Seminar Overview

From bawdy flirts to noble knights, from the lowest joke to the highest parable, the tales and tellers of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales bring their complex community vividly to life. In this classic work of English literature, pilgrims from all levels of medieval society make a spring journey to Canterbury. Their genial host bids tales from "each one of you to help shorten our way along this journey,” thus drawing us into a tapestry of unforgettable characters, varied narratives and interwoven layers of meaning.

For Chaucer is a true master of subtle storytelling whose experiments in perspective and genre have inspired readers and writers for centuries. Like Dante and Bocaccio, cosmopolitan Chaucer turned the local language of his people and his time into literature, and that literature into the development of a modern language.  At times, we will look to the original Middle English text of the Canterbury Tales to help us appreciate the beauty of his poetry and his place in our linguistic history. But as readers of today we can still appreciate Chaucer's genius in a modern English “translation,” which is mainly what we will be reading.

The intricate artistry of Chaucer's masterpiece will assume its proper place at the center of our considerations. Gaining "meaning and delight” through close reading of selected tales, we see how the perspective of the teller shapes each tale, and how they respond one to another. Honor, marriage, morality, all are under question here as we connect the microcosm of this gathering to the macrocosm of their changing feudal world. Meanwhile the voices of the Host, and Chaucer himself, remind us that stereotypes are being both created and critiqued, while simplistic moral pieties are sometimes offered yet perhaps also undermined. 

When we read and discuss these comic, touching, yet surprisingly sophisticated stories, we sharpen our capacity to grasp the interdependencies in our own society. By immersing us in this world that may at first appear quaint, Chaucer gives us new insights into those perennial questions we encounter on our own human journey.

Seminar will include brief presentations of information and images to frame discussions, along with a website of additional optional resources. 

“Yet do not miss the moral, my good men.

For Saint Paul says that all that’s written well

Is written down some useful truth to tell.

Then take the wheat and let the chaff lie still.”

– The Nun’s Priest’s Tale