The Canterbury Tales

Written in the late 1300s, Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales is one of the greatest surviving works of Middle English literature, and was a huge influence on later writers from Shakespeare to Keats, among many others.

This guide refers to Neville Coghill’s modern English translation (Penguin, 2003).

Plot Summary

The Canterbury Tales tells the story of a group of pilgrims traveling from London to Canterbury to visit the holy shrine of St. Thomas Becket. This is a story made of stories: Each of the pilgrims takes a turn as a storyteller, with a banquet promised to the person who tells the best tale.

The poem begins with a Prologue, in which a shrewd narrator—who, oddly enough, shares a name with his author—stops at the Tabard Inn on the night before his pilgrimage begins. There, he meets the host of other pilgrims who will become his traveling companions and assesses the character of each. They’re a lively, hearty bunch, and often not exactly as one would expect: The religious figures, in particular, are often corrupt and flesh-loving (though there are a few truly holy people among them). The tavern’s Host suggests the pilgrims should have a storytelling competition as they travel and offers to go along with them as a judge. The company happily agrees, and they set off together the next morning.

Each of the tales that follows is told in the voice of one of the pilgrims—and, as the Tales progress, those pilgrims often react to each other, telling stories that insult the person who spoke before them or balancing a tale of moral instruction with a dirty joke (The crude Miller, for instance, insists on following the gentle Knight’s chivalrous romance with a bawdy tale of adultery, trickery, and flatulence—and in turn infuriates the sour old Reeve, who retorts with a story about a cheating miller who got what was coming to him.). The stories are often retellings of familiar narratives; through his characters, Chaucer puts a human spin on even the most preachy of old tales, and finds humor everywhere he looks—from the heights of Mount Olympus to the dirt of the barnyard.

The Canterbury Tales also provides an energetic picture of daily life in medieval England—a world in which intense religious conviction lived side-by-side (and indeed often coincided) with untamable sexuality, greed, and casual violence. Chaucer’s polyphonic portrait of his world feels both historically rooted and timeless: This is, indeed, the nature of human beings.

Chaucer never completed The Canterbury Tales, and there’s some scholarly debate about the ordering of the stories (both in terms of when they were written and in terms of their sequence). But the fragmentary, changeable shape of the surviving narrative fits right in with the Tales’ interest in shifting perspectives and collaborative meaning-making. As the Host mock-solemnly says, referring to no lesser authority than the Gospels: “It has been told again and yet again/By various writers; but I may explain/No one Evangelist would have sufficed/To tell us of the pains of Jesus Christ./Nor does each tell it as the others do;/Nevertheless what each has said is true,/And all agree as to their general sense,/Though each with some degree of difference” (184).