The Canterbury Tales

The Pilgrims

In April, a group of pilgrims gathers at the Tabard Inn in Southwark to travel to the shrine of Thomas Becket at Canterbury. The Host proposes a storytelling contest. The pilgrims — Knight, Miller, Prioress, Wife of Bath, Pardoner, Merchant, Franklin, and about twenty others — represent a cross-section of late fourteenth-century English society.

Chaucer’s structural achievement is to use the frame to explore the relationship between teller and tale. The Knight’s tale is a courtly romance; the Miller (drunk) interrupts to tell a bawdy story about a carpenter being cuckolded. The Reeve (a carpenter) responds with a story about a Miller being cuckolded. The sequence is not random — it is a social comedy in which every story is also a competitive move.

The Wife of Bath

Alice, the Wife of Bath, gives the collection its most vivid character. Her Prologue — a long, comic, self-aware defence of serial marriage and female authority — is the first sustained first-person account of a woman’s inner life in English literature. She has been married five times. She knows she is the subject of misogynist sermons and quotes them herself, to refute them. She argues with five centuries of anti-feminist tradition and largely wins.

The Pardoner and the Problem of the Teller

Among the most unsettling of the pilgrims is the Pardoner, a seller of papal indulgences and fake relics who openly confesses, in his Prologue, that he preaches against avarice purely in order to enrich himself. He tells the company exactly how his con works — and then tells a genuinely powerful moral tale about three revelers who go looking for Death and find it in a hoard of gold. The tale is a masterpiece of compressed moral horror; the man telling it is a self-declared fraud. Chaucer leaves the resulting paradox hanging in the air without resolving it: can an immoral man produce moral art, and does the corruption of the teller poison the truth of the tale? It is a question modern criticism has never stopped debating, and it shows how far Chaucer was willing to push the relationship between voice and meaning. The Pardoner’s portrait is also remarkable for its ambiguity of gender and sexuality, rendered with a worldly candor that startles readers expecting medieval literature to be either pious or naive.

Chaucer’s Comedy of Voices

What makes The Canterbury Tales feel astonishingly modern six centuries on is Chaucer’s mastery of dramatized voice. Each tale is shaped to fit and expose its teller: the gentle, philosophical Knight produces a stately romance of chivalry; the drunken Miller responds with a riotously obscene comedy of a cuckolded carpenter; the choleric Reeve, himself a carpenter, retaliates with a tale humiliating a miller. The pilgrims quarrel, interrupt, insult, and one-up each other, so that the frame is not a neutral container but a living social comedy in which storytelling becomes a form of combat and self-revelation. Chaucer the narrator hovers above all this with an irony so subtle and so consistent that readers still cannot fully agree on where his sympathies lie. He gives the Wife of Bath, the Pardoner, the worldly Monk, and the corrupt Friar room to condemn themselves in their own words, and the result is a portrait gallery of late-medieval English society that is sharper and more humane than any sermon could be.

Approaching the Text Today

Modern readers face one real obstacle: the language. Chaucer wrote in Middle English, and while it is far closer to modern English than Old English (the tongue of Beowulf), it still requires either a facing-page glossed edition or a verse translation. The original repays the effort, since so much of Chaucer’s pleasure lives in the music of his rhyme and meter, but a good modern rendering is a legitimate way in for first-time readers. It also helps to know that the work is unfinished — Chaucer planned far more tales than he completed — so the collection reads less as a single arc than as a gloriously varied anthology held together by the pilgrimage frame. The best approach is to sample widely rather than read straight through: begin with the General Prologue to meet the pilgrims, then turn to the Miller’s Tale, the Wife of Bath’s Prologue, and the Pardoner’s Tale, which together display the full range of Chaucer’s comic, social, and moral imagination. For anyone interested in the roots of English storytelling, there is no more rewarding place to begin.

Our rating: 4.3/5 — The foundation of English literature — social breadth, competing voices, and the Wife of Bath.

Reading Guides

• Where to Start with Geoffrey Chaucer
• Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes — Full Review
• Paradise Lost by John Milton — Full Review

Manuscript Tradition, Printing History, and the Text’s Literary Status

The Canterbury Tales was begun c. 1387 and remained unfinished at Chaucer’s death on 25 October 1400. The plan announced in the General Prologue — 120 tales in total, two per pilgrim on the road to Canterbury and two on the return — was never completed; approximately 24 tales survive, some of them themselves incomplete. William Caxton printed the first edition in 1476, among the first books printed in England, using a manuscript that later scholarship has identified as textually inferior; he printed a corrected edition in 1484.

The text survives in 83 manuscript copies, of which the Ellesmere Manuscript (c. 1400–1405, now at the Huntington Library in California) and the Hengwrt Manuscript (c. 1400, now at the National Library of Wales) are the most important and most debated. The two manuscripts differ in the order of tales and in many individual readings; the question of which reflects Chaucer’s own arrangement has no definitive answer.

Chaucer’s decision to write in Middle English rather than Latin or French — both more prestigious literary languages in 14th-century England — was culturally significant. His use of the vernacular for a work of this scale and ambition helped establish English as a literary language capable of addressing serious subjects. The Tales range in register from the high chivalric romance of the Knight’s Tale to the bawdy fabliaux of the Miller’s and Reeve’s tales, with the Wife of Bath’s Prologue (at 828 lines, the longest prologue in the collection) representing Chaucer’s most ambitious experiment in feminine voice and autobiography. The diversity of genres, registers, and social perspectives within a single framing narrative made The Canterbury Tales a model for later collections from Boccaccio’s Decameron influence back on it to Shakespeare’s problem plays.