Canterbury TalesGeoffrey Chaucer

Chaucer's unfinished late work, begun around 1387 and worked on until his death in 1400. The frame: a company of some thirty pilgrims, gathered at the Tabard Inn in Southwark, agrees to ride to the shrine of Thomas Becket at Canterbury and to tell tales along the way, two going and two returning. Only twenty-four tales survive, and the return journey is never written.

The General Prologue introduces the pilgrims in a gallery of social portraits: the Knight and his Squire, the Prioress, the Monk, the Wife of Bath, the Miller, the Pardoner, the Parson, the Plowman, and the rest. Each portrait carries a moral judgment without ever stating one, through the accumulation of telling detail: the Monk's greyhounds, the Pardoner's fake relics, the Wife's five husbands. The tales then issue from their tellers in a way that doubles the characterization. The Knight tells a high romance of Palamon and Arcite. The Miller answers with a bawdy fabliau. The Wife of Bath argues her case on sovereignty in marriage and illustrates it with an Arthurian tale. The Pardoner preaches against avarice while confessing his own. The Parson closes the book with a prose treatise on penitence.

Chaucer assembles, in the Canterbury Tales, a portrait of medieval English society across every estate and vocation, handled with a comic realism the tradition had not seen before.