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The Canterbury Tales is a collection of twenty-four stories that runs to over 17,000 lines written in Middle English by Geoffrey Chaucer between 1387 and 1400. It is widely regarded as Chaucer's magnum opus. 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, author, and civil servant best known for The Canterbury Tales. He has been called the "father of English literature", or, alternatively, the "father of English poetry". He was the first writer to be buried in what has since come to be called Poets' Corner, in Westminster Abbey. Chaucer also gained fame as a philosopher and astronomer, composing the scientific A Treatise on the Astrolabe for his 10-year-old son Lewis. He maintained a career in the civil service as a bureaucrat, courtier, diplomat, and member of parliament.
Frederick James Furnivall was an English philologist, best known as one of the co-creators of the New English Dictionary. 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 injustice.
"The Wife of Bath's Tale" is among the best-known of Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. It provides insight into the role of women in the Late Middle Ages and was probably of interest to Chaucer himself, for the character is one of his most developed ones, with her Prologue twice as long as her Tale. He also goes so far as to describe two sets of clothing for her in his General Prologue. She holds her own among the bickering pilgrims, and evidence in the manuscripts suggests that although she was first assigned a different, plainer tale—perhaps the one told by the Shipman—she received her present tale as her significance increased. She calls herself both Alyson and Alys in the prologue, but to confuse matters these are also the names of her 'gossib', whom she mentions several times, as well as many female characters throughout The Canterbury Tales.
"The Franklin's Tale" is one of The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer. It focuses on issues of providence, truth, generosity and gentillesse in human relationships.
A fabliau is a comic, often anonymous tale written by jongleurs in northeast France between c. 1150 and 1400. They are generally characterized by sexual and scatological obscenity, and by a set of contrary attitudes—contrary to the church and to the nobility. Several of them were reworked by Giovanni Boccaccio for the Decameron and by Geoffrey Chaucer for his Canterbury Tales. Some 150 French fabliaux are extant, the number depending on how narrowly fabliau is defined. According to R. Howard Bloch, fabliaux are the first expression of literary realism in Europe.
"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 the physician's depressing tale. The Pardoner initiates his Prologue—briefly accounting his methods of swindling people—and then proceeds to tell a moral tale.
Troilus and Criseyde is an epic poem by Geoffrey Chaucer which re-tells in Middle English the tragic story of the lovers Troilus and Criseyde set against a backdrop of war during the siege of Troy. It was written in rime royale and probably completed during the mid-1380s. Many Chaucer scholars regard it as the poet's finest work. As a finished long poem it is more self-contained than the better known but ultimately unfinished The Canterbury Tales. This poem is often considered the source of the phrase: "all good things must come to an end" (3.615).
"The Man of Law's Tale" is the fifth of the Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer, written around 1387. John Gower's "Tale of Constance" in Confessio Amantis tells the same story and may have been a source for Chaucer. Nicholas Trivet's Les chronicles was a source for both authors.
The General Prologue is the first part of The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer. It introduces the frame story, in which a group of pilgrims travelling to the shrine of Thomas Becket in Canterbury agree to take part in a storytelling competition, and describes the pilgrims themselves.
"The Squire's Tale" is a tale in Geoffrey Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales. It is unfinished, perhaps deliberately, and comes first in group F, followed by the Franklin's interruption, prologue and tale. The Squire is the Knight's son, a novice warrior and lover with more enthusiasm than experience. His tale is an epic romance, which, if completed, would probably have been longer than rest of the Tales combined. It contains many literary allusions and a great deal of vivid description.
Elizabeth Helen Cooper,, known as Helen Cooper, is a British literary scholar. From 2004 to 2014, she was Professor of Medieval and Renaissance English at the University of Cambridge, and a fellow of Magdalene College, Cambridge.
The loathly lady, is a tale type commonly used in medieval literature, most famously in Geoffrey Chaucer's The Wife of Bath's Tale. The motif is that of a woman who appears unattractive but undergoes a transformation upon being approached by a man in spite of her unattractiveness, becoming extremely desirable. It is then revealed that her ugliness was the result of a curse which was broken by the hero's action.
"The Marriage of Sir Gawain" is an English Arthurian ballad, collected as Child Ballad 31. Found in the Percy Folio, it is a fragmented account of the story of Sir Gawain and the loathly lady, which has been preserved in fuller form in the medieval poem The Wedding of Sir Gawain and Dame Ragnelle. The loathly lady episode itself dates at least back to Geoffrey Chaucer's "Wife of Bath's Tale" from The Canterbury Tales. Unlike most of the Child Ballads, but like the Arthurian "King Arthur and King Cornwall" and "The Boy and the Mantle", "The Marriage of Sir Gawain" is not a folk ballad but a song for professional minstrels.
The Vitae duorum Offarum "The lives of the two Offas" is a literary history written in the mid-thirteenth century, apparently by the St Albans monk Matthew Paris; however, the most recent editor and translator of the work rejects this attribution and argues for an earlier date, in the late twelfth century. The earliest editor, William Wats, argues that the texts are older than Matthew's day but were revised by him; he bases this view on stylistic elements, such as the inclusion in the first Vita of a quotation from Lucan which also appears repeatedly in Matthew's Chronica maiora.
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".
Crescentia is an Early Middle High German language chivalric romance, included in the Kaiserchronik about 1150. Other versions appeared in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, in prose and verse.
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. 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 Squire is a fictional character in the framing narrative of Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. He is squire to the Knight and is the narrator of The Squire's Tale or Cambuscan. The Squire is one of the secular pilgrims, of the military group. The Knight and the Squire are the pilgrims with the highest social status. However his tale, interrupted as it is, is paired with that of the Franklin. The Squire is a candidate for the interrupter of The Host in the epilogue of the Man of Law's Tale.
References
- ↑ Mitchell, Jerome (1987). Scott, Chaucer, and Medieval Romance: A Study in Sir Walter Scott's Indebtedness to the Literature of the Middle Ages . UP of Kentucky. p. 175. ISBN 9780813116099 . Retrieved 9 January 2013.
- ↑ "Franklin's Tale, The". Merriam-Webster's Encyclopedia of Literature . Merriam-Webster. 1995. p. 433. ISBN 9780877790426 . Retrieved 9 January 2013.
- ↑ Thompson, Stith (1955–58). Motif-index of folk-literature : a classification of narrative elements in folktales, ballads, myths, fables, mediaeval romances, exempla, fabliaux, jest-books, and local legends. Bloomington: Indiana UP.
- ↑ Chaucer, Geoffrey; Benson, Larry Dean (2008). The riverside Chaucer: based on The works of Geoffrey Chaucer. Oxford UP. pp. 895–. ISBN 9780199552092 . Retrieved 9 January 2013.
- 1 2 Edwards, Robert R. (2003). "The Franklin's Tale". In Robert M. Correale (ed.). Sources and Analogues of the Canterbury Tales. Vol. 1. Mary Hamel. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer. pp. 211–65. ISBN 9780859918282.
- ↑ Clouston, W. A. (1872). "The Damsel's Rash Promise: Indian Original and Some Asiatic and European Variants of Chaucer's Franklin's Tale". In F.J. Furnivall (ed.). Originals and analogues of some of Chaucer's Canterbury tales. E. Brock, W.A. Clouston. Furnivall. pp. 289–340.
- ↑ Mann, Jill (2002). Geoffrey Chaucer. Boydell & Brewer. p. 10. ISBN 9780859916134 . Retrieved 9 January 2013.
- ↑ Wollock, Jennifer G. (2011). Rethinking Chivalry and Courtly Love. ABC-CLIO. p. 169. ISBN 9780275984885 . Retrieved 9 January 2013.
