Chaucer and The Canterbury Tales

The Canterbury Tales is a collection of twenty-four stories that runs to over 17,000 lines written in Middle English by Geoffrey Chaucer between 1387 and 1400. The tales (mostly written in verse, although some are in prose) are presented as part of a story-telling contest by a group of pilgrims as they travel together from London to Canterbury to visit the shrine of Saint Thomas Becket at Canterbury Cathedral. The prize for this contest is a free meal at the Tabard Inn at Southwark on their return. It has been suggested that the greatest contribution of The Canterbury Tales to English literature was the popularization of the English vernacular in mainstream literature, as opposed to French, Italian or Latin. English had, however, been used as a literary language centuries before Chaucer's time, and several of Chaucer's contemporaries—John Gower, William Langland, and Julian of Norwich also wrote major literary works in English. (Wikipedia)

REQUIRED READING:

Read: Prologue (p. 1), The Knight's Tale (p. 26), The Miller's Tale (p. 88),
The Reeve's Tale (p. 108), The Wife of Bath Prologue (p. 258), The Wife of Bath's Tale (p. 281).

RECOMMENDED READING READING:

There is no better book on the Fourteenth Century than A Distant Mirror. Barbara Tuchman was a master of history. And as the reviewers say: this is her greatest book. It is a big book and you will be sad when it ends.

Reviews:

“Beautifully written, careful and thorough in its scholarship . . . What Ms. Tuchman does superbly is to tell how it was. . . . No one has ever done this better.”—The New York Review of Books

“A beautiful, extraordinary book . . . Tuchman at the top of her powers . . . She has done nothing finer.”—The Wall Street Journal

“Wise, witty, and wonderful . . . a great book, in a great historical tradition.”—Commentary

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next class THURSDAY JAN 9, 2025.