The Canterbury Tales at a glance
Geoffrey Chaucer’s best-known work is the Canterbury Tales, begun probably in the late 1380s and never finished. In the poem, a group of pilgrims meet at an inn in Southwark, across the river from London, on the way to the shrine of Saint Thomas Becket at Canterbury. The innkeeper proposes that each pilgrim tell stories to pass the time, and promises a supper to the best teller. The poem as it survives has around two dozen tales, some incomplete, far fewer than the plan announced at the start, which seems to have called for each pilgrim to tell several. Chaucer left it as a set of connected parts, and the order is partly the work of later editors and scribes.
The pilgrim frame
The General Prologue introduces around thirty travelers, depending on how some are counted, including the narrator himself. This is where Chaucer shows his gift for character. A few lines of description, built from clothing, habits and small details, give a vivid picture. The Knight is honorable and well-traveled. The Prioress is dainty and anxious about manners. The Merchant carefully hides his debts. The Parson is poor and conscientious. Together they form a rough cross-section of fourteenth-century England, though not of the very poorest or the highest nobility.
Pilgrimage was a normal part of religious life, and travel to a shrine could mix devotion with sightseeing and company. Anyone setting out would know the experience of medieval pilgrims, and Chaucer plays on that familiarity. The Canterbury shrine was among the most visited in England, and the murder of Becket in 1170 was the event that made it so.
Types of tale
The tales are remarkably varied, and Chaucer uses the variety to make a point about literature itself.
- The Knight’s Tale is a courtly romance of two young men in love with the same woman, adapted from an Italian poem by Boccaccio.
- The Miller’s Tale is a fabliau, a short, comic and often indecent story of trickery, told in answer to the Knight.
- The Pardoner’s Tale is a moral story about three men and death, told by a man who admits that he cheats people for money.
- The Nun’s Priest’s Tale is a beast fable about a rooster and a fox, which turns into a joke about learning and vanity.
- The Tale of Sir Thopas is a deliberately silly romance, which the Host interrupts.
- The Parson’s Tale is a long prose treatise on penance and sin, which closes the book in a serious tone.
Matching tale to teller is part of the fun. A reader sees how a character is revealed, and sometimes undermined, by what they choose to say. The Wife of Bath opens with a long autobiography about her five marriages before her tale, and this has made her one of the best-known figures in English literature. How seriously to take her views is something critics still discuss, and the same goes for how medieval women in art and literature were drawn by male writers.
Religion, satire and ambiguity
Chaucer is often described as a satirist, and he does poke at figures such as the friar, the summoner and the pardoner. The Pardoner sells pardons and holy relics he admits are fake, which fits with a long history of medieval complaints about church corruption. But Chaucer’s tone is hard to pin down. He rarely lectures. Instead he lets characters condemn themselves, and the Parson, a good priest, offers a contrast. Whether the poem as a whole is a comic celebration, a criticism or both is left to the reader.
Learning also appears in many places. The Canterbury Tales refers to medieval astrology, medicine, alchemy and the law, usually with an eye for the gap between theory and practice. His own interest in astronomy led him to write a prose treatise on the astrolabe for a young boy.
Chaucer’s other writing
Chaucer wrote much more than the Canterbury Tales. The Book of the Duchess is an early dream poem, widely thought to mourn the wife of John of Gaunt. The House of Fame and the Parliament of Fowls are other dream visions that play with learned ideas. Troilus and Criseyde, a long love poem set during the siege of Troy, is often regarded as his most polished work and was adapted from Boccaccio. He translated Boethius’ Consolation of Philosophy from Latin, a book that deeply influenced medieval ideas of fortune.
He ends the Canterbury Tales with a retraction in which he asks forgiveness for his worldly writings. Readers disagree on whether this is sincere, conventional or ironic, and the question stays open.
Language and legacy
Chaucer’s English is Middle English, with sounds and spellings that differ from the present. The poems were copied by hand for decades. They were printed in the 1470s, and the printed editions helped create his later reputation. By the sixteenth century he was already being called a father of English poetry, a title that simplifies a more complex picture, since other English poets wrote well before and during his life.
A good way into the work is to start with the General Prologue and then read a short tale such as the Pardoner’s or the Nun’s Priest’s, ideally in an edition with a glossary or a modern translation alongside.