The Cambridge Companion to The Canterbury Tales

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

Frank Grady (Edited by)

9781316632437, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 10 September 2020

320 pages, 7 b/w illus.
23 x 15.3 x 1.5 cm, 0.45 kg

'This essay collection lives up to its aim, as stated in the back matter: to 'deliver an accessible introduction to the variety, depth, and wonder of Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales.' Grady (Univ. of Missouri, St. Louis) emphasizes the volume's utility not just for students but also for faculty assigned to teach Chaucer and for the general reading public.' D. W. Hayes, Choice

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.

List of illustrations
List of contributors
Preface
Note on the text
Chronology
List of abbreviations
1. The form of the Canterbury tales Marion Turner
2. Manuscripts, scribes, circulation Simon Horobin
3. The general prologue Steven Justice
4. The knight's tale and the estrangements of form Mark Miller
5. The miller's tale and the art of solaas Maura Nolan
6. The man of law's tale Catherine Sanok
7. The wife of bath's prologue and tale Elizabeth Scala
8. The friar's tale and the summoner's tale in word and deed David K. Coley
9. Griselda and the problem of the human in the clerk's tale Holly A. Crocker
10. The franklin's symptomatic sursanure Peter W. Travis
11. The pardoner and his tale Kathy Lavezzo
12. The prioress's tale Steven F. Kruger
13. The nun's priest's tale Mishtooni Bose
14. Moral Chaucer Frank Grady
15. Chaucer's sense of an ending Patricia Clare Ingham and Anthony Bale
16. Postscript: How to talk about Chaucer with your friends and colleagues
Reading Chaucer: Easier than you think? David Matthews
Scholarship or distraction? new forums for talking about Chaucer Ruth Evans
Talking about Chaucer with school teachers David Raybin
Who will pay? Stephanie Trig
Further reading, Index.

Subject Areas: Medieval history [HBLC1], Literary companions, book reviews & guides [DSRC], Literary studies: fiction, novelists & prose writers [DSK], Literary studies: poetry & poets [DSC], Literary studies: classical, early & medieval [DSBB], Literary essays [DNF], Poetry by individual poets [DCF]