Chaucer, Geoffrey. Canterbury Tales. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1992.
The premise behind Chaucer’s tale is really quite simple: out of a group of pilgrims traveling to Canterbury Cathedral, who can tell the best tale? Whoever wins gets a free meal back at the Tabard Inn at the end of the journey. Most of the stories center around three themes, religion, fidelity and social class. The entire story is an example of framing a story within a story, or in the case of Canterbury Tales stories within one story.
This quote had me scratching my head, “The precise, unerring delicately emphatic characterization for which the Canterbury Tales is so famous are no more extraordinary than Chaucer’s utter mastery of English rhythms and his effortless versification” (back cover). Whatever. This doesn’t tell me anything, anything at all, about the plot between the pages.
Best quote is right from the beginning, “He may nat wepe, althogh hym soor smerte” (p 7). Awesome.
Book Trivia: there are some scholars out there who think Chaucer wasn’t finished with The Canterbury Tales and that some of the tales are incomplete.
BookLust Twist: From More Book Lust in the chapter called “Digging up the Past Through Fiction” (p 79). Interestingly enough, this didn’t need to be on the list. Pearl was mentioning it as the inspiration for another book. I am starting to call these mentions “off topic” or “not the point.”
~*LunaSea*~ 