Study guide
The Canterbury Tales
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Overview
- Author
- Geoffrey Chaucer (c. 1343–1400), London vintner's son, courtier, diplomat, Controller of Customs in the port of London and Clerk of the King's Works
- Composed
- c. 1387–1400, in London and Kent; left unfinished at Chaucer's death. The Knight's Tale and the Second Nun's Tale were written earlier and absorbed into the collection
- Language
- Middle English of London, late fourteenth century
- Manuscripts
- More than eighty manuscripts and fragments survive. The two most important, Hengwrt (Aberystwyth, National Library of Wales, Peniarth 392D) and Ellesmere (San Marino, Huntington Library, EL 26 C 9), were both copied, it is believed, by the scribe Adam Pinkhurst; Caxton printed the work c. 1476
- Structure
- A General Prologue and twenty-four tales with their links, preserved in ten 'fragments' (I–X) whose final order Chaucer never fixed; the Cook's and Squire's Tales are incomplete and two tales are cut short by other pilgrims
- Frame
- Some thirty pilgrims meet at the Tabard inn in Southwark; the Host, Harry Bailly, proposes a story-telling game on the road to Canterbury, with a free supper for the teller of the best tale
- Verse and prose
- Mostly pentameter couplets (the later 'heroic couplet'); rhyme royal in the Man of Law's, Clerk's, Prioress's and Second Nun's Tales; an eight-line stanza in the Monk's Tale; tail-rhyme in Sir Thopas; prose in Melibee and the Parson's Tale
- Genres
- Chivalric romance, fabliau, saint's life, miracle of the Virgin, exemplum, beast fable, 'tragedy' in the medieval sense, Breton lay, moral treatise and penitential sermon
- This edition
- The site's text is D. Laing Purves's edition (1870s) with modernized spelling; it abridges the Parson's Tale and omits the Retraction. References in this guide follow the fragment and line numbers of the Riverside Chaucer
- Key themes
- Fellowship and rivalry; social estates and their failings; marriage, 'maistrie' and 'sovereynetee'; gentilesse; authority and experience; the uses and abuses of religion; fortune and providence; game and earnest in storytelling
Context
Geoffrey Chaucer was born in London in the early 1340s, the son of John Chaucer, a prosperous wine merchant. As a boy he served as a page in the household of Elizabeth, countess of Ulster, wife of Edward III's son Lionel; in 1359–60 he fought in the Hundred Years War, was captured near Reims and was ransomed, the king himself contributing £16. He married Philippa de Roet, a lady of the queen's household whose sister Katherine Swynford became the mistress and finally the wife of John of Gaunt. Chaucer's career was that of a royal servant, not a professional poet: he was an esquire of the king's household, went on diplomatic missions to France, Flanders and Italy, served from 1374 to 1386 as Controller of the wool custom in the port of London, living in a house over Aldgate, sat in Parliament for Kent in 1386 and was Clerk of the King's Works from 1389 to 1391. He died in 1400 and was buried in Westminster Abbey, the first occupant of what became Poets' Corner (Pearsall 1992).
Chaucer's poetry was formed by three literatures. His early dream visions, The Book of the Duchess, The House of Fame and The Parliament of Fowls, draw on French courtly poetry, above all the Roman de la Rose, which he partly translated (Muscatine 1957). His journeys to Genoa and Florence in 1372–73 and to Milan in 1378 brought him into contact with the work of Dante, Petrarch and Boccaccio. From Boccaccio he took the plots of Troilus and Criseyde (from the Filostrato) and the Knight's Tale (from the Teseida); the Clerk's Tale follows Petrarch's Latin version of Boccaccio's story of Griselda; and Dante is quoted and named in the Monk's Tale, the Second Nun's Prologue and elsewhere. Latin learning, from Boethius's Consolation of Philosophy, which he translated, to the antifeminist writings of Jerome, runs through everything he wrote (Wallace 1997) (Correale 2005).
The Canterbury Tales occupied Chaucer from about 1387 until his death. He was then a member of the London and Westminster world of lawyers, clerks, merchants and courtiers, a 'mixed' audience that Paul Strohm has seen reflected in the social variety of the pilgrims themselves (Strohm 1989). The work is a frame narrative, a collection of stories held together by a fictional occasion, a form familiar from Boccaccio's Decameron and from Gower's Confessio Amantis; Chaucer's innovation is to make the tellers as interesting as the tales and to let them quarrel, interrupt and answer one another. Earlier pieces, the story of Palamon and Arcite and the life of St Cecilia, both listed among his works in the Prologue to The Legend of Good Women, were taken into the new scheme as the Knight's and the Second Nun's Tales.
The work survives unfinished. The Host's plan, two tales from each pilgrim on the way to Canterbury and two on the way back, is far from completed: we have twenty-four tales, some of them incomplete, and the pilgrims never reach the cathedral. The text exists in ten 'fragments', groups of tales joined by links, whose order varies from manuscript to manuscript. The Hengwrt manuscript is generally thought to preserve the best text, and the Ellesmere manuscript, a luxurious book with portraits of the pilgrims, the most satisfactory order; both appear to have been copied early in the fifteenth century by the same scribe, identified by Linne Mooney in 2004 (published 2006) as the London scrivener Adam Pinkhurst, though that identification has since been questioned (Mooney 2006) (Warner 2018). The Riverside Chaucer, the standard edition, follows Ellesmere's order and numbers the lines fragment by fragment (Benson 1987).
The text on this site is the nineteenth-century edition of D. Laing Purves, which modernizes much of Chaucer's spelling ('Aprilis', 'showers swoot', 'very perfect gentle knight') while keeping his grammar, vocabulary and metre. It follows the Ellesmere order of tales, prints a few links in places where modern editors do not, abridges the Parson's Tale with bracketed summaries and leaves out the Retraction. Students should read the quotations here as an aid to the poem's sense and sound, and use a modern edition such as the Riverside for close textual work; the references given in this guide are to the Riverside's fragments and lines.
Plot overview
In April, when spring sets people longing to go on pilgrimage, the narrator is staying at the Tabard inn in Southwark, across the Thames from London, when a company of 'nine and twenty' pilgrims arrives, all bound for the shrine of St Thomas Becket at Canterbury. He describes them one by one, from the Knight to the Pardoner. The Host, Harry Bailly, offers to ride with them as guide and judge: each pilgrim will tell tales on the road, and the teller of the best, judged for 'sentence' and 'solaas', instruction and pleasure, will have a supper at the others' expense. Lots are drawn and the Knight begins.
The Knight's romance of Palamon and Arcite pleases the gentlefolk, but the drunken Miller insists on 'quiting' it with a bawdy story about a carpenter, which in turn offends the Reeve, himself a carpenter, who answers with a tale against a miller. The Cook begins a tale of a London apprentice that breaks off. Next day the Man of Law tells the pious history of Constance. The Wife of Bath then delivers a long autobiographical prologue on her five marriages and a tale of a knight who must learn what women most desire; along the way the Friar and the Summoner quarrel, and each tells a tale against the other's profession.
The Clerk answers the Wife with the story of patient Griselda, the Merchant with a cynical tale of an old husband deceived by his young wife, and, after the Squire's unfinished romance, the Franklin with a Breton lay about a marriage in which neither partner seeks mastery. The Physician tells a grim Roman story of a father who kills his daughter to save her chastity, and the Pardoner, after confessing his own frauds, preaches against avarice in the tale of three rioters who go looking for Death. A long fragment follows: the Shipman's comic tale of a merchant's wife, the Prioress's miracle of the Virgin, the narrator's own two tales, the parody romance Sir Thopas (cut off by the Host) and the prose Melibee, the Monk's string of tragedies (cut off by the Knight) and the Nun's Priest's beast fable of the cock and the fox.
Near the end of the road the Second Nun tells the life of St Cecilia; a Canon and his Yeoman ride up, and when the Canon flees in shame the Yeoman exposes the frauds of alchemy. At a village called 'Bob-up-and-down' the Manciple tells how the crow became black. As the sun sets the Host calls on the Parson to end the game, and the Parson, refusing to tell fables, delivers a long prose treatise on penitence and the seven deadly sins, 'to knit up all this feast, and make an end'. In the manuscripts Chaucer's Retraction follows, in which he asks forgiveness for those of his works, including 'the tales of Canterbury' that tend towards sin.
Part by part
Part 1: The General Prologue
Fragment I, lines 1–858
Summary
The poem opens with an eighteen-line sentence on the coming of spring: April showers, the west wind, the young sun and the singing birds stir nature and people alike, and folk long to go on pilgrimage, especially to Canterbury, to the 'holy blissful martyr' Thomas Becket. The narrator, lodging at the Tabard in Southwark, falls in with a company of pilgrims and resolves to describe each of them: the Knight, his son the Squire and their Yeoman; the Prioress with her nun and priests; the Monk, the Friar, the Merchant, the Clerk, the Man of Law, the Franklin and five Guildsmen with their Cook; the Shipman, the Physician, the Wife of Bath, the Parson and his brother the Plowman; and finally the Miller, the Manciple, the Reeve, the Summoner and the Pardoner.
The narrator apologizes in advance for repeating the pilgrims' coarse words, since a reporter must tell the truth, and for not setting people 'in their degree'. The Host, a large, merry and bossy man, proposes the game of story-telling, appoints himself judge and makes everyone swear to obey him. Next morning, at the watering place of St Thomas, the pilgrims draw lots; by chance, or by the Host's management, the cut falls to the Knight.
Analysis
The portraits belong to the medieval tradition of estates satire, in which society is surveyed by its 'estates' or occupations and each is measured against its ideal. Jill Mann showed how closely Chaucer follows the conventions of that tradition and how he changes them: the narrator rarely condemns, describes each pilgrim through the pilgrim's own sense of excellence and often omits the victims of their abuses, leaving the reader to make the moral judgment (Mann 1973). Only a few figures, the Knight, the Clerk, the Parson and the Plowman, are drawn as ideals, and even these are presented with a selective, admiring eye.
The narrator himself is one of the work's great inventions. E. Talbot Donaldson distinguished 'Chaucer the pilgrim', a genial, impressionable observer who calls the Monk's opinion 'good' and admires the Friar, from Chaucer the poet, whose irony works through that naivety (Donaldson 1954). The apology at the end, in which the narrator claims he must repeat every word 'as nigh as ever he can', lets Chaucer disclaim responsibility for the churls' tales to come while raising a serious question about the relation of words to truth.
Christ spake Himself full broad in Holy Writ, And well ye wot no villainy is it. Eke Plato saith, whoso that can him read, The wordes must be cousin to the deed.
'Christ himself spoke very plainly in Scripture, and you know well there is no coarseness in that. Plato also says, for anyone who can read him, that words must be akin to the deed.' The narrator's defence of plain reporting, borrowed from Boethius and the Roman de la Rose.
Part 2: The Knight's Tale
Fragment I, lines 859–3108
Summary
Theseus, duke of Athens, returning from his conquest of the Amazons with his bride Hippolyta and her sister Emily, makes war on Creon of Thebes and finds two young Theban princes, the cousins Palamon and Arcite, wounded among the dead. He imprisons them for life. From their tower they see Emily walking in a garden and both fall in love with her, and their sworn brotherhood turns to rivalry. Arcite is released on condition of exile, returns in disguise to serve in Emily's household, and is discovered fighting Palamon, who has escaped, in a grove. Theseus spares them and decrees a tournament a year later, with a hundred knights on each side, to decide who shall marry Emily.
Theseus builds a great amphitheatre with temples to Venus, Mars and Diana. Palamon prays to Venus for Emily, Arcite to Mars for victory, Emily to Diana to remain unmarried. The quarrel among the gods is settled by Saturn: Arcite wins the tournament, but a fury sent from Saturn startles his horse, and he dies of his injuries after commending Emily to Palamon. Years later, after a speech on the order of the universe by the 'First Mover', Theseus marries Palamon to Emily.
Analysis
Chaucer adapts Boccaccio's long epic Teseida into a philosophical romance, shortened, tightened and given a Boethian frame: the characters struggle to make sense of a world ruled, as it seems, by Fortune and the cruel gods, and Theseus's final speech argues that the chain of love binds all things in order and that the wise man will 'make a virtue of necessity'. Critics divide over whether that answer satisfies. Charles Muscatine saw the tale's formal symmetry as an image of noble order imposed on chaos; others have stressed how much suffering the ordering requires, and Lee Patterson has read the tale as a meditation on the limits of chivalric ideology at a time when English chivalry was under strain (Muscatine 1957) (Patterson 1991).
Palamon and Arcite are almost indistinguishable, and that is the point: the tale is less interested in individual character than in patterns of desire, rivalry and pageantry. As the first tale, told by the highest-ranking pilgrim, it sets the standard of 'sentence' and 'solaas' that the others will imitate, parody or reject.
What is this world? what aske men to have? Now with his love, now in his colde grave Al one, withouten any company.
'What is this world? What do people ask to have? Now with one's love, now in one's cold grave, alone, without any company.' Arcite's dying speech, the tale's most direct statement of human helplessness.
Part 3: The Miller's Tale
Fragment I, lines 3109–3854
Summary
Everyone praises the Knight's Tale, and the Host invites the Monk to follow, but the Miller, drunk and loud, insists on telling a tale to 'quite' the Knight's. He warns that it concerns a carpenter and his wife; the Reeve objects, and the narrator excuses himself for repeating the Miller's 'churl's tale', telling squeamish readers to 'turn over the leaf'.
In Oxford, John, a rich old carpenter, has married Alison, a lively girl of eighteen. Their lodger Nicholas, a clerk who studies astrology, persuades John that a second Flood is coming and that he must hang three tubs from the roof to save himself, his wife and Nicholas; while John sleeps in his tub, Nicholas and Alison go to bed together. Absolon, the fastidious parish clerk, comes to woo Alison at her window and is tricked into kissing her backside; he returns with a hot coulter from the smithy, Nicholas tries the same joke on him and is branded, his cry of 'Water!' wakes John, who cuts his rope and crashes to the floor, and the neighbours laugh him to scorn as a madman.
Analysis
The Miller's Tale is a fabliau, a short comic tale of trickery and sex, but one of extraordinary formal skill: the two plots, Nicholas's Flood and Absolon's wooing, meet in a single cry. It 'quites' the Knight's Tale point by point. Again two young men desire one woman, but the courtly language of the romance is applied to a carpenter's wife, and the Knight's ordered cosmos becomes the 'privity' of God that John, Nicholas's dupe, is warned not to pry into.
The tale's religious parody, Nicholas playing Noah's prophet to a carpenter named John who has a young wife, recalls both the mystery plays and the Joseph of the Nativity. The Miller's Prologue introduces the dramatic principle that drives the whole work: the order of the Host's game breaks down as soon as a churl insists on his turn, and the narrator's apology ('men should not make earnest of game') admits that comedy will be part of the record (Pearsall 1985).
An husband should not be inquisitive Of Godde’s privity, nor of his wife.
'A husband should not be inquisitive about God's secrets, nor about his wife's.' The Miller's proverb, with its double meaning of privity, announces the tale's joke about forbidden knowledge.
Part 4: The Reeve's Tale
Fragment I, lines 3855–4324
Summary
The Reeve, Osewold, a carpenter by trade, takes the Miller's Tale as a personal insult. He first delivers a gloomy sermon on old age, in which lust and pride survive the body's power, and then promises to pay the Miller back in his own coin.
Symkyn, a proud and thieving miller of Trumpington near Cambridge, steals corn from the students of a Cambridge college. Two northern students, John and Aleyn, come to watch him grind their corn; he unties their horse, and while they chase it he steals half a bushel of their flour. Benighted, they lodge with the miller, his wife, their marriageable daughter and their baby. In the night Aleyn sleeps with the daughter and John, by moving the cradle, tricks the wife into his bed. In the confusion the miller is beaten by his own wife, and the students ride away with their flour.
Analysis
The Reeve's Tale is a fabliau of revenge, harsher and more mechanical than the Miller's. The Reeve's pleasure is in humiliation: the miller's pride in his wife's lineage (she is the parson's daughter) and his plans for his daughter's marriage are both destroyed. The two students speak a northern dialect, the first sustained use of regional dialect for comic effect in English literature.
The Reeve's Prologue gives the collection its first voice of age and bitterness. The 'quiting' of one tale by another becomes a pattern of social and professional antagonism, and the tale closes with the proverb that sums up the logic of the whole game of answering: the beguiler is himself beguiled.
We olde men, I dread, so fare we; Till we be rotten, can we not be ripe; We hop away, while that the world will pipe;
'We old men, I fear, are like that: we cannot be ripe until we are rotten; we go on dancing as long as the world plays the pipe.' The Reeve's image, from the medlar fruit, of desire outliving capacity.
Part 5: The Cook's Tale
Fragment I, lines 4325–4422
Summary
The Cook, Roger of Ware, is delighted with the Reeve's story and promises a tale of his own; the Host, Harry Bailly (named here for the only time), teases him about his stale pies and the flies in his shop, and the Cook threatens to tell a tale about an innkeeper in return.
Perkyn Revelour, a London apprentice victualler, loves dancing, dice and taverns more than his master's shop, and pilfers to pay for his pleasures. His master finally dismisses him, reasoning that a rotten apple should be thrown out before it spoils the rest. Perkyn moves in with a companion of his own sort, whose wife keeps a shop for appearance's sake and earns her living as a prostitute. There the tale breaks off.
Analysis
The Cook's Tale is the shortest fragment in the collection, fifty-eight lines of the tale proper, and its incompleteness has been explained in several ways: Chaucer may have abandoned it, lost it or meant to cancel it. Several fifteenth-century manuscripts fill the gap with the romance of Gamelyn, which is not by Chaucer. What survives brings the first fragment from romance through fabliau to the streets of contemporary London, a movement down the social scale that some critics read as a deliberate decline.
The tale's London setting, with its apprentices, ridings and taverns, gives the only glimpse of Chaucer's own city in the Tales, and its unfinished state is a reminder that the 'design' of the work is partly the creation of its editors.
And had a wife, that held for countenance A shop, and swived for her sustenance.
'And who had a wife that kept a shop for the sake of appearances, and made her living by sex.' The last lines of the Cook's Tale and of Fragment I.
Part 6: The Man of Law's Tale
Fragment II, lines 1–1162
Summary
On 28 April, at ten in the morning, the Host reminds the company that time is wasting and calls on the Man of Law. The lawyer complains that Chaucer has already told every good story, in a list that recalls The Legend of Good Women, and says that he will speak in prose, though he then tells his tale in rhyme royal stanzas.
Constance, daughter of the emperor of Rome, is married to the Sultan of Syria on condition that he become a Christian; his mother has him and his followers slaughtered at the wedding feast and sets Constance adrift in a rudderless boat. She lands in pagan Northumbria, converts the constable and his wife, is falsely accused of murder, is saved by a miracle and marries King Alla. While Alla is at war, his mother forges letters that have Constance and her baby son set adrift again. After years at sea she returns to Rome, where Alla, on pilgrimage, finds her, and their son Maurice becomes emperor.
Analysis
Chaucer's source is the Anglo-Norman chronicle of Nicholas Trevet, also used by Gower in the Confessio Amantis. He turns the story into a hagiographic romance, adding apostrophes, laments and prayers that emphasize Constance's passive endurance and the providence that protects her. Her helplessness is both the measure of her holiness and, for modern readers, a problem: Carolyn Dinshaw and others have analysed how the tale makes a woman the object of exchange between men and nations (Dinshaw 1989).
The Introduction raises textual puzzles. The Man of Law's promise of prose suggests that he was once assigned a different tale, perhaps the Melibee, and the Epilogue (printed in the site's text before the Shipman's Tale) links this fragment to a following tale in ways that bear on the order of the whole (Benson 1981).
Women are born to thraldom and penance, And to be under mannes governance.
'Women are born to servitude and suffering, and to be under the rule of men.' Constance's lament as she leaves Rome for her arranged marriage.
Part 7: The Wife of Bath's Prologue and Tale
Fragment III, lines 1–1264
Summary
Alison of Bath begins by setting her own experience against the authorities who condemn marriage and remarriage. She has had five husbands since she was twelve; she argues that Scripture commands increase and nowhere forbids a widow to marry again, and claims for herself the use of her body. She describes how she dominated her first three husbands, rich and old, by nagging and false accusation; how her fourth was a reveller; and how her fifth, Jankin, a clerk twenty years younger, read to her every night from his 'book of wicked wives' until she tore pages from it and he struck her deaf in one ear. They made peace when he gave her 'the bridle', and after that, she says, they lived happily. The Friar and the Summoner squabble during her performance.
Her tale is set in King Arthur's time. A knight who has raped a maiden is condemned to death, but the queen grants him a year to discover what women most desire. An old, ugly woman gives him the answer, sovereignty, in return for his promise to grant her next request, which is that he marry her. On their wedding night she lectures him on true gentilesse, poverty and age, then offers him a choice between a wife old and faithful or young and perhaps unfaithful. When he leaves the choice to her, she becomes young, beautiful and faithful, and they live in joy.
Analysis
The Wife's Prologue is a dramatic monologue built from the antifeminist tradition itself: Jerome's Against Jovinian, Theophrastus, Walter Map and the speech of La Vieille in the Roman de la Rose. Kittredge saw her as a powerful character whose challenge to clerical authority provokes the 'Marriage Group' (Kittredge 1912). Later critics have debated whether she subverts antifeminism or confirms it. Dinshaw reads her as a woman who glosses the masculine text against itself, Elaine Tuttle Hansen as a figure in whom the male fear of the feminine is finally contained, and Lee Patterson as a voice that exploits the rhetoric of misogyny to claim a self (Dinshaw 1989) (Hansen 1992) (Patterson 1991).
The tale, a version of the 'loathly lady' story also told in Gower's Tale of Florent, is a wish-fulfilment in which a rapist is educated, not punished. The hag's sermon on gentilesse, drawn from Dante and Boethius, insists that nobility lies in virtue, not birth, and makes the Wife a mouthpiece for one of the collection's central moral ideas.
Experience, though none authority Were in this world, is right enough for me To speak of woe that is in marriage:
'Experience, even if there were no authority in the world, is quite enough for me to speak of the woe that is in marriage.' The Wife's opening sets lived experience against the written authority of the clerks.
Part 8: The Friar's Tale
Fragment III, lines 1265–1664
Summary
The Friar, who has been scowling at the Summoner, compliments the Wife of Bath and then announces a tale about a summoner, an officer who summoned offenders to the church courts. The Host keeps the peace, and the Summoner promises to answer.
A corrupt summoner, riding out to extort money from a poor widow, meets a yeoman in green who turns out to be a devil from hell. They swear brotherhood and agree to share their winnings. They see a carter whose horses are stuck in the mud curse them to the devil, but the devil takes nothing, because the carter did not mean it. The summoner then tries to extort twelve pence from the old widow; she curses him to the devil unless he repents, and since she means it and he will not repent, the devil carries him off to hell.
Analysis
The tale is an exemplum on intention: a curse counts only if it comes from the heart. The devil, cheerful, well informed and professionally competent, is more honest than the summoner, whose greed blinds him to the danger he is in. The Friar turns the satire of a profession into a theological joke.
The Friar–Summoner quarrel shows the 'quiting' principle at its most personal. Both men belong to institutions that, as Mann showed, were common targets of estates satire, and each exposes the other's abuses while unconsciously revealing his own (Mann 1973).
“Brother,” quoth he, “wilt thou that I thee tell? I am a fiend, my dwelling is in hell,
'Brother, do you want me to tell you? I am a fiend; my home is in hell.' The devil's frank self-revelation, which the summoner hears without alarm.
Part 9: The Summoner's Tale
Fragment III, lines 1665–2294
Summary
The Summoner, trembling with rage, begins with a short story: an angel once showed a friar the place of friars in hell, under the tail of Satan. Then he tells his tale.
Friar John, a begging friar in Yorkshire, preaches for money, collects gifts and promises prayers, erasing the donors' names from his tablet as soon as he leaves. He visits Thomas, a sick man who has given generously to the friars without result, flatters his wife, orders a fine dinner and delivers a long sermon against anger. When he asks for a gift, the exasperated Thomas tells him to reach under his buttocks and gives him a fart, on condition that it be shared equally among the friars of his convent. The friar complains to the lord of the village, whose squire Jankin solves the 'problem' of division with a cartwheel and thirteen friars.
Analysis
The tale is a scatological parody of the friars' learning and of the Pentecost, when the Holy Spirit descended on the apostles with a sound of wind. Friar John's sermon, full of misapplied examples, is satire of the preaching of the mendicant orders, whose wealth and privileges were controversial in Chaucer's England.
Friar John's praise of 'glossing', interpretation that overrides the letter of Scripture, makes him a comic cousin of the Wife of Bath and the Pardoner; Dinshaw's study of Chaucer's 'sexual poetics' makes glossing central to his treatment of reading and interpretation (Dinshaw 1989).
Glosing is a full glorious thing certain, For letter slayeth, as we clerkes sayn.
'Glossing (interpretation) is a glorious thing, certainly, for the letter kills, as we clerks say.' Friar John's misuse of St Paul (2 Corinthians 3:6) to justify bending the text to his profit.
Part 10: The Clerk's Tale
Fragment IV, lines 1–1212
Summary
The Host tells the quiet Clerk of Oxford to tell a merry tale in plain style. The Clerk says he will tell a story learned at Padua from Francis Petrarch, the laureate poet, who is now dead.
Walter, marquis of Saluzzo, yields to his people's request that he marry, choosing Griselda, the daughter of a poor villager, on condition that she never resist his will. To test her he takes away her daughter and then her son, letting her believe that they are to be killed; then he pretends to divorce her, sends her home in her shift and brings her back to prepare the palace for his new bride. Griselda never complains. Finally Walter reveals that the 'bride' is her daughter, restores both children and takes her back with honour. The Clerk adds that the story is not meant to make wives imitate Griselda, and closes with an ironic Envoy advising wives to fight back.
Analysis
Chaucer follows Petrarch's Latin version of the last tale in Boccaccio's Decameron, with help from a French translation, and like Petrarch he makes the story an allegory of the soul's patience under God's testing. The tale's power lies in the tension between this allegorical reading and the human outrage of the literal story: the narrator himself calls Walter's tests needless and cruel. The concluding stanzas and the Envoy, which address the Wife of Bath by name, turn the tale into a reply in the debate about marriage (Kittredge 1912) (Cooper 1989).
The rhyme royal stanza, the formal language and the Clerk's careful withdrawal from the literal moral make the tale a test case for reading the Canterbury Tales: it can be read as a religious exemplum, as a political fable about tyranny, or as a drama of the Clerk's own response to the Wife (Wallace 1997).
This story is said, not for that wives should Follow Griselda in humility, For it were importable though they would;
'This story is told, not so that wives should follow Griselda in humility, for that would be unbearable even if they wished to.' The Clerk's correction of the literal moral.
Part 11: The Merchant's Tale
Fragment IV, lines 1213–2418
Summary
The Merchant picks up the Clerk's last words: he has known weeping and wailing enough in two months of marriage to the worst of wives, and his tale will show the difference between Griselda and a real wife.
January, a knight of Pavia of sixty, decides to marry, after a long praise of marriage and a debate with his brothers Placebo and Justinus. He chooses May, a girl of low birth, and after a wedding night described with grotesque detail, his squire Damian falls ill with love for her. May answers Damian's letter, and when January goes blind she arranges to meet Damian in January's private garden, in a pear tree. Pluto, watching with Proserpina, restores January's sight at the moment of betrayal; Proserpina gives May the wit to persuade him that he has seen wrongly, and January is content.
Analysis
The Merchant's Tale is a fabliau with the elaborate rhetoric of a moral treatise, and its tone is among the most debated in the collection: savage, bitter, comic or simply cynical. The opening praise of marriage, delivered in a voice that may be January's or the Merchant's, sets the patterns of the marriage debate against one another. The garden, the blindness and the tree make January's self-deception a parody of Eden and of the courtly love garden of the Roman de la Rose.
For Kittredge the tale is the Merchant's bitter answer to the Clerk; later critics have been less certain that its narrator is the disillusioned husband of the Prologue, since the tale's misogyny is that of the long clerical tradition and its intelligence is the poet's own (Kittredge 1912) (Cooper 1989).
Weeping and wailing, care and other sorrow, I have enough, on even and on morrow,
'Weeping and wailing, care and other sorrow, I know enough of, evening and morning.' The Merchant echoes the last line of the Clerk's Envoy and turns it into personal complaint.
Part 12: The Squire's Tale
Fragment IV, lines 2419–40, and Fragment V, lines 1–670
Summary
The Host, after the Merchant's Tale, complains of his own wife and turns to the Squire. The Squire begins an oriental romance: at the birthday feast of Cambyuskan, king of Tartary, a strange knight arrives with magic gifts, a horse of brass that can fly anywhere, a mirror that reveals treachery, a ring that gives understanding of the language of birds and a sword whose wounds only it can heal.
Next morning the king's daughter Canace, wearing the ring, meets a female falcon who tells her how she was betrayed by a faithless tercelet. Canace nurses her. The Squire announces the adventures to come, which promise to be very long, but the tale stops at the beginning of the third part.
Analysis
The Squire's Tale is a romance of wonders, full of rhetorical display and digression, suited to the young lover of the General Prologue. Whether the Franklin's following words interrupt it out of tact or merely praise it after Chaucer abandoned it is disputed. Some critics take the tale as a gentle comedy of youthful excess, others as an exotic romance Chaucer did not live to finish.
The falcon's story of betrayed love is the emotional centre of the tale, and its line on pity in a gentle heart, which Chaucer uses several times, links the Squire to the language of noble feeling that the Franklin will take up.
That pity runneth soon in gentle heart (Feeling his simil’tude in paines smart),
'That pity flows quickly in a noble heart, which feels its own likeness in another's sharp pains.' The falcon's words to Canace; the first line is one of Chaucer's favourite sayings.
Part 13: The Franklin's Tale
Fragment V, lines 673–1624
Summary
The Franklin praises the Squire's eloquence and wishes his own son were like him; the Host cuts him short. The Franklin says he will tell a Breton lay, though he is a plain man who never learned rhetoric.
In Brittany the knight Arveragus marries Dorigen, promising never to exercise mastery over her except in name, while she promises to be faithful. While he is away in England, Dorigen grieves over the black rocks of the coast that threaten his return. The squire Aurelius declares his love; she rejects him, but adds, in play, that she will love him if he removes the rocks. Aurelius pays a clerk of Orleans to make the rocks seem to disappear by magic and claims his reward. Dorigen, in despair, considers suicide; Arveragus tells her she must keep her word. Aurelius, moved by her distress and the knight's honour, releases her; the clerk in turn releases Aurelius from his debt. The Franklin asks which of the three was the most generous.
Analysis
Kittredge saw the Franklin's Tale as the resolution of the 'Marriage Group': against the Wife's sovereignty of women, the Clerk's obedient wife and the Merchant's deceived husband, it presents a marriage of mutual patience in which love 'will not be constrained by mastery' (Kittredge 1912). The reading remains influential but has been challenged: Arveragus keeps the reputation of mastery, and his command to Dorigen that she must keep her promise is hardly a sign of equality.
The tale's subject is 'trouthe', the keeping of one's word, and 'fredom', generosity. Its closing question, modelled on the love-questions in Boccaccio's Filocolo, invites the pilgrims and readers to judge, and shows how a gentry figure like the Franklin aspires to the values of the nobility.
Love will not be constrain’d by mastery. When mast’ry comes, the god of love anon Beateth his wings, and, farewell, he is gone.
'Love will not be constrained by mastery. When mastery comes, the god of love at once beats his wings, and farewell, he is gone.' The Franklin's comment on the marriage of Arveragus and Dorigen.
Part 14: The Physician's Tale
Fragment VI, lines 1–286
Summary
The site's text, which calls the teller the Doctor, opens with a short link in square brackets, found in some manuscripts but generally rejected by modern editors. The Physician tells a story from Roman history. Virginia, the beautiful and virtuous fourteen-year-old daughter of the knight Virginius, is seen by the corrupt judge Appius, who lusts after her and bribes a churl, Claudius, to claim falsely that she is his runaway slave.
Appius rules in Claudius's favour. Virginius, rather than surrender his daughter to shame, cuts off her head and brings it to the judge. The people rise against Appius, who kills himself in prison; Virginius pleads for Claudius, who is exiled. The Physician closes with the warning to forsake sin before it forsakes you.
Analysis
Chaucer's source is the Roman de la Rose, which in turn follows Livy. He expands the description of Virginia's virtue and adds a digression on the duty of governesses and parents to guard the young, but leaves the moral of the story uncertain. The exemplum seems to praise Virginius's act, yet the final lines turn it into a sermon against sin in general, and the Host's response in the next part shows him moved chiefly by pity.
The tale has often been judged one of Chaucer's least successful; some critics have tried to read its awkwardness as a satire of the Physician, others as a deliberate study in the extremes of a religious ideal of chastity.
Therefore I rede you this counsel take, Forsake sin, ere sinne you forsake.
'Therefore I advise you to take this counsel: forsake sin, before sin forsakes you.' The Physician's closing moral.
Part 15: The Pardoner's Prologue and Tale
Fragment VI, lines 287–968
Summary
The Host is distressed by the Physician's Tale and asks the Pardoner for something merry; the gentles insist on a moral tale. In his Prologue the Pardoner explains how he preaches: always on the text 'Greed is the root of all evil', with papal bulls, Latin phrases and false relics, a sheep's shoulder-bone and a pillow-case he claims as Our Lady's veil, and all for money. He knows he is preaching against his own vice.
His tale begins with a sermon against gluttony, drunkenness, gambling and swearing. Three rioters in a Flemish tavern hear that Death has killed their friend and swear to kill Death. An old man who longs to die directs them to a tree, where they find a heap of gold. The youngest goes to town for bread and wine and poisons the wine; the other two kill him on his return and then drink the poison. The Pardoner then offers his relics to the pilgrims, inviting the Host to kiss them first. The Host answers with a brutal insult, and the Knight makes them kiss and be friends.
Analysis
The Pardoner's Tale is a perfect exemplum told by a self-confessed hypocrite, and its interest lies in the gap between the teller and the tale. The Old Man, who knocks on the ground, his 'mother's gate', asking to be let in, is one of the most haunting figures in Chaucer; he has been read as Death, as Old Age, as the Wandering Jew and as the old Adam of St Paul.
The General Prologue's description of the Pardoner as 'a gelding or a mare' has prompted readings of his body and sexuality. Dinshaw read him as a figure of lack who seeks a fullness of meaning he cannot possess, Patterson as a figure of a self locked in confession without repentance. His final offer to the pilgrims, after admitting his frauds, remains psychologically puzzling (Dinshaw 1989) (Patterson 1991).
For mine intent is not but for to win, And nothing for correction of sin.
'For my intention is only to make money, and not at all to correct sin.' The Pardoner's frank account of his own motives.
Part 16: The Shipman's Tale
Fragment II, lines 1163–90 (the Man of Law's Epilogue), and Fragment VII, lines 1–434
Summary
The site's text opens with the link that modern editions print as the Man of Law's Epilogue. The Host asks the Parson for a tale and, hearing him object to swearing, mocks him as a 'Lollard'; another pilgrim, here the Shipman, refuses to let him preach and offers a merry tale instead.
A rich merchant of Saint-Denis near Paris has a beautiful, extravagant wife and a friend, the monk Daun John, who claims him as a cousin. The wife tells the monk that she needs a hundred francs to pay for her clothes; the monk borrows a hundred francs from the merchant, gives them to the wife and sleeps with her while the merchant is away at Bruges. When the merchant asks the monk about the loan, the monk says he has repaid it to the wife; she tells her husband that she spent it on clothes and offers to repay him in bed.
Analysis
The Shipman's Tale is a fabliau in which money and sex are interchangeable currencies. It has an analogue in Boccaccio's Decameron (VIII.1 and VIII.2), and lines that speak of 'us' wives suggest that Chaucer first wrote it for a woman, perhaps the Wife of Bath. Its cool, mercantile tone has led critics to read it as a satire of a commercial society in which everything has its price.
The opening link, which Ellesmere omits and in which the speaker is named differently in different manuscripts, is a key piece of evidence in the arguments over the order of the tales; the Lollard jibe also gives one of the work's rare references to contemporary religious controversy (Benson 1981).
Thus endeth now my tale; and God us send Taling enough, until our lives’ end!
'Thus my tale ends; and God send us tallying enough until the end of our lives.' 'Taling' puns on the tally of debts and on sex, the two currencies of the tale.
Part 17: The Prioress's Prologue and Tale
Fragment VII, lines 435–690
Summary
The Host praises the Shipman's tale and politely asks the Prioress to speak. She begins with a prayer to the Virgin, asking for help to speak like a child of twelve months old.
In a city in Asia, a seven-year-old Christian schoolboy learns the hymn Alma redemptoris mater and sings it on his way to and from school through the Jewish quarter. Satan stirs the Jews to murder him, and they throw his body into a privy. His mother searches for him, and the boy, though his throat is cut, sings the hymn aloud. The provost has the Jews tortured and executed. Before the abbot the boy explains that the Virgin has placed a 'grain' on his tongue; when it is removed he dies. The Prioress closes with a prayer to Hugh of Lincoln, a boy said to have been murdered by Jews in 1255.
Analysis
The Prioress's Tale is a miracle of the Virgin, written in rhyme royal, and one of Chaucer's most beautiful exercises in a pathetic, devotional style. It is also a version of the blood libel, the false accusation that Jews murdered Christian children, and the most troubling poem in the collection for modern readers. Jews had been expelled from England in 1290, so the tale's antisemitism concerns an imagined enemy.
Critics have argued whether Chaucer shared the tale's prejudice or exposed it through the Prioress, whose General Prologue portrait shows her sentimental tenderness for mice and dogs. The essays collected by Sheila Delany place the tale in the history of medieval attitudes to the Jews and caution against easy defences (Delany 2002).
O younge Hugh of Lincoln! slain also With cursed Jewes, — as it is notable, For it is but a little while ago, —
'O young Hugh of Lincoln, slain also by accursed Jews, as is well known, for it was only a little while ago.' The Prioress links her tale to an English blood libel of 1255.
Part 18: The Tale of Sir Thopas
Fragment VII, lines 691–918
Summary
After the Prioress's miracle everyone is solemn, until the Host notices the narrator, who stares at the ground, and asks who he is and teases him about his shape. He asks for a tale, and the narrator says that he knows only an old rhyme.
Sir Thopas, a knight of Flanders, handsome and dainty, rides out through a forest full of spices and birdsong, falls in love with an elf-queen he has never seen and meets the giant Sir Olifaunt, who throws stones at him; he flees, promising to return armed. The narrator describes his arming at length, and Thopas sets off again. Before any adventure occurs the Host stops the tale.
Analysis
Sir Thopas parodies the English tail-rhyme romances of the fourteenth century, with their stock formulas, catalogues and jingling stanzas. The joke is that Chaucer, the greatest poet of the company, assigns himself the worst performance. The verse becomes progressively more broken, collapsing into lines of a single foot, before the Host interrupts.
The tale continues the figure of 'Chaucer the pilgrim' described by Donaldson, a narrator whose apparent incompetence is the poet's subtlest irony (Donaldson 1954). It also shows Chaucer's awareness that the English romances of his time had a literary tradition he did not wish to follow.
Himself drank water of the well, As did the knight Sir Percivel, So worthy under weed;
'He himself drank water from the well, as did the knight Sir Perceval, so worthy in his armour.' The last complete lines before the Host interrupts.
Part 19: The Tale of Melibee
Fragment VII, lines 919–1888
Summary
The Host stops Sir Thopas with a coarse insult to its 'drafty rhyming'. The narrator, apparently offended, offers a 'little thing in prose', warning that it may contain more proverbs than his hearers know from other versions but has the same meaning.
Melibeus, a rich young man, returns home to find that three enemies have broken in, beaten his wife Prudence and wounded his daughter Sophie. He wants vengeance. Prudence, through a long series of arguments supported by proverbs and authorities, persuades him to take counsel, to avoid war and to forgive his enemies. When they repent, he pardons them.
Analysis
Melibee is a close translation of Renaud de Louens's French version of Albertano of Brescia's Latin treatise. To many modern readers it is the least readable of the tales, but in its own time it was a respected work of moral and political counsel. Its argument for peace and against private war had obvious relevance during the Hundred Years War and the crises of Richard II's reign, and Prudence is one of the strongest and wisest women in Chaucer.
The pairing of the parody romance and the earnest treatise, the narrator's two tales, sets 'solaas' and 'sentence' at their extremes. Whether the Melibee itself is meant as a joke is disputed; most critics now take it seriously as Chaucer's own example of prose wisdom.
Thy drafty rhyming is not worth a tord:
'Your filthy rhyming is not worth a turd.' The Host's verdict on Sir Thopas, which leads Chaucer the pilgrim to offer the prose Melibee instead.
Part 20: The Monk's Tale
Fragment VII, lines 1889–2766
Summary
The Host wishes his wife Goodelief could have heard the patient Prudence, describes her violent temper and then teases the Monk about his fine body, suggesting that so manly a man should have been a breeder of children. The Monk replies that he will tell some of the hundred tragedies he keeps in his cell, and defines tragedy.
The tragedies are short stanzaic accounts of the falls of the great: Lucifer, Adam, Samson, Hercules, Nebuchadnezzar, Belshazzar, Zenobia, Nero, Holofernes, Antiochus, Alexander, Julius Caesar and Croesus, together with four 'modern instances', Pedro of Castile, Peter of Cyprus, Bernabò Visconti of Milan and Ugolino of Pisa. In the site's text the modern instances come at the end, closing with Ugolino and a reference to Dante; the Riverside places them in the middle.
Analysis
The Monk's Tale is the fullest English example of the medieval idea of tragedy, the fall of a person from prosperity by the turning of Fortune's wheel, derived from Boethius and from Boccaccio's De casibus virorum illustrium. Its eight-line stanzas and refrain-like monotony are deliberate: the tale offers no explanation of the falls but Fortune's instability, and the Knight cannot bear it.
The tale's place in Fragment VII, between the narrator's Melibee and the Nun's Priest's fable, sets three views of literature side by side: moral counsel, fatalistic tragedy and comic fable. The modern instances, including Bernabò Visconti, whom Chaucer had visited in 1378 and who died in 1385, are among the few contemporary events named in the work.
Tragedy is to say a certain story, As olde bookes maken us memory, Of him that stood in great prosperity, And is y-fallen out of high degree
'Tragedy means a certain kind of story, as old books remind us, of someone who stood in great prosperity and has fallen from high rank.' The Monk's definition, which ends 'into misery'.
Part 21: The Nun's Priest's Tale
Fragment VII, lines 2767–3446
Summary
The Knight stops the Monk, saying that enough sorrow has been told; the Host agrees and asks the Nun's Priest, Sir John, for something merry. He tells a beast fable.
A poor widow keeps a cock, Chauntecleer, who crows more accurately than any clock and has seven hens, the fairest of whom is Pertelote. One night he dreams that a beast like a hound attacks him. Pertelote scorns his fear, diagnoses indigestion and prescribes laxatives; Chauntecleer answers with a learned defence of prophetic dreams, from Cicero, Macrobius and the Bible, and then ignores his own argument. Next morning the fox Daun Russell flatters him into crowing with his eyes closed and carries him off. In the chase that follows Chauntecleer persuades the fox to boast to his pursuers, escapes when the fox opens his mouth, and both draw a moral.
Analysis
The Nun's Priest's Tale takes a simple fable from the tradition of Reynard the Fox and inflates it with the rhetoric of epic, tragedy, natural science, dream theory, theology and antifeminist commonplace. The comedy is in the disproportion: a barnyard fowl argues like a scholar, and the narrator laments his capture with the apostrophes of Geoffrey of Vinsauf. The tale glances at the Monk's tragedies, at the debate about free will and at the Rising of 1381, comparing the noise of the chase to the shouts of Jack Straw's men.
The Priest's final advice, to take the fruit and leave the chaff, is often read as a statement of Chaucer's own poetics. Yet it is far from clear what the 'fruit' of this tale is, and the instruction applies as much to the reader of the whole collection as to this fable (Pearsall 1985) (Cooper 1989).
For Saint Paul saith, That all that written is, To our doctrine it written is y-wis. Take the fruit, and let the chaff be still.
'For St Paul says that all that is written is written for our instruction, indeed. Take the fruit, and leave the chaff alone.' The Nun's Priest's closing advice on reading (Romans 15:4).
Part 22: The Second Nun's Tale
Fragment VIII, lines 1–553
Summary
The Second Nun's Prologue begins with a warning against idleness, which the tale is offered to avoid, an invocation to the Virgin based on St Bernard's prayer in Dante's Paradiso, and an explanation of the name Cecilia.
Cecilia, a Roman noblewoman, marries Valerian but tells him on their wedding night that an angel guards her virginity. Valerian is converted and baptized, sees the angel and receives a crown of roses and lilies; his brother Tiburce is also converted. Both are martyred for refusing to sacrifice to idols. Cecilia argues boldly with the prefect Almachius, survives a bath of fire and is struck three times on the neck; she lives three days, preaching, and her house becomes a church.
Analysis
The Second Nun's Tale is a saint's life in rhyme royal, based on the Golden Legend of Jacobus de Voragine and another Latin source. It is probably an early work, listed in the Prologue to The Legend of Good Women, adapted for the Tales. Cecilia's active, argumentative holiness contrasts with Constance's passive endurance and Griselda's silent obedience.
The tale's themes of spiritual 'business' against idleness, of the true transformation of matter and of light and sight are taken up, in a sordid key, by the Canon's Yeoman's Tale that follows.
The minister and norice unto vices, Which that men call in English idleness, The porter at the gate is of delices;
'The servant and nurse of the vices, which men call idleness in English, is the porter at the gate of pleasures.' The opening of the Second Nun's Prologue, recalling the figure of Idleness in the Roman de la Rose.
Part 23: The Canon's Yeoman's Prologue and Tale
Fragment VIII, lines 554–1481
Summary
At Boughton-under-Blean, a few miles from Canterbury, a Canon and his Yeoman gallop up to join the pilgrims. The Yeoman boasts of his master's powers, then begins to reveal the secrets of their trade, alchemy; the Canon flees in shame.
In the first part the Yeoman describes his seven years of alchemical labour, with its vocabulary of substances and processes, the explosions, the debts and the discoloured face it has given him. In the second he tells how another canon cheated a London priest by pretending to turn mercury and copper into silver, and sold him the 'recipe' for forty pounds. He ends by warning that God does not permit men to discover the secret of the philosophers' stone.
Analysis
The Canon's Yeoman's Tale is the only tale told by a pilgrim who was not part of the original company, and its arrival introduces a sudden contemporary realism. The Yeoman's confession, half excitement and half bitterness, is a portrait of obsession; alchemy appears both as fraud and as a parody of spiritual transformation.
Placed after the Second Nun's Tale, the tale contrasts true and false conversion, sanctity and greed. The Yeoman's proverb about gold reverses the alchemist's hope that base things can become precious.
But all thing, which that shineth as the gold, It is not gold, as I have heard it told;
'But not everything that shines like gold is gold, as I have heard tell.' The proverb, applied to the alchemists' false promises.
Part 24: The Manciple's Tale
Fragment IX, lines 1–362
Summary
At a village called Bob-up-and-down on the Canterbury road, the Host notices that the Cook is so drunk he can hardly sit his horse. The Manciple insults him, the Cook falls off his horse, and the Manciple soothes him with more wine; the Host praises drink as a peacemaker.
Phoebus, the god, keeps a white crow that can speak, and a wife he loves and guards. When Phoebus is away the wife takes a lover. The crow tells Phoebus, who in rage kills his wife, then repents, breaks his instruments, plucks out the crow's white feathers, takes away its speech and turns it black. The Manciple ends with his mother's long advice to keep one's tongue.
Analysis
The Manciple's Tale is based on Ovid's Metamorphoses and the medieval moralized tradition. It is a story about the dangers of speech, told in a voice that recommends silence, near the end of a work made of speech. Critics have read it as an ironic farewell to poetry: Phoebus, god of music and poetry, destroys his instruments, and the truthful bird is punished for telling the truth.
The Manciple's Prologue is set in the morning, while the Parson's Prologue, which follows, is set in the late afternoon, an inconsistency in the time scheme that suggests that the order of the last fragments was not finally fixed (Benson 1981).
Of tidings, whether they be false or true; Whereso thou come, amonges high or low, Keep well thy tongue, and think upon the crow.
'(Be no author) of news, whether false or true; wherever you go, among high or low, guard your tongue and remember the crow.' The last lines of the Manciple's Tale.
Part 25: The Parson's Tale
Fragment X, lines 1–1080 (abridged; the Retraction, X.1081–92, is not included)
Summary
As the sun sets, the Host says that only one tale remains to complete the game and asks the Parson to tell it. The Parson refuses to tell fables; as a southern man he cannot use alliteration and does not think much of rhyme, so he will tell a 'merry tale in prose' to knit up the feast and show the pilgrims the way to the heavenly Jerusalem.
The 'tale' is a treatise on penitence: its nature, its three parts, contrition, confession and satisfaction, and a long analysis of the seven deadly sins and their remedies. In the manuscripts it is followed by Chaucer's Retraction, in which 'the maker of this book' asks for prayers and revokes his 'translations and enditings of worldly vanities', including those of the Canterbury Tales that tend towards sin. The site's text abridges the treatise and omits the Retraction.
Analysis
The Parson's Tale draws on Latin penitential manuals, the Summa of Raymond of Pennaforte and the treatise on the vices of William Peraldus. Placed at the end, it turns the pilgrimage from a holiday of story-telling into an image of the journey of the soul, and the Parson's rejection of fiction, rhyme and alliteration puts all the earlier tales in question. Patterson argued that it 'quits' the whole game, replacing fiction with penance (Patterson 1978).
Whether the ending is a true conclusion or a final turn of irony is the question of the Retraction. Robertson's exegetical criticism took the Parson's doctrine as the key to the whole work, while other critics stress the openness of the Tales; all agree that the work ends by measuring itself against a standard of truth beyond literature (Robertson 1962) (Cooper 1989).
But, truste well, I am a southern man, I cannot gest, rom, ram, ruf, by my letter; And, God wot, rhyme hold I but little better.
'But believe me, I am a southern man; I cannot tell stories in alliteration, "rum, ram, ruf", and God knows I think little better of rhyme.' The Parson rejects both the alliterative verse of the north and the rhyme of Chaucer's own poetry.
Characters
Others
- The Narrator (Chaucer the pilgrim)
- The 'I' who joins the pilgrims at the Tabard and describes them, genial, observant and apparently naive. The Host teases him for his shy manner and his round shape. He tells two tales, the parody romance Sir Thopas, which the Host stops, and the prose Melibee. Donaldson's distinction between this pilgrim and the ironic poet behind him has shaped modern reading of the work (Donaldson 1954).
- Harry Bailly, the Host
- Innkeeper of the Tabard in Southwark, named in the Cook's Prologue, and probably modelled on a real Southwark innkeeper, Henry Bailly. Large, bold and talkative, he proposes the game, appoints himself judge and guide, manages the order of tellers and gives his opinion of every tale. He complains of his violent wife and quarrels with the Pardoner.
- The Canon and his Yeoman
- Latecomers who catch up with the pilgrims at Boughton-under-Blean. The Canon, an alchemist, flees when his servant begins to expose their trade; the Yeoman stays to tell how alchemy has ruined him and how a canon cheated a priest.
Gentles
- The Knight
- The most distinguished pilgrim, a veteran of crusading campaigns from Prussia to Spain and North Africa, modest in manner and dressed in a stained tunic. The narrator calls him 'a very perfect gentle knight'. He tells the first tale, a philosophical romance, and later stops the Monk and reconciles the Host and the Pardoner. Whether his portrait is wholly ideal has been questioned by some critics.
- The Squire
- The Knight's son, about twenty, a fashionable lover who sings, dances, writes songs and wears embroidered clothes. He tells an unfinished oriental romance of wonders.
- The Franklin
- A wealthy landowner below the rank of knight, a former sheriff and member of Parliament, devoted to good food. He admires the Squire and wishes his own son were as gentle. His Breton lay about Dorigen and Arveragus is often read as resolving the debate on marriage, and his portrait shows the aspirations of the rising gentry.
Church
- The Prioress (Madame Eglentyne)
- Head of a convent, elegant in her table manners, tender to mice and lapdogs, wearing a brooch inscribed 'Amor vincit omnia'. Her portrait gently satirizes a nun who imitates courtly ways. She tells a miracle of the Virgin in which Jews murder a child, the most debated tale in the collection (Delany 2002).
- The Second Nun and the Nun's Priest
- The Prioress's companions, barely described in the General Prologue. The Second Nun tells the life of St Cecilia; the Nun's Priest, called Sir John, tells the mock-heroic fable of Chauntecleer and Pertelote, one of the most brilliant tales in the collection.
- The Monk
- A huntsman and lover of fine horses and food, who has no time for the rule of St Benedict and thinks the cloister's restrictions out of date. The narrator agrees with his opinion. He tells a series of 'tragedies' of the fall of the great, until the Knight stops him.
- The Friar (Huberd)
- A begging friar, charming, musical and corrupt, who hears confessions for easy penance and knows the taverns better than the lepers. He quarrels with the Summoner and tells a tale of a summoner carried off to hell.
- The Clerk of Oxford
- A thin, poor scholar on a thin horse, who would rather have twenty books of Aristotle than fine clothes and who speaks little, 'and gladly would he learn, and gladly teach'. He tells the story of Griselda, from Petrarch, and answers the Wife of Bath in his Envoy.
- The Parson
- A poor parish priest who teaches the Gospel and first follows it himself, visiting his parish in all weathers and refusing to leave it for a well-paid chantry in London. With the Knight, the Clerk and the Plowman he is an ideal portrait. He tells the final tale, a prose treatise on penitence.
- The Summoner
- An officer of the church courts, with a diseased, pimpled face that frightens children, who sells pardons for sins and bullies the people he summons. He answers the Friar with a coarse tale about a friar and a fart.
- The Pardoner
- A seller of indulgences, with long yellow hair, a goat's voice and no beard; the narrator guesses he is 'a gelding or a mare'. He confesses his frauds openly and then tells a superb exemplum against avarice. His nature and motives have been the subject of much modern criticism (Dinshaw 1989) (Patterson 1991).
Commons
- The Merchant
- A dignified trader with a forked beard and a Flemish beaver hat, who talks constantly of his profits and hides the fact that he is in debt. In his Prologue he complains of two months of an unhappy marriage, and his tale of January and May is the bitterest view of marriage in the work.
- The Man of Law
- A serjeant at law, learned, busy and always seeming busier than he is, who buys land and knows every statute. He tells the pious tale of Constance in rhyme royal.
- The Physician (the Doctor)
- A learned doctor who knows the medical authorities and astrology, who studies little of the Bible and loves gold, since gold is a medicine. He tells the Roman story of Virginia.
- The Wife of Bath (Alison)
- A cloth-maker from near Bath, somewhat deaf, gap-toothed, richly dressed, who has had five husbands and has been three times to Jerusalem. Her long Prologue, an attack on clerical antifeminism made from its own materials, and her tale of the loathly lady are central to the debate about marriage and to modern feminist criticism (Dinshaw 1989) (Hansen 1992).
- The Shipman
- A sea captain from Dartmouth, skilled in navigation and in piracy, who sends his prisoners home by sea. He refuses to let the Parson preach and tells a fabliau of a merchant's wife and a monk.
- The Miller (Robin)
- A huge, brawny man with a red beard and a wart on his nose, who can break any door with his head, plays the bagpipes and steals corn. Drunk, he insists on 'quiting' the Knight with a fabliau about a carpenter.
- The Reeve (Osewold)
- An estate manager from Norfolk, thin and choleric, who knows every trick of the servants and has grown rich by cheating his lord. A carpenter by trade, he takes offence at the Miller's tale and answers it with a tale against a miller.
- The Cook (Roger of Ware)
- A London cook travelling with the five Guildsmen, skilled with sauces and pies but with a running sore on his shin. His tale of a London apprentice breaks off; later he is too drunk to tell another.
- The Plowman, the Manciple, the Guildsmen and the Yeoman
- The Plowman, the Parson's brother, is an ideal labourer who tells no tale. The Manciple, buyer of provisions for a London inn of court, outwits his learned masters and tells the tale of Phoebus and the crow. The five Guildsmen (Haberdasher, Carpenter, Weaver, Dyer and Tapestry-maker) and the Knight's Yeoman, a forester, are described but tell no tales.
Themes
Fellowship, rivalry and 'quiting'
The pilgrimage creates a temporary community in which people of different estates ride together and agree to the same rules. The Host's game turns that community into a competition, and the competition soon becomes a series of quarrels: the Miller 'quites' the Knight, the Reeve the Miller, the Friar and the Summoner each other. The word 'quite', to repay, runs through the work.
Fellowship is restored at moments of crisis, as when the Knight makes the Host and the Pardoner kiss. The work explores how stories serve social purposes, to flatter, insult, assert status and resolve conflict, and Strohm has read the pilgrimage as an image of a society of competing interests trying to find a common voice (Strohm 1989).
Estates and their ideals
The General Prologue describes the pilgrims as representatives of their estates, the knighthood, the clergy and the commons, and measures them against what they should be. The ideal figures are few and come from the old model of society, those who fight, those who pray and those who work: the Knight, the Parson and the Plowman.
Most of the pilgrims belong to the new, mobile world of trade and professions: merchants, lawyers, physicians, guildsmen and estate managers, whose excellence lies in their skill at making money. Mann showed how Chaucer's apparent neutrality leaves their moral judgment to the reader (Mann 1973).
Marriage, mastery and sovereignty
Many tales concern the balance of power between husband and wife. The Wife of Bath claims sovereignty for women; the Clerk answers with a wife of absolute obedience; the Merchant shows an old husband deceived; the Franklin imagines a marriage in which neither seeks mastery. The fabliaux of the Miller, Reeve and Shipman show the same struggle in comic form.
Kittredge's 'Marriage Group' gave this theme its classic shape; later criticism has broadened it to the question of gender itself, of how male writers represent and contain female speech (Kittredge 1912) (Dinshaw 1989) (Hansen 1992).
Gentilesse
Gentilesse, nobility of character, is a recurring concern: the Wife's hag argues that it comes from virtue and not from birth, the Franklin admires it in the Squire and makes it the subject of his tale, and the Clerk's Griselda, a peasant's daughter, possesses it more fully than her noble husband.
The idea, which Chaucer takes from Dante and Boethius, had a special point in a society where wealth and service were opening the gentry to new men like Chaucer himself.
Authority and experience
The Wife of Bath's first line sets experience against authority, and the conflict between written tradition and individual testimony runs through the whole work. The pilgrims cite authorities constantly, often wrongly; Chauntecleer and Pertelote argue over dream theory by quoting books; the Pardoner and the Friar bend the authority of Scripture to their profit.
Chaucer's own position as a learned poet translating and retelling old books makes this theme reflexive: the Tales ask what authority any story has, and what it means to read it well (Dinshaw 1989).
Religion and its abuses
The pilgrimage is a religious act, but most of the pilgrims treat it as a holiday, and many of the clergy are satirized: the Monk who hunts, the Friar who seduces, the Summoner and Pardoner who sell salvation. Against them stand the Parson and the Clerk, and the religious tales of the Man of Law, the Prioress and the Second Nun.
The work ends with a sermon on penitence and with the Retraction, in which the pilgrimage becomes the soul's journey to the heavenly Jerusalem. How seriously to take that ending is one of the main questions of interpretation (Patterson 1978) (Robertson 1962).
Game and earnest
The Host demands tales of 'sentence' and 'solaas', and the narrator insists that 'men should not make earnest of game'. The Tales move constantly between play and seriousness, fabliau and sermon, and many tales, such as the Nun's Priest's and the Merchant's, are serious and comic at once.
The relation between fiction and truth, between telling a story and telling the truth, is finally put in question by the Parson, who refuses to tell fables, and by the Retraction (Cooper 1989).
Motifs
Interrupted and unfinished tales
The Cook's Tale breaks off; the Squire's Tale is stopped or abandoned; the Host stops Sir Thopas and the Knight stops the Monk. The interruptions make the pilgrims judges of literature and remind readers that the work itself is incomplete.
The links and the road
The links between tales record the time of day, places on the road (Deptford, Greenwich, Rochester, Sittingbourne, Boughton-under-Blean, Bob-up-and-down) and the pilgrims' reactions, creating the illusion of a journey in real time. The inconsistencies in these references are evidence for the work's unfinished state (Benson 1981).
Glossing and interpretation
The Wife of Bath, the Friar of the Summoner's Tale and the Pardoner all 'glose', interpreting texts to suit themselves. The motif raises questions about reading that apply to the Tales as a whole (Dinshaw 1989).
Proverbs and sentences
Proverbs close many tales ('a guiler shall himself beguiled be', 'think upon the crow', 'take the fruit, and let the chaff be still'). They give each tale a moral that often fits it awkwardly, inviting the reader to compare the 'sentence' with the story.
Symbols
Spring and April
The opening's April showers and west wind join natural renewal, sexual desire and religious longing. The pilgrimage begins in the same impulse that drives birds to sing, and the work keeps the sacred and the natural in tension throughout.
The pilgrimage to Canterbury
The journey to the shrine of Becket is both a holiday excursion and, as the Parson says, an image of the soul's pilgrimage to the heavenly Jerusalem. The pilgrims never arrive, which leaves the meaning of the journey open.
The Tabard and the supper
The inn where the pilgrims meet, and the free supper promised to the best teller, represent the worldly reward and the fellowship of the game, in contrast with the spiritual goal of Canterbury.
Relics and the Pardoner's bag
The Pardoner's false relics, pig's bones in a glass, a sheep's shoulder-bone, stand for the commercialization of religion, and the Host's obscene reply to them for the anger it provokes.
Critical debates
Roadside drama and the 'Marriage Group'
George Lyman Kittredge proposed in 1912 that the Wife of Bath, Clerk, Merchant and Franklin form a 'Marriage Group' in which the pilgrims debate the question of mastery in marriage, and that the Franklin offers the resolution. In Chaucer and His Poetry (1915) he extended the idea to the whole work, reading the pilgrims as dramatic characters and their tales as long speeches that express them (Kittredge 1912) (Kittredge 1915). R. M. Lumiansky developed the dramatic principle tale by tale, explaining each tale by its teller's psychology (Lumiansky 1955).
The dramatic reading has met increasing skepticism. Critics have pointed out that many tales fit their tellers loosely, that some were written before the frame, and that the links are few. C. David Benson argued that the Tales are better read as a collection of contrasting styles and genres than as a drama of personalities, and Pearsall and Cooper stress the variety of the tales as literature in their own right (Benson 1986) (Pearsall 1985) (Cooper 1989).
Chaucer the pilgrim
E. Talbot Donaldson argued in 1954 that the narrator of the General Prologue is a fictional persona, 'Chaucer the pilgrim', an amiable, naive man impressed by worldly success, distinct from Chaucer the poet, whose irony works through the narrator's failures of judgment (Donaldson 1954). The distinction became a foundation of modern Chaucer criticism.
Later critics have questioned how consistently the persona is maintained and whether the narrator's voice can be separated from the poet's. Mann's study of estates satire suggested that the narrator's refusal to judge is a deliberate technique, not a naive trait, and some critics prefer to speak of a shifting narrative voice (Mann 1973).
Estates satire
Jill Mann's Chaucer and Medieval Estates Satire (1973) showed that the General Prologue draws on a long tradition of satire of the estates, in Latin, French and English, and that most details of the portraits have parallels in that tradition. Chaucer's originality lies in his handling of the conventions: he presents the pilgrims in terms of their own professional values, omits the victims and withholds judgment (Mann 1973).
Mann's work moved criticism away from attempts to identify the pilgrims with real people and towards reading the portraits as social types. Strohm and Patterson have extended the analysis to the social and historical world of the late fourteenth century (Strohm 1989) (Patterson 1991).
The Wife of Bath and antifeminism
The Wife's Prologue is built from antifeminist texts, and critics have long disagreed whether it criticizes or reproduces them. Carolyn Dinshaw's Chaucer's Sexual Poetics (1989) read Chaucer as a poet who identifies with the feminine and whose Wife glosses masculine texts against themselves, though in the end within masculine terms (Dinshaw 1989).
Elaine Tuttle Hansen's Chaucer and the Fictions of Gender (1992) argued that the Wife, for all her energy, is a male construction who confirms antifeminist fears, and that Chaucer's representation of women is less sympathetic than humanist critics believed. Patterson read the Wife as using the rhetoric of misogyny to claim a self (Hansen 1992) (Patterson 1991).
The Prioress's Tale and antisemitism
The Prioress's Tale repeats the blood libel, and the question whether Chaucer endorses or exposes its antisemitism has been debated since the mid-twentieth century. Some critics see the tale as a satire of the Prioress's sentimental piety; others argue that nothing in the text distances Chaucer from the tale's assumptions, which were widely shared.
The essays in Sheila Delany's Chaucer and the Jews (2002) place the tale in the context of medieval Christian representations of Jews and of England after the expulsion of 1290, and generally caution against reading the tale as ironic (Delany 2002).
The order of the tales
The manuscripts preserve ten fragments but no agreed order. The Ellesmere order, followed by the Riverside, places Fragment VII (Shipman to Nun's Priest) after VI. Henry Bradshaw proposed, and Furnivall's Chaucer Society adopted, moving Fragment VII to follow II (the 'Bradshaw shift'), because the Man of Law's Epilogue seems to lead into the Shipman's Tale and the reference to Rochester in Fragment VII should come before the reference to Sittingbourne in Fragment III.
Larry D. Benson argued that the Ellesmere order represents Chaucer's own arrangement, and most modern editors accept it while acknowledging that the work was never finished (Benson 1981) (Benson 1987). The question bears on readings that depend on sequence, such as the 'Marriage Group'.
The Retraction and Chaucer's piety
The Retraction, in which Chaucer revokes his worldly works, has been read as a conventional formula, as a sincere act of penitence at the end of his life and as the logical conclusion of the Parson's Tale. Robertson's exegetical criticism saw the whole work as Christian in purpose, so that the Retraction confirms its meaning (Robertson 1962).
Patterson argued that the Parson's Tale was designed to 'quit' the game of fiction, replacing story with penance (Patterson 1978). Others observe that the Retraction, by naming the works it revokes, also keeps them in memory, and see the ending as one more voice in the work rather than a final judgment on it (Cooper 1989).
Chaucer and Boccaccio
Chaucer used Boccaccio's Filostrato and Teseida, and several tales have analogues in the Decameron, which also offered the model of a story-collection with a frame and a company of tellers. But Chaucer never names Boccaccio, and there is no proof that he knew the Decameron; his Griselda comes from Petrarch's Latin version, not directly from Boccaccio's Italian.
N. S. Thompson argued that Chaucer probably knew the Decameron and that the two works can be read as part of a common debate about love; the essays in Correale and Hamel's Sources and Analogues assess the evidence tale by tale, and David Wallace has placed Chaucer in the political and literary culture of Italian city-states (Thompson 1996) (Correale 2005) (Wallace 1997).
Key passages
WHEN that Aprilis, with his showers swoot, The drought of March hath pierced to the root, And bathed every vein in such licour, Of which virtue engender’d is the flower;
'When April with its sweet showers has pierced the drought of March to the root, and bathed every vein in such moisture as gives life to the flower.' The opening joins natural renewal, desire and the urge to go on pilgrimage, the impulses that set the whole work in motion.
He never yet no villainy ne said In all his life, unto no manner wight. He was a very perfect gentle knight.
'He never said anything base in all his life to anyone. He was a true, perfect, noble knight.' The first and most admiring portrait sets the ideal of the knightly estate against which the others are measured.
Then is it wisdom, as it thinketh me, To make a virtue of necessity, And take it well, that we may not eschew,
'Then it is wisdom, I think, to make a virtue of necessity and to accept what we cannot avoid.' Theseus's Boethian consolation after Arcite's death is the Knight's answer to the problem of suffering.
And eke men should not make earnest of game.
'And people should not take a game seriously.' The narrator's excuse for the Miller's Tale names the tension between play and seriousness that runs through the whole work.
Who painted the lion, tell it me, who?
'Who painted the lion? Tell me, who?' Recalling the fable of the lion who saw a picture of a man killing a lion, the Wife argues that the stories of wicked women were written by men, and that women would have written differently.
Women desire to have the sovereignty As well over their husband as their love And for to be in mast’ry him above.
'Women desire to have sovereignty over their husbands as well as their lovers, and to have mastery over them.' The answer to the tale's question, and the Wife's thesis in the debate on marriage.
O stormy people, unsad and ev’r untrue,
'O fickle people, unsteady and always untrue.' The Clerk's outburst at the people of Saluzzo, who welcome Walter's new bride, shows the narrator's commentary breaking through the story.
Lordings, this question would I aske now, Which was the moste free, as thinketh you?
'Gentlemen, I would now ask this question: which was the most generous, do you think?' The Franklin's love-question invites the pilgrims and readers to judge the nobility of the knight, the squire and the clerk.
And on the ground, which is my mother’s gate, I knocke with my staff, early and late, And say to her, ‘Leve mother, let me in.
'And on the ground, which is my mother's gate, I knock with my staff, early and late, and say to her, Dear mother, let me in.' The Old Man who cannot die is one of the most mysterious figures in Chaucer.
To shewe you the way, in this voyage, Of thilke perfect glorious pilgrimage, That hight Jerusalem celestial.
'To show you the way, on this journey, of that perfect, glorious pilgrimage that is called the heavenly Jerusalem.' The Parson reinterprets the road to Canterbury as the soul's journey to heaven.
Questions for study
How does the General Prologue use the conventions of estates satire, and how does Chaucer's narrator change them?
Compare the ideal portraits (Knight, Parson, Plowman) with the Monk or the Friar; consider what the narrator praises and what he leaves unsaid.
Is the narrator of the Canterbury Tales a naive pilgrim or an ironic poet?
Consider his praise of the Monk, his apology for the Miller's Tale and his own two tales.
How does the Miller's Tale 'quite' the Knight's Tale?
Compare the two plots of rival lovers, the language of courtly love, and the idea of God's 'privity'.
Does the Wife of Bath challenge the antifeminist tradition or confirm it?
Consider her use of authorities, her account of Jankin's book, and the hag's sermon on gentilesse.
Is there a 'Marriage Group', and does the Franklin's Tale resolve it?
Compare the views of marriage in the Wife's, Clerk's, Merchant's and Franklin's tales, and the problem of Arveragus's command.
How should we read the Clerk's Tale: as a religious allegory, a political fable or a story of cruelty?
Look at the narrator's comments on Walter, the closing stanzas and the Envoy.
What is the relation between the Pardoner and his tale?
Consider his Prologue, the figure of the Old Man and his final offer to the Host.
Can the Prioress's Tale be read as an ironic portrait of its teller?
Compare her portrait in the General Prologue with the tale's style and its treatment of the Jews.
What view of literature emerges from the tales of Fragment VII?
Think about Sir Thopas and Melibee, the Monk's tragedies and the Nun's Priest's 'fruit and chaff'.
Does the Parson's Tale with the Retraction make a true ending to the Canterbury Tales?
Consider the Parson's refusal of fiction, the image of the heavenly Jerusalem and the work's unfinished state.
Further reading
- Benson, C. David. Chaucer's Drama of Style: Poetic Variety and Contrast in the Canterbury Tales. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1986.
- Benson, Larry D. "The Order of The Canterbury Tales." Studies in the Age of Chaucer 3 (1981): 77–120.
- Benson, Larry D., gen. ed. The Riverside Chaucer. 3rd ed. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987.
- Cooper, Helen. Oxford Guides to Chaucer: The Canterbury Tales. 2nd ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996. First published 1989.
- Correale, Robert M., and Mary Hamel, eds. Sources and Analogues of the Canterbury Tales. 2 vols. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2002–2005.
- Delany, Sheila, ed. Chaucer and the Jews: Sources, Contexts, Meanings. New York: Routledge, 2002.
- Dinshaw, Carolyn. Chaucer's Sexual Poetics. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989.
- Donaldson, E. Talbot. "Chaucer the Pilgrim." PMLA 69 (1954): 928–936.
- Hansen, Elaine Tuttle. Chaucer and the Fictions of Gender. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992.
- Kittredge, George Lyman. "Chaucer's Discussion of Marriage." Modern Philology 9 (1912): 435–467.
- Kittredge, George Lyman. Chaucer and His Poetry. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1915.
- Lumiansky, R. M. Of Sondry Folk: The Dramatic Principle in the Canterbury Tales. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1955.
- Mann, Jill. Chaucer and Medieval Estates Satire: The Literature of Social Classes and the General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973.
- Mooney, Linne R. "Chaucer's Scribe." Speculum 81 (2006): 97–138.
- Muscatine, Charles. Chaucer and the French Tradition: A Study in Style and Meaning. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1957.
- Patterson, Lee W. "The 'Parson's Tale' and the Quitting of the 'Canterbury Tales'." Traditio 34 (1978): 331–380.
- Patterson, Lee. Chaucer and the Subject of History. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991.
- Pearsall, Derek. The Canterbury Tales. London: George Allen & Unwin, 1985.
- Pearsall, Derek. The Life of Geoffrey Chaucer: A Critical Biography. Oxford: Blackwell, 1992.
- Robertson, D. W., Jr. A Preface to Chaucer: Studies in Medieval Perspectives. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1962.
- Strohm, Paul. Social Chaucer. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989.
- Thompson, N. S. Chaucer, Boccaccio, and the Debate of Love: A Comparative Study of the Decameron and the Canterbury Tales. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996.
- Wallace, David. Chaucerian Polity: Absolutist Lineages and Associational Forms in England and Italy. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997.
- Warner, Lawrence. Chaucer's Scribes: London Textual Production, 1384–1432. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018.
Written by the Poetry Codex editors. Updated 2026-10-19.