The Canterbury Tales is a collection of stories, mostly in verse, written by Geoffrey Chaucer chiefly from 1387 to 1400. They are held together in a frame story of a pilgrimage on which each member of the group is to tell two tales on the way to Canterbury, and two on the way back. Fewer than a quarter of the projected tales were completed before Chaucer's death. [1] It is uncertain in what order Chaucer intended the tales to appear; moreover it is very possible that, as a work-in-progress, no final authorial order of tales ever existed.
The Canterbury Tales is a collection of 24 stories that runs to over 17,000 lines written in Middle English by Geoffrey Chaucer between 1387 and 1400. In 1386, Chaucer became Controller of Customs and Justice of Peace and, in 1389, Clerk of the King's work. It was during these years that Chaucer began working on his most famous text, The Canterbury Tales. The tales are presented as part of a story-telling contest by a group of pilgrims as they travel together from London to Canterbury to visit the shrine of Saint Thomas Becket at Canterbury Cathedral. The prize for this contest is a free meal at the Tabard Inn at Southwark on their return.
Geoffrey Chaucer was an English poet and author. Widely considered the greatest English poet of the Middle Ages, he is best known for The Canterbury Tales. Chaucer has been styled the "Father of English literature" and was the first writer buried in Poets' Corner of Westminster Abbey.
Canterbury is a historic English cathedral city and UNESCO World Heritage Site, situated in the heart of the City of Canterbury, a local government district of Kent, England. It lies on the River Stour.
Several different orders are evident in the manuscripts of the work; in addition certain orders and structures of the Tales have been proposed by scholars.
The table below enumerates all the pilgrims mentioned in the General Prologue, plus two that materialise later in the tales, and the stories they tell. It also compares the orders in which stories appear in various sources.
The General Prologue is the first part of Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales.
Scholarly arrangements [2]
Thomas Tyrwhitt was an English classical scholar and critic.
Henry Bradshaw was a British scholar and librarian.
Frederick James Furnivall (1825–1910), one of the co-creators of the New English Dictionary, was an English philologist. He founded a number of learned societies on early English literature and made pioneering and massive editorial contributions to the subject, of which the most notable was his parallel text edition of The Canterbury Tales. He was one of the founders of and teachers at the London Working Men's College and a lifelong campaigner against what he perceived as injustice.
Manuscripts: Over 80 manuscripts containing all or part of The Canterbury Tales exist. The six tabulated below represent the four main orders (El, Cx, La, Pw) in which tales appear in the manuscripts, plus two significant anomalous arrangements (Hg, Ha). [7] All manuscript orders (except Hg*) were collated by Furnivall. [8]
The Ellesmere Chaucer, or Ellesmere Manuscript of the Canterbury Tales, is an early 15th-century illuminated manuscript of Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, owned by the Huntington Library, in San Marino, California. It is considered one of the most significant copies of the Tales.
The Hengwrt Chaucer manuscript is an early-15th-century manuscript of the Canterbury Tales, held in the National Library of Wales, in Aberystwyth. It is an important source for Chaucer's text, and was possibly written by someone with access to original authorial holograph, now lost.
John Matthews Manly was an American professor of English literature and philology at the University of Chicago. Manly specialized in the study of the works of William Shakespeare and Geoffrey Chaucer. His eight-volume work, The Text of the Canterbury Tales (1940), written in collaboration with his former student Edith Rickert, has been cited as a definitive study of Chaucer's works.
(+G = Manuscript includes the non-Chaucerian Tale of Gamelyn after the Cook's initial abortive attempt to tell a tale.)
The Tale of Gamelyn is a romance written in c. 1350 in a dialect of Middle English, considered part of the Matter of England. It is presented in a style of rhymed couplets and described by Skeat as "the older and longer kind of ballad" and by Ramsey as a "rough and ready romance."
Pilgrim | GP | Tyr | CS | El | Hg | Hg* | Cx | La | Pw | Ha |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Knight | 1 | I.2 | A.2 | 2 | 2 | 2 | 2 | 2 | 2 | 2 |
Squire (Knight's son) | 2 | V.1 | F.1 | 12 | 13 | 10 | 7 | 7 | 9 | 12 |
Yeoman (Knight's servant) | 3 | |||||||||
Prioress | 4 | VII.2 | B2.2 | 17 | 21 | 18 | 19 | 19 | 7 | 19 |
Nun "Second Nun" (with Prioress) | 5 | VIII.1 | G.1 | 22 | 16 | 13 | 14 | 14 | 16 | 14 |
Priest "Nun's Priest" (with Prioress) | 6 | VII.6 | B2.6 | 21 | 10 | 22 | 23 | 23 | 23 | 23 |
Second Priest (with Prioress) | 7 | |||||||||
Third Priest (with Prioress) | 8 | |||||||||
Monk | 9 | VII.5 | B2.5 | 20 | 9 | 21 | 22 | 22 | 22 | 22 |
Friar | 10 | III.2 | D.2 | 8 | 7 | 7 | 10 | 9 | 12 | 8 |
Merchant | 11 | IV.2 | E.2 | 11 | 14 | 11 | 8 | 12 | 10 | 11 |
Clerk | 12 | IV.1 | E.1 | 10 | 17 | 14 | 12 | 11 | 14 | 10 |
Sergeant of Law "Man of Law" | 13 | II | B1 | 6 | 12 | 9 | 6 | 6 | 8 | 6 |
Franklin | 14 | V.2 | F.2 | 13 | 15 | 12 | 13 | 13 | 15 | 13 |
Haberdasher (guildsman) | 15 | |||||||||
Carpenter (guildsman) | 16 | |||||||||
Weaver (guildsman) | 17 | |||||||||
Dyer (guildsman) | 18 | |||||||||
Tapestry Weaver (guildsman) | 19 | |||||||||
Cook (with guildsmen) | 20 | I.5 | A.5 | 5 | 5 | 5 | 5 | 5 +G | 5 +G | 5 +G |
Shipman | 21 | VII.1 | B2.1 | 16 | 20 | 17 | 18 | 18 | 6 | 18 |
Doctor of Physic "Physician" | 22 | VI.1 | C.1 | 14 | 18 | 15 | 16 | 16 | 18 | 16 |
Wife of Bath | 23 | III.1 | D.1 | 7 | 6 | 6 | 9 | 8 | 11 | 7 |
Parson | 24 | X.1 | I.1 | 25 | 24 | 24 | 25 | 25 | 25 | 25 |
Plowman (brother of Parson) | 25 | |||||||||
Reeve | 26 | I.4 | A.4 | 4 | 4 | 4 | 4 | 4 | 4 | 4 |
Miller | 27 | I.3 | A.3 | 3 | 3 | 3 | 3 | 3 | 3 | 3 |
Summoner | 28 | III.3 | D.3 | 9 | 8 | 8 | 11 | 10 | 13 | 9 |
Pardoner (with Summoner) | 29 | VI.2 | C.2 | 15 | 19 | 16 | 17 | 17 | 19 | 17 |
Manciple | 30 | IX | H | 24 | 11 | 23 | 24 | 24 | 24 | 24 |
"Chaucer" (General Prologue) | 31 | I.1 | A.1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 |
"Chaucer" (Sir Thopas) | 31 | VII.3 | B2.3 | 18 | 22 | 19 | 20 | 20 | 20 | 20 |
"Chaucer" (The Tale of Melibee) | 31 | VII.4 | B2.4 | 19 | 23 | 20 | 21 | 21 | 21 | 21 |
"Chaucer" (Chaucer's Retraction) | 31 | X.2 | I.2 | 26 | - | - | 26 | 26 | 26 | 26 |
Our Host | 32 | |||||||||
Canon's Yeoman | - | VIII.2 | G.2 | 23 | - | - | 15 | 15 | 17 | 15 |
Canon | - |
Hg is the chemical symbol of Mercury.
The Parson's Tale seems, from the evidence of its prologue, to have been intended as the final tale of Geoffrey Chaucer's poetic cycle The Canterbury Tales. The "tale", which is the longest of all the surviving contributions by Chaucer's pilgrims, is in fact neither a story nor a poem, but a long and unrelieved prose treatise on penance. Critics and readers are generally unclear what rhetorical effect Chaucer may have intended by ending his cycle in this unlikely, extra-generic fashion.
"The Miller's Tale" is the second of Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales (1380s–1390s), told by the drunken miller Robin to "quite" "The Knight's Tale". The Miller's Prologue is the first "quite" that occurs in the tales.
"The Pardoner's Tale" is one of The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer. In the order of the Tales, it comes after The Physician's Tale and before The Shipman's Tale; it is prompted by the Host's desire to hear something positive after that depressing tale. The Pardoner initiates his Prologue—briefly accounting his methods of swindling people—and then proceeds to tell a moral tale.
Sir Thopas is one of The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer, published in 1387. The tale is one of two—together with The Tale of Melibee—told by the fictive Geoffrey Chaucer as he travels with the pilgrims on the journey to Canterbury Cathedral. The tale concerns the adventures of the knight "Sir Thopas" and his quest to win the elf-queen.
Adam Pinkhurst is most well known as a fourteenth-century English scribe whom Linne Mooney identified as the 'personal scribe' of Geoffrey Chaucer, although much recent scholarship has cast doubt on this connection.
"The Monk's Tale" is one of The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer.
The Pilgrim's Tale is an English anti-monastic poem. It was probably written ca. 1536–38, since it makes references to events in 1534 and 1536 – i.e., the Lincolnshire Rebellion – and borrows from The Plowman's Tale and the 1532 text by William Thynne of Chaucer's Romaunt of the Rose, which is cited by page and line. It remains the most mysterious of the pseudo-Chaucerian texts. In his 1602 edition of the Works of Chaucer, Thomas Speght mentions that he hoped to find this elusive text. A prefatory advertisement to the reader in the 1687 edition of the Works speaks of an exhaustive search for The Pilgrim's Tale, which had proved fruitless
Contact between Geoffrey Chaucer and the Italian humanists Petrarch or Boccaccio has been proposed by scholars for centuries. More recent scholarship tends to discount these earlier speculations because of lack of evidence. As Leonard Koff remarks, the story of their meeting is "a 'tydying' worthy of Chaucer himself".
The Prologue and Tale of Beryn are spurious 15th century additions to Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. They are both written in Middle English.
Harley MS. 7334, sometimes known as the Harley Manuscript, is a mediaeval manuscript of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales held in the Harleian Collection of the British Library.
Edith Rickert (1871–1938) was an influential medieval scholar at the University of Chicago, whose foundational work includes the Chaucer Life-Records and the eight-volume Text of the Canterbury Tales (1940).
Johannes August Hermann (John) Koch was one of the most prolific modern scholars of medieval English literature, especially the works of Geoffrey Chaucer.
Norman Francis Blake was a British academic and scholar specialising in Middle English and Early Modern English language and literature on which he published abundantly during his career.