Key themes
- Social England in miniature — every rank and its pretensions
- Storytelling as a form of self-revelation
- The gap between what people profess and what they are
About this book
A collection of stories written in Middle English by Geoffrey Chaucer at the end of the 14th century. The tales (mostly in verse, although some are in prose) are told as part of a story-telling contes
Written in the 1380s and 1390s, the Tales were left incomplete at Chaucer's death in 1400. They established English as a language capable of serious literature, challenging Latin and French in the process.
Discussion questions
- The pilgrimage frame means each tale is told by a specific social type. How does Chaucer use the gap between the teller and their tale — does the Knight's Tale reveal the Knight?
- The Miller's Tale immediately follows and subverts the Knight's Tale. What does this juxtaposition say about Chaucer's attitude to social hierarchy and to literary genre?
- The Wife of Bath's prologue is one of the great early feminist documents — a woman laying out her case for female authority with wit and force. How does the tale that follows it complicate or develop her argument?
- Chaucer's narrator is conspicuously naive — praising everyone the reader can see is corrupt or hypocritical. What is this ironic persona doing — and how does it create meaning without explicit authorial judgment?
- The Canterbury Tales is unfinished — Chaucer never completed the return journey. Does this incompleteness matter? What would a completed collection have changed about how we read it?
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