserves Chaucer's rhymes and comic rhythms. Highly readable; the default for general readers.

David Wright translation (Oxford World's Classics, 1985) — clear prose translation; easier than Coghill for extended reading.

Original Middle English with facing translation (Larry Benson's Riverside Chaucer, or the Norton) — the scholarly standard; reading the Middle English alongside a modern translation reveals how much Chaucer's effects depend on sound. Many readers find Middle English easier than expected after an hour.

For selected tales: Read The Knight's Tale, The Miller's Tale, The Wife of Bath's Prologue and Tale, The Pardoner's Prologue and Tale, and The Nun's Priest's Tale if you want a selective introduction to the collection's range.

The Canterbury Tales is for readers who like social observation, variety, and comedy alongside more elevated material. Chaucer is genuinely funny — the Miller's Tale in particular — in ways that translate across six centuries. The collection's range means there is almost certainly something in it for any reader.

It is not for readers who need sustained narrative or thematic unity. The Canterbury Tales is explicitly fragmentary — it was unfinished at the author's death — and the tales vary enormously in quality and register. Some (The Second Nun's Tale, The Man of Law's Tale) are flat compared to the collection's peaks. Reading selectively is a completely valid approach.

Start with the General Prologue, then read the Knight's Tale and Miller's Tale in sequence — the juxtaposition is intentional and central. Then the Wife of Bath's Prologue and Tale; then the Pardoner's Prologue and Tale. These five pieces give you the collection's range and its major voices. From there, explore at will.

The Middle English is not as difficult as it looks. The pronunciation is different and some vocabulary is archaic, but the grammar is recognizable and most readers can sound out the original with some help within an hour. The Riverside Chaucer's glosses are sufficient. Hearing the language read aloud — many recordings exist — helps enormously.

• Giovanni Boccaccio — The Decameron (1353). Chaucer borrowed several tales directly from Boccaccio; the Decameron provides the same framing device (a group of people telling each other stories) and shares the Canterbury Tales' range of registers and social observation.
• William Langland — Piers Plowman (c. 1370–1386). Chaucer's contemporary and near-antithesis: an allegorical, spiritually earnest vision poem that shows what serious Middle English poetry was doing that Chaucer was deliberately not doing.
• **Shakespeare — The Canterbury Tales tales feed directly into Shakespeare's comedies and histories; Troilus and Criseyde (Chaucer's other major work) is the source material for Troilus and Cressida.

1. The frame narrative of The Canterbury Tales — pilgrims telling stories — means each tale is shaped by who tells it. How does knowing the teller change how you read each story?
2. The Wife of Bath argues from personal experience rather than scriptural authority. What is Chaucer's position on her argument — does the tale endorse it, undercut it, or do both?
3. The Pardoner confesses his cynicism explicitly before performing his con anyway. What is Chaucer doing by having him perform manipulation transparently?
4. The Miller's Tale and the Knight's Tale cover similar material (two men competing for one woman) in completely different registers. What does the juxtaposition suggest about genre and class?
5. The Canterbury Tales was unfinished at Chaucer's death. Does this incompleteness matter? What would a completed version have changed?
6. Chaucer the pilgrim is also a character in the collection, telling two tales himself (one mocked, one interrupted). What is Chaucer doing by making himself a minor and somewhat ridiculous figure in his own work?