Geoffrey Chaucer

'Whoever best acquits himself, and tells The most amusing and instructive tale, Shall have a dinner, paid for by us all...' In Chaucer's most ambitious poem, The Canterbury Tales (c. 1387), a group of pilgrims assembles in an inn just outside London and agree to entertain each other on the way to Canterbury by telling stories. The pilgrims come from all ranks of society, from the crusading Knight and burly Miller to the worldly Monk and lusty Wife of Bath. Their tales are as various as the tellers, including romance, bawdy comedy, beast fable, learned debate, parable, and Eastern adventure. The resulting collection gives us a set of characters so vivid that they have often been taken as portraits from real life, and a series of stories as hilarious in their comedy as they are affecting in their tragedy. Even after 600 years, their account of the human condition seems both fresh and true. This new edition of David Wright's acclaimed translation includes a new critical introduction and invaluable notes by a leading Chaucer scholar. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

A clear modern prose translation of Chaucer's masterpiece of Middle English storytelling by the acclaimed poet David Wright. The Canterbury Tales has entertained readers for centuries, with its comic animal fables, moral allegories, miniature epics of courtly love, and rollicking erotic farces that bring fourteenth-century England to life on every page. The gloriously varied stories, narrated by a group of pilgrims on their way to Canterbury, are peopled with saints, sinners, and ordinary mortals in a vivid panorama of the medieval world. This prose translation renders these tales as accessible and irresistible to modern readers as they were to Chaucer's contemporaries.

Chaucer's Knight's Tale breaks boundaries. It uncovers the dark heart of chivalric idealism, injects the political seriousness of epic into the timeless summer of romance, insists on a pagan outlook within a Christian culture, and draws compassion for female suffering from a man's world. Along with the exquisite anonymous poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, the Knight's Tale is the most intricately structured and stylistically pleasing of medieval English romances. For these reasons, it is worthy of its own edition, but what makes it particularly suitable to an illustrated edition is how its narration works by condensing actions and their effects into powerful images and figures. The Knight's Tale has, in fact, been illustrated many times, but never so thoroughly as in the current edition. Moreover, past illustrations have tended to romanticize or sentimentalize the story, eschewing its most violent and disturbing images. The illustrations in this edition attempt to recapture Chaucer's mature vision of the noble life, which refuses to deny the tragic aspects of the chivalric equation of love with war and war with honor. Past illustrations have also tended to adopt a Gothic idiom. The illustrations in our edition adopt a Classical Greek idiom drawn from the Parthenon frieze, Attic black- and red-figure pottery, and ancient Greek sculpture - an idiom suitable to the setting of the tale in legendary Athens and Thebes as well as to Chaucer's humanist impusle. The If considering Theseus's prosecution of war as a civilizing force, one can point to the fact that he puts an end to Creon's "tirannye" (941), restoring the bodies of the desecrated dead to the Argive widows. However, if his objective in attacking Thebes is to avenge the widows on Creon, why does he destroy the city after he has already killed him and routed the Theban army, tearing down "wall, and sparre and rafter" (line 990)? The motive is hardly humanitarian, nor even strategic in the military sense since the Theban forces have already been defeated. Its only objective is pillage - to pay off the Athenian troops - and, of course, it is while ransacking the dead that they find Palamon and Arcite still alive among a pile of corpses, a detail unique to Chaucer's text. While such a practice was endemic to chivalric warfare, it was difficult to contain once started, and it would inevitably produce results inimical to Theseus's stated purpose for going to war against Thebes, which was to right a wrong done to a group of helpless women. As Maurice Keen writes, the trouble with the practice of looting-as-pay was that to pay off soldiers in this way was not the same as to disband them. They had to be left at large, still armed with equipment that was their own, beyond control; and so whole provinces were subjected to the indiscriminate pillaging of soldiery that sought to claim a share in chivalry but whose manner of living was the antithesis of what chivalry stood for, the protection of the poor, the fatherless and the widow. Knight's Tale poses the pivotal question about war: Is there such a thing as civilized warfare, as war fought for a just cause in a controlled manner as a means of restoring order to society, or do all wars inevitably lead to acts of savagery and excess that make a mockery of policy?35 Ancient Thebes is the story of a sustained, sordid, brutal, and self-indulgent lust for power and pleasure eventuating in spectacular violence - Cadmus and the dragon-tooth warriors, Oedipus's primal crimes against nature, Eteocles and Polynices' impiety and fratricidal warfare, Creon's desecration of his nephew's corpse and subsequent murder of his niece Antigone. The idea of a moderate use of force to serve the common good is alien to the Theban legend. Statius considers the possibility of a good war by inserting the Athenian warlord Theseus into the myth of Thebes. Theseus brings peace to Thebes and, in Statius's version of events, saves Antigone, but only after an unforgettable orgy of death has occurred. As discussed above, Chaucer returned to Statius's brooding treatment of the Theban material in order to foreground it. He rereads the Teseida through the lens of the Thebaid, turning it from a conventional love story into a philosophical reflection on the nature of love, war, and governance - both earthly and cosmic. Indeed, it becomes a kind of theodicy, asking why humans must suffer so much and whether there is a benevolent order that transcends the individual ills of human experience, providing an origin for temporal governance. In this vein, Chaucer presents the stadium Theseus builds to hold the tournament as a theatrum mundi, a microcosmic space in which Theseus will try to civilize the unruly dispute between Palamon and Arcite, itself symbolic of the dynastic rivalry between Polynices and Eteocles. 36 Ominously, there is nothing to stop Theseus's men from just such rapine, as he "dide with al the contree as hym leste" (line 1004). For Chaucer, it seems it is not justice but fortune that decides the outcome of war. The eldest Argive widow reminds Theseus of the role of "Fortune" in war, and Chaucer returns to the idea of the uncertainty of military ventures in the temple of Mars murals, where an enthroned "Conquest" (line 2028) is depicted with the sharp sword of Damocles hanging over his head by the thinnest of threads. Perhaps Theseus learns this lesson, as he moves steadily away from militarism in Chaucer's narrative, changing the rules of the tournament to prevent mortal combat and ending the strife with Thebes through the diplomacy of the parliament. Yet, even in the mock battle of the tournament, death cannot be prevented, despite his best efforts. Is Chaucer suggesting that the prospect of limited warfare for some greater purpose (in this case the eventual pacification of Thebes) is human folly?

Title: The Chaucer Birthday Book. Compiled by Harriet Waechter. With a frontispiece.]Publisher: British Library, Historical Print EditionsThe British Library is the national library of the United Kingdom. It is one of the world's largest research libraries holding over 150 million items in all known languages and formats: books, journals, newspapers, sound recordings, patents, maps, stamps, prints and much more. Its collections include around 14 million books, along with substantial additional collections of manuscripts and historical items dating back as far as 300 BC. The FICTION & PROSE LITERATURE collection includes books from the British Library digitised by Microsoft. The collection provides readers with a perspective of the world from some of the 18th and 19th century's most talented writers. Written for a range of audiences, these works are a treasure for any curious reader looking to see the world through the eyes of ages past. Beyond the main body of works the collection also includes song-books, comedy, and works of satire. ++++The below data was compiled from various identification fields in the bibliographic record of this title. This data is provided as an additional tool in helping to insure edition identification: ++++ British Library Chaucer, Geoffrey; Waechter, Harriet; 1889. 4 . 11603.ee.17.

An abridged retelling of the highlights of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales in modern English. While it is written for a younger audience, readers of any age can enjoy these timeless stories.