Geoffrey Chaucer · Late fourteenth century · Middle English, edited by Walter W. Skeat
Read The Canterbury Tales with context
Chaucer brings pilgrims together on a road and lets their stories disclose a society that cannot speak with one voice. A tale may entertain its listeners, answer a rival, advertise its teller, or expose more than its teller intends. Read the Middle English aloud where possible, and attend to the distance between a pilgrim, the narrator who describes that pilgrim, and the author who arranges their encounter. You can read the text, save notes and quotes, and follow the passage paths below.
Key Reading Paths
- The narrator’s defense of plain speech: The narrator asks pardon for repeating the pilgrims’ words faithfully. Does the claim to report what others say relieve him of responsibility for what his story makes available to us?
- Learning put to crooked use: Nicholas presents his invented flood as the product of astrology and privileged religious knowledge. Follow how learned authority becomes a means of controlling another person’s fear.
- A sermon that indicts its preacher: The Pardoner explains that his preaching against avarice is designed to make money. Can a moral argument remain persuasive when its speaker openly refuses to live by it?
- Who gets to answer for women?: The knight tells a court of women that women desire sovereignty. Attend to the setting in which this answer is judged, and distinguish his report from the Wife of Bath’s own authority as storyteller.
- Praise as a trap: The fox flatters Chauntecleer’s voice and invokes his father’s example. How does the language of friendship persuade its listener to perform the very action that puts him in danger?
Questions for comparison
- Compare the Wife of Bath’s appeal to experience with the Pardoner’s account of preaching. What makes a speaker credible, and when does credibility become part of the performance?
- Set the fox’s flattery beside Nicholas’s prophecy. How does each speaker recruit something the listener already wants to believe?
Teaching with these readings
Begin with the opening in Middle English, letting students notice sound and repeated words before consulting a gloss. Then assign a speaker to each group and ask what that speaker wants from an audience. Require a distinction between the speaker’s claim and the effects of the language.
For a short response, place two acts of persuasion beside one another. Identify a shared technique and a difference in consequence; then find a detail that prevents either tale from becoming a simple illustration of a moral rule.