Geoffrey Chaucer

During his life, Geoffrey Chaucer (born c.1340) was courtier, diplomat, revenue collector, administrator, negotiator, overseer of building projects, landowner and knight of the shire. He was servant, retainer, husband, friend and father, but is now mainly known as a poet and ‘the father of English literature’, a postion to which he was raised by other writers in the generation after his death. It was Boccaccio’s Decameron which inspired Chaucer, in the 1390s, to begin work on The Canterbury Tales, which was still unfinished at his death in October 1400. It tells the story of a group of 30 pilgrims who meet at the Tabard Inn in Southwark, on the south bank of the Thames opposite the city of London, and travel together to visit the then famous shrine of St Thomas Becket in Canterbury cathedral. The tavern host, who accompanies them, suggests that they amuse one another along the way by telling stories, with the best storyteller awarded a meal in the tavern (paid for by all the others) on their return. The stories told by the pilgrims range from bawdy comedies through saints’ lives and moral tracts to courtly romances, always delivered with a generous helping of Chaucer’s own sly wit and ironic humour. Although basing his characters on the stereotypes of ‘estates satire’, Chaucer succeeds in his aim of producing an overview of his times and their culture, for posterity, in the manner of Italian, proto-Renaissance, writers. This transcription and edition is taken from British Library MS Harley 7334, produced within ten years of Chaucer’s death. The on-page notes and glosses aim to enable readers with little or no previous experience of medieva

Los cuentos de Canterbury es una de las obras m s importantes de la literatura inglesa, y quiz s la mejor obra de la Edad Media en Inglaterra. Escrita por Geoffrey Chaucer, presenta una estructura semejante al Decamer n, de Boccaccio. Los cuentos, escritos en ingl s medio, est n contenidos en una narrativa mayor y son contados por un grupo de peregrinos que viajan desde Southwark a Canterbury para visitar el templo de Santo Thomas Becket, en la Catedral de Canterbury. La obra resulta de inter s, tanto para sus contempor neos como en la actualidad, porque fue la primera obra literaria escrita en ingl s; antes de Chaucer s lo se escrib a en franc s o en lat n. Los cuentos fueron escritos a finales del siglo XIV.

The Broadview Canterbury Tales is an edition of the complete tales in a text based on the famous Ellesmere Manuscript. Here one may read a Middle English text that is closer to what Chaucer's scribe, Adam Pinkhurst, actually wrote than that in any other modern edition. Unlike most editions, which draw on a number of manuscripts to recapture Chaucer's original intention, this edition preserves the text as it was found in one influential manuscript. A sampling of facsimile pages from the original manuscript is also included, along with a selection of other works that give the reader a rich sense of the cultural, political, and literary worlds in which Chaucer lived. The second edition includes a new Middle English glossary, a timeline of Chaucer's life and times, and detailed page headers showing the fragment and line numbers to assist readers in finding a specific section of the poem.

'We'll give a free dinner to the person who tells the best story. Now, put up your hands if you agree. � The pilgrims all held up their hands. A group of pilgrims are travelling together for five days from London to Canterbury. On the way, each pilgrim has to tell a story to keep the others amused. Some stories are happy, and some are sad. But they all have a message, and we can learn from them.

In the tradition of Seamus Heaney’s Beowulf and Marie Borroff’s Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Sheila Fisher’s The Selected Canterbury Tales is a vivid, lively, and readable translation of the most famous work of England’s premier medieval poet. Preserving Chaucer’s rhyme and meter, Fisher makes these tales accessible to a contemporary ear while inviting readers to the Middle English original on facing pages. Her informative introduction highlights Chaucer’s artistic originality in his memorable portrayals of surprisingly modern women and men from across the spectrum of medieval society.

The Wife of Bath is the most vibrant character in The Canterbury Tales - and arguably the most famous. In creating his brilliant portrayal of the talkative wife, Chaucer weaves a dazzling array of allusions to biblical, classical, patristic, and vernacular sources. These two volumes - the most recent contribution to the Variorum Chaucer series - integrate six hundred years of scholarship on The Wife of Bath's Prologue and Tale. Editors Mark Allen and John H. Fisher present a comprehensive record of the textual traditions of the tale and of the critical commentary from the earliest manuscripts to the mid-1990s. Part A (the first volume) includes the text of Chaucer's poem, accompanied by exhaustive collation of the ten most valuable manuscript witnesses to the text and all twenty-two of the major editions. Also included in Part A are an introduction to the text, and extensive discussions of sources and analogues, genres, theoretical approaches, and major themes. A bibliographical index concludes the scholarly apparatus in Part A. In Part B (the second volume), the editors present a line-by-line, often word-by-word, record of the legacy of Chaucer's text, including variants, glosses, editors' notes, and observations by scholars through the ages.

HarperCollins is proud to present its range of best-loved, essential classics. ‘Full wise is he that can himselven knowe.’ Written at the end of the fourteenth century, the poet Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales are a collection of stories told in Middle-English. Thirty pilgrims leave Southwark to travel to a shrine in Canterbury and become the narrators, telling each other stories of chivalrous romance, fable, parable, debate and comedy as they journey. Their accounts of the human condition remain as resonant today as when they were first written.

This volume was edited by Lilian Winstanley and originally published in 1922. It presents the full texts of 'The Prioress's Tale' and 'The Tale of Sir Thopas', accompanied by thorough, comprehensive notes. Winstanley further enhances the reading experience through extensive introductory chapters, focusing on Chaucer's life and the historical, social and literary contexts of his writing. She addresses common themes within The Canterbury Tales as well as providing a useful guide to pronunciation, grammar and metre within Chaucer. Furthermore, this book contains sound critical readings of both texts, discussing the historical relevance and religious connotations of 'The Prioress's Tale', and the form, satire and intertextuality of 'The Tale of Sir Thopas'. These tales, of a child martyr and a child knight respectively, will be enjoyed not simply because of their literary merit, but through the pains of the editor to produce a text that is both informative and accessible.

First published in 1914, this volume contains the complete text of The Nonnë Prestes Tale. The Ellesmere manuscript is used as the main source, though elements of the Harleian version are also present. Consummately edited by Lilian Winstanley (1876–1960), the text also contains generous explanatory notes, a glossary of terms, together with a lengthy introduction which provides contextual information on the tale and a chronological overview of Chaucer's life. This book will remain of value to anyone with an interest in The Canterbury Tales or the history of Chaucerian criticism.