The Canterbury Tales is a collection of stories written by Geoffrey Chaucer in the 14th century (two of them in prose, the remaining twenty-two in verse). The tales are contained inside a frame tale and told by a collection of pilgrims on a pilgrimage from Southwark to visit the shrine of Saint Thomas Becket at Canterbury Cathedral. [1] The Canterbury Tales are written in Middle English. The tales are considered to be his magnum opus, influenced by the structure of The Decameron , which Chaucer is said to have read on an earlier visit to Italy, but Chaucer peopled his tales with 'sondry folk' rather than Boccaccio's fleeing nobles.

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Synopsis

On an April day, a group of English pilgrims meet outside the Tabard Inn and are joined by the innkeeper, just outside London. They set out on a pilgrimage from London to Canterbury to pay their respects to the tomb of Saint Thomas Becket at Canterbury Cathedral. The group is described in detail, with characters from all classes, upper and lower, represented. Religious characters, such as a prioress, monk and a Pardoner, travel alongside a shipman, miller, carpenter, reeve, squire, yeoman and a knight, among others. Harry Bailey, the innkeeper, suggests that as a game they all tell stories to each other along the way. The pilgrims agree to tell four stories each, two on the way to Canterbury, and two on the way back. The person who tells the best story, as determined by the host, will have his supper paid for by the rest of the group. The tale-telling begins with the knight and proceeds as the pilgrims near Canterbury, each person telling a story that reflects their social position, and some telling stories which are intended to make fun of others in the group. No winner is chosen by the host in the end, and not all of the pilgrims have told their tales by the time the story ends. Chaucer adds to the work a retraction apologizing for anything written which may have offended.

Dating issues

The date of the conception and writing of The Canterbury Tales as a collection of stories has proved difficult to discover. It seems clear that the Tales were begun after some of Chaucer's other works, such as Legend of Good Women , which fails to mention them in a list of other works by the author. Also, it was probably written after his Troilus and Criseyde , since Legend is written in part as an apology for the portrayal of women in the Criseyde character. Troilus is dated to sometime between 1382 and 1388, with Legend coming soon after, possibly in 1386-87. In any case, work on The Canterbury Tales as a whole probably began in the late 1380s and continued as Chaucer neared his death in the year 1400. ^{[2] [3]}

Two of the tales, The Knight's Tale and The Second Nun's Tale , were probably written before the compilation of stories was ever thought of. Both of these tales are mentioned in the Prologue to the aforementioned Legend of Good Women . ^[4] Other tales, such as the Clerk's and the Man of Law's, are also suggested to have been written earlier and added into the Canterbury Tales framework after the fact. These suggestions, however, are less supported by scholars. ^[5] The Monk's Tale is one of the few describing an event which provides a clear date. It describes the death of Bernabò Visconti, which occurred on 19 December 1385, although some scholars believe the lines about him were added after the main tale had already been written. ^[6] The Shipman's Tale was in all likelihood written before The Wife of Bath's Tale , as in parts the Shipman speaks as if he were a woman, leading scholars to believe that the Shipman's Tale was originally intended for the Wife of Bath, before she became a more prominent character. References to her in Envoy to Bukton (1396) seem to indicate that her character was quite famous in London by that time. ^[7]

Chaucer's use of sources also provide chronological clues. The Pardoner's Tale , the Wife of Bath's Prologue , and the Franklin's Tale all draw frequent reference to St. Jerome's Epistola adversus Jovinianum . Jerome's work is also an addition to Chaucer's Prologue to a revised Legend of Good Women dated to 1394, suggesting that these three tales were written sometime in the mid-1390s. Scholars have also used Chaucer's references to astronomy to find the dates specific tales were written. From the data Chaucer provides in the prologue, for example, the pilgrimage in which the tales are told takes place in 1387. However, this assumes that, when looking up astronomical data, Chaucer stayed with current events. ^[8]

Text

A total of 83 medieval manuscripts of The Canterbury Tales are known to exist, more than any other vernacular medieval literary work except The Prick of Conscience . This is taken as evidence of the tales' popularity during the 15th century. ^[9] Fifty-five of these manuscripts are thought to have once been complete, while 28 more are so fragmentary that it is difficult to tell whether they were copied individually or were part of a larger set. ^[10] The Tales vary in both minor and major ways from manuscript to manuscript, with many of the minor variations obviously coming from copyists' errors. However, other variations suggest that Chaucer himself was constantly adding to and revising his work as it was copied and distributed. No official, complete version of the Tales exists and it is impossible with the information available to determine the order Chaucer intended them to be placed in or even, in some cases, whether he even had any intention in mind. ^{[11] [12]}

There are clues which have led to the two most popular methods of ordering the tales. Scholars usually divide the tales into ten fragments. The tales that make up a fragment are directly connected and make clear distinctions about what order they go in, usually with one character speaking to and then stepping aside for another character. Between fragments, however, there is less of a connection. This means that there are several possible permutations for the order of the fragments and consequently the tales themselves. The most popular ordering of the fragments is as follows:

Fragment	Tales
Fragment I(A)	General Prologue, Knight, Miller, Reeve, Cook
Fragment II(B1)	Man of Law
Fragment III(D)	Wife, Friar, Summoner
Fragment IV(E)	Clerk, Merchant
Fragment V(F)	Squire, Franklin
Fragment VI(C)	Physician, Pardoner
Fragment VII(B2)	Shipman, Prioress, Sir Thopas, Melibee, Monk, Nun's Priest
Fragment VIII(G)	Second Nun, Canon's Yeoman
Fragment IX(H)	Manciple
Fragment X(I)	Parson

An alternative to this order is the placing of Fragment VIII(G) before VI(C). In other cases, the above order follows that set by early manuscripts. Fragments I and II almost always follow each other, as do VI and VII, IX and X in the oldest manuscripts. Fragments IV and V, by contrast are located in varying locations from manuscript to manuscript. Victorians would frequently move Fragment VII(B²) to follow Fragment II(B¹), but this trend is no longer followed and has no justification. Even the earliest surviving manuscripts are not Chaucer's originals, the oldest being MS Peniarth 392 D (called "Hengwrt"), compiled by a scribe shortly after Chaucer's death. The scribe uses the order shown above, though he does not seem to have had a full collection of Chaucer's tales, so part are missing. The most beautiful of the manuscripts of the tales is the Ellesmere manuscript, and many editors have followed the order of the Ellesmere over the centuries, even down to the present day. ^{[13] [14]} The latest of the manuscripts is William Caxton's 1478 print edition, the first version of the tales to be published in print. Since this version was created from a now-lost manuscript, it is counted as among the 83 manuscripts.

Language

The Canterbury Tales were written in Middle English, specifically in a dialect associated with London and spellings associated with the then emergent chancery standard. Although we have no manuscript of the Tales in Chaucer's own hand, two were copied around the time of his death by Adam Pinkhurst, a scribe whom he seems to have worked closely with before, meaning that we can be fairly sure about how Chaucer himself wrote the Tales . ^[15] Chaucer's generation of English-speakers was among the last to pronounce e at the end of words (so for Chaucer the word was pronounced , not as in modern English). This meant that later copyists tended to be inconsistent in their copying of final -e and this for many years gave scholars the impression that Chaucer himself was inconsistent in using it. ^[16] It has now been established, however, that -e was an important part of Chaucer's morphology (having a role in distinguishing, for example, singular adjectives from plural and subjunctive verbs from indicative). ^[17] The pronunciation of Chaucer's writing otherwise differs most prominently from Modern English in that his language had not undergone the Great Vowel Shift: pronouncing Chaucer's vowels as they would be pronounced today in European languages like Italian, Spanish or German generally produces pronunciations more like Chaucer's own than Modern English pronunciation would. In addition, sounds now written in English but not pronounced were still pronounced by Chaucer: the word for Chaucer was , not . The pronunciation of Chaucer's poetry can now be reconstructed fairly confidently through detailed philological research; the following gives an IPA reconstruction of the opening lines of The Merchant's Prologue ; it is likely, moreever, that when a word ending in a vowel was followed by a word beginning in a vowel, the two vowels were elided into one syllable, as seen here with care and :