The Canterbury Tales

Writing at the end of a tragic and violent century, Chaucer portrays England as a discordant nation, where virtue prevails over vice and vice is an occasion for laughter rather than cause for indignation. To do so, he stages a group of pilgrims heading from London to Canterbury, who meet along the way and tell stories. There is a good-natured and somewhat prevaricating innkeeper, a modest and virtuous knight who has seen a thousand military campaigns, a learned but somewhat greedy medical doctor, and no shortage of civil servants, millers and farmers, good country parish priests, vain nuns and corrupt friars. The result is a cross-section of a mobile and restless society, whose characters seem almost like our contemporaries. Therein lies Chaucer's true masterpiece: in the vividness of the subjects depicted in the frame to the actual tales.