Geoffrey Chaucer — The Canterbury Tales

Definition

The Canterbury Tales uses a frame narrative: an outer story (29 pilgrims travelling to Canterbury to visit St Thomas Becket's shrine at Canterbury Cathedral) contains an inner series of stories told by those pilgrims. The Host of the Tabard Inn in Southwark proposes the game: each pilgrim tells 2 tales going and 2 returning — 120 tales total. Chaucer wrote 24, of which 2 are unfinished.

Explanation

The pilgrimage is the perfect frame because it gathers people from every level of society — nobility, clergy, merchants, craftsmen, workers — who would never otherwise travel together. Each character's tale reflects their personality, class, and values. The structure allows Chaucer to write in many styles simultaneously: courtly romance (Knight), fabliaux (Miller, Reeve), hagiography (Second Nun), moral tale (Pardoner), Breton lai (Franklin). The frame is borrowed from Boccaccio's Decameron (1353), but Chaucer's pilgrimage gives him a more socially realistic cross-section than Boccaccio's plague-refugees.

Examples

• ▸The Knight tells a chivalric romance; the Miller immediately follows with a bawdy fabliaux — class conflict built into the structure
• ▸The Pardoner confesses his own fraud in his Prologue, then preaches against it in his Tale — psychological complexity only possible in a frame
• ▸The Host (Harry Bailey) controls pacing, interrupts, judges — a fictional audience within the frame

Definition

Estates satire is a medieval literary genre that criticises each social estate — clergy, nobility, and commons — for failing to fulfil their God-given social function. In the General Prologue, Chaucer creates portraits of pilgrims from all three estates and measures each against an ideal. The Knight (genuine chivalry) and the Ploughman (genuine Christian labour) are the only estates representatives who actually perform their proper roles.

Explanation

Chaucer's irony works through excessive, apparently admiring description. The Monk is praised for his contempt of dusty books and his love of hunting — but the praise is damning, because a monk's whole duty is to pray and study in his monastery. The Pardoner is described as the finest pardoner 'from Berwick to Ware' — which means he is the most effective fraud in England. Understanding estates satire unlocks why Chaucer's 'praise' often means the opposite of what it says.

Examples

• ▸The Knight — the only noble figure who genuinely embodies chivalry (no irony)
• ▸The Ploughman — the only commoner figure who genuinely lives a Christian life (no irony)
• ▸The Prioress, Monk, Friar, Pardoner, Summoner — all clergy failing their vocation (all ironic)

Definition

In the General Prologue, Chaucer creates a fictional narrator who presents himself as a simple, somewhat obtuse observer who will faithfully report everything he heard, regardless of whether it is crude. This narrator-persona is distinct from Chaucer-the-author. The narrator's apparent naivety and admiration often produce irony: the author means the opposite of what the narrator says.

Explanation

The split between Chaucer-the-narrator and Chaucer-the-author is one of the most discussed aspects of the poem. When the narrator praises the Monk's love of hunting and says he agrees with the Monk's dismissal of dusty rules, we know that Chaucer-the-author is satirising both the Monk and the narrator who cannot see the monk's corruption. This technique — the unreliable narrator — allows Chaucer to voice dangerous criticisms of the Church without taking personal responsibility for them. He is only reporting what he saw.

Examples

• ▸'He was a verray parfit gentil knyght' — the narrator's sincere admiration; Chaucer-author's genuine ideal
• ▸'And I seyde his opinioun was good' — narrator agrees with the Monk's dismissal of rules; author is satirising both
• ▸The Pardoner's portrait — narrator admires his skill; author reveals him as a fraud

Definition

Chaucer wrote in Middle English — the form of English spoken from roughly 1150 to 1500, after the Norman Conquest transformed Old English. His specific dialect was the East Midland dialect of London, which was the prestige dialect of the 14th century. He chose to write in English at a time when Latin was the language of scholarship and French was the language of the court — a deliberate cultural and political choice.

Explanation

Key features of Chaucer's Middle English include: (1) final '-e' was often pronounced (making metre work differently); (2) spelling was not standardised; (3) vocabulary draws heavily on French (because of the Norman Conquest) and Latin; (4) word order is more flexible than Modern English. Chaucer's choice of English — over French or Latin — was significant: he was part of a 14th-century movement (alongside Langland's Piers Plowman and the Gawain-poet) that made English a literary language. He is credited with 'legitimising' the vernacular for serious literature.

Examples

• ▸'Whan that Aprill with his shoures soote' — the famous opening; 'soote' means sweet
• ▸'The droghte of March hath perced to the roote' — 'droghte' = drought; 'perced' = pierced
• ▸The General Prologue's rhyming couplets — Chaucer's preferred form for narrative verse

Definition

A fabliaux (plural: fabliaux) is a short, bawdy comic tale in verse, typically about middle-class characters, featuring sexual trickery, cuckolding, and the humiliation of foolish husbands. Originally a French genre, Chaucer adapts several for his lower-class pilgrims. The Miller's Tale, Reeve's Tale, Merchant's Tale, and Shipman's Tale are all fabliaux.

Explanation

Chaucer's fabliaux do cultural work that goes beyond mere entertainment. The Miller tells his fabliaux immediately after the Knight's courtly romance — a deliberate class disruption. The Miller's Tale parodies the conventions of courtly love: the lover addresses a carpenter's wife using the same language a courtly knight would use for a highborn lady. The joke is the gap between elevated language and base reality. Fabliaux also give Chaucer space to give voice to characters — the Wife of Bath, the Miller — who challenge hierarchy and authority.

Examples

• ▸The Miller's Tale — carpenter cuckolded, clerk tricked; a lover asks a lady to kiss his 'naked ers'
• ▸The Reeve's Tale — two students take revenge on a dishonest miller by sleeping with his wife and daughter
• ▸The Merchant's Tale — old January marries young May; she commits adultery in a pear tree

Definition

The Wife of Bath's Prologue (over 800 lines) is the longest prologue in the Tales and one of the most discussed texts in medieval literature. Alisoun defends her five marriages using scripture, reason, and 'experience' — she argues that women's sexuality and desire for sovereignty are natural, not sinful. Her Tale is an Arthurian romance in which the answer to 'What do women most desire?' is sovereignty over their husbands.

Explanation

Scholars debate whether the Wife of Bath is a proto-feminist character or the ultimate anti-feminist male fantasy — a woman who confirms every misogynist stereotype (lustful, domineering, manipulative) while appearing to celebrate herself. She draws heavily on the anti-feminist tradition of Ovid, St Jerome, and Walter Map. Her fifth husband Jankyn reads to her from his 'book of wicked wives' — a compilation of every anti-feminist text in the tradition — until she tears three pages out and he hits her, causing her deafness. The scene is simultaneously comic, violent, and complex.

Examples

• ▸'Experience, though noon auctoritee / Were in this world' — experience over written authority
• ▸Her five husbands — three old and rich (she dominated them), two young and attractive (they dominated her)
• ▸The Arthurian Tale — a rapist knight is sent to find what women most desire; an old hag gives him the answer in exchange for marriage, then transforms into a beautiful wife