Sacred Texts: Legends and Sagas

The Canterbury Tales and Other Works of Chaucer (Middle E...

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*The Canterbury Tales* is a late 14th-century narrative frame poem by Geoffrey Chaucer, written in Middle English verse, belonging to the tradition of estate satire and pilgrimage literature. The General Prologue opens in spring as a narrator joins a group of roughly thirty pilgrims gathering at the Tabard Inn in Southwark before travelling to Canterbury's shrine of Thomas Becket. The bulk of the prologue is a series of vivid portrait sketches introducing each pilgrim — a Knight of genuine chivalric virtue, a worldly Monk who ignores his Rule to hunt and feast, a hypocritical Friar who sells easy absolution, a fastidious Prioress more moved by a trapped mouse than by religious duty, a Merchant who hides his debts behind solemn talk of profit, and a threadbare Oxford Clerk who loves books above all worldly gain. What makes the work distinctive is Chaucer's ironic double-voicing: the naive narrator praises nearly everyone as "worthy," while the details he provides quietly expose vanity, corruption, and social pretension across every rank of medieval English society. Readers drawn to sharp social comedy, medieval English life rendered in concrete sensory detail, and a foundational text of the English literary canon will find the Prologue an unusually rewarding entry point into the full collection.

The Canterbury Tales and Other Works of Chaucer (Middle E...

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