Canterbury Tales Classic Tales of Pilgrimage, Satire, and Medieval Life

The Canterbury Tales is one of the great works of English literature: a vivid, funny, bawdy, moral, satirical, and deeply human collection of stories told by pilgrims on the road to Canterbury. Geoffrey Chaucer frames the work as a storytelling contest among travelers from many walks of medieval life: knights, clerks, merchants, millers, wives, friars, pardoners, cooks, lawyers, and more. As they ride together, they reveal themselves through the tales they choose to tell and the ways they interrupt, mock, challenge, and expose one another. Written in Middle English in the late fourteenth century, The Canterbury Tales brings together romance, comedy, sermon, beast fable, saint's life, fabliau, tragedy, and sharp social observation. Chaucer's genius lies not only in the stories themselves, but in the voices behind them. The pilgrims become a moving portrait of medieval society: devout and corrupt, noble and ridiculous, tender and cruel, worldly and spiritual, all caught in the act of telling stories to make sense of themselves. Readers interested in classic literature, medieval poetry, English literary history, satire, pilgrimage, storytelling, and the roots of English fiction will find The Canterbury Tales essential. It remains a living work because its people still feel recognizable: vain, generous, lustful, pious, greedy, clever, foolish, frightened, and endlessly talkative.