Chaucer's Canterbury Tales

Classic Literature II: Medieval & Early Modern

Course 2 · Chapter 3 · Chaucer's Canterbury Tales

Dante wrote his epic in Tuscan while Latin still dominated serious literature. Roughly a lifetime later, in a very different country, an English civil servant made the same kind of choice — and built an entire story collection around something Dante's poem never had: a live, ongoing contest between its own storytellers.

Geoffrey Chaucer: Poet and Civil Servant

Not a Professional Poet by Trade

Geoffrey Chaucer (c. 1340–1344 to 1400) is often called the "Father of English literature" — but poetry was never his day job. He held real, documented civil-service positions: Controller of Customs on Wool and Hides from 1374, a Member of Parliament for Kent, and multiple diplomatic missions carried out on behalf of the English crown across his career.

A Story Collection Left Unfinished

Chaucer composed The Canterbury Tales roughly between 1387 and 1400. Of a planned 120 tales — around thirty pilgrims, each meant to tell two tales on the journey out and two on the way back — Chaucer actually completed only 24 before his death in 1400, several of them themselves unfinished.

Unfinished by accident, or closed on purpose? — most scholars treat the work as genuinely incomplete, cut short by Chaucer's own death. A minority view holds that the ending — the sober Parson's Tale followed by Chaucer's own "Retraction," in which he apologizes for his more worldly writing — suggests a deliberate, if abrupt, act of closure rather than pure incompleteness. Worth flagging as a live, minor scholarly disagreement rather than a settled fact either way.

The Frame: A Pilgrimage and a Storytelling Contest

The collection is held together by a frame narrative: a diverse group of pilgrims gathers at the Tabard Inn in Southwark, near London, before setting out together to Canterbury Cathedral — the shrine of St. Thomas Becket, murdered inside the cathedral itself on 29 December 1170 and canonized just three years later, in 1173. His shrine became one of medieval England's most popular pilgrimage destinations, with over 700 healing miracles reportedly recorded at the site within its first decade.

A shrine that didn't survive either — Becket's own shrine was destroyed in 1540, on the order of Henry VIII, during the dissolution of England's monasteries — a real historical postscript to the very place Chaucer's pilgrims are traveling toward.

The innkeeper, Harry Bailey, proposes a storytelling contest to pass the journey: each pilgrim is to tell two tales each way, with the best storyteller winning a free meal at the Tabard, funded by the rest of the group.

A real innkeeper, probably — Harry Bailey appears to be based on an actual historical figure: a Southwark man of the same name is named across more than twenty surviving documents from 1375–1398, served twice as an MP, and is recorded as an innkeeper in the 1380–81 Southwark Subsidy Rolls. He isn't explicitly documented as the Tabard Inn's own specific proprietor — a small but honest gap in an otherwise strong real-world match.

The Pilgrims: A Cross-Section of Medieval England

The General Prologue introduces roughly thirty pilgrims, spanning a genuinely wide social range.

The Knight

An idealized figure of chivalry and nobility, opening the storytelling with a courtly romance.

The Wife of Bath

A wealthy, outspoken tradeswoman on her fifth marriage — one of the collection's most famous and debated characters, covered in more depth below.

The Pardoner

A religious figure who openly admits to selling fake relics and indulgences for profit — a sharp, cynical portrait embedded inside an otherwise devout pilgrimage.

Middle English: Chaucer's Own Vernacular Choice

Since the Norman Conquest of 1066, French had carried real prestige in English aristocratic and court circles, while Latin dominated church and scholarly writing. Chaucer chose to write his major work in Middle English instead — a choice genuinely credited with helping legitimize English as a serious literary language.

🔮 A Pattern Worth Naming This is the third vernacular choice this course has covered in three chapters — Murasaki's kana over kanbun, Dante's Tuscan over Latin, and now Chaucer's English over French and Latin. No source claims these three writers were directly responding to one another; this is the course's own pattern to notice, not a documented influence chain. But across three unconnected cultures, within roughly three centuries of each other, three major writers each chose their culture's "lesser" language over its prestige one — and each time, that choice helped shape what that language's own literature became for centuries afterward.

The Wife of Bath

A Prologue Longer Than Her Tale

The Wife of Bath's own Prologue — in which she discusses her five marriages and argues openly for female authority within marriage — is the longest in the entire collection, roughly twice the length of her actual Tale.

A genuinely contested modern reading — the Wife of Bath is widely discussed in proto-feminist terms by modern scholars (Carolyn Dinshaw's readings are a well-known example). Other scholars, including Elaine Tuttle Hansen, argue she's better understood as a male author's construction reflecting the misogynist discourse of Chaucer's own era, not a genuinely feminist voice. This remains a real, live scholarly debate — not a settled modern consensus either way.

No Original Copy, Again

No autograph manuscript of the Canterbury Tales survives. The two most authoritative early copies — the Hengwrt and Ellesmere manuscripts — both date from the early 15th century, after Chaucer's own death, and both are believed to have been copied by the same scribe, tentatively identified in 2004 as Adam Pinkhurst. Hengwrt is considered the earlier of the two, and closest to Chaucer's own spelling practices.

🔮 A Third Text With No Original Genji (Chapter 1) and Beowulf (Course 1, Chapter 8) both survive with no original manuscript in the author's own hand. Chaucer's Tales makes a third — a genuinely recurring pattern across this course: some of literature's most enduring works exist for us today only through later copies, made by scribes we can barely, if at all, identify.

Three Vernacular Classics, Side by Side

	The Tale of Genji	The Divine Comedy	The Canterbury Tales
Prestige language displaced	Classical Chinese (kanbun)	Latin	French and Latin
Vernacular used	Japanese kana	Tuscan Italian	Middle English
Structure	A single continuous narrative	A structured three-part journey	A frame narrative of independent tales
Original manuscript survives?	No	No	No

Questions to Sit With

Reflection 1

The Canterbury Tales was left unfinished — 24 of a planned 120 tales. Does an incomplete masterpiece lose something essential compared to a finished one, or can the surviving fragment stand entirely on its own terms?

Reflection 2

Scholars genuinely disagree about whether the Wife of Bath is a proto-feminist voice or a misogynist construction dressed up as one. How do you personally weigh a modern reading of an old text against what its original author may actually have intended?

Reflection 3

Three vernacular choices in three chapters — Japanese, Tuscan, and English — each shaped their own language's literary future. What do you think makes a single work powerful enough to help decide the future shape of an entire language?

Quick Reference — Chapter 3

Geoffrey Chaucer (c. 1340–1400) — "Father of English literature," also a real customs official, MP, and diplomat
The Canterbury Tales — composed c. 1387–1400; 24 of a planned 120 tales completed; genuinely unfinished at his death (with a minor scholarly debate over whether the ending suggests deliberate closure)
Frame narrative — pilgrims from the Tabard Inn, Southwark, traveling to Thomas Becket's shrine at Canterbury Cathedral; a storytelling contest proposed by the innkeeper, Harry Bailey, likely based on a real historical figure
~30 pilgrims span medieval English society, from the Knight to the Wife of Bath to the corrupt Pardoner
Written in Middle English rather than prestige French or Latin — a vernacular choice paralleling Genji's kana and Dante's Tuscan
The Wife of Bath's Prologue is the collection's longest, and genuinely contested between proto-feminist and misogynist-construction readings
No autograph manuscript survives; the Hengwrt and Ellesmere manuscripts (early 15th century) are the two most authoritative early copies

What's Next

Chapter 4: The Sundiata Epic and West African Oral Tradition.