The Cambridge Companion to The Canterbury Tales

A lively and accessible introduction to the variety, depth, and wonder of Chaucer's best-known poem.

This selection of essays delivers an accessible introduction to the variety, depth, and wonder of Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. Fresh engagement with the individual tales provides a lively and provocative guide to arguably the most important text in the teaching of medieval literature.Chaucer's best-known poem, The Canterbury Tales, is justly celebrated for its richness and variety, both literary - the Tales include fabliaux, romances, sermons, hagiographies, fantasies, satires, treatises, fables and exempla - and thematic, with its explorations of courtly love and scatology, piety and impiety, chivalry and pacifism, fidelity and adultery. Students new to Chaucer will find in this Companion a lively introduction to the poem's diversity, depth, and wonder. Readers returning to the Tales will appreciate the chapters' fresh engagement with the individual tales and their often complicated critical histories, inflected in recent decades by critical approaches attentive to issues of gender, sexuality, class, and language.