Geoffrey Chaucer · c. 1400
Geoffrey Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales (c. 1400) is the foundation stone of English literature, and its variety can disguise how tightly it is designed. This guide names the concepts that make the poem legible and links each to Lexio's glossary.
The whole work is a frame narrative: a company of pilgrims agree to tell stories on the road to Canterbury, so tales of every genre sit inside one journey. The frame lets Chaucer juxtapose a knight's romance with a miller's bawdy comedy and make the contrast itself meaningful.
The General Prologue is a masterclass in irony: the narrator praises each pilgrim in terms that quietly expose them, satirizing the "estates" of medieval society — church, nobility, commoners. Learning to hear the gap between the flattering description and the damning detail is the essential skill.
Chaucer's characterization is astonishingly vivid for its age; a recurring epithet or physical detail — the Wife of Bath's gap teeth, the Pardoner's relics — pins each pilgrim in the memory. The tellers and their tales illuminate one another.
Across the tales run Chaucer's themes of class, gender, and the ethics of storytelling itself, carried by constant biblical and classical allusion. The motif of the tale that reveals its teller — where each story becomes a self-portrait — unifies the sprawling collection.
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