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SoSe 19: PS-Medieval English Literatures II: The Canterbury Tales

Andrew James Johnston

Comments

The Canterbury Tales (c. 1387) is Geoffrey Chaucer’s best-known work – and perhaps the best-known literary work of the English Middle Ages. A collection of shorter narratives – almost all of them in verse – the Tales plays a major role in the development of what we nowadays consider the canon of English literature and – not least because of its obvious affinities with Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decamerone – simultaneously stakes a claim for English letters within the wider context of European literature.

Yet for all its indisputable canonicity the Tales is far more than a mere showcase of medieval poetic and narrative styles and genres. It betrays a fascination with tension and conflict, with debate and self-questioning that undermines all facile attempts to install the work and its author in the straightforward position of the fons et origo of an uninterrupted, glorious tradition of English literature. On the contrary, the Canterbury Tales presents itself as a rigorous investigation into such diverse issues as the roles of tradition and history for literature, the problem of social conflict and its representation in literature, the tensions between religion and aesthetics, the power and limitations of ideology and the relationship between gender and authority, to name but a few.

Since even in its unfinished form the Canterbury Tales is a vast and sprawling work, this course will be able to deal only with a selection of the tales.

Students are expected to have acquired an edition of the complete text by the first session of the course. This edition must be in the original Middle English and possess a full-fledged critical apparatus. Texts not meeting these standards will not be accepted in class. I recommend either the Riverside Chaucer (Larry D. Benson, ed., Oxford UP, 1988/2008) or the Penguin Classics edition (Jill Mann, ed., Penguin, 2005).