The Canterbury Tales and other Poems

Abstract

The Canterbury Tales (Middle English: Tales of Caunterbury[2]) is a collection of 24 stories that runs to over 17,000 lines written in Middle English by Geoffrey Chaucer between 1387 and 1400.[3] It is widely regarded as Chaucer's magnum opus. The tales (mostly written in verse, although some are in prose) 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 prologue introduces in detail (and sometimes quite sarcastically) the thirty characters, belonging to different professions, social classes and psychological types, on a pilgrimage to Canterbury, including Chaucer himself, who tells two short stories. This is followed by a series of stories told by the individual characters. The stories have many different themes, typical themes are courtly love, betrayal and greed, and the hypocrisy of priests is also a common theme. The stories are humorous and serious, there are many different genres in the collection, such as the knight's novel (The Knight's Tale) and his parody (Composing about Mr. Thopas), the fable (The Nun's Priest's Tale), the legend (The Abbot's Tale) or the Fabliau (The Miller's Tale). The diversity of short stories demonstrates the extent of Chaucer's literary abilities and demonstrates that the author knew a large number of rhetorical forms and stylistic levels. Contemporary rhetorical schools emphasized this diversity and classified literature, similar to Virgil, into high, medium, and low, with respect to the breadth of rhetorical forms and the diversity of vocabulary.