The Canterbury Tales

The Canterbury Tales is Geoffrey Chaucer’s unfinished collection of stories told within a pilgrimage to Canterbury. The General Prologue introduces travellers whose occupations, manners, and rivalries help shape the storytelling that follows. A knight’s romance, a saint’s life, a comic tale, and a prose argument can offer strikingly different ways of judging human conduct. Chaucer’s Middle English verse and prose preserve this variety of voices without making every narrator a spokesman for the author. The exchanges between stories are part of the work’s meaning, showing how pride, experience, faith, and social position affect both narration and response.