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GEOFFREY CHAUCER + CANTERBURY TALES (4._oel-chaucer.doc)

OLD ENGLISH LITERATURE

Geoffrey Chaucer – his life and his work

MIDDLE ENGLISH LITERATURE

        The Norman conquest of England in 1066 traditionally signifies the beginning of 200 years of the domination of French in English letters. French cultural dominance, moreover, was general in Europe at this time. French language and culture replaced English in polite court society and had lasting effects on English culture. But the native tradition survived, although little 13th-century, and even less 12th-century, vernacular literature is extant, since most of it was transmitted orally. Anglo-Saxon fragmented into several dialects                 and gradually evolved into Middle English, which, despite an admixture of French, is unquestionably English.

Literary and linguistic cultures

The period of great transition from French as the language of literature to English lasted between 1100 and about 1450 to 1500. In The fourteenth century a new form of English was used. The language  of this period is referred to as Middle English. It was in fact Old English enriched by thousands of French words.

Middle English was one of the five languages current in England. Though never the language of the Roman Catholic Church, which was always Latin, it lost status as a language of courtly life, literature  and documentation, being largely supplanted by Anglo-Norman French. It remained, though, the spoken language of the majority, and may be regarded as the only true vernacular language of most English people after about the mid-12th century, with Anglo-Norman becoming, like Latin, a learned tongue of the court. English did not cease to be used in the court: it retained a cartulary function (so being the language used           in royal charters); nor did it disappear as a language of literary production. From the later 12th and 13th century there survive huge amounts of written material of various forms, from lyrics to saints' lives, devotional manuals to histories, encyclopaedias to poems of moral (and often immoral) discussion and debate, though much  of this material remains unstudied, in part because it evades or defies modern, arguably quite restricted, categorisations of literature. Middle English is more familiar to us as the language of Ricardian Poetry               and its followers, the 14th- and 15th-century literature cultures clustered around the West Midlands and around London and East Anglia. This includes the works of William Langland, the Gawain Poet, Lydgate, Gower, Malory, Caxton, and Wycliffe.

And it is also into this period that the writing of GEOFFREY CHAUCER falls.

Geoffrey Chaucer

        Born (about *1340) and died (†1400) in London, buried in Westminster Abbey as the first poet in the part which has been known as Poet’s Corner since the late 16th century, GEOFFREY CHAUCER was the greatest poet of the Middle Ages and the most outstanding English writer before Shakespeare.

        Chaucer is often called “the father of English poetry”, although there were many English poets before him, because his using of English at the time when much court poetry was still written in Anglo-Norman (French) or Latin made a great contribution to the development of English Literature.

        Not in point of genius only, but even in point of time, Chaucer may claim the proud designation of "first" English poet. Geoffrey Chaucer lived in a turbulent period of war, plague, social revolt, religious heresy and murdered kings. But this society was also vibrant, creative and increasingly literate, a time of resurgence for the English language as a literary medium. The books and manuscripts of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries give us direct access to this vital culture. Whether workaday or gloriously illuminated, their pages offer fascinating glimpses of the late medieval world from which they came.

Life

Chaucer was born in 1343 in London, although the exact date and location of his birth are not known. His father and grandfather were both London vintners and before that, for several generations, the family members were merchants in Ipswich. His name is derived from the French chausseur, meaning shoemaker. In 1324 John Chaucer, Geoffrey's father, was kidnapped by an aunt in the hope of marrying the twelve year old boy to her daughter in an attempt to keep property in Ipswich. The aunt was imprisoned and the £250 fine levied suggests that the family was financially secure, upper middle-class, if not in the elite.

There are no details of Chaucer's early life and education but compared to his near contemporary poets, William Langland and The Pearl Poet, his life is well documented, with nearly five hundred written items testifying to his career. The first time he is mentioned is in 1357, in the household accounts of Elizabeth de Burgh, the Countess of Ulster, when his father's connections enabled him to become the noblewoman's page at the age of seventeen. He also worked as a courtier, a diplomat, and a civil servant, as well as working for the king collecting and inventorying scrap metal. In 1359, in the early stages of the Hundred Years' War, Edward III invaded France and Chaucer travelled with Lionel of Antwerp, 1st Duke of Clarence, Elizabeth's husband, as part of the English army. In 1360, he was captured during the siege of Rheims, becoming a prisoner of war. Edward contributed £16 as part of a ransom, and Chaucer was released. Chaucer was then known as the prisoner.

After this, Chaucer's life is uncertain, but he seems to have travelled in France, Spain, and Flanders, possibly as a messenger and perhaps even going on a pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela. Around 1366, Chaucer married Philippa  Roet. It is uncertain how many children Chaucer and Philippa had, but three or four are the numbers most widely agreed upon. His son, Thomas Chaucer, had an illustrious career, chief butler to four kings, envoy to France, and Speaker of the House of Commons. Thomas' great-grandson (Geoffrey’s great-great-grandson), John de la Pole, Earl of Lincoln, was the heir to the throne designated by Richard III before he was deposed. Geoffrey's other children probably included Elizabeth, a nun; Agnes, an attendant at Henry IV's coronation; and another son, Lewis Chaucer.

Chaucer is presumed to have studied law in the Inner Temple (an Inn of Court) at about this time, although definite proof is lacking. It is recorded that he became a member of the royal court of Edward III as a valet, yeoman, or esquire on 20 June 1367, a position which could entail any number of jobs. He travelled abroad many times, at least some of them in his role as a valet. In 1368, he may have attended the wedding of Lionel of Antwerp to Violante, daughter of Galeazzo II Visconti, in Milan. Two other literary stars of the era who were in attendance were Jean Froissart (one of the most important of the chroniclers of medieval France) and Petrarch (one of the earliest Renaissance humanists, often popularly called the "father of humanism”). Around this time Chaucer is believed to have written The Book of the Duchess in honor of Blanche of Lancaster, the late wife of John of Gaunt, who died in 1369.

Chaucer travelled to Picardy the next year as part of the military expedition, and visited Genoa and Florence in 1373. It is on this Italian trip that it is speculated he came into contact with medieval Italian poetry, the forms and stories of which he would use later. One other trip he took in 1377 seems shrouded in mystery, with records of the time conflicting in details. Later documents suggest it was a mission, along with Jean Froissart, to arrange a marriage between the future Richard II and a French princess, thereby ending the Hundred Years War. If this was the purpose of their trip, they seem to have been unsuccessful, as no wedding occurred.

In 1378, Richard II sent Chaucer as an secret dispatch to the Visconti and to Sir John Hawkwood, English Soldier for Hire, in Milan. It is on the person of John Hawkwood that Chaucer based his Knight's Character. The Knight, based on his description, dress and appearance, looks exactly like a soldier for hire would have looked in the fourteenth century.

Chaucer obtained the very substantial job of Controller of the Customs for the port of London, which Chaucer began on 8 June 1374. He must have been suited for the role as he continued in it for twelve years, a long time in such a post at that period. His life goes undocumented for much of the next ten years               but it is believed that he wrote most of his famous works during this time period.

While still working as comptroller, Chaucer appears to have moved to Kent, being appointed as  one of the commissioners of peace for Kent, at a time when French invasion was a possibility. He is thought to have started work on The Canterbury Tales in the early 1380s (the Pilgrims' Way used by his fictional characters on their way to Canterbury Cathedral passes through Kent). He also became a Member  of Parliament for Kent in 1386. There is no further reference after this date to Philippa, Chaucer's wife,                        and she is presumed to have died in 1387.

On 12 July 1389, Chaucer was appointed the clerk of the king's works, a sort of foreman organizing most of the king's building projects. No major works were begun during this time, but he did conduct repairs on Westminster Palace, St. George's Chapel, Windsor, continue building the wharf at the Tower of London, and build the stands for a tournament held in 1390. It may have been a difficult job but it paid well: two shillings a day, over three times his salary as a comptroller. In September 1390, records say that he was robbed, and possibly injured, while conducting the business, and it was shortly after, on 17 June 1391, that he stopped working in this capacity. Almost immediately, on 22 June, he began as deputy forester in the royal forest of North Petherton, Somerset. It is believed that Chaucer stopped work on the Canterbury Tales sometime towards the end of this decade.

Soon after the overthrow of his patron Richard II in 1399, Chaucer vanished from the historical record. He is believed to have died of unknown causes on 25 October 1400 but there is no firm evidence for this date, as it comes from the engraving on his tomb, which was built more than one-hundred years after Chaucer's death. There is some speculation – most recently in Terry Jones' book Who Murdered Chaucer?: A Medieval Mystery – that he was murdered by enemies of Richard II or even on the orders of his successor Henry IV. However, as of yet there is no solid evidence to support this claim.

The new king (Henry IV) did renew the grants assigned to Chaucer by Richard, but in The Complaint of Chaucer to his Purse, Chaucer hints that the grants might not have been paid. The last mention of Chaucer in the historical record is on 5 June 1400, when some monies owing to him were paid. Chaucer was buried in Westminster Abbey in London, as was his right owing to the jobs he had performed and the new house he had leased nearby on 24 December 1399. In 1556 his remains were transferred to a more ornate tomb, making Chaucer the first writer interred in the area now known as Poets' Corner.

[edit]Works

Chaucer's first major work The Book of the Duchess was an elegy for Blanche of Lancaster  (who died in 1369). It is possible that this work was commissioned by her husband John of Gaunt. This would seem to place the writing of The Book of the Duchess between the years 1369 and 1374. Two other early works by Chaucer were Anelida and Arcite and The House of Fame. Chaucer wrote many of his major works in a prolific period when he held the job of customs comptroller for London (1374 to 1386). His Parlement               of Foules, The Legend of Good Women and Troilus and Criseyde all date from this time. Chaucer is best known as the writer of The Canterbury Tales, which is a collection of stories told by fictional pilgrims on the road to the cathedral at Canterbury; these tales would help to shape English literature.

The Canterbury Tales contrasts with other literature of the period in the naturalism of its narrative, the variety of stories the pilgrims tell and the varied characters who are engaged in the pilgrimage. Many of the stories narrated by the pilgrims seem to fit their individual characters and social standing, although some of the stories seem ill-fitting to their narrators, perhaps as a result of the incomplete state of the work. Chaucer drew on real life for his cast of pilgrims: the innkeeper shares the name of a contemporary keeper of an Inn in Southwark, and real-life identities for the Wife of Bath, the Merchant, the Man of Law and the Student have been suggested. The many jobs Chaucer held in medieval society probably exposed him to many  of the types of people he depicted in the Tales. He was able to shape their speech and satirize their manners in what was to become popular literature among people of the same types.

Chaucer's works are sometimes grouped into first a French period, then an Italian period and finally an English period, with Chaucer being influenced by those countries' literatures in turn. Certainly  Troilus and Criseyde is a middle period work with its reliance on the forms of Italian poetry, little known in England at the time, but to which Chaucer was probably exposed during his frequent trips abroad on court business. In addition, its use of a classical antiquity subject and its elaborate, courtly language sets it apart as one of his most complete and well-formed works. In Troilus and Criseyde Chaucer draws heavily on his source, Bocaccio, and on the Late Latin philosopher Boethius. However, it is The Canterbury Tales, wherein he focuses on English subjects, with bawdy jokes and respected figures often being undercut with humour that has cemented his reputation.

Chaucer also translated such important works as Boethius' Consolation of Philosophy and The Romance of the Rose by Guillaume de Lorris. However, while many scholars maintain that Chaucer did indeed translate part of the text of The Romance of the Rose as Roman de la Rose, others claim that this has been effectively disproved. Many of his other works were very loose translations of, or simply based on, works from continental Europe. It is in this role that Chaucer receives some of his earliest critical praise. Eustache Deschamps wrote a ballade on the great translator and called himself a "nettle in Chaucer's garden of poetry". In 1385 Thomas Usk made glowing mention of Chaucer, and John Gower, Chaucer's main poetic rival of the time, also lauded him. This reference was later edited out of Gower's Confessio Amantis and it has been suggested by some that this was because of ill feeling between them, but it is likely due simply to stylistic concerns.

One other significant work of Chaucer's is his Treatise on the Astrolabe, possibly for his own son that describes the form and use of that instrument in detail. Although much of the text may have come from other sources, the treatise indicates that Chaucer was versed in science in addition to his literary talents. Another scientific work discovered in 1952, Equatorie of the Planetis, has similar language and handwriting compared to some considered to be Chaucer's and it continues many of the ideas from the Astrolabe. The attribution of this work to Chaucer is still uncertain.

Major works

The following major works are in rough chronological order but scholars still debate the dating of most of Chaucer's output and works made up from a collection of stories may have been compiled over a long period.

1. Translation of Roman de la Rose, possibly extant as The Romaunt of the Rose
2. The Book of the Duchess
3. The House of Fame
4. Anelida and Arcite
5. The Parliament of Fowls
6. Translation of Boethius' Consolation of Philosophy as Boece
7. Troilus and Criseyde
8. The Legend of Good Women
9. Treatise on the Astrolabe
10. The Canterbury Tales

Short poems

1. An ABC
2. Chaucers Wordes unto Adam, His Owne Scriveyn
3. The Complaint unto Pity
4. The Complaint of Chaucer to his Purse
5. The Complaint of Mars
6. The Complaint of Venus
7. A Complaint to His Lady
8. The Former Age
9. Fortune
10. Gentilesse
11. Lak of Stedfastnesse
12. Lenvoy de Chaucer a Scogan
13. Lenvoy de Chaucer a Bukton
14. Proverbs
15. To Rosemounde
16. Truth
17. Womanly Noblesse

[edit]Influence

[edit]Linguistic

Chaucer wrote in continental accentual-syllabic metre, a style which had developed since around the twelfth century as an alternative to the alliterative Anglo-Saxon metre. Chaucer is known for metrical innovation, inventing the rhyme royal, and he was one of the first English poets to use the five-stress line, a decasyllabic cousin to the iambic pentameter, in his work, with only a few anonymous short works using it before him. The arrangement of these five-stress lines into rhyming couplets, first seen in his Legend   of Good Women, was used in much of his later work and became one of the standard poetic forms in English. His early influence as a satirist is also important, with the common humorous device, the funny accent of a regional dialect, apparently making its first appearance in The Reeve's Tale.

The poetry of Chaucer, along with other writers of the era, is credited with helping to standardize  the London Dialect of the Middle English language from a combination of the Kentish and Midlands dialects. Modern English is somewhat distanced from the language of Chaucer's. This change in the pronunciation of English, still not fully understood, makes the reading of Chaucer difficult for the modern audience, though it is thought by some that the modern Scottish accent is closely related to the sound of Middle English. Apart from the irregular spelling, much of the vocabulary is recognisable to the modern reader. Chaucer is also recorded in the Oxford English Dictionary as the first author to use many common English words in his writings. These words were probably frequently used in the language at the time but Chaucer, with his ear for common speech, is the earliest manuscript source. Acceptable, alkali, amble, angrily, annex, annoyance, approaching, arbitration, armless, army, arrogant, arsenic, aspect are just some of those from the first letter of the alphabet.

Although Chaucer's language is much closer to modern English than the text of Beowulf, it differs enough that most publications modernise his idioms.                              

This is a sample from the prologue of the "Summoner's Tale" that compares Chaucer's text to a modern translation: (+ text 1)

[edit]Chaucer's English - text 1

Literary

Chaucer's early popularity is attested by the many poets who imitated his works. John Lydgate was one of earliest imitators who wrote a continuation to the Tales. Many of the manuscripts of Chaucer's works contain material from these admiring poets and the later romantic era poets' appreciation of Chaucer was coloured by their not knowing which of the works were genuine. 17th and 18th century writers, such as John Dryden, admired Chaucer for his stories, but not for his rhythm and rhyme, as few critics could then read Middle English and the text had been butchered by printers, leaving a somewhat unadmirable mess. It was not until the late 19th century that the official Chaucerian canon, accepted today, was decided upon;  One hundred and fifty years after his death, The Canterbury Tales was selected by William Caxton  (he was the first English person to work as a printer and the first person to introduce a printing press into England. He was also the first English retailer of books, the most important works printed by Caxton were Le Morte d'Arthur and Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales - his two folio editions of The Canterbury Tales were published in 1478 and 1483) to be one of the first books to be printed in England.

[edit]Manuscripts and printed books

Chaucer’s great achievement was to establish English as a major literary language, and his poetry has been loved for generations for its humanity and humour. But very few manuscripts of his works actually survive from the Fourteenth Century, and there are none that are in his hand or known to have been definitively corrected or authorised by him. Most of the texts we know today as being by Chaucer are based on posthumous copies of his work, and these may well have been subject to scribal editing and errors in their transmission from copy to copy. Many years of painstaking research by scholars in collating all the different versions of the early manuscripts results in the poems published in modern editions. We know from one poem to his scribe, Adam, that Chaucer was, in fact, anxious that his texts should be preserved as he wrote them and not corrupted by careless copying: he chides Adam for his ‘negligence’ and complains that he then has to ‘rub and scrape’ out his words to correct his mistakes.

As early as 1400, Chaucer's courtly audience grew to include members of the rising literate, middle and merchant classes, which included many Lollard sympathizers who would have been inclined to read Chaucer as one of their own, particularly in his satirical writings about priests and various religions. We would not have so many manuscripts of Chaucer's works today if this group of readers had not created a great demand for them.

Later on, representations of Chaucer began to circle around two co-existing identities:

1) a courtier and a king's man, an international humanist familiar with the classics and continental greats;

2) a man of the people, a plain-style satirist and a critic of the church.

All things to all people (barring some sensitive moralists), for a combination of mixed aesthetic and political reasons, Chaucer was held in high esteem by high and low audiences – certainly a boon for printers and booksellers.

In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Chaucer was printed more than any other English author, and he was the first author to have his works collected in comprehensive single-volume editions in which a Chaucer canon began to cohere. Some scholars contend that that sixteenth-century editions of Chaucer's Works set the precedent for all other English authors in terms of presentation, prestige and success in print. These editions certainly established Chaucer's reputation, but they also began the complicated process of reconstructing and frequently inventing Chaucer's biography and the canonical list of works attributed to him.

The Canterbury Tales

The Canterbury Tales (about 1387 to 1400)  is a collection of stories and the greatest work written by Geoffrey Chaucer in the 14th century, two of them in prose, the rest in verse. There are altogether about 17 000 lines, about half of Chaucer’s literary production. The tales, some of which   are originals and others not, are contained inside a frame tale and told by a collection of pilgrims    on a pilgrimage from Southwark to Canterbury to visit the shrine of Saint Thomas Becket at Canterbury Cathedral. The Canterbury Tales are written in Middle English, there are five main beats in each line and the rhyme has taken the place of Old English alliteration.  

(+ text 2)

Although the tales are considered to be his magnum opus, some believe the structure of the tales  is indebted to the works of The Decameron which Chaucer is said to have read on an earlier visit to Italy.

The story

The book opens with the General Prologue in which Chaucer gives a description on each of his pilgrims that appear in it. Together their characters give us a broad view of  a human nature ad a good insight into the life of medieval England.

        In the 14th century, going on a pilgrimage to the shrine of a saint became a popular activity. It enabled people to meet socially and gave them a good excuse for travel. Chaucer uses one such a pilgrimage as the setting for his Canterbury Tales. He brings together thirty pilgrims; all from varied occupations and walks of life. They meet at the Tabard Inn at Southwark, on the other side of the Thames from London, to set off                  on a pilgrimage to Canterbury to the shrine of the martyr Saint Thomas Becket, the archbishop of Canterbury, who was murdered in the cathedral. Before they start in the morning, the innkeeper suggests that they all take a part in a story-telling contest in order to make the journey pass more quickly. The prize for the best storyteller will be a supper at the Tabard Inn, paid for by all the rest of the group.

        So, each of the pilgrims tells a tale on the way to Canterbury. The tales, such as The Knight’s Tale, The Cook’s Tale, The Miller’s Tale, The Student’s Tale, The Wife of Bath’s Tale, The Monk’s Tale and others, reveal much about the teller’s character, his interests and the way of life. They are told in the style peculiar to the social group the teller belongs to.

        There are more then twenty of these stories, mostly in verse, and in the stories we get to know the pilgrims themselves. Most of them, like the Merchant, the Lawyer, the Sailor, the Doctor, the Ploughman  and the poor Scholar are ordinary people, but each of them can be recognized as a real person with his  or her own character.

        Then there is the Knight who is the highest in social rank and demonstrates the courtesy and nobility that is to be expected of his high breeding. The religion is represented by the Friar, the honest Parson, as well as by the Prioress and the Monk.

        Some of the pilgrims are involved in business such as the Merchant or the Wife of Bath, on of the most enjoyable characters. She is a vigorous, talkative, earthy character who spends more time introducing her tale than actually telling it. By the time she tells her story we know her as a woman of very strong opinions who believes firmly in marriage (she has had five husbands, one after the other) and equally firmly in the need to manage her husbands, and at least all men, very strictly.

        Chaucer’s skill in developing the treatment of his characters in depth is very impressive. Some of the pilgrims, like the Knight, are straightforward in their behaviour and attitudes. Others are more complex and not quite always what they at first may seem. Chaucer enjoys showing up deceit and hypocrisy in human behaviour. Consider the Monk, for example, who is too keen on enjoying all the luxuries of life. Chaucer’s realism influenced future developments in English literature, with the increasing interest in depicting individual characters.

text 2

Whan that Aprill with his shoures soote        
The droghte of March hath perced to the roote,
And bathed every veyne in swich licour
Of which vertu engendred is the flour;
Whan Zephirus eek with his sweete breeth
Inspired hath in every holt and heeth
The tendre croppes, and the yonge sonne
Hath in the Ram his halve cours yronne,
And smale fowles maken melodye,
That slepen al the nyght with open ye
(So priketh hem nature in hir corages),
Thanne longen folk to goon on pilgrimages.     

         (General Prologue, 1–12)

These are the opening lines with which the narrator begins the General Prologue of The Canterbury Tales. The imagery in this opening passage is of spring’s renewal and rebirth. April’s sweet showers have penetrated the dry earth of March, hydrating the roots, which in turn coax flowers out of the ground. The constellation Taurus is in the sky; Zephyr, the warm, gentle west wind, has breathed life into the fields; and the birds chirp merrily. The verbs used to describe Nature’s actions – piercing, engendering, inspiring, and pricking – conjure up images of conception.

The natural world’s reawakening aligns with the narrator’s similarly “inspired” poetic sensibility. The classical (Latin and Ancient Greek) authors that Chaucer emulated and wanted to surpass would always begin their epic narrative poems by invoking a muse, or female goddess, to inspire them, quite literally to talk or breathe a story into them. Most of them begin “Sing in me, O muse,” about a particular subject. Chaucer too begins with a moment of inspiration, but in this case it is the natural inspiration of the earth readying itself for spring rather than a supernatural being filling the poet’s body with her voice.

After the long sleep of winter, people begin to stir, feeling the need to “goon on pilgrimages,” or to travel to a site where one worships a saint’s relics as a means of spiritual cleansing and renewal. Since winter ice and snow made travelling long distances almost impossible (this was an age not only before automobiles but also before adequately developed horse-drawn carriages), the need to get up, stretch one’s legs, and see the world outside the window must have been great. Pilgrimages combined spring vacations with religious purification.

The landscape in this passage also clearly situates the text in England. This is not a classical landscape like the Troy of Homer’s Iliad, nor is it an entirely fictionalized space like the cool groves and rocky cliffs of imaginary Arcadia from pastoral poetry and romances. Chaucer’s landscape is also accessible to all types of people, but especially those who inhabit the countryside, since Chaucer speaks of budding flowers, growing crops, and singing birds.

The Firste Moevere of the cause above,
Whan he first made the faire cheyne of love,
Greet was th’effect, and heigh was his entente.
. . .
For with that faire cheyne of love he bond
The fyr, the eyr, the water, and the lond
In certeyn boundes, that they may nat flee.

        (The Knight’s Tale, 2987–2993)

This passage is from the conclusion of the Knight’s Tale, as Duke Theseus explains why Emelye must marry the knight Palamon. Theseus bases his argument on concepts drawn from the fifth-century a.d. Roman philosopher Boethius, whose ideas appealed to medieval Christians because he combined Plato’s theory of an ideal world with Christian teachings of a moral universe. Chaucer took it upon himself to translate and provide a commentary for Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy. Chaucer’s translation, a long prose text, is informally known as his Boece.

The “Firste Moevere” (first mover) is the Aristotelian notion of God. The story the Knight tells takes place long before Christ. Although medieval Christians could not condemn classical writers and philosophers, since much of Virgil’s poetry and Plato’s philosophy formed the basis for Christian literature, they had difficulty imagining a time before people believed in Christ. Chaucer (or the Knight) has carefully given Theseus a pagan notion of God that nevertheless resonates with Christianity. Having a supreme ancient Greek or Roman god would be idolatrous and therefore immoral (although the gods appear as lesser entities in the second half of the tale), because, according to medieval Christians, there was only one god and that god was the Trinity.

The “faire cheyne of love” is a medieval view of cosmology, or the natural order of things. It is the idea that every thing has its place in the hierarchy of the world, from the smallest flea to the hand of God. The fifty lines or so that follow this passage contain ideas that are taken almost word for word from Chaucer’s Boece. Theseus argues that Emelye’s overly long mourning threatens to disrupt the great chain of love, and that the only way to maintain the chain’s balance is for her to marry Palamon and be happy.

Thus swyved was this carpenteris wyf,
For al his kepyng and his jalousye;
And Absolon hath kist hir nether ye;
And Nicholas is scalded in the towte.
This tale is doon, and God save al the rowte!   

        (The Miller’s Tale, 3850–3854)

This passage, the rhyming conclusion to the Miller’s Tale, neatly resolves the story by offering a reckoning of accounts. Everyone in the story has learned his or her lesson and gotten the physical punishment he or she deserves. The carpenter’s wife, Alisoun, was “swyved,” or possessed in bed by another man, in this case, Nicholas. John, the ignorant and jealous carpenter, has been made a cuckold, despite his watchful and possessive eye. Absolon, the foolish and foppish parish clerk, has kissed Alisoun’s behind, fair punishment for evading his clerical duties. Nicholas, the smart-alecky student who cheated on the carpenter with Alisoun, has been burned on his bottom with a red-hot poker as payback for farting in Absolon’s face. Still, the distribution of punishments is not entirely equal. John is dealt the worst lot—he ends up with a broken arm and the whole town believing he has gone insane. Alisoun’s “swyving” is a double punishment for John, while Alisoun herself escapes unscathed.

The prologue and individual tales

The Canterbury Tales is a complex of vivid tales, unique for its realism, humour and variety. Chaucer created here an image of the English society of the 14th century. People from various parts of England and of all social groups are presented here. The characters, introduced in the General Prologue of the book, tell tales of great cultural relevance.

The first part of the prologue begins with "Whan that Aprill with his shoures soote" indicating the start of spring and the end of a brutal winter. The themes of the tales vary, and include topics such as courtly love, treachery, and avarice. The genres also vary, and include romance, sermon, beast fable, and fabliaux (the fabliau is a comic, usually anonymous tale written by jongleurs in northeast France circa the 13th century, they are generally bawdy in nature, typical fabliaux concern cuckolded husbands, rapacious clergy and foolish peasants). Though there is an overall frame, there is no single poetic structure to the work; Chaucer utilizes a variety of rhyme schemes and metrical patterns, and there are also two prose tales.

The 24 Tales include:

1. The General Prologue
2. The Knight's Prologue and Tale
3. The Miller's Prologue and Tale
4. The Reeve's Prologue and Tale
5. The Cook's Prologue and Tale
6. The Man of Law's Prologue and Tale
7. The Wife of Bath's Prologue and Tale
8. The Friar's Prologue and Tale
9. The Summoner's Prologue and Tale
10. The Clerk's Prologue and Tale
11. The Merchant's Prologue and Tale
12. The Squire's Prologue and Tale
13. The Franklin's Prologue and Tale
14. The Physician's Tale
15. The Pardoner's Prologue and Tale
16. The Shipman's Tale
17. The Prioress' Prologue and Tale
18. Chaucer's Tale of Sir Topas
19. The Tale of Melibee
20. The Monk's Prologue and Tale
21. The Nun's Priest's Prologue and Tale
22. The Second Nun's Prologue and Tale
23. The Canon's Yeoman's Prologue and Tale
24. The Manciple's Prologue and Tale
25. The Parson's Prologue and Tale
26. Chaucer's Retraction

Some of the tales are serious and others comical. Religious malpractice is a major theme as well as focusing on the division of the three estates. Most of the tales are interlinked with similar themes running through them and some are told in retaliation for other tales in the form of an argument. The work is incomplete, as it was originally intended that each character would tell four tales, two on the way to Canterbury and two on the return journey - this would have meant a possible 120 tales.

People have sought political overtones within the tales, particularly as Chaucer himself was a political figure at the time, close to the corridors of power. There are many hints at contemporary events, and the theme of marriage common in the tales has been presumed to refer to several different marriages, most often those of John of Gaunt. Aside from Chaucer himself, Harry Bailly of the Tabard Inn was a real person, and it is considered quite likely that the cook was Roger Knight de Ware, a contemporary London cook.

[edit]The complete work                                                                                The work began some time in the 1380s but Chaucer stopped working on it in the late 1390s.  It was not written down fully conceived: it seems to have had many revisions with the addition of new tales at various times. The plan for one hundred and twenty tales is from the general prologue. It is announced by Harry Bailly, the host, that there will be four tales each. This is not necessarily   the opinion of Chaucer himself, who appears as the only character to tell more than one tale.                            It has been suggested that the unfinished state was deliberate on Chaucer's part.

The structure of The Canterbury Tales is a frame narrative and easy to find in other contemporary works, such as The Book of Good Love by Juan Ruiz and Boccaccio's Decameron, which may have been one of Chaucer's main sources of inspiration. Compared to Boccaccio's main characters the characters in Chaucer are of extremely varied stock, including representatives of most  of the branches of the middle classes at that time. Not only are the participants very different, but they tell very different types of tales, with their personalities showing through both in their choices of tales and in the way they tell them.

The idea of a pilgrimage appears to have been mainly a useful device to get such a diverse collection of people together for literary purposes. In fact, the Monk would probably not be allowed to undertake the pilgrimage, and some of the other characters would be unlikely ever to want to attend.  Also all of the pilgrims ride horses, so there is no suggestion of them suffering for their religion. None of the popular shrines along the way are visited and there is no suggestion that anyone attends mass, so that it seems much more like a tourist's jaunt.

Chaucer does not pay much attention to the progress of the trip. He hints that the tales take several days but he does not detail any overnight stays. Although the journey could be done in one day this speed would make telling tales difficult and three to four days was the usual duration for such pilgrimages. Walter William Skeat, a 19th century editor, determined 17 April 1387 as the probable first day of the tales.

Scholars divide the tales into ten fragments. The tales that make up a fragment are directly connected, usually with one character speaking to and handing over to another character, but there is no connection between most of the other fragments. This means that there are several possible permutations for the order of the fragments and consequently the tales themselves. The exception to the independence between fragments are the last two tales. The Manciple's tale is the last tale in fragment 9 but fragment 10 starts with the Parson's prologue by saying that the Manciple had finished his tale. The reason that they     are kept as two different fragments is that the Manciple starts his short tale in the morning but   the Parson's tale is told at four in the afternoon. It is assumed that Chaucer would have amended his manuscript or inserted more tales to fill the time.

[edit]Significance                                                                                        It is sometimes argued that the greatest contribution that this work made to English literature was in popularising the literary use of the vernacular, English, rather than French or Latin. However, English had been used as a literary language for centuries before Chaucer's life, and several of Chaucer's contemporaries – John Gower, William Langland, and the Pearl Poet – also wrote major literary works in English. It is unclear to what extent Chaucer was responsible for starting a trend rather than simply being part of it.

The Canterbury Tales can also tell modern readers much about "the occult" during Chaucer's time, especially in regards to astrology and the astrological lore prevalent during Chaucer's era. There are hundreds if not thousands of astrological allusions found in this work; some are quite overt while others are more subtle in nature.

While some readers look to interpret the characters of The Canterbury Tales as historical figures, other readers choose to interpret its significance in less literal terms. After analysis of his diction and historical context, his work appears to develop a critique against society during his lifetime. Within a number of his descriptions, his comments can appear complimentary in nature, but through clever language, the statements are ultimately critical of the pilgrim’s actions. It is unclear whether Chaucer would intend for the reader to link his characters with actual persons. Instead, it appears that Chaucer creates fictional characters to be general representations of people in such fields of work. With an understanding of medieval society, one can detect subtle satire at work. Chaucer’s masterpiece The Canterbury Tales is considered to be one of the best poetic works in English.  

Plot Overview

General Prologue

At the Tabard Inn, a tavern in Southwark, near London, the narrator joins a company of twenty-nine pilgrims. The pilgrims, like the narrator, are traveling to the shrine of the martyr Saint Thomas Becket in Canterbury. The narrator gives a descriptive account of twenty-seven of these pilgrims, including a Knight, Squire, Yeoman, Prioress, Monk, Friar, Merchant, Clerk, Man of Law, Franklin, Haberdasher, Carpenter, Weaver, Dyer, Tapestry-Weaver, Cook, Shipman, Physician, Wife, Parson, Plowman, Miller, Manciple, Reeve, Summoner, Pardoner, and Host. (He does not describe the Second Nun or the Nun’s Priest, although both characters appear later in the book.) The Host, whose name, we find out in the Prologue to the Cook’s Tale, is Harry Bailey, suggests that the group ride together and entertain one another with stories. He decides that each pilgrim will tell two stories on the way to Canterbury and two on the way back. Whomever he judges to be the best storyteller will receive a meal at Bailey’s tavern, courtesy of the other pilgrims. The pilgrims draw lots and determine that the Knight will tell the first tale.

The Knight’s Tale

Theseus, duke of Athens, imprisons Arcite and Palamon, two knights from Thebes (another city in ancient Greece). From their prison, the knights see and fall in love with Theseus’s sister-in-law, Emelye. Through the intervention of a friend, Arcite is freed, but he is banished from Athens. He returns in disguise and becomes a page in Emelye’s chamber. Palamon escapes from prison, and the two meet and fight over Emelye. Theseus apprehends them and arranges a tournament between the two knights and their allies, with Emelye as the prize. Arcite wins, but he is accidentally thrown from his horse and dies. Palamon then marries Emelye.

The Miller’s Prologue and Tale

The Host asks the Monk to tell the next tale, but the drunken Miller butts in and insists that his tale should be the next. He tells the story of an impoverished student named Nicholas, who persuades his landlord’s sexy young wife, Alisoun, to spend the night with him. He convinces his landlord, a carpenter named John, that the second flood is coming, and tricks him into spending the night in a tub hanging from the ceiling of his barn. Absolon, a young parish clerk who is also in love with Alisoun, appears outside the window of the room where Nicholas and Alisoun lie together. When Absolon begs Alisoun for a kiss, she sticks her rear end out the window in the dark and lets him kiss it. Absolon runs and gets a red-hot poker, returns to the window, and asks for another kiss; when Nicholas sticks his bottom out the window and farts, Absolon brands him on the buttocks. Nicholas’s cries for water make the carpenter think that the flood has come, so the carpenter cuts the rope connecting his tub to the ceiling, falls down, and breaks his arm.

The Reeve’s Prologue and Tale

Because he also does carpentry, the Reeve takes offense at the Miller’s tale of a stupid carpenter, and counters with his own tale of a dishonest miller. The Reeve tells the story of two students, John and Alayn, who go to the mill to watch the miller grind their corn, so that he won’t have a chance to steal any. But the miller unties their horse, and while they chase it, he steals some of the flour he has just ground for them. By the time the students catch the horse, it is dark, so they spend the night in the miller’s house. That night, Alayn seduces the miller’s daughter, and John seduces his wife. When the miller wakes up and finds out what has happened, he tries to beat the students. His wife, thinking that her husband is actually one of the students, hits the miller over the head with a staff. The students take back their stolen goods and leave.

The Cook’s Prologue and Tale

The Cook particularly enjoys the Reeve’s Tale, and offers to tell another funny tale. The tale concerns an apprentice named Perkyn who drinks and dances so much that he is called “Perkyn Reveler.” Finally, Perkyn’s master decides that he would rather his apprentice leave to revel than stay home and corrupt the other servants. Perkyn arranges to stay with a friend who loves drinking and gambling, and who has a wife who is a prostitute. The tale breaks off, unfinished, after fifty-eight lines.

The Man of Law’s Introduction, Prologue, Tale, and Epilogue

The Host reminds his fellow pilgrims to waste no time, because lost time cannot be regained. He asks the Man of Law to tell the next tale. The Man of Law agrees, apologizing that he cannot tell any suitable tale that Chaucer has not already told—Chaucer may be unskilled as a poet, says the Man of Law, but he has told more stories of lovers than Ovid, and he doesn’t print tales of incest as John Gower does (Gower was a contemporary of Chaucer). In the Prologue to his tale, the Man of Law laments the miseries of poverty. He then remarks how fortunate merchants are, and says that his tale is one told to him by a merchant.

In the tale, the Muslim sultan of Syria converts his entire sultanate (including himself) to Christianity in order to persuade the emperor of Rome to give him his daughter, Custance, in marriage. The sultan’s mother and her attendants remain secretly faithful to Islam. The mother tells her son she wishes to hold a banquet for him and all the Christians. At the banquet, she massacres her son and all the Christians except for Custance, whom she sets adrift in a rudderless ship. After years of floating, Custance runs ashore in Northumberland, where a constable and his wife, Hermengyld, offer her shelter. She converts them to Christianity.

One night, Satan makes a young knight sneak into Hermengyld’s chamber and murder Hermengyld. He places the bloody knife next to Custance, who sleeps in the same chamber. When the constable returns home, accompanied by Alla, the king of Northumberland, he finds his slain wife. He tells Alla the story of how Custance was found, and Alla begins to pity the girl. He decides to look more deeply into the murder. Just as the knight who murdered Hermengyld is swearing that Custance is the true murderer, he is struck down and his eyes burst out of his face, proving his guilt to Alla and the crowd. The knight is executed, Alla and many others convert to Christianity, and Custance and Alla marry.

While Alla is away in Scotland, Custance gives birth to a boy named Mauricius. Alla’s mother, Donegild, intercepts a letter from Custance to Alla and substitutes a counterfeit one that claims that the child is disfigured and bewitched. She then intercepts Alla’s reply, which claims that the child should be kept and loved no matter how malformed. Donegild substitutes a letter saying that Custance and her son are banished and should be sent away on the same ship on which Custance arrived. Alla returns home, finds out what has happened, and kills Donegild.

After many adventures at sea, including an attempted rape, Custance ends up back in Rome, where she reunites with Alla, who has made a pilgrimage there to atone for killing his mother. She also reunites with her father, the emperor. Alla and Custance return to England, but Alla dies after a year, so Custance returns, once more, to Rome. Mauricius becomes the next Roman emperor.

Following the Man of Law’s Tale, the Host asks the Parson to tell the next tale, but the Parson reproaches him for swearing, and they fall to bickering.

The Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale

The Wife of Bath gives a lengthy account of her feelings about marriage. Quoting from the Bible, the Wife argues against those who believe it is wrong to marry more than once, and she explains how she dominated and controlled each of her five husbands. She married her fifth husband, Jankyn, for love instead of money. After the Wife has rambled on for a while, the Friar butts in to complain that she is taking too long, and the Summoner retorts that friars are like flies, always meddling. The Friar promises to tell a tale about a summoner, and the Summoner promises to tell a tale about a friar. The Host cries for everyone to quiet down and allow the Wife to commence her tale.

In her tale, a young knight of King Arthur’s court rapes a maiden; to atone for his crime, Arthur’s queen sends him on a quest to discover what women want most. An ugly old woman promises the knight that she will tell him the secret if he promises to do whatever she wants for saving his life. He agrees, and she tells him women want control of their husbands and their own lives. They go together to Arthur’s queen, and the old woman’s answer turns out to be correct. The old woman then tells the knight that he must marry her. When the knight confesses later that he is repulsed by her appearance, she gives him a choice: she can either be ugly and faithful, or beautiful and unfaithful. The knight tells her to make the choice herself, and she rewards him for giving her control of the marriage by rendering herself both beautiful and faithful.

The Friar’s Prologue and Tale

The Friar speaks approvingly of the Wife of Bath’s Tale, and offers to lighten things up for the company by telling a funny story about a lecherous summoner. The Summoner does not object, but he promises to pay the Friar back in his own tale. The Friar tells of an archdeacon who carries out the law without mercy, especially to lechers. The archdeacon has a summoner who has a network of spies working for him, to let him know who has been lecherous. The summoner extorts money from those he’s sent to summon, charging them more money than he should for penance. He tries to serve a summons on a yeoman who is actually a devil in disguise. After comparing notes on their treachery and extortion, the devil vanishes, but when the summoner tries to prosecute an old wealthy widow unfairly, the widow cries out that the summoner should be taken to hell. The devil follows the woman’s instructions and drags the summoner off to hell.

The Summoner’s Prologue and Tale

The Summoner, furious at the Friar’s Tale, asks the company to let him tell the next tale. First, he tells the company that there is little difference between friars and fiends, and that when an angel took a friar down to hell to show him the torments there, the friar asked why there were no friars in hell; the angel then pulled up Satan’s tail and 20,000 friars came out of his ass.

In the Summoner’s Tale, a friar begs for money from a dying man named Thomas and his wife, who have recently lost their child. The friar shamelessly exploits the couple’s misfortunes to extract money from them, so Thomas tells the friar that he is sitting on something that he will bequeath to the friars. The friar reaches for his bequest, and Thomas lets out an enormous fart. The friar complains to the lord of the manor, whose squire promises to divide the fart evenly among all the friars.

The Clerk’s Prologue and Tale

The Host asks the Clerk to cheer up and tell a merry tale, and the Clerk agrees to tell a tale by the Italian poet Petrarch. Griselde is a hardworking peasant who marries into the aristocracy. Her husband tests her fortitude several ways, including pretending to kill her children and divorcing her. He punishes her one final time by forcing her to prepare for his wedding to a new wife. She does all this dutifully, her husband tells her that she has always been and will always be his wife (the divorce was a fraud), and they live happily ever after.

The Merchant’s Prologue, Tale, and Epilogue

The Merchant reflects on the great difference between the patient Griselde of the Clerk’s Tale and the horrible shrew he has been married to for the past two months. The Host asks him to tell a story of the evils of marriage, and he complies. Against the advice of his friends, an old knight named January marries May, a beautiful young woman. She is less than impressed by his enthusiastic sexual efforts, and conspires to cheat on him with his squire, Damien. When blind January takes May into his garden to copulate with her, she tells him she wants to eat a pear, and he helps her up into the pear tree, where she has sex with Damien. Pluto, the king of the faeries, restores January’s sight, but May, caught in the act, assures him that he must still be blind. The Host prays to God to keep him from marrying a wife like the one the Merchant describes.

The Squire’s Introduction and Tale

The Host calls upon the Squire to say something about his favorite subject, love, and the Squire willingly complies. King Cambyuskan of the Mongol Empire is visited on his birthday by a knight bearing gifts from the king of Arabia and India. He gives Cambyuskan and his daughter Canacee a magic brass horse, a magic mirror, a magic ring that gives Canacee the ability to understand the language of birds, and a sword with the power to cure any wound it creates. She rescues a dying female falcon that narrates how her consort abandoned her for the love of another. The Squire’s Tale is either unfinished by Chaucer or is meant to be interrupted by the Franklin, who interjects that he wishes his own son were as eloquent as the Squire. The Host expresses annoyance at the Franklin’s interruption, and orders him to begin the next tale.

The Franklin’s Prologue and Tale

The Franklin says that his tale is a familiar Breton lay, a folk ballad of ancient Brittany. Dorigen, the heroine, awaits the return of her husband, Arveragus, who has gone to England to win honor in feats of arms. She worries that the ship bringing her husband home will wreck itself on the coastal rocks, and she promises Aurelius, a young man who falls in love with her, that she will give her body to him if he clears the rocks from the coast. Aurelius hires a student learned in magic to create the illusion that the rocks have disappeared. Arveragus returns home and tells his wife that she must keep her promise to Aurelius. Aurelius is so impressed by Arveragus’s honorable act that he generously absolves her of the promise, and the magician, in turn, generously absolves Aurelius of the money he owes.

The Physician’s Tale

Appius the judge lusts after Virginia, the beautiful daughter of Virginius. Appius persuades a churl named Claudius to declare her his slave, stolen from him by Virginius. Appius declares that Virginius must hand over his daughter to Claudius. Virginius tells his daughter that she must die rather than suffer dishonor, and she virtuously consents to her father’s cutting her head off. Appius sentences Virginius to death, but the Roman people, aware of Appius’s hijinks, throw him into prison, where he kills himself.

The Pardoner’s Introduction, Prologue, and Tale

The Host is dismayed by the tragic injustice of the Physician’s Tale, and asks the Pardoner to tell something merry. The other pilgrims contradict the Host, demanding a moral tale, which the Pardoner agrees to tell after he eats and drinks. The Pardoner tells the company how he cheats people out of their money by preaching that money is the root of all evil. His tale describes three riotous youths who go looking for Death, thinking that they can kill him. An old man tells them that they will find Death under a tree. Instead, they find eight bushels of gold, which they plot to sneak into town under cover of darkness. The youngest goes into town to fetch food and drink, but brings back poison, hoping to have the gold all to himself. His companions kill him to enrich their own shares, then drink the poison and die under the tree. His tale complete, the Pardoner offers to sell the pilgrims pardons, and singles out the Host to come kiss his relics. The Host infuriates the Pardoner by accusing him of fraud, but the Knight persuades the two to kiss and bury their differences.

The Shipman’s Tale

The Shipman’s Tale features a monk who tricks a merchant’s wife into having sex with him by borrowing money from the merchant, then giving it to the wife so she can repay her own debt to her husband, in exchange for sexual favors. When the monk sees the merchant next, he tells him that he returned the merchant’s money to his wife. The wife realizes she has been duped, but she boldly tells her husband to forgive her debt: she will repay it in bed. The Host praises the Shipman’s story, and asks the Prioress for a tale.

The Prioress’s Prologue and Tale

The Prioress calls on the Virgin Mary to guide her tale. In an Asian city, a Christian school is located at the edge of a Jewish ghetto. An angelic seven-year-old boy, a widow’s son, attends the school. He is a devout Christian, and loves to sing Alma Redemptoris (Gracious Mother of the Redeemer). Singing the song on his way through the ghetto, some Jews hire a murderer to slit his throat and throw him into a latrine. The Jews refuse to tell the widow where her son is, but he miraculously begins to sing Alma Redemptoris, so the Christian people recover his body, and the magistrate orders the murdering Jews to be drawn apart by wild horses and then hanged.

The Prologue and Tale of Sir Thopas

The Host, after teasing Chaucer the narrator about his appearance, asks him to tell a tale. Chaucer says that he only knows one tale, then launches into a parody of bad poetry—the Tale of Sir Thopas. Sir Thopas rides about looking for an elf-queen to marry until he is confronted by a giant. The narrator’s doggerel continues in this vein until the Host can bear no more and interrupts him. Chaucer asks him why he can’t tell his tale, since it is the best he knows, and the Host explains that his rhyme isn’t worth a turd. He encourages Chaucer to tell a prose tale.

The Tale of Melibee

Chaucer’s second tale is the long, moral prose story of Melibee. Melibee’s house is raided by his foes, who beat his wife, Prudence, and severely wound his daughter, Sophie, in her feet, hands, ears, nose, and mouth. Prudence advises him not to rashly pursue vengeance on his enemies, and he follows her advice, putting his foes’ punishment in her hands. She forgives them for the outrages done to her, in a model of Christian forbearance and forgiveness.

The Monk’s Prologue and Tale

The Host wishes that his own wife were as patient as Melibee’s, and calls upon the Monk to tell the next tale. First he teases the Monk, pointing out that the Monk is clearly no poor cloisterer. The Monk takes it all in stride and tells a series of tragic falls, in which noble figures are brought low: Lucifer, Adam, Sampson, Hercules, Nebuchadnezzar, Belshazzar, Zenobia, Pedro of Castile, and down through the ages.

The Nun’s Priest’s Prologue, Tale, and Epilogue

After seventeen noble “falls” narrated by the Monk, the Knight interrupts, and the Host calls upon the Nun’s Priest to deliver something more lively. The Nun’s Priest tells of Chanticleer the Rooster, who is carried off by a flattering fox who tricks him into closing his eyes and displaying his crowing abilities. Chanticleer turns the tables on the fox by persuading him to open his mouth and brag to the barnyard about his feat, upon which Chanticleer falls out of the fox’s mouth and escapes. The Host praises the Nun’s Priest’s Tale, adding that if the Nun’s Priest were not in holy orders, he would be as sexually potent as Chanticleer.

The Second Nun’s Prologue and Tale

In her Prologue, the Second Nun explains that she will tell a saint’s life, that of Saint Cecilia, for this saint set an excellent example through her good works and wise teachings. She focuses particularly on the story of Saint Cecilia’s martyrdom. Before Cecilia’s new husband, Valerian, can take her virginity, she sends him on a pilgrimage to Pope Urban, who converts him to Christianity. An angel visits Valerian, who asks that his brother Tiburce be granted the grace of Christian conversion as well. All three—Cecilia, Tiburce, and Valerian—are put to death by the Romans.

The Canon’s Yeoman’s Prologue and Tale

When the Second Nun’s Tale is finished, the company is overtaken by a black-clad Canon and his Yeoman, who have heard of the pilgrims and their tales and wish to participate. The Yeoman brags to the company about how he and the Canon create the illusion that they are alchemists, and the Canon departs in shame at having his secrets discovered. The Yeoman tells a tale of how a canon defrauded a priest by creating the illusion of alchemy using sleight of hand.

The Manciple’s Prologue and Tale

The Host pokes fun at the Cook, riding at the back of the company, blind drunk. The Cook is unable to honor the Host’s request that he tell a tale, and the Manciple criticizes him for his drunkenness. The Manciple relates the legend of a white crow, taken from the Roman poet Ovid’s Metamorphoses and one of the tales in The Arabian Nights. In it, Phoebus’s talking white crow informs him that his wife is cheating on him. Phoebus kills the wife, pulls out the crow’s white feathers, and curses it with blackness.

The Parson’s Prologue and Tale

As the company enters a village in the late afternoon, the Host calls upon the Parson to give them a fable. Refusing to tell a fictional story because it would go against the rule set by St. Paul, the Parson delivers a lengthy treatise on the Seven Deadly Sins, instead.

Chaucer’s Retraction

Chaucer appeals to readers to credit Jesus Christ as the inspiration for anything in his book that they like, and to attribute what they don’t like to his own ignorance and lack of ability. He retracts and prays for forgiveness for all of his works dealing with secular and pagan subjects, asking only to be remembered for what he has written of saints’ lives and homilies.

Character List

The Narrator 

The narrator makes it quite clear that he is also a character in his book. Although he is called Chaucer, we should be wary of accepting his words and opinions as Chaucer’s own. In the General Prologue, the narrator presents himself as a gregarious and naïve character. Later on, the Host accuses him of being silent  and sullen. Because the narrator writes down his impressions of the pilgrims from memory, whom he does  and does not like, and what he chooses and chooses not to remember about the characters, tells us as much about the narrator’s own prejudices as it does about the characters themselves.

The Knight 

The first pilgrim Chaucer describes in the General Prologue, and the teller of the first tale. The Knight represents the ideal of a medieval Christian man-at-arms. He has participated in no less than fifteen of the great crusades of his era. Brave, experienced, and prudent, the narrator greatly admires him.

What do you think - why is the Knight first in the General Prologue and first to tell a tale?

The Knight is first to be described in the General Prologue because he is the highest on the social scale, being closest to belonging to the highest estate, the aristocracy. The Knight’s nobility derives from the courtly and Christian values he has sworn to uphold: truth, honor, freedom, and courtesy. The Knight’s Tale comes first because he has drawn the shortest   straw of the group.

The Wife of Bath 

Bath is an English town on the Avon River, not the name of this woman’s husband. Though she is a seamstress by occupation, she seems to be a professional wife. She has been married five times and had many other affairs in her youth, making her well practiced in the art of love. She presents herself as someone who loves marriage and sex, but, from what we see of her, she also takes pleasure in rich attire, talking, and arguing. She is deaf in one ear and has a gap between her front teeth, which was considered attractive in Chaucer’s time. She has travelled on pilgrimages to Jerusalem three times and elsewhere in Europe as well.

The Pardoner 

Pardoners granted papal indulgences – reprieves from penance in exchange for charitable donations   to the Church. Many pardoners, including this one, collected profits for themselves. In fact, Chaucer’s Pardoner excels in fraud, carrying a bag full of fake relics – for example, he claims to have the veil of the Virgin Mary. The Pardoner has long, greasy, yellow hair and is beardless. These characteristics were associated with shiftiness and gender ambiguity in Chaucer’s time.

What do you think – what makes the Pardoner so offensive?

The Pardoner is the most controversial of all the pilgrims for four reasons: his work, his sin (greed), his unrepentant pride, and his sexuality. The Pardoner’s job –  giving people written absolution from sin – was a dubious profession in medieval Europe. As he reveals in his Prologue, the Pardoner is well aware that he himself is covetous, which is the very sin against which he preaches in order to con people into giving him money. What makes him so distasteful to the other characters, especially the Host, is that fact that he is so proud of his vice. In the General Prologue, the narrator suggests that the Pardoner’s sexual orientation is ambiguous, which means that he occupies an even further marginalized position in fourteenth-century society.

The Miller 

Stout and brawny, the Miller has a wart on his nose and a big mouth, both literally and figuratively. He threatens the Host’s notion of propriety when he drunkenly insists on telling the second tale. Indeed, the Miller seems to enjoy overturning all conventions: he ruins the Host’s carefully planned storytelling order; he rips doors off hinges; and he tells a tale that is somewhat blasphemous, ridiculing religious clerks, scholarly clerks, carpenters, and women.

The Prioress 

Described as modest and quiet, this Prioress (a nun who is head of her convent) aspires to have exquisite taste. Her table manners are dainty, she knows French (though not the French of the court), she dresses well, and she is charitable and compassionate.

The Monk 

Most monks of the Middle Ages lived in monasteries according to the Rule of Saint Benedict, which demanded that they devote their lives to “work and prayer.” This Monk cares little for the Rule; his devotion is to hunting and eating. He is large, loud, and well clad in hunting boots and furs.

The Friar 

Roaming priests with no ties to a monastery, friars were a great object of criticism in Chaucer’s time. Always ready to befriend young women or rich men who might need his services, the friar actively administers the sacraments in his town, especially those of marriage and confession. However, Chaucer’s worldly Friar has taken to accepting bribes.

The Summoner 

The Summoner brings persons accused of violating Church law to ecclesiastical court. This Summoner is a lecherous man whose face is scarred by leprosy. He gets drunk frequently, is irritable, and is not particularly qualified for his position. He spouts the few words of Latin he knows in an attempt to sound educated.

The Host 

The leader of the group, the Host is large, loud, and merry, although he possesses a quick temper. He mediates among the pilgrims and facilitates the flow of the tales. His title of “host” may be a pun, suggesting both an innkeeper and the Eucharist, or Holy Host.

The Parson 

The only devout churchman in the company, the Parson lives in poverty, but is rich in holy thoughts and deeds. The pastor of a sizable town, he preaches the Gospel and makes sure to practice what he preaches. He is everything that the Monk, the Friar, and the Pardoner are not.

The Squire 

The Knight’s son and apprentice. The Squire is curly-haired, youthfully handsome, and loves dancing and courting.

The Clerk 

The Clerk is a poor student of philosophy. Having spent his money on books and learning rather than on fine clothes, he is threadbare and wan. He speaks little, but when he does, his words are wise and full of moral virtue.

The Man of Law 

A successful lawyer commissioned by the king. He upholds justice in matters large and small and knows every statute of England’s law by heart.

The Manciple 

A manciple was in charge of getting provisions for a college or court. Despite his lack of education, this Manciple is smarter than the thirty lawyers he feeds.

The Merchant 

The Merchant trades in furs and other cloths, mostly from Flanders. He is part of a powerful and wealthy class in Chaucer’s society.

The Shipman 

Brown-skinned from years of sailing, the Shipman has seen every bay and river in England, and exotic ports in Spain and Carthage as well. He is a bit of a rascal, known for stealing wine while the ship’s captain sleeps.

The Physician 

The Physician is one of the best in his profession, for he knows the cause of every malady and can cure most of them. Though the Physician keeps himself in perfect physical health, the narrator calls into question the Physician’s spiritual health: he rarely consults the Bible and has an unhealthy love of financial gain.

The Franklin 

The word “franklin” means “free man.” In Chaucer’s society, a franklin was neither a vassal serving a lord nor a member of the nobility. This particular franklin is a connoisseur of food and wine, so much so that his table remains laid and ready for food all day.

The Reeve 

A reeve was similar to a steward of a manor, and this reeve performs his job shrewdly—his lord never loses so much as a ram to the other employees, and the vassals under his command are kept in line. However, he steals from his master.

The Plowman 

The Plowman is the Parson’s brother and is equally good-hearted. A member of the peasant class, he pays his tithes to the Church and leads a good Christian life.

The Guildsmen 

Listed together, the five Guildsmen appear as a unit. English guilds were a combination of labor unions and social fraternities: craftsmen of similar occupations joined together to increase their bargaining power, and live communally. All five Guildsmen are clad in the livery of their brotherhood.

The Cook 

The Cook works for the Guildsmen. Chaucer gives little detail about him, although he mentions a crusty sore on the Cook’s leg.

The Yeoman 

The servant who accompanies the Knight and the Squire. The narrator mentions that his dress and weapons suggest he may be a forester.

The Second Nun 

The Second Nun is not described in the General Prologue, but she tells a saint’s life for her tale.

The Nun’s Priest 

Like the Second Nun, the Nun’s Priest is not described in the General Prologue. His story of Chanticleer, however, is well crafted and suggests that he is a witty, self-effacing preacher.

Analysis of Major Characters

The Knight

The Knight rides at the front of the procession described in the General Prologue, and his story  is the first  in the sequence. The Host clearly admires the Knight, as does the narrator. The narrator seems to remember four main qualities of the Knight. The first is the Knight’s love of ideals – “chivalrie” (prowess), “trouthe” (fidelity), “honour” (reputation), “fredom” (generosity), and “curteisie” (refinement).  The second is the Knight’s impressive military career. The Knight has fought in the Crusades, wars in which Europeans travelled by sea to non-Christian lands and attempted to convert whole cultures by the force of their swords. By Chaucer’s time, the spirit for conducting these wars was dying out, and they were no longer undertaken as frequently. The Knight has battled the Muslims in Egypt, Spain, and Turkey, and the Russian Orthodox in Lithuania and Russia. He has also fought in formal duels. The third quality the narrator remembers about the Knight is his meek, gentle, manner. And the fourth is his “array,” or dress. The Knight wears a tunic made of coarse cloth, and his coat of mail is rust-stained, because he has recently returned from an expedition.

The Knight’s interaction with other characters tells us a few additional facts about him. In the Prologue to the Nun’s Priest’s Tale, he calls out to hear something more light-hearted, saying that it deeply upsets him to hear stories about tragic falls. He would rather hear about “joye and greet solas,” about men who start off in poverty climbing in fortune and attaining wealth. The Host agrees with him, which is not surprising, since the Host has mentioned that whoever tells the tale of “best sentence and moost solaas” will win the storytelling contest. And, at the end of the Pardoner’s Tale, the Knight breaks in to stop the squabbling between the Host and the Pardoner, ordering them to kiss and make up. Ironically, though a soldier, the romantic, idealistic Knight clearly has an aversion to conflict or unhappiness of any sort.

The Wife of Bath

One of two female storytellers (the other is the Prioress), the Wife has a lot of experience under her belt. She has travelled all over the world on pilgrimages, so Canterbury is a jaunt compared to other perilous journeys she has endured. Not only has she seen many lands, she has lived with five husbands. She is worldly in both senses of the word: she has seen the world and has experience in the ways of the world, that is, in love and sex.

Rich and tasteful, the Wife’s clothes veer a bit toward extravagance: her face is wreathed in heavy cloth, her stockings are a fine scarlet colour, and the leather on her shoes is soft, fresh, and brand new – all of which demonstrate how wealthy she has become. Scarlet was a particularly costly dye, since it was made from individual red beetles found only in some parts of the world. The fact that she hails from Bath, a major English cloth-making town in the Middle Ages, is reflected in both her talent as a seamstress and her stylish garments. Bath at this time was fighting for a place among the great European exporters of cloth, which were mostly in the Netherlands and Belgium. So the fact that the Wife’s sewing surpasses that of the cloth makers of “Ipres and of Gaunt” (Ypres and Ghent) speaks well of Bath’s (and England’s) attempt to outdo its overseas competitors.

Although she is argumentative and enjoys talking, the Wife is intelligent in a commonsense, rather than intellectual, way. Through her experiences with her husbands, she has learned how to provide for herself  in a world where women had little independence or power. The chief manner in which she has gained control over her husbands has been in her control over their use of her body. The Wife uses her body as a bargaining tool, withholding sexual pleasure until her husbands give her what she demands.

The Pardoner

The Pardoner rides in the very back of the party in the General Prologue and is fittingly the most marginalized character in the company. His profession is somewhat dubious—pardoners offered indulgences, or previously written pardons for particular sins, to people who repented of the sin they had committed. Along with receiving the indulgence, the penitent would make a donation to the Church by giving money to the pardoner. Eventually, this “charitable” donation became a necessary part of receiving an indulgence. Paid by the Church to offer these indulgences, the Pardoner was not supposed to pocket the penitents’ charitable donations. That said, the practice of offering indulgences came under critique by quite a few churchmen, since once the charitable donation became a practice allied to receiving an indulgence, it began to look like one could cleanse oneself of sin by simply paying off the Church. Additionally, widespread suspicion held that pardoners counterfeited the pope’s signature on illegitimate indulgences and pocketed the “charitable donations” themselves.

Chaucer’s Pardoner is a highly untrustworthy character. He sings a ballad with the hypocritical Summoner, undermining the already challenged virtue of his profession as one who works for the Church. He presents himself as someone of ambiguous gender and sexual orientation, further challenging social norms. The narrator is not sure whether the Pardoner is an effeminate homosexual or a eunuch (castrated male). Like the other pilgrims, the Pardoner carries with him to Canterbury the tools of his trade – in his case, freshly signed papal indulgences and a sack of false relics, including a brass cross filled with stones to make    it seem as heavy as gold and a glass jar full of pig’s bones, which he passes off as saints’ relics. Since visiting relics on pilgrimage had become a tourist industry, the Pardoner wants to cash in on religion in any way he can, and he does this by selling tangible, material objects – whether slips of paper that promise forgiveness of sins or animal bones that people can string around their necks as charms against the devil. After telling the group how he gulls people into indulging his own avarice through a sermon he preaches on greed, the Pardoner tells a tale that exemplifies the vice decried in his sermon. Furthermore, he attempts to sell pardons to the group – in effect plying his trade in clear violation of the rules outlined by the host.

Themes, Motifs & Symbols

Themes

Themes are the fundamental and often universal ideas explored in a literary work.

The Pervasiveness of Courtly Love

The phrase “courtly love” refers to a set of ideas about love that was enormously influential on the literature and culture of the Middle Ages. Beginning with the Troubadour poets of southern France in the eleventh century, poets throughout Europe promoted the notions that true love only exists outside of marriage; that true love may be idealized and spiritual, and may exist without ever being physically consummated; and that a man becomes the servant of the lady he loves. Together with these basic premises, courtly love encompassed a number of minor motifs. One of these is the idea that love is a torment or a disease, and that when a man is in love he cannot sleep or eat, and therefore he undergoes physical changes, sometimes to the point of becoming unrecognizable. Although very few people’s lives resembled the courtly love ideal in any way, these themes and motifs were extremely popular and widespread in medieval and Renaissance literature              and culture. They were particularly popular in the literature and culture that were part of royal and noble courts.

Courtly love motifs first appear in The Canterbury Tales with the description of the Squire in the General Prologue. The Squire’s role in society is exactly that of his father the Knight, except for his lower status,  but the Squire is very different from his father in that he incorporates the ideals of courtly love into his interpretation of his own role. Indeed, the Squire is practically a parody of the traditional courtly lover. The description of the Squire establishes a pattern that runs throughout the General Prologue, and The Canterbury Tales: characters whose roles are defined by their religious or economic functions integrate the cultural ideals of courtly love into their dress, their behaviour, and the tales they tell, in order to give a slightly different twist to their roles. Another such character is the Prioress, a nun who sports a “Love Conquers All” brooch.

The Importance of Company

Many of Chaucer’s characters end their stories by wishing the rest of the “compaignye,” or company, well. The Knight ends with “God save al this faire compaignye” (3108), and the Reeve with “God, that sitteth heighe in magestee, / Save al this compaignye, grete and smale!” Company literally signifies the entire group of people, but Chaucer’s deliberate choice of this word over other words for describing masses of people, like the Middle English words for party, mixture, or group, points us to another major theme that runs throughout  The Canterbury Tales. Company derives from two Latin words, com, or “with,” and pane, or “bread.” Quite literally, a company is a group of people with whom one eats, or breaks bread. The word for good friend, or “companion,” also comes from these words. But, in a more abstract sense, company had an economic connotation. It was the term designated to connote a group of people engaged in a particular business,                     as it is used today.

The functioning and well-being of medieval communities, not to mention their overall happiness, depended upon groups of socially bonded workers in towns and guilds, known informally as companies. If workers   in a guild or on a feudal manor were not getting along well, they would not produce good work, and the economy would suffer. They would be unable to bargain, as a modern union does, for better working conditions and life benefits. Eating together was a way for guild members to cement friendships, creating a support structure for their working community. Guilds had their own special dining halls, where social groups got together to bond, be merry, and form supportive alliances. When the peasants revolted against their feudal lords in 1381, they were able to organize themselves so well precisely because they had formed these strong social ties through their companies.

Company was a levelling concept – an idea created by the working classes that gave them more power and took away some of the nobility’s power and tyranny. The company of pilgrims on the way to Canterbury is not a typical example of a tightly networked company, although the five Guildsmen do represent this kind of fraternal union. The pilgrims come from different parts of society – the court, the Church, villages, the feudal manor system. To prevent discord, the pilgrims create an informal company, united by their jobs as storytellers, and by the food and drink the host provides. As far as class distinctions are concerned, they do form a company in the sense that none of them belongs to the nobility, and most have working professions, whether that work be sewing and marriage (the Wife of Bath), entertaining visitors with gourmet food (the Franklin), or tilling the earth (the Plowman).

The Corruption of the Church

By the late fourteenth century, the Catholic Church, which governed England, Ireland, and the entire continent of Europe, had become extremely wealthy. The cathedrals that grew up around shrines to saints’ relics were incredibly expensive to build, and the amount of gold that went into decorating them and equipping them with candlesticks and reliquaries (boxes to hold relics that were more jewel-encrusted than kings’ crowns) surpassed the riches in the nobles’ coffers. In a century of disease, plague, famine, and scarce labour, the sight of a church ornamented with unused gold seemed unfair to some people, and the Church’s preaching against greed suddenly seemed hypocritical, considering its great displays of material wealth. Distaste for the excesses of the Church triggered stories and anecdotes about greedy, irreligious churchmen who accepted bribes, bribed others, and indulged themselves sensually and gastronomically, while ignoring the poor famished peasants begging at their doors.

The religious figures Chaucer represents in The Canterbury Tales all deviate in one way or another from what was traditionally expected of them. Generally, their conduct corresponds to common medieval stereotypes, but it is difficult to make any overall statement about Chaucer’s position because his narrator is so clearly biased toward some characters – the Monk, for example—and so clearly biased against others, such as the Pardoner. Additionally, the characters are not simply satirical versions of their roles; they are individuals and cannot simply be taken as typical of their professions.

The Monk, Prioress, and Friar were all members of the clerical estate. The Monk and the Prioress live in a monastery and a convent, respectively. Both are characterized as figures who seem to prefer the aristocratic to the devotional life. The Prioress’s bejewelled rosary seems more like a love token than something expressing her devotion to Christ, and her dainty mannerisms echo the advice given by Guillaume de Loris in the French romance Roman de la Rose, about how women could make themselves attractive to men. The Monk enjoys hunting, a pastime of the nobility, while he disdains study and confinement. The Friar was a member of an order of mendicants, who made their living by travelling around and begging, and accepting money to hear confession. Friars were often seen as threatening and had the reputation of being lecherous, as the Wife of Bath describes in the opening of her tale. The Summoner and the Friar are at each others’ throats so frequently in The Canterbury Tales because they were in fierce competition in Chaucer’s  time – summoners, too, extorted money from people.

Overall, the narrator seems to harbour much more hostility for the ecclesiastical officials (the Summoner and the Pardoner) than he does for the clerics. For example, the Monk and the Pardoner possess several traits in common, but the narrator presents them in very different ways. The narrator remembers the shiny baldness of the Monk’s head, which suggests that the Monk may have ridden without a hood, but the narrator uses the fact that the Pardoner rides without a hood as proof of his shallow character. The Monk and the Pardoner both give their own opinions of themselves to the narrator—the narrator affirms the Monk’s words by repeating them, and his own response, but the narrator mocks the Pardoner for his opinion of himself.

Motifs

Motifs are recurring structures, contrasts, or literary devices that can help to develop and inform the text’s major themes.

Romance

The romance, a tale about knights and ladies incorporating courtly love themes, was a popular literary genre in fourteenth-century literature. The genre included tales of knights rescuing maidens, embarking on quests, and forming bonds with other knights and rulers (kings and queens). In particular, the romances about King Arthur, his queen, Guinevere, and his society of “knights of the round table” were very popular in England. In The Canterbury Tales, the Knight’s Tale incorporates romantic elements in an ancient classical setting, which is a somewhat unusual time and place to set a romance. The Wife of Bath’s Tale is framed by Arthurian romance, with an unnamed knight of the round table as its unlikely hero, but the tale itself becomes a proto-feminist’s moral instruction for domestic behavior. The Miller’s Tale ridicules the traditional elements of romance by transforming the love between a young wooer and a willing maiden into a boisterous and violent romp.

Fabliaux

Fabliaux were comical and often grotesque stories in which the characters most often succeed by means of their sharp wits. Such stories were popular in France and Italy in the fourteenth century. Frequently, the plot turns or climaxes around the most grotesque feature in the story, usually a bodily noise or function. The Miller’s Tale is a prime experiment with this motif: Nicholas cleverly tricks the carpenter into spending the night in his barn so that Nicholas can sleep with the carpenter’s wife; the finale occurs when Nicholas farts in Absolon’s face, only to be burned with a hot poker on his rear end. In the Summoner’s Tale, a wealthy man bequeaths a corrupt friar an enormous fart, which the friar divides twelve ways among his brethren. This demonstrates another invention around this motif—that of wittily expanding a grotesque image in an unconventional way. In the case of the Summoner’s Tale, the image is of flatulence, but the tale excels in discussing the division of the fart in a highly intellectual (and quite hilarious) manner.

Symbols

Symbols are objects, characters, figures, or colours used to represent abstract ideas or concepts.

Springtime

The Canterbury Tales opens in April, at the height of spring. The birds are chirping, the flowers blossoming, and people long in their hearts to go on pilgrimages, which combine travel, vacation, and spiritual renewal. The springtime symbolizes rebirth and fresh beginnings, and is thus appropriate for the beginning of Chaucer’s text. Springtime also evokes erotic love, as evidenced by the moment when Palamon first sees Emelye gathering fresh flowers to make garlands in honor of May. The Squire, too, participates in this symbolism. He is compared to the freshness of the month of May, in his devotion to courtly love.

Clothing

In the General Prologue, the description of garments, in addition to the narrator’s own shaky recollections, helps to define each character. In a sense, the clothes symbolize what lies beneath the surface of each personality. The Physician’s love of wealth reveals itself most clearly to us in the rich silk and fur of his gown. The Squire’s youthful vanity is symbolized by the excessive floral brocade on his tunic. The Merchant’s forked beard could symbolize his duplicity, at which Chaucer only hints.

Physiognomy

Physiognomy was a science that judged a person’s temperament and character based on his or her anatomy. Physiognomy plays a large role in Chaucer’s descriptions of the pilgrims in the General Prologue. The most exaggerated facial features are those of the peasants. The Miller represents the stereotypical peasant physiognomy most clearly: round and ruddy, with a wart on his nose, the Miller appears rough and therefore suited to rough, simple work. The Pardoner’s glaring eyes and limp hair illustrate his fraudulence.

To telle yow al the condicioun,

Of ech of hem, so as it semed me,

And whiche they weren, and of what degree,

And eek in what array that they were inne,

And at a knyght than wol I first bigynne.

        extract 4

177         He yaf nat of that text a pulled hen,
                 He gave not a plucked hen for that text
178         That seith that hunters ben nat hooly men,
                 That says that hunters are not holy men,
179         Ne that a monk, whan he is recchelees,
                 Nor that a monk, when he is heedless of rules,
180         Is likned til a fissh that is waterlees --
                 Is like a fish that is out of water --
181         This is to seyn, a monk out of his cloystre.
                 This is to say, a monk out of his cloister.

extract 5

Wherfore I biseke yow mekely, for the mercy

Of God, that ye preye for me that crist have

Mercy on me and foryeve me my giltes;/ and

Namely of my translacions and enditynges of

Worldly vanitees, the whiche I revoke in

My retracciouns:/ as is the book of Troilus;

the book also of Fame; the book of

The xxv. Ladies; the book of the duchesse;

The book of seint valentynes day of the parlement

of briddes; the tales of counterbury,

Thilke that sownen into synne;/ the book of the

Leoun; and many another book.

extract 6

Adam scriveyn, if ever it thee bifalle
Boece or Troylus for to wryten newe,
Under thy long lokkes thou most have the scalle,
But after my makyng thow wryte more trewe;
So ofte adaye I mot thy werk renewe,
It to correcte and eke to rubbe and scrape,
And al is thorugh thy negligence and rape.

        Chaucer’s Wordes unto Adam, His Owne Scriveyn

General Prologue

The General Prologue is the assumed title of the series of portraits that precedes The Canterbury Tales.

The General Prologue is the key to The Canterbury tales that narrates about the gathering of a group of people in an inn that intend to go on a pilgrimage to Canterbury, England next morning. In the General Prologue, the narrator of The Canterbury Tales, who is one of the intended pilgrims, provides more or less accurate depictions of the members of the group and describes why and how The Canterbury Tales is told. If we trust the General Prologue, Chaucer determined that each pilgrim should tell two tales on the way to Canterbury and two tales on the way back. The host of the inn offers to be and is appointed as judge of the tales as they are told and is supposed to determine the best hence winning tale. As mentioned before, The Canterbury Tales was never finished.

The conceit of the poem, as set out in the 858 lines of Middle English which make up the general prologue, is that of a religious pilgrimage. Chaucer is in the Tabard Inn, in Southwark, where he meets a motley crew of middle-class folk from various parts of England. Coincidentally, they are all on the way to Canterbury, the site of the Shrine of Saint Thomas Becket. In the Prologue, Chaucer seeks to describe their 'condition', their 'array', and their social degree like you can see in the fourth extract  (+ text 2 – extract 3)

The General Prologue seems deliberately disorganised, implying the confusion of the assorted rabble that has set out for Canterbury on that day. While the genre of the Canterbury Tales as a whole is a "frame narrative," the General Prologue constitutes an example of "Estates Satire", a genre that satirizes the corruption that occurs within the three medieval social estates (clergy, nobility, and peasantry).

The pilgrims include a knight, a squire, the knight's yeoman, a prioress, a second nun, the nun's priest, a monk, a friar, a merchant, a clerk, a sergeant of law, a franklin, a haberdasher, a carpenter, a weaver, a dyer, a tapestry weaver, a cook, a shipman, a doctor of physic, a wife of Bath, a parson, a ploughman, a miller, a manciple, a reeve, a summoner, a pardoner, the host, and a portrait of Chaucer himself. The order the pilgrims are introduced places them in a social order, describing the nobility in front, the craftsmen in the middle, and the peasants at the end. A canon and his yeoman later join the pilgrimage and tell one of the tales.

The General Prologue is the basis for Chaucer’s mirror of society. The idea that there are so many characters with their own stories to tell is representative of a real society. Societies require multiple dimensions in order to be called a society. Even the corrupt people in some way, are if not desired, certainly required in a society because it is impossible to have a completely ideal society where everyone is happy and ethical. In addition to the numerous characters, Chaucer offers the reader addition ranks and segments of society within the various tales. Rulers are represented extremely well with stories about emperors, kings, popes and bishops. These examples are of course the most obvious examples of rulers in his stories. Chaucer places less obvious but equally as important subclasses in many of his other Tales. There is the judge in the Physician’s Tale, the apprentice in the Cook’s Tale and the schoolchild in the Prioress’s Tale. This class system and representation of the various components that make up society was a way for Chaucer to accurately mirror his current society’s situation in his tales. An extremely clear example of the parallel Chaucer draws between thirteenth century England and his tales is seen through the monk.

This tremendous wealth attained by the monks quickly led to corruption among the various monasteries. The monastic orders became businesses versus places to stay close to God. Everything became extravagant and the need to be productive and help others diminished as the living conditions became more and more comfortable. Chaucer reflects this perspective in his General Prologue when he writes: (+ text 2 – extract 5)

This passage is a way for Chaucer to poke fun at monastic rules by pointing out the ridiculousness of the current situation in his society. The monk in this passage is described as a fish that is no longer surrounded by the water it needs to survive. This water is paralleled with the riches of the monk, suggesting that the riches and extravagant lifestyle is the water of the monk and without them, the monk cannot live.

After a classically poetic, highly amorous introduction, which describes the renewed reproductive energy of spring after a long winter, Chaucer introduces the first pilgrim, the "perfect, gentle knight". This crusader had travelled the length of Europe to the borders of Asia Minor defending his religion. The highest ranked of all the pilgrims; he is followed by portraits of the members of his retinue. His son, the squire, "loved hotly", and has pressed curls in his hair. He is the personification of the springtime vigour and sexual energy Chaucer embraces in his introduction and it is this energy that he seeks to highlight even in his less attractive pilgrims.

There follow short descriptions of many of the other pilgrims containing details on how they are dressed, the horses they ride and frequent sly digs at their personalities. Some of the people in the prologue have descriptions but no tale assigned to them – the knight's yeoman, the haberdasher, the carpenter, the weaver, the dyer, the tapestry-weaver, the ploughman, and the host – whereas characters such as the second nun are never described. Directly after mention of the second nun, Chaucer says "and preestes thre", but this conflicts with line 24 which says that twenty-nine pilgrims set out and there is only one nun's priest. It is assumed Chaucer intended to include a short portrait of the second nun and the priest in a later amendment.

The collection of portraits of the characters is one of the distinguishing parts of the Tales, as they have far more life and depth than most other characters in literature at this time. Not only does Chaucer describe the pilgrims' clothing, he also puts in details about their physiognomy, a familiar short-cut for medieval people in understanding a character. Appearance was linked to the balance of the four humours within a person, so the Reeve's choleric humour is shown in his tall, slender nature and suggests his likelihood to be quarrelsome.

Chaucer's satirical asides directed at these people are more muted than was typical in contemporary stories. Similar characters at that time were often savagely attacked by their narrators, leaving them little more than a cipher. When Chaucer does attack his characters it is usually by one of the other protagonists in between the tales, and frequently with not quite the obvious clichés. Only Hubert the Friar and Eglentyne the Prioress are given names during the prologue, though others are named later.

The General Prologue

An Interlinear Translation

1         Whan that Aprill with his shoures soote
                  When April with its sweet-smelling showers
2         The droghte of March hath perced to the roote,
                 Has pierced the drought of March to the root,
3         And bathed every veyne in swich licour
                 And bathed every vein (of the plants) in such liquid
4         Of which vertu engendred is the flour;
                 By which power the flower is created;
5         Whan Zephirus eek with his sweete breeth
                 When the West Wind also with its sweet breath,
6         Inspired hath in every holt and heeth
                 In every wood and field has breathed life into
7         The tendre croppes, and the yonge sonne
                 The tender new leaves, and the young sun
8         Hath in the Ram his half cours yronne,
                 Has run half its course in Aries,
9         And smale foweles maken melodye,
                 And small fowls make melody,
10         That slepen al the nyght with open ye
                 Those that sleep all the night with open eyes
11         (So priketh hem Nature in hir corages),
                 (So Nature incites them in their hearts),
12         Thanne longen folk to goon on pilgrimages,
                 Then folk long to go on pilgrimages,
13         And palmeres for to seken straunge strondes,
                 And professional pilgrims to seek foreign shores,
14         To ferne halwes, kowthe in sondry londes;
                 To distant shrines, known in various lands;
15         And specially from every shires ende
                 And specially from every shire's end
16         Of Engelond to Caunterbury they wende,
                 Of England to Canterbury they travel,
17         The hooly blisful martir for to seke,
                 To seek the holy blessed martyr,
18         That hem hath holpen whan that they were seeke.
                 Who helped them when they were sick.
19         Bifil that in that seson on a day,
                 It happened that in that season on one day,
20         In Southwerk at the Tabard as I lay
                 In Southwark at the Tabard Inn as I lay
21         Redy to wenden on my pilgrymage
                 Ready to go on my pilgrimage
22         To Caunterbury with ful devout corage,
                 To Canterbury with a very devout spirit,
23         At nyght was come into that hostelrye
                 At night had come into that hostelry
24         Wel nyne and twenty in a compaignye
                 Well nine and twenty in a company
25         Of sondry folk, by aventure yfalle
                 Of various sorts of people, by chance fallen
26         In felaweshipe, and pilgrimes were they alle,
                 In fellowship, and they were all pilgrims,
27         That toward Caunterbury wolden ryde.
                 Who intended to ride toward Canterbury.

The Knight's Tale

The Knight's Tale is the first tale from The Canterbury Tales.

The "Knight's Tale" is about two knights and close friends, Arcite and Palamon, who are imprisoned by Theseus, duke of Athens. In prison they see and fall in love with the sister of Hippolyta, Emily (Emelye). When they see this beautiful woman, they both instantly fall in love with her. The sense of competition brought about by this love causes them to hate each other. They eventually are released from prison and each try to win Emily over by any means necessary, almost killing each other while doing so. Finally they battle in a tournament over Emily (arranged by Theseus). Palamon prays to make Emily his wife, Emily prays to marry the one that really loves her, and Arcite prays for victory. Arcite wins the battle, but dies before he can claim Emily as his prize, and so Palamon marries her. The story introduces many typical aspects of knighthood such as courtly love and ethical dilemmas. The story is in the form of poetry.

Teseida delle nozze di Emilia by Giovanni Boccaccio is the source of the tale. "The Knight's Tale", though, is a very loose translation, shortening Boccaccio's 9000 line epic to a little over 2000 lines. Although some of the plot is lost, an undercurrent of philosophy is added by Chaucer, mainly inspired by the Consolation of Philosophy of Boethius which Chaucer had also translated.

John Dryden translated this story to a more modern language in the style of his time. Dryden's book is entitled "Palamon and Arcite" and is longer than the original text due to Dryden's own poetic touches.

The Knight and his tale supposedly embody the ideas of chivalry, but Chaucer's Knight, a book by Terry Jones, portrays the knight as a mercenary and far from a gallant, ethical, gentle character (though this theory has been widely disputed by the academic community). The following tale, by the Miller, is a direct antithesis to the Knight's with none of the nobility or heritage of classical mythology, but is instead rollicking, bawdy, comedic and designed to annoy the Knight.

The Two Noble Kinsmen, a play co-written by William Shakespeare and John Fletcher, is based on the tale.

The 2001 movie A Knight's Tale, starring Heath Ledger, takes its name from this story, and a fictionalized version of Chaucer appears as a character. At the end of the film, a small joke is made about this poem wherein the fictionalized Chaucer claims that he will put this particular tale into writing, referencing "The Knight's Tale" written by the real Chaucer.

A side by side verse translation into modern English

The Knight’s Tale

The Wife of Bath's Prologue and Tale

        The Wife of Bath's Tale is a tale from Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. It gives insight into the role of women in the Late Middle Ages and is probably of interest to Chaucer himself, for the character is one of his most developed ones, with her prologue twice as long as her tale. He also goes so far as to describe two sets of clothing for her in his General Prologue. She holds her own among the bickering pilgrims, and evidence in the manuscripts suggests that although she was first assigned a different, plainer tale – perhaps the one told by the Shipman – she received her present tale as her significance increased. She calls herself both Alyson and Alys in the prologue, but to confuse matters these are also the names of her 'gossib' (a close friend or gossip), whom she mentions several times, as well as many female characters throughout The Canterbury Tales.

The tale is often regarded as the first of the so-called "marriage group" of tales, which includes the Clerk's, the Merchant's and the Franklin's tales. But some scholars contest this grouping, first proposed by Chaucer scholar George Lyman Kittredge, not least because the later tales of Melibee and the Nun's Priest also discuss this theme. A separation between tales that deal with moral issues and ones that deal with magical issues, as the Wife of Bath's does, is favoured by some scholars.

The Wife of Bath’s Prologue belongs to Fragment III (Group D) of Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales and is essentially about marriage. The Wife of Bath, or Alisoun, establishes herself as an authority on marriage in the first three lines of her prologue. She tells the other pilgrims that she has been married five times and, likely anticipating the hostility of her fellow pilgrims, attempts to provide justification for her numerous marriages. Alisoun states that Christ never stated the number of times people could marry, but people assume that because he attended a single wedding, that of Cana of Galilee, individuals should only marry once. She points to how Abraham and Jacob each had more than two wives. Alisoun’s justification of her actions continues with her note that, while Christ is perfect, she is not.

Alisoun moves away from her attempts to justify her numerous nuptials and, instead, starts to discuss the men that she married and her relationships with them. According to her, three were good men and two were not. The three that were good were all old and rich. Alisoun prides herself in telling the other pilgrims that she had control over them, which she apparently achieved by lying to them. She used to tell her husbands that they said horrible things about her and women in general while in a drunken state, in order to gain the upper hand in the marital relationship. Alisoun then speaks of her fourth husband, whom she fondly remembers torturing because she felt he robbed her of her youth and beauty: it is suspiciously unclear how he died. Her fifth husband, Jankyn, is the husband that the reader is provided the most information about and whom she recounts as loving the most out of the five, despite their tumultuous relationship. She notes how she first met him at her friend’s home while still married to her fourth husband and then ended up marrying him a month after her previous husband’s death. Alisoun describes her marriage to Jankyn in detail, noting how their relationship was characterized by his desire to control her and her unwillingness to submit. It is only after a physical confrontation, the cause of which is Alisoun’s desecration of Jankyn’s “book of wikked wyves,” that he gives up his quest to control Alisoun. This is symbolized by his returning of her property (which she gave to him out of love). They live in harmony until Jankyn’s death. Thus, the Wife of Bath’s Prologue is one woman’s take on marriage based, as she says at the start, on her own “experience.”

It is crucial for any reader of the Wife of Bath’s Prologue to understand that it is working within the tradition of antifeminism. The simple fact that Alison is a widow who remarries more than once suggests she is an embodiment of antifeminist beliefs. Alisoun refutes Jovinianus’ proposition concerning virginity and marriage by noting that God would have condemned marriage and procreation if He had commanded virginity. Her decision to use God as a defence of sorts for her promiscuity is significant, as it shows how the Bible is another source that Alisoun draws upon, although her interpretations of Scripture, such as St. Paul’s view on marriage, are tailored to suit her own purpose. In addition, while it is quite obvious that Alisoun is an embodiment of antifeminist beliefs, it may be less obvious that she is also someone who resists them as well. For instance, her repeated acts of remarriage are an example of how she mocks clerical teachings concerning the remarriage of widows. Alisoun illustrates this point by describing her ability to remarry four times, and also to attract a man who is much younger than she, Jankyn. Thus, while Alisoun is portrayed as epitomizing antifeminist traditions through her very thoughts and actions, she also attacks them, in part by forcing readers to realize that it is men, including the author Chaucer, who construct them in the first place.

The theme of female dominance is fundamental to the Wife of Bath’s Prologue. The Wife’s dominance is highlighted in terms of sexual dominance. It is quite clear that she is the one who is the master of the bedroom based on the comments that she makes to her fellow pilgrims.

The manner in which Alisoun describes how she made her husbands labour, “swynke,” for her pleasure reminds one of the relative situations of men and lords. Alisoun’s husbands are depicted as peasants who must cater to her sexual appetite.

The image of the whip solidifies her role as master; she tells everyone that she is the one in charge in her household, especially in the bedroom. Alisoun appears to have an insatiable thirst for sex; the result is a satirical, sexualized depiction of a woman, but also of feudal power arrangements.

The Wife of Bath´s Tale begins with an allusion to the absence of fairies in modern day and their prevalence in King Arthur's time. She then starts in on her tale though she interrupts and is interrupted several times throughout the telling, creating several digressions. A knight in King Arthur's court rapes a woman in a corn field. By law, his punishment is death, but the queen intercedes on his behalf, and the king turns the knight over to her for judgement. The queen punishes the knight by sending him out on a quest to find out what women really want "more than anything else," giving him a year and a day to discover it and having his word that he will return. If he fails to satisfy the queen with his answer, he forfeits his life. He searches, but every woman he finds says something different, from riches to flattery.

On his way back to the queen after failing to find the truth, he sees four and twenty ladies dancing. They disappear suddenly, leaving behind an old hag whom he asks for help. She says she'll tell him the answer that will save him if he promises to grant her request at a time she chooses. He agrees and they go back to the court where the queen pardons him after he explains that what women want most is "to have the sovereignty as well upon their husband as their love, and to have mastery their man above." The old woman cries out to him before the court that she saved him and that her reward will be that he takes her as his wife and loves her. He protests, but to no avail, and the marriage takes place the next day.

The old woman and the knight converse about the knight's happiness in their marriage bed and discuss that he is unhappy because she is ugly and low-born. She discourses upon the origins of gentility, as told by Jesus and Dante, and reflects on the origins of poverty. She says he can choose between her being ugly and faithful or beautiful and unfaithful. He gives the choice to her to become whatever would bring the most honour and happiness to them; pleased with the mastery of her husband, she becomes fair and faithful to live with him happily until the end of their days.

The tale utilizes the "loathly lady" motif, the oldest examples of which are the medieval Irish sovereignty myths like that of Niall of the Nine Hostages. Arthur's nephew Gawain goes on a nearly identical quest to discover what women truly want in the medieval poem The Wedding of Sir Gawain and Dame Ragnelle, and the ballad "The Marriage of Sir Gawain", a retelling of the same story. The usual formula is simply that the woman will be a hag during the day and a beautiful woman at night. Where "The Wife's Tale" differs from these stories is the initial rape and his emphasis on faithfulness and the redemptive decision of the knight. The knight's decision of faithfulness or fairness, his choice of the most honourable option, and then his eventual reward for making the right choice, displays his chivalrous nature. Both the tale and the Wife of Bath's prologue deal with the question of who has control in relationships between men and women.

There are also theories that the Wife's tale was written to ease Chaucer's guilty conscience. It is recorded that in 1380 associates of Chaucer stood surety for an amount equal to half his yearly salary for a charge brought by Cecilia Champaign for "de rapto" rape or abduction; the same view has been taken of his Legend of Good Women, which Chaucer himself describes as a penance. It remains important, however, as with any author, to observe the difference between the author's intentions and the multiplicity of potential meanings in the text.

A side by side verse translation into modern English

The Wife of Bath’s Tale

The Franklin's Prologue and Tale

A franklin was a medieval landowner, and this pilgrim's words when interrupting the Squire are often seen as displaying his social climbing tendencies. After stopping the Squire's seemingly endless tale he obsequiously praises him and complains that his own son is not s learned until the Host tells him to tell his own tale, which he does only after warning his audience that he is a "burel" (simple) man. This is an example of the rhetorical device of diminutio as he then goes on to employ several more rhetorical devices throughout the Tale.

The story tells of a young knight named Arveragus and a young woman named Dorigen, who fall in love. In this the Tale differs from most stories of courtly love, as the lady is wooed and won by her knight at the very beginning. Unusual for an early English text, the two lovers decide that their marriage should be one of equal status, although they agree that in public, Arveragus should make decisions so as not to draw suspicion. Arveragus then travels to Britain to seek honour and fame, leaving Dorigen in France alone.

While he is gone, Dorigen falls into a deep depression. In an attempt to cheer her up her friends invite her to a garden where a squire, Aurelius, declares his love for Dorigen, who refuses his love because of her great devotion to her husband. However, she jokingly says that she will be his lover if he can make the rocks in the sea, upon which she fears her dearest's ship will crash, disappear. Aurelius pays a magician, with knowledge of astrology, to help him achieve this.

The high time comes as predicted just as Arveragus returns safely, and Dorigen is promptly confronted by both men claiming her hand. After days of lamenting and agonizing over her predicament, during which she lists numerous examples of legendary women who killed themselves rather than submit to losing their virginity (Dorigen is considering suicide to avoid losing her honor), Dorigen tells her husband of her promise to the squire. Arveragus insists that Dorigen keep her word, demanding that she go to Aurelius. (In this, Arveragus mirrors the Franklin, who aspires to an idealistic standard of nobility and "gentilesse").

However, Aurelius himself defers to nobility when he recognizes that the couple's love is true, and Arveragus noble; he releases Dorigen from her oath. The magician is so pleased that he cancels the debt that Aurelius owes him.

At the end of the Tale, the Franklin asks the rhetorical question about the three characters, "Which was the mooste fre?" (ie, "Who was the most generous?")

As the Franklin says in his prologue, his story is in the form of a Breton lai, although it is in fact based on a work by the Italian poet and author Boccaccio (in which the suitor's task is to cause a garden to flower in winter). But the Franklin adapts the style so that it is barely recognizable as a lai. The relationship between the knight and his wife is explored, continuing the theme of marriage which runs through many of the pilgrims' tales. Also, where most of the lais involved magic and fairies, the fantastical element is completely undercut when a thorough understanding of science is used to make rocks disappear rather than a spell. This is fitting for a writer like Chaucer who was well versed in the science of the time and wrote a book on the use of the astrolabe.

A side by side verse translation into modern English

The Franklin’s Tale

The Miller's Prologue and Tale

The Miller's Tale is the second of Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, told by a drunken miller to 'quit' The Knight's Tale. When the host Harry Bailey asks for something to 'quit with it', this can be taken to mean 'to balance' or to 'pay back'. While the host who wants The Monk's Tale to follow means to balance, the Miller takes the other meaning. It is a vulgar, ribald, and satirical fabliau in stark contrast to the courtly love of the Knight's Tale.

The Miller's Prologue is the first 'quit' that occurs in the tales (to 'quit' someone is to mock them in a satirical way, or in the Middle Ages, to 'quit' was to match their blow in jousting.

The prologue of the tale is in the form of a conversation between Harry Bailey (the owner of the Tabard Inn) and the Miller, whose name is Robin. While the publican wants another good heroic and majestic tale to follow the knights to tell a tale he eventually allows the Miller (just to make him shut up) to tell his tale.

The Miller is portrayed as drunk and shouting, in the voice associated with Pilate in mystery plays. The Reeve urges the Miller not to joke about his profession; the Miller replies that he does not mean to insult carpenters in general, or portray them as cuckolds, and tells his tale anyway. Thus, The Reeve's Tale follows, which 'quites' the Miller with a tale in which some students make a fool out of a dishonest and greedy miller.

The Miller's Tale is of a student (Nicholas) who persuades his jealous old landlord's much younger wife (Alisoun/Alison) to spend the night with him. They plan a way to have sex by duping John, the landlord, through an elaborate scheme in which Nicholas convinces him that he has found, through his astrology, that a flood of Biblical proportions is imminent. Their safety depends, says Nicholas, on waiting overnight in separate tubs suspended from the rafters, and to cut their tubs from the roof when the water has risen. He adds that if the landlord tells anyone else people will think he is mad (although he says this to make sure that no man tells the landlord to see sense in the matter). This comic prank allows Nicholas and Alison the opportunity to sneak down, after the landlord falls asleep, and make love.

While Nicholas and Alison lie together, the foppish and fastidious parish clerk, Absolon, who is also attracted to Alison and believes her husband to be away, appears kneeling at the bedchamber's low "shot-wyndowe" (privy vent) and asks Alison for a kiss. In the darkness, she presents her "hole" (bottom) at the window and he "kiste hir naked ers ful savorly," pausing only when he feels bristly hair. He realizes the prank and goes away enraged. He borrows a red hot coulter (a knife-like plough part) from the early-rising blacksmith. Returning, he asks for another kiss, intending to burn Alison. This time Nicholas, who had risen from bed to "pisse" in the privy, sticks his own backside out the window and lets loose an enormous fart in Absolon's face. The enraged suitor thrusts the coulter "amidde the ers" burning Nicholas' "toute" (anus) and the skin "a hands-breadth round about". In agony, Nicholas cries for water, awakening John. Hearing someone screaming for water, he thinks that the Second Flood has come, panics, and cuts himself down, falling to the floor and breaking his arm. The rest of the town awakens to find him lying in the tub. He tries to explain what he's doing in the tub, and sure enough in accordance with Nicholas' prophecy, he is considered a madman, and a cuckold too.

The tale appears to combine the motifs of two separate fabliaux, the 'second flood' and 'misdirected kiss', both of which appear in continental European literature of the period. Its bawdiness serves not only to introduce the Reeve's tale, but the general sequence of low comedy which terminates in the unfinished Cook's tale.

Some critics see Christian symbolism in the Miller's Tale. Parts of the tale are similar to the Annunciation, with Nicholas as the Angel Gabriel and Alison as Mary, while the clueless carpenter John is Joseph. Nicholas's singing of the 'Virgin's Angelus', a popular song about the Annunciation, hints at the parallel.

The character of Absolon introduces another theme of the Tales, the corruption of the Church. The Nun's Priest's Tale and The Shipman's Tale deals with the same theme; the Summoner, Friar and Pardoner personify it. Absolon is a clerk, but thinks of little except wooing young women at church:

Alison, however, does not return Absolon's affections, although she readily takes his gifts.

A third theme, that of knowledge and science, appears in several marginal comments. Nicholas is an avid astrologer (as Chaucer himself was[citation needed]), equipped with, "His Almageste, and bookes grete and smale, / His astrelabie, longynge for his art..." John the carpenter represents unintellectual laymen.

He also recounts a story (sometimes told of Thales) of an astrologer who falls into a pit while studying the stars. The issue of whether learned or unlearned faith is better is also relevant to The Prioress' Tale and The Parson's Tale.

Feminists have occasionally criticized the story for its treatment of Alison as a "prize" to be fought over by the three principal male characters and by the fact that the hot colter was intended for her after refusing Absolon's unwanted attention. Others have noted that Alison freely chooses where to bestow her affections, is a spirited character, and exercises a great deal of control over the situation. All three of her paramours end up in physical and/or emotional pain. Critics have often noted Chaucer's progressively liberal morality, this incident being perhaps the most conspicuous example.

The insecure/ambiguous manhood of the three males has also been suggested as a theme. John, being elderly, and likely impotent, obsessively fears the shame of being cuckolded. Absolon is a prissy, effeminate, fop. Nicholas, while undeniably lusty, is described as having a woman's "sleigh and ful privee" character. Absolon's choice of the coulter, after his masculinity is humiliated, represents a phallic symbol. Nicholas' substitution denies him his revenge, while, by placing himself in Alison's posture, Nicholas reveals his feminine "sleigh" side. He may consider himself fortunate to merely suffer a form of buggery with the hot iron and not complete feminization (castration) which would have been the result of the glowing blade upon his dangling privates had Absolon's aim been slightly lower.

A side by side verse translation into modern English

The Miller’s Tale

The Prioress' Prologue and Tale

The Prioress' Tale follows The Shipman's Tale in Geoffrey Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales. Because of fragmentation of the manuscripts, it is impossible to tell where it comes in ordinal sequence, but it is second in group B2, followed by Chaucer's Tale of Sir Topas. The General Prologue names the prioress as Madame Eglantine, and describes her impeccable table manners and soft-hearted ways. Her story is of a child martyr killed by Jews, a common theme in Medieval Christianity, and much later criticism focuses on the tale's anti-Semitism.

The story begins with an invocation to the Virgin Mary, then sets the scene in Asia, where a community of Jews live in a Christian city. A seven-year-old school-boy, son of a widow, is brought up to revere Mary. He teaches himself the first verse of the popular Medieval hymn 'Alma Redemptoris Mater' (nurturing mother of the redeemer); though he does not understand the words, an older classmate tells him it is about Mary. He begins to sing it every day as he walks to school through the Jews' street.

Satan, 'That hath in Jewes' heart his waspe's nest', incites the Jews to murder the child and throw his body on a dungheap. His mother searches for him and eventually finds his body, which begins miraculously to sing the 'Alma Redemptoris'. The Christians call in the provost of the city, who has the Jews drawn by wild horses and then hung. The boy continues to sing throughout his burial service until the holy abbot of the community asks him why he is able to sing. He replies that although his throat is cut, he has had a vision in which Mary laid a grain on his tongue and he will keep singing until it is removed. The abbot removes the grain and he dies.

The story ends with a mention of Little Saint Hugh of Lincoln, another child martyr supposedly slain by Jews.

The story is an example of a class of stories, popular at the time, known as the miracles of the Virgin such as those by Gautier de Coincy. It also blends elements of common story of a pious child killed by the enemies of the faith; the first example of which in English was written about William of Norwich.

The tale is related to various blood libel stories common at the time, distributed by the Church. Chaucer's attitude toward the tale is less clear.

The Prioress' French accent is a sign of social climbing, yet her speech is modeled after the Stratford-at-Bow school, not the more desirable Parisian French. She makes her oaths by "Seint Loy" (St. Eligius), the patron of, among others, goldsmiths. Her overzealousness to her pet dogs and to mice killed in traps is perhaps misdirected in a nun, who might otherwise be serving the poor. The bangle she wears on her wrist bears the Virgilian motto 'Amor vincit omnia' (love conquers all) is also a rather dubious maxim for a nun which perhaps takes the place of a rosary and further illustrates her fascination with courtly love. In addition, the fact that Chaucer chose to set her tale in elaborate rhyme royal, a rhyme scheme generally used in tales of courtly love, seems at odds with her tale's apparent emphasis on simple piety. Thus her portrayal as a character is not wholly positive. In fact, the language and structure of her prologue and tale have led many literary critics to argue that Chaucer is mocking the Prioress.

The Jews were banished from England in 1290, one hundred years before the tale was written and so it had to be set in some un-named Asian city. This means that the Jews are an even more distant and unfocused evil quality than is usual in such stories. The Physician's Tale is a similar story about an innocent child persecuted by an implacable enemy but without the anti-Semitic tone.

Her tale, with its emphasis on infantile faith, balances the Shipman's story of a too-sophisticated monk who sleeps with the wife of a friend. Both tales seem to describe extremes, faith without knowledge versus knowledge without faith.

While this says nothing about Chaucer's actual attitude toward Jews (and antipathy would have been entirely typical of the period), the Prioress's opinions should not be read as his own.

In “Chaucer’s Prioress and the Sacrifice of Praise,” Sherman Hawkins opposes the Pardoner and the Prioress as the representatives of two radically different forms of religious expression. The Pardoner’s materialistic orientation, his suspicious relics and accusations of sinfulness (evident in his conflict with the Host) align him with Paul’s account of the “outward Jew, circumcised only in the flesh,” rather than the “inward” Jew of Romans 2.29 who is spiritually rather than literally circumcised: “the Pardoner, outwardly ‘a noble ecclesiaste,’ actually reduces Christianity to a code as rigorous and external as the Old Law itself.

In “Criticism, Anti-Semitism and the Prioress’s Tale,” L.O. Fradenburg argues for a radical rereading of the binary oppositions between Christian and Jew, Old Law and New Law, literal and spiritual in the tale in part to critique the “patristic exegesis” of Sherman Hawkins’ earlier interpretation. Fradenburg challenges Hawkins’ “elision of the ‘literal’ or ‘carnal’ level of meaning in favour of the spiritual” by lingering on those moments in the tale, such as the “litel clergeon’s” transgressive rote memorization of the Alma Redemptoris, in which this elision fails, or succeeds only ambiguously . She traces the impossibility of ultimately separating and opposing Old and New Laws in the "Prioress’s Tale" back to a tension between letter and spirit internal to Paul’s discourse itself. Fradenburg gestures at a larger project of turning “patristic exegesis” against itself to read the contradictions revealed by the theological subtext of the tale.

Fradenburg notes that the substance of the "Prioress’s Tale" can be linked to the “’child-host’ miracle of the later Middle Ages” which involved the substitution of the “actual body of the Christ Child” for the Eucharist. Such miraculous tales appear designed to reaffirm faith in the miraculous efficacy of transubstantiation in the face of the pressure of Lollard dissent, which broadly questioned the spiritual status of the Eucharist and other Church traditions: relics, clerical celibacy, even pilgrimages. According to Fradenburg, these miraculous tales operate according to a paradoxical logic in which “visuality and carnality are used to insist upon the superior virtue of that which is beyond sight and flesh.” Yet such sacramental materialism remains vulnerable to the kinds of abuse more obviously associated with the Pardoner; Fradenburg cites the case of Little Saint Hugh of Lincoln, the historical episode of the young English Christian supposedly martyred by Jews, tacked onto the end of the "Prioress’s Tale." The tale was intimately bound up with attempts to “aggrandise the spiritual prestige and temporal revenues” of the local cathedral. Thus the vivid “carnality” of the miraculous tale of martyrdom could be deployed as easily to enhance the worldly prominence of the Church as to refute heretical doctrine by reaffirming the spiritual legitimacy of Church rituals. The "Prioress's Tale" may approximate the greedy exploitation of spirituality embodied by The Pardoner's Prologue and Tale insofar as it is indebted to tales of martyrdom circulated for worldly profit.

The Friar's Prologue and Tale

The Friar's Tale is one of The Canterbury Tales told by Huberd the Friar.

The tale is a satirical and somewhat bitter attack on the profession of summoner – an official in ecclesiastical courts who summons people to attend – and in particular The Summoner one of the other people on the pilgrimage. Unlike the Miller and the Reeve who tell tales which irritate the other and do not get on for that reason, the Friar and the Summoner seem to have a longstanding hatred between them.

The Friar is of one of the mendicant orders which travelled about preaching and making their livings by begging. Part of the animosity between the two characters may be due to these orders of friars, which had been formed relatively recently, interfering with the work of the summoners. Once a friar had taken confession and given absolution to someone they could not be charged in an ecclesiastical court with the same sin. The Friar's tale has no clear original source like many of Chaucer's tales but it is of a type which is common and always seems popular; "the corrupt official gets a comeuppance".

Even in the prologue the Friar begins by making some pointedly rude remarks about summoners in general. The host reprimands him, saying he should be mindful of his social standing and that he should get straight on with his tale. The Summoner merely replies that he should say what he wants to say but that he will pay him back in kind.

The tale itself continues in the denigration of summoners with its vivid description of the work of a summoner. This includes bribery, corruption and extortion and a network of pimps and wenches acting as informants making this important clerical office seem more like a 14th century protection racket. The Friar then says that luckily friars are not under summoners' jurisdiction but the Summoner snaps back that neither are women in styves, meaning brothels; which were licensed to operate by archdeacons.

Once the Friar resumes, he tells of one particular summoner who meets a yeoman one day who asks him what he does, but rather than admit he is a summoner, an odious profession, he says he is a bailiff. The yeoman says he is also a bailiff and when the summoner asks how he makes money the yeoman admits in any underhand way he can. The summoner agrees this is also how he works and then, in the spirit of confession, the yeoman says that he is actually a daemon from hell. This does not seem to overly concern the summoner and he simply asks how he is able to take human form.

They come upon a man damning his stubborn horses to hell; when they do move he praises God. The summoner criticises the daemon for not capitalising on this situation and taking the horses, but the daemon explains that since the man was not sincere in cursing the horses he couldn't take them. The summoner then says that he will show the daemon how it is done, by extorting money from an old widow woman even though he admits there is nothing legitimate to summon her for. They go to her house and the summoner demands a bribe from her or he will summon her to court on a spurious charge. He also demands she give him her new pan in payment for an old debt, falsely claiming he paid a fine to get her off a charge of adultery. The old woman is so incensed she damns the summoner unless the summoner repents his false charges; the summoner refuses to repent and the daemon, obligingly, takes his soul – and the old woman's pan – to hell.

The Man of Law's Prologue and Tale

The Man of Law's Tale is the fifth of the Canterbury Tales.

The Man of Law tells a Romance tale of a Christian princess named Custance or Shannon who is betrothed to the Syrian Sultan on condition that he convert to Christianity. The Sultan's mother connives to prevent this and has her set adrift on the sea. Her adventures and trials continue after she is shipwrecked on the Northumberland coast.

Northumberland is a pagan country where the King, Alla, eventually converted to Christianity. His evil mother intercepts and falsifies a letter between the couple, which results in Constance returning to Rome with their son. The King goes to Rome and in the end the couple return to Northumberland. Alla dies shortly after, and the baby boy becomes the King.

The tale is based on a story within the Chronicles of Nicholas Trivet but the major theme in the tale, of an exiled princess uncorrupted by her suffering, was common in the literature of the time. Her tale is also told in John Gower's Confessio Amantis, and both are similar to the verse Romance Emare.

Although Chaucer receives some praise and also criticism from his own character with favourable mentions of The Book of the Duchess and The Legend of Good Women; in the Man of Law's prologue he seems to spare most of his opprobrium for John Gower. Two of the tales which he dislikes, Canace and Apollonius of Tyre, involve incest, as did the some versions of the story. Chaucer based this tale on the Nicholas Trivet story from his Chronicle. Gower though had recorded all these stories. Chaucer is, perhaps, with friendly banter, trying to goad his friend and fellow writer into a storytelling challenge.

The tale is meant to be a morally uplifting story and is similar to hagiography, or stories of the saints' lives, which were common popular literature of the time. Custance or Constance as her name suggests is constant to her Christian religion despite the attacks and testing it receives from the pagans and heathens she meets on her travels. The Man of Law tells his story in a pompous over-blown style as if he is defending Custance in a court of law. He also uses many rhetorical figures, taken straight from the manuals of rhetoric of the day, to emphasize Custance's noble character – as well as the teller's lawyerly – and state her case.

The various manuscripts of the tales differ on the structure of the tales with some containing the Man of Law's epilogue and others not. In the epilogue, the host invites the Parson but he is interrupted before he can begin and a different speaker tells the next tale. The Summoner, the Squire and the Shipman are listed as interrupters in the different manuscripts but it is the Shipman whose character best matches the rude remarks although the mention of his "joly body" sounds closer to something the wife of Bath may say. What it probably shows is that Chaucer had not fixed his overall plan. There are also hints, with his claim he will talk in prose despite rhyming throughout, that the Man of Law originally told the Tale of Melibee before he was assigned Custance's tale late in the composition of the tales.

The Merchant's Prologue and Tale

The Merchant's Prologue and Tale subtly mocks antifeminist literature like that of Theophrastus. The tale also shows the influence of Boccaccio, Andreas Capellanus, Statius and Cato. Though several of the tales are sexually explicit by modern standards, this one is especially so.

The naming of the characters in this Tale is riddled with satirical nomenclature: Januarie, the main character, is named in conjunction with his equally seasonal wife May, representing their individual characters: January is 'hoor and oolde', sharing the bare and unfruitful characteristics of his title month, whereas his youthful and 'fresshe' wife represents the spring seasons. Damyan, the treacherous squire is given the same name as the son of Satan, and is incidentally likened to 'the n'addre' (an adder) by The Merchant. this has particular relevance when considering the parallel between this tale, and the Biblical tale of Adam and Eve. Januarie's brothers are named Placebo and Justinus: the former a sycophant, whose name in Latin means 'I will please', and the latter a fairer man with no individual motive.

The main character, Januarie, is a 60-year-old knight from the town of Pavie, in Lombardy. Pavie was a place known for having many banks and brothels (thus revealing certain characteristics about both the merchant and Januarie).

When Januarie decides that he wants to marry, he consults his two brothers Placebo, who enourages him and Justinus, who opposes marriage from his own experience. Janueary, a vain man, hears only the flattery of his pleasing brother Placebo.

Januarie marries May, a teenage girl, largely out of lust and under the guise of religious acceptablilty. It is unknown why May accepts Januarie, however, it is safe to assume that she did it for social betterment and possibly some kind of inheritance, Januarie being a rich man.

A squire in Januarie's court, called Damyan, falls in love with May and writes a letter to her confessing his desires. She becomes intrigued by this man and plots to have sex with him. Januarie is struck blind shortly after he is married, although it is not explained why, though Chaucer's suggestion is that his vanity, lust and general immorality have rendered him both morally, and literally blind. This disability, however, spiritually serves January well. His language and character, formerly lewd and repulsive, becomes beautiful and gentle love poetry, and his love for May evolves to more than just lust and desire. On June 8, Januarie and May enter a garden that he has built for her (suggestions arising both from traditional romantic literature and, of course, The Old Testament's Garden of Eden). Meanwhile, Damyan has sneaked in and waits for May in a pear tree, symbolising, it has been said, the Apple from Genesis. The Biblical relevance of The Merchant's Tale allows it to become more than just a bawdy fabliaux, but a reinforcement of age-old Christian morality.

May requests a pear from the tree and Januarie, old and blind, and therefore unable to reach, stoops to allow May to climb onto his back helself. Here Chaucer evokes enormouse pathos for the 'hoor and oolde' January, soon to cuckolded by a manipulative female figure, a clear reversal from the horrific and repulsive figure painted by the narrator in the opening presentation of the man. In the tree, May is promptly greeted by her young lover Damyan, and they begin to have sex, described by the Merchant in a particularly lewd and bold fashion: 'And sodeynly anon this Damyan / Gan pullen up the smok, and in he throng.' Indeed, the narrator does apologise for this explicit description, addressing the pilgrims saying: 'Ladyes, I prey yow that ye be nat wrooth; I kan nat glose, I am a rude man --'

Two Gods are, at this moment, watching the adultery: Pluto and 'Proserpina'. They begin a passionate argument about the scene, in which Pluto condemns women's morality. He decides that he will grant Januarie his sight back, but Proserpina will grant May the ability to talk her way out of the situation. Indeed, Proserpina's promise that 'alle wommen after' should be able to excuse themselves easily from their treachery, can be seen as a distinctly anti-feminist comment from the narrator, or perhaps even from Chaucer himself. This presentations of these two characters and their quarrel exposes many elements of the tale, namely the argument between man and woman and the religious confusion in the tale which calls of both the ancient and the Christian Gods. Indeed the presence of these particular Gods has individual relevance when related to this tale: as the legend goes, Proserpina, a young and much loved Goddess, was stolen and held captive by Pluto, the King of the Underworld, who forced her to marry him.

Januarie regains his sight just in time to see his wife and Damyan engaged in intercourse, but May successfully convinces him that his eyesight is deceiving him because it has only just been restored and that she is only 'struggling with a man' because she was told this would get Januarie's sight back.

The tale ends in an unorthodox manner: the fooled January and May continue to live happily with the promise of a baby soon to be born. However, Chaucer does not end the tale entirely happily: a darker suggestion is there, as May tells January that he may be mistaken on many more occasions ('Ther may ful many a sighte yow bigile'), indicating that, perhaps, her infidelity will not stop there.

One question that splits critics is whether the Merchant's tale is a fabliau. Typically a description for a tale of carnal lust and frivolous bed-hopping, some would argue that especially the latter half of the tale, where Damyan and May make love in the tree with the blind Januarie at the foot of the tree, represents fabliau. Derek Pearsall, for example, is in favour of this view. Some critics, such as Maurice Hussey, feel that Chaucer offers a great deal more sophistication and philosophical insight to put this on a level above fabliau.

The Squire's Prologue and Tale

"The Squire's Tale" is a tale in Geoffrey Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales. It is deliberately unfinished; it comes first in group F, followed by the Franklin's interruption, prologue and tale. The Squire is the Knight's son, a novice warrior and lover with more enthusiasm than experience. His tale is an epic romance, which, if completed, would probably have been longer than rest of the Tales combined. It contains many literary allusions and a great deal of vivid description.

A king named Cambuskan ruled with two sons (Algarsyf eldest, and Cambalo) and a daughter, Canace. At the twentieth anniversary of Cambuskan's reign, he holds a feast, and a strange knight approaches him bearing gifts (a motif common in Arthurian legends). These are a brass steed with the power of teleportation, a mirror which can reveal the minds of the king's friends and enemies, a ring which confers understanding of the language of birds (as some legends say King Solomon owned), and a sword which deals deadly wounds that only its touch can heal again (both the spear of Achilles and the Holy Lance have these powers). After much learned discussion of the gifts, digressing into astrology, the first part of the tale ends. A subplot of the tale deals with Canace and her ring. Eagerly rising the next morning, she goes on a walk and discovers a grieving falcon. The falcon tells Canace that she has been abandoned by her false lover, a tercelet (male hawk), who left her for a kite. (In Medieval falconry, kites were birds of low status.) Canace heals the bird and builds a mew for it, painted blue for true faith within and green for falsity, with pictures of deceitful birds, outside. (This image is based on the Romance of the Rose.) The second part ends with a promise of more to come. Cambuskan's sons and the quest of Cambalo to win Canace as his wife. (The prologue hints that Canace and her brothers commit incest, as in John Gower's version of the story.) However, it is extremely unlikely that Chaucer ever intended to finish the tale. Instead the Franklin breaks into the very beginning of the third section with elaborate praise of the Squire's gentility (the Franklin is somewhat of a social climber) and proceeds to his own tale.

Early critics were very admiring of the Squire's tale and John Milton, for instance, was convinced that Chaucer had intended to conclude it. Many authors of the Elizabethan period, including Edmund Spenser, did use characters from the tale in their own works, or even write complete continuations of it.

In general, modern critics have not paid it much attention and consider it Chaucer's way of poking gentle fun at the young Squire's love of romance literature, frequent and somewhat pretentious digressions, and lack of narrative self-control. Compared to the tale told by his father, the Knight, which is formal, serious, and complete, the rambling and fantastical story shows the Squire's inexperience. Some critics see the gifts as symbolic of the powers of poetry, which the Squire is still learning to use.

There is no clear source for the story but is instead a collection of ideas and themes from many romances as befits the Squire, a lover of such literature. The extravagant details on eastern kingdoms come from the travel literature of the time such as Giovanni da Pian del Carpini, Simon of St Quentin and John Mandeville.

Chaucer's Retraction

Is the final section of The Canterbury Tales. It is written as an apology, where Chaucer asks for forgiveness for the vulgar and unworthy parts of this and other past works, and seeks absolution for his sins. (+ text – extract 6)

It is not clear whether these are sincere declarations of remorse on Chaucer's part, a continuation of the theme of penitence from the Parson's Tale or simply a way to advertise the rest of his works. It is not even certain if the retraction was an integral part of the Canterbury Tales or if it was the equivalent of a death bed confession which became attached to this his most popular work.

Retractions, often called palinodes, were common in works of this era and the bawdy nature of some of Chaucer's works possibly needed forgiveness. The book of the Leoun seems to be an unknown work by Chaucer. With the retraction he manages to call an end and complete what is otherwise regarded as an unfinished work.

Geoffrey Chaucer

Illustration from Cassell's History of England

published circa 1902

        Portrait of Chaucer as a Canterbury pilgrim

in the Ellesmere manuscript of The Canterbury Tales

Canterbury Tales Woodcut 1484

Quiz

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1. Why are the pilgrims going to Canterbury?

(A) To meet King Henry III

(B) To see a medieval mystery play

(C) To worship the relics of Saint Thomas Becket

(D) Because they are tourists

2. According to the Wife of Bath, what do women most desire?

(A) Sovereignty over their husbands

(B) True love

(C) Perfect beauty

(D) Great wealth

3. When does The Canterbury Tales take place?

(A) In the Renaissance

(B) In pre-Christian Britain

(C) During the Norman invasion

(D) In the late fourteenth century

4. For which social classes did Chaucer write?

(A) The nobility

(B) All levels of society

(C) Illiterate peasants

(D) Merchants

5. How many Canterbury Tales are there?

(A) 80

(B) 24

(C) 16

(D) 50

6. At what time of year does the pilgrimage take place?

(A) In the dead of winter

(B) In the height of spring

(C) “That time of year when yellow leaves … hang upon these boughs”

(D) On a midsummer night

7. Which characters are connected to the Church?

(A) The Prioress, the Monk, the Friar, the Summoner, and the Pardoner

(B) The Miller, the Ploughman, and the Reeve

(C) The Knight, the Manciple, and the Host

(D) The Canon’s Yeoman, the Physician, the Clerk, and the Man of Law

Key Facts

full title  

The Canterbury Tales

author  

Geoffrey Chaucer

type of work  

Poetry & two tales are in prose: the Tale of Melibee and the Parson’s Tale.

genres  

Narrative collection of poems; character portraits; parody; estates satire; romance; fabliau

language  

Middle English

time and place written  

Around 1386–1395, England

date of first publication  

Sometime in the early fifteenth century

publisher  

Originally circulated in hand-copied manuscripts

narrator  

The primary narrator is an anonymous, a member of the pilgrimage, who is not described.

The other pilgrims narrate most of the tales.

point of view  

In the General Prologue, the narrator speaks in the first person, describing each of the pilgrims                              as they appeared to him. Though narrated by different pilgrims, each of the tales is told from an omniscient third-person point of view, providing the reader with the thoughts as well as actions of the characters.

tone  

The Canterbury Tales incorporates an impressive range of attitudes toward life and literature.                        The tales are by turns satirical, elevated, pious, earthy, bawdy, and comical. The reader should not                accept the naïve narrator’s point of view as Chaucer’s.

SETTING TIME AND PLACE

The late fourteenth century, after 1381 – The Tabard Inn; the road to Canterbury

protagonists  

Each individual tale has protagonists, but Chaucer’s plan is to make none of his storytellers superior to others; it is an equal company. In the Knight’s Tale, the protagonists are Palamon and Arcite;                              in the Miller’s Tale, Nicholas and Alisoun; in the Wife of Bath’s Tale, the errant knight and the loathsome hag; in the Nun’s Priest’s Tale, the rooster Chanticleer.

major conflict  

The struggles between characters, manifested in the links between tales, mostly involve clashes between social classes, differing tastes, and competing professions. There are also clashes between the sexes, and there is resistance to the Host’s somewhat tyrannical leadership.

rising action  

As he sets off on a pilgrimage to Canterbury, the narrator encounters a group of other pilgrims and joins them. That night, the Host of the tavern where the pilgrims are staying presents them with a storytelling challenge and appoints himself judge of the competition and leader of the company.

climax 

Not applicable (collection of tales)

falling action  

After twenty-three tales have been told, the Parson delivers a long sermon. Chaucer then makes a retraction, asking to be forgiven for his sins, including having written The Canterbury Tales.

themes  

The pervasiveness of courtly love, the importance of company, the corruption of the church

motifs  

Romance, fabliaux

symbols  

Springtime, clothing, physiognomy

Bibliography:

Brendlová, Světla; Novy, Jan Lindsey: A Survey of Literature in English-Speaking Countries. Bratislava: Nakladateľstvo Fraus, 1999.

Chaucer, Geoffrey: The Canterbury tales. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1969.

Chaucer, Geofrey: Canterburské poviedky. Bratislava: Mladé letá, 1969.

Chaucer, Geoffrey: Canterburské povídky. Praha: Naše vojsko, 1959.

Silvánová, Barbara: Angličtina. Bratislava: Enigma jr., 1994.

Thornley, G.C.; Roberts, Gwyneth: An Outline of English Literature.

Essex: Longman Group, 2001.

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http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext00/cbtls12.txt

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Geoffrey_Chaucer&printable=yes

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