Geoffrey Chaucer

- The Canterbury Tales is the most famous and

critically acclaimed work of Chaucer.

- For most of his life, Chaucer served in the Hundred

Years War between England and France, both as a

soldier and a diplomat (he was fluent in French and

Italian).

- His diplomatic travels brought him twice to Italy,

where he might have met Giovanni Bocaccio (an

Italian author and poet), whose writing influenced

Chaucer’s work, and Francesco Petrarch (an Italian

scholar and poet).

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- Around 1378, Chaucer began to develop his vision of

an English poetry that would be linguistically

accessible to all: to the court (official language is

French) or to the Church (official language is Latin).

- Instead, Chaucer wrote in the vernacular, the English

that was spoken in and around London in his day.

- In 1374, the king appointed Chaucer as the

Controller of the Customs of Hides, Skins and Wools

in the port of London, which meant that he was a

government official who worked with cloth importers.

Hence his experience overseeing imported cloths

might be the reason why he frequently describes in

exquisite detail the garments and fabric that attire

his characters.

- After he retired in the early1390s, he seems to be

working primarily on The Canterbury Tales, which he

began around 1387. By the time of his retirement,

Chaucer had already written a substantial amount of

narrative poetry (the class of poems that tell stories),

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 including the celebrated romance Troilus and

Criseyde.

- William Caxton, English first printer, published The

Canterbury Tales in the 1470s, and it continued to

enjoy a rich printing history that never truly faded.

- Hence, Chaucer’s project to create a literature and

poetic language for all class of society succeeded.

The Canterbury Tales

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- A collection of stories (two of them in prose, the rest

in verse), written in Middle English.

- The tales, some of which are originals and others not,

are contained inside a frame tale and told by a group

of pilgrims on their way from Southwark to

Canterbury to visit the shrine of Saint Thomas a

Beckets at Canterbury Cathedral.

- Storytelling was the main entertainment in England

at the time, and storytelling contests had been

around for hundreds of years.

- In 14th-century England there is a story telling trend

where a group with an appointed leader would judge

the songs of the group. The winner received a crown

and, as with the winner of the Canterbury Tales, a

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 free dinner. It was common for pilgrims on a

pilgrimage to have a chosen "master of ceremonies"

to guide them and organize the journey

- Chaucer’s original plan for The Canterbury Tales was

for each character to tell four tales, two on the way

to Canterbury and two on the way back.

- But, instead of 120 tales, the text ends after 24 tales,

and the party is still on its way to Canterbury.

Chaucer left it incomplete when he died on October

20, 1400.

- The themes of the tale vary, and include topics such

as courtly love, treachery and greed.

- The genres also vary, and include romance, Breton

lays (short stories in rhyme like The Franklin’s Tale),

sermon and fabliau (a coarsely humorous short story

in verse where stock characters in the middle class

involve in obscene pranks, like The Miller’s Tale).

- The characters, introduced in the General Prologue of

the book, tell tales of great cultural relevance. The

characters are also of extremely varied stock,

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 including representatives of most of the branches of

the middle classes at that time and their

personalities are shown through both their choices of

tales and the way they tell them.

- Some of the tales are serious and others humorous;

however, all are very precise in describing the traits

and faults of human nature. Most of the tales are

interlinked with similar themes running through them

and some are told in retaliation for other tales in the

form of an argument.

- There are many hints at contemporary events,

although few are proven, and the theme of marriage

common in the tales is presumed to refer to several

different marriages, most often of those of John of

Gaunt. Aside from Chaucer himself, Harry Bailly of

the Tabard Inn was a real person and the Cook has

been identified as quite likely to be Roger Knight de

Ware, a contemporary London cook.

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Ezra Winters, Canterbury tales mural (1939), Library of Congress John Adams Building,

Washington, D.C.