The Canterbury Tales

A storytelling contest among some thirty pilgrims riding from Southwark to Canterbury, framed so that a knight, a miller, a prioress, a pardoner and the Wife of Bath all get the floor in turn and in their own registers. The frame is the invention: it lets Chaucer put the whole social order into one book and let its members undercut each other.

It is also the reason Middle English is legible to English readers at all, and the Lexile of 1290 the curator assigns it is the highest in this stretch of the list.

Context: Geoffrey Chaucer (c. 1343-1400) was an English poet and civil servant who wrote the Tales in the last dozen or so years of his life and did not finish them; the surviving text runs to twenty-four tales against a plan that would have required well over a hundred.

Connections

• Geoffrey Chaucer — the author.
• Storytelling — the frame device is the book’s argument.
• Christianity — the pilgrimage that organises it, and a standing target of its satire.
• Literature