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Oxford Guides to Chaucer
The Canterbury Tales
 Praise for the Third Edition

‘marked by wit, learning, intelligence, and that rarest of critical virtues, good
judgement . . . a genuine guide whose abundant information and good sense
make it a sure foundation for series work on The Canterbury Tales. Although
especially useful for those, on any level, studying Chaucer for the first time,
experienced Chaucerians will find it a helpful companion to The Riverside
Chaucer. For teaching or research this is now the first book on The Canterbury
Tales to consult after reading the text itself.’
Studies in the Age of Chaucer
‘Cooper’s guide is a more powerful book than any previous aid or introduction
to Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. It presents the lively generous mind of a serious
scholar and a sensitive reader.’
Notes & Queries
‘This is a major book with many virtues . . . a book with much to offer its reader.’
Review of English Studies
‘a well-written and reliable guide through a mass of material that largely transcends
the limitations of its form to offer critical analysis of lasting value.’
Archiv für das Stadium der neueren Sprachan und Literaturen
Oxford Guides to Chaucer
The Canterbury Tales
THIRD EDITION ■

HELEN COOPER
 Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP,
United Kingdom
Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford.
It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship,
and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of
Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries
© Helen Cooper 1989, 1996, 2023
The moral rights of the author have been asserted
First Edition published in 1989
Second Edition published in 1996
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in
a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the
prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted
by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics
rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the
above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the
address above
You must not circulate this work in any other form
and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer
Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press
198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Data available
Library of Congress Control Number: 2023940789
ISBN 978–0–19–882142–7 (hbk.)
ISBN 978–0–19–887878–0 (pbk.)
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198821427.001.0001
Printed and bound by
CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY
Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and
for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials
contained in any third party website referenced in this work.
 FOREWORD TO THE FIRST EDITION

The idea for a series of guides to Chaucer originated in a sense that medieval
studies in general and Chaucerian studies in particular had advanced to a point
where a reappraisal of his poetry was both possible and necessary. The three
volumes are devoted to the shorter poetry, Troilus and Criseyde, and the
Canterbury Tales. We see these books as fulfilling a role comparable to the intro-
duction to a good edition, but at greater length than would be possible there.
The kind of line-­by-­line expository material that the notes to an edition would
contain is included only where such matters are of wider importance for an
understanding of the whole text or where recent scholarship has made signifi-
cant advances. We hope to provide readers of Chaucer with essential and up-­to-­
date information, with the emphasis falling on how the interpretation of that
information advances our understanding of his work; we have therefore gone
beyond summarizing what is known to suggest new critical readings.
The original plan for the series was designed to provide some degree of con-
sistency in the outline of the volumes, but it was part of the project from the start
that there should be plenty of room for each author’s individuality. We hope that
our sense of common interests and concerns in our interpretation of Chaucer’s
poetry will provide a deeper critical consistency below the diversity. Such a
para­dox would, after all, be true to the nature of our subject.
1989
Helen Cooper
A. J. Minnis
Barry Windeatt
 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS TO THE THIRD EDITION

I began work on the first edition of this book over thirty years ago, when Oxford
University Press, in the person of Kim Scott Walwyn, asked me to draw up a
scheme for a series of authoritative guides to Chaucer. I did not quite realize
what I was letting myself in for. It may be that she did not realize either; but she
remained consistently encouraging, patient, and broad-­ minded. The Press
found excellent people to replace her after her sadly early death, and I worked
with them for the lightly revised second edition and this more thoroughly
revised third. I thank them too; but I am more than happy to remember Kim’s
part in bringing to birth both the series and my own volume within it.
To have asked any of my medievalist friends to comment on the draft of such
an extensive work would have been taking unfair advantage of their willingness,
so all its original errors were on my own head. Over the years, however, various
colleagues have noticed mistakes that I have been able to correct; and James
Simpson waived his right to anonymity as reader for this new edition, and I am
very grateful for his comments. Other colleagues—­Alexander Murray (for his-
tory), Colin Day (for chemistry), Charlotte Morse, John Alford, Edwin Craun,
Ruth Morse—­commented on other sections of the original; and V. A. Kolve, and
more recently Elizabeth Robertson and Richard Firth Green, gave me access to
work of theirs that had not yet been published. Over the years I have also prof-
ited more broadly from the conferences of the New Chaucer Society and the
many conversations I have had there. The undergraduates who have cross-­
examined me on the Tales in tutorials, and urged fine readings of their own,
have provided a stimulus to excellence of which I can only have fallen short. Of
my graduate students, I should give particular thanks to Megan Murton, whose
work is acknowledged in the course of this book.
My greatest debt, however, was to my husband, for his unstinting encourage-
ment of my career when such things were far from being taken for granted, and
for his help with word processing when that was still in its infancy. That there
were far fewer infelicities than in the original drafts I owe to his sharp eyes. He
helped me every page of the way, and remained sufficiently interested in the
viii Acknowledgements to the T hird E dition

Tales in spite of it all to reread them at the end. He would be pleased, and as a
scientist slightly bemused, that a publication of this kind could still be updated
so as to have value after so long. The last word of thanks, however, must go to my
daughters, for their tolerating Chaucer as an extra member of the household for
so much of their young lives, and for bearing with a mother who, as the youngest
described it, ‘sits upstairs writing and writing and writing. Her book has taken
far too long.’
 CONTENTS

Abbreviations xv

Introduction 1
Bibliographical Note 6

The Canterbury Tales 9

Date 9; Text 11; Genre 14; Sources and
Analogues 15; Structure 24; Themes 26
Style: Language, Rhetoric, and Prosody 33

FRAGMENT I
The General Prologue 39
Date and Text 39; Genre 40; Sources and Analogues 42;
Structure 44; Themes and Style: A Guided Tour of the General
Prologue 46, The Knight 47, The Squire 49, The Yeoman 50,
The Prioress 50, The Monk 52, The Friar 53, The Merchant 55,
The Clerk 56, The Sergeant of Law 57, The Franklin 58,
The Guildsmen 61, The Cook 62, The Shipman 62,
The Doctor of Physic 63, The Wife of Bath 64, The Parson 66,
The Ploughman 67, The Miller 68, The Manciple 69,
The Reeve 70, The Summoner 71, The Pardoner 72, The Tabard 75

The Knight’s Tale 77

Date 77; Text 78; Genre 79; Sources and Analogues 81,
1. Boccaccio: The Teseida 81, 2. Boethius 84, 3. Minor Sources:
Statius, the Ovidian Tradition, the Roman de la Rose, Dante, English
Romance 87; Structure 89; Themes 92; A Note on Astrology 100;
The Tale in Context 101; Style 104
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x CONTENTS

The Miller’s Tale 109

Prologue 109; Date and Text 111; Genre 112; Sources and
Analogues 113; Structure 116; Themes 118; The Tale in
Context 120; Style 122

The Reeve’s Tale 126

Prologue 126; Date and Text 127; Genre 127; Sources and
Analogues 128; Structure 130; Themes 131; The Tale in
Context 133; Style 134

The Cook’s Tale 137

Prologue 137; Date and Text 138; Genre 138; Sources and
Analogues 139; Structure, Themes, and Style 139; The Tale in
Context 140

FRAGMENT II
The Man of Law’s Tale 143
Introduction 143; Date and Text 145; Genre 147; Sources and
Analogues 148; Structure 150; Themes 151; The Tale in
Context 155; Style 157; Epilogue: A Textual Note 159

FRAGMENT III
The Wife of Bath’s Prologue 161
Date and Text 161; Genre 163; Sources and Analogues 164;
Structure 170; Themes 172; The Prologue in Context 176;
Style 178

The Wife of Bath’s Tale 180

Date and Text 180; Genre 180; Sources and Analogues 181;
Structure 185; Themes 186; The Tale in Context 188; Style 189

The Friar’s Tale 192

Prologue 192; Date and Text 192; Genre 193; Sources and
Analogues 193; Structure 195; Themes 196; The Tale in
Context 198; Style 199

The Summoner’s Tale 201

Prologue 201; Date and Text 201; Genre 202; Sources and
Analogues 202; Structure 204; Themes 204; The Tale in
Context 206; Style 207
Contentsxi

FRAGMENT IV
The Clerk’s Tale 209
Prologue 209; Date and Text 210; Genre 212; Sources and
Analogues 213; Structure 216; Themes 218; The Tale in
Context 222; Style 225

The Merchant’s Tale 228

Prologue 228; Date and Text 229; Genre 230; Sources and
Analogues 230; Structure 233; Themes 234; The Tale in
Context 238; Style 240

FRAGMENT V
The Squire’s Tale 245
Prologue 245; Date and Text 245; Genre 247; Sources and
Analogues 248; Structure 250; Themes 251; The Tale in
Context 254; Style 256

The Franklin’s Tale 259

The Ending of the Squire’s Tale: The Squire–Franklin Link 259;
Date and Text 260; Genre 261; Sources and Analogues 262;
Structure 264; Themes 265; The Tale in Context 271;
Style 273

FRAGMENT VI
The Placing of the Fragment 277

The Physician’s Tale 278

Date and Text 278; Genre 278; Sources and
Analogues 280; Structure 281; Themes 282; The Tale in
Context 286; Style 288; The Physician–Pardoner Link 290

The Pardoner’s Prologue and Tale 291

Date and Text 291; The Prologue: Sources and Analogues 291;
The Prologue: Structure, Themes, and Style 293; The Tale:
Genre 295; Sources and Analogues 295; Structure 297;
Themes 299; The Tale in Context 303; Style 304

FRAGMENT VII
The Placing of the Fragment 309
xii CONTENTS

The Shipman’s Tale 310

Date, Attribution, and Text 310; Genre, Sources, and
Analogues 311; Structure 312; Themes 313; The Tale in
Context 315; Style 316

The Prioress’s Tale 319

The Shipman–Prioress Link 319; Date and Text 319;
Genre 320; Sources and Analogues 321;
Structure 324; Themes 325; The Tale in Context 328;
Style 330

The Tale of Sir Thopas 333

Prologue 333; Date and Text 333; Genre, Sources, and
Analogues 335; Structure 338; Themes and Style 339; The Tale in
Context 342

The Tale of Melibee 344

Prologue 344; Date 346; Text 347; Genre 347; Sources 348;
Structure 350; Themes 351; The Tale in Context 355; Style 356

The Monk’s Tale 359

Prologue 359; Date 361; Text 361; Genre 363; Sources and
Analogues 364; Structure 367; Themes 368; The Tale in
Context 371; Style 372

The Nun’s Priest’s Tale 375

Prologue: Text 375; Prologue: Themes 376; Date and Text 377;
Genre 377; Sources and Analogues 379;
Structure 383; Themes 385; The Tale in Context 388;
Style 390; Endlink 393

FRAGMENT VIII
The Placing of the Fragment 395

The Second Nun’s Tale 396

Date 396; Attribution and Text 396; Genre, Sources, and
Analogues 397; Structure 398; Themes 399; The Tale in
Context 401; Style 404

The Canon’s Yeoman’s Tale 407

Date and Text 407; Prologue 408; Genre 409; Sources and
Analogues 410; Structure 412; Themes 413; The Tale in
Context 416; Style 417
Contentsxiii

FRAGMENT IX
The Manciple’s Tale 421
Prologue 421; Date and Text 422; Genre 423; Sources and
Analogues 424; Structure 426; Themes 427; The Tale in
Context 430; Style 432

FRAGMENT X
The Parson’s Tale 435
Prologue 435; Date 438; Text 439; Genre, Sources, and
Analogues 440; Themes 443; The Tale in Context 446; Style 449

Taking Leave: Chaucer’s ‘Retractions’ 451

Imitations of the Canterbury Tales 1400–1615 455

Filling in the Gaps: The Cook’s and Squire’s Tales 456; Tales for the
Pilgrimage: Beryn, The Siege of Thebes, Two Ploughman’s Tales 458; The
Non-­Canterbury Tales: The Pilgrim’s Tale, The Cobbler of Canterbury,
Greene’s Vision 462; The Afterlife of Individual Tales 464

General Bibliography 473

Index 477
 ABBREVIATIONS

ChR Chaucer Review

EETS Early English Text Society
ELH English Literary History
ELN English Language Notes
ELR English Literary Renaissance
ES English Studies
JEGP Journal of English and Germanic Philology
MÆ Medium Ævum
M&H Medievalia et humanistica
MLN Modern Language Notes
MLQ Modern Language Quarterly
MP Modern Philology
MS Medieval Studies
NLH New Literary History
NM Neuphilologische Mitteilungen
N&Q Notes and Queries
PMLA Publications of the Modern Languages Association
RES Review of English Studies
SAC Studies in the Age of Chaucer
SP Studies in Philology
UTQ University of Toronto Quarterly
 Introduction

The object of the third edition of this book, like its original, is to give an up-­to-­
date summary of what is known about the Canterbury Tales, together with a
critical reading of each tale. To help with locating areas of discussion, the whole
work and each of the tales are discussed under the same series of headings;
many of these would have been familiar to Chaucer and his readers, but they are
broad enough to encompass more recent critical and theoretical frameworks.
The form such issues took throughout the Middle Ages is summarized by the
pupil who asks for literary instruction in Conrad of Hirsau’s twelfth-­century
Dialogue on the Authors:

I want you (O teacher) to explain briefly and in summary form what we must
look for, namely, who the author is, what he has written, the scale of his work,
when he has written it, and how, that is whether it is in prose or verse, with what
subject-­matter or intention each has begun his work, what end the composition
has in view. I also want to find out about what is the difference between a poet, a
writer of history, and a writer of discourse, between explanation and exposition
and detailed study and transference of meaning, and to find out the nature of
prose, verse, fable, the figures which are called tropes, and any other question
that must be asked concerning ecclesiastical or pagan authors. A brief answer to
all these questions seems to me to constitute a way in to the understanding of
authors important and unimportant alike.

All of those questions remain basic to an understanding of the Canterbury Tales,

and this book aims to provide at least some answers. The responses invited are
however often uniquely complicated in the Tales, as Chaucer so rarely writes in
a voice that can be identified simply as his own. However much he keeps control
of every line of the tales, they are told in voices that are explicitly not directly his;
and even the interjections of Chaucer as pilgrim are rarely those that as their
creator he would wholeheartedly endorse. Identifying his ‘intention’ is therefore
problematic; but substituting the ‘intention’ of the pilgrim who tells the tale can
be still more misleading, especially for readers now who take for granted the

Oxford Guides to Chaucer: The Canterbury Tales. Helen Cooper, Oxford University Press. © Helen Cooper 1989, 1996, 2023.
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198821427.003.0001
2 OX F O R D G U I D E S T O C HAU C E R : T H E C A N T E R BU RY TA L E S

grounding of every speech in the psychology of the speaker. There are occasions
when Chaucer offers something analogous to that, so that the intentions of (for
instance) the Wife of Bath in her prologue (to argue against men’s views of
women—­against antifeminism, though that is not a word she could have used),
the Summoner (to insult the Friar), or the Pardoner (to make money), are clear
enough, whether or not they are adequate to the tale that follows (and often they
are not); but those intentions are never psychological in the modern sense of
their being unique to the individual and their life experiences. More often, the
‘intention’ of a tale is coupled to its genre rather than to individual psychology,
though the genre may well be chosen for its appropriateness to its speaker—­or
perhaps more accurately, the speakers may well be chosen for their appropriate-
ness to the tales Chaucer wants to tell. The term he uses for the low-­class comic
tales known to us as fabliaux was ‘cherles tales’, and that principle—­a mixture of
social, cultural and moral placing—­is the first determinant of their tellers. This
appropriateness of teller to genre (or sometimes in the Tales, its notable and
deliberate inappropriateness) emerges in the more formal of Conrad’s questions,
as part of the large field of study defined as rhetoric, what writing could do and
how one might do it.
One of Conrad’s questions that has necessarily concerned everyone involved
in the transmission of Chaucer’s text, from the earliest scribes to the creators of
online textual platforms, is what the author wrote. It took several centuries for
something resembling a consensus to be reached that some tales and linking
prologues present in some manuscripts were not by Chaucer at all, or what the
order for the tales should be in a work that never completes its promised shape;
and although most of those issues have now attained widely accepted answers,
many questions remain over the readings of individual lines upwards.
In addition to those matters of Conrad’s that will have concerned Chaucer’s
original audiences and readers, whether consciously (for the more educated)
or not (since the choice of English for the Tales makes them potentially
ac­cess­ible to every speaker of English, though what we know of their early
readers indicates a predominance of gentry, townsmen, and clerics), there are
other issues that have moved more recently to the foreground of the under-
standing of literary studies, Chaucer included. Feminist theory has high-
lighted an area of interest that was already present in medieval culture, as
witnessed by innumerable texts but which has only recently begun to receive
its proper share of attention, even though an accusation against Chaucer of
being too much ‘wommanes friend’ was made within about a century of his
death (by Gavin Douglas, the Scottish translator of Virgil, to explain his mis-
representation of the Aeneid). Historical approaches to the Tales in the sense
of identifying specific incidents or individuals have been familiar for well
over a century, but the work’s grounding in broader social issues such as play
a key role in New Historicism has increasingly shown a different kind of
Introduction 3

importance. Finding a balance between the social and political background

and the work itself is not however a straightforward business. It is common
now for the history to take priority, with the tales as a series of footnotes or
illustrations to larger political or social movements; but those movements are
best handled in studies that focus less closely on the tales themselves, and
there is no point in reproducing in detail here work done finely elsewhere.
This volume by contrast puts the work itself and the extraordinary skill and
power of its writing at the centre, with the historical context as supporting
material. That is what made Chaucer so central in the history of English
poetry in the six and more centuries since his death. Furthermore, his con-
tinuing relevance to the social and ethical conditions of the twenty-­first cen-
tury is now moving to the centre of critical debate, whether or not those
conditions could have been familiar to Chaucer or his pilgrims. Those debates
too are given a place here, though they are set within the cultural and intel-
lectual parameters familiar to him and his earlier readers.
The basic structure of the third edition of this volume is accordingly the same
as in the previous editions, but with some changes of emphasis or additional
material. After a revised introduction to the whole work, changes are concen-
trated on those immediately relevant for a reading of each tale. Since so much of
the more recent criticism on the Tales has been of the broader theoretical or
political kind that looks beyond the particularity of the tales, in many cases the
most extensive alterations and updatings appear in the tale bibliographies rather
than in the original text.
The structure for the discussion of the work as a whole, and of each tale, is as
follows.
Date. I give arguments for the approximate dating of each tale in the course of
Chaucer’s career or the composition of the Tales where these are available, and
record hypothesis where it seems plausible.
Text. There are some eighty surviving manuscripts of part or all of the Tales,
and no two of them say quite the same thing. As it is all too easy to base an argu-
ment on a disputed reading or a passage of doubtful authenticity, or on struc-
tural patterns adopted by editors on flimsy manuscript evidence, I try to note
those variants that are not always visible in modern edited texts but that could
significantly affect interpretation as well as the sense or the style. I also indicate
the kind of glosses that accompany each tale, and if these are ever likely to be
Chaucer’s.
Genre. The Canterbury Tales is unique among story-­collections for its generic
variety—­a variety often insisted on in the links between the tales, which provide
some of the earliest such commentary in Middle English. Medieval Latin trea-
tises on poetry devoted plenty of space to generic definitions, but in relation to
classical rather than vernacular kinds; and the generic accounts written of
French, Provençal, or Welsh poetry have no Middle English equivalents. Such
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4 OX F O R D G U I D E S T O C HAU C E R : T H E C A N T E R BU RY TA L E S

distinctions seem to have been taken for granted in England without any
requirement for formal definition, on the basis of content alone. Some of
Chaucer’s most interesting individual tales do however mix genres within them-
selves, a process that itself shows an acute sense of generic difference. A sense of
genre, to judge from the many comments made on the subject within the work,
was thus crucial to Chaucer’s conception of the Tales, and he is indeed excep-
tional among Middle English writers for his interest in, and alertness to, the
differences of literary kinds available to him. Generic difference in the premod-
ern period was closely tied to ideas of rhetorical appropriateness, decorum—­a
word applied to the variety of the Tales from the sixteenth century forwards.
I try to give some indication of its function and effect, not least in relation to the
social embrace—­the polity—­of the pilgrim company.
Sources and analogues. Chaucer draws his stories from a remarkably wide
range of origins, from French, Latin, and Italian as well as English, and from all
the cultural varieties that those languages encompass. Where specific sources
are known for the individual tales, I give summaries and an account of Chaucer’s
use and adaptation of them. I also discuss the sources of illustrative material,
major authoritative aphorisms, and so on. Where no sources are known, I try to
reconstruct the literary context in which he was working. The most extensive
change since the original edition of this volume relates to the sources for the
whole conception of the Tales.
Structure. Narratology has tended to be an under-­studied area of the Tales,
though the stories are often intriguingly structured, both in the arrangement of
their narrative material and in their tendency to play games with fictive forms.
I discuss the ground plan of each tale, how structure can affect meaning, their
reliance on narrative, speech, or commentary, and the interest in the process of
storytelling that Chaucer shows.
Themes—­thematics and ‘sentence’. Chaucer does not write full-­scale allegory;
it is however very difficult to write a story that does not carry some meaning
beyond the bare events recounted, and which shapes how those events are told.
The term ‘themes’ has tended to become degraded since the original writing of
this book; but that literature should have a ‘sentence’, a set of meanings inform-
ing its shape and content, was a recognized principle of composition in the
Middle Ages—­hence the emphasis on it by Conrad of Hirsau’s student quoted at
the start of this introduction. These meanings are often overt, expressed in
digressions, comments from the narrator or the pilgrims, or concluding
moralites, but those are not always supplied; and even when they appear to be,
disagreement is often still an option, sometimes an implied requirement.
Chaucer is generously open to all kinds of experience, but he maintains a clear
ethical core, even if his historically conditioned ethics are on occasion at odds
with our own (one might cite the anti-­Semitism of the Prioress’s Tale as being
the most egregious example, were it not that it is still so widely current). In this
Introduction 5

section, I look at the relation of such matters to the narratives that contain them:
at the inner meanings that shape the tales, whether they are made explicit or not.
The ways in which tale and teller can affect each other are also discussed here.
The tale in context. The tales of the Canterbury sequence could stand as
au­tono­mous short stories or narrative poems, but they do not: they are placed
within a larger work, and each tale affects the others and is affected by them.
This section studies the additional meanings and resonances that result from
their being part of the larger scheme.
Style. The style—­or styles—­of each tale can be as distinctive as its genre or its
themes, and they are indeed an integral part of such things, reinforcing the
social elevation or moral identity of both tale and, often, its teller. Chaucer has
an especially interesting range of styles at his disposal, not only because of the
range of his sources, but because the composite nature of English, deriving from
its dual origins in Germanic Old English and Latin-­derived French, was just
reaching its full range of potential contrasting registers in his own lifetime; and
this gave him a richness of choice of vocabulary and style unparalleled in any
other language, and never so fully exploited elsewhere until Shakespeare. I ana-
lyse aspects such as the choice of words and images, the verse forms, rhetorical
heightening, and characteristic syntax of each tale.
In addition, I provide separate discussions of the linking passages or pro-
logues. One characteristic of the links is the quantity of critical or theoretical
comment they contain, and I have tried to bring out this emphasis.
Such a division into separate areas of discussion is a matter of convenience,
and the most frustrated or sceptical reader will still not be as conscious as I am
of the artificiality of some of these boundaries. How Chaucer treats a source is
inseparable from what he wants to say; we seldom read the tales as isolated units,
without being aware of the Reeve’s breathing fire at the Miller, or the Merchant’s
glancing over his shoulder at the Wife of Bath. I have tried to arrange the ma­ter­
ial so that it is possible to find the discussion of a specific point where it would
most reasonably be expected, but the sections, like the tales, are not watertight
units, and there are plenty of spills and leaks.
I have not attempted to give a complete survey of critical viewpoints on the
tales, though the annotated bibliographies at the end of each section record
some of the lines of battle. My own approach emphasizes primarily Chaucer’s
literary and stylistic awareness, his sheer multifariousness, rather than read-
ings that see the tales as dramatic speeches by their tellers, as allegories of
orthodox Christian teaching, or as footnotes to political events, though I have
learnt much from such interpretations. But there are as many interpretations
of Chaucer as there are readers; he is supremely skilled at providing material
for an almost infinite variety of readings (though he would be startled at some
of the in­ter­pret­ations he has produced). It is impossible, therefore, to write a
definitive study of the Tales, and I am very much aware of that impossibility.
6 OX F O R D G U I D E S T O C HAU C E R : T H E C A N T E R BU RY TA L E S

The scholarship on the work is vast; I have had to make a large number of
omissions in the course of selecting material, and there will inevitably be other
accidental ones. But more importantly, Chaucer is not the kind of author on
whom it is possible to be definitive. The Tales itself is unfinished; its possibilities
are endless. I have tried to keep the sense of the work’s open-­endedness, even
where it has led me down some unexpected paths. I do not expect that every
reader will follow me along all of them, though some (such as the claim of
protofeminism in the Clerk’s Tale) have in the event become well trodden
since the first edition of this book.
The interpretations given in the main text are my own, though the running
bibliographies, discussed below, note significant inspirations and precursors as
well as interesting disagreements. Chaucer is not the kind of writer on whom
there can ever be a last word, as the continuing abundance of criticism testifies.

The opening quotation is abbreviated from Conrad of Hirsau, Dialogue on the Authors,
extracts ed. A. J. Minnis and A. B. Scott, with the assistance of David Wallace, in
Medieval Literary Theory and Criticism, c. 1100–c. 1375 (Oxford, 1988, 1991), pp. 40–1.

BIBLIOGRA P HICAL NOTE

All citations from Chaucer in this book are taken from The Riverside Chaucer,
edited by Larry D. Benson, and keyed to its numbering. This established itself
as the definitive edition when it was first published in 1987; other editions
published since then have generally adopted its numbering system or at least
in­corp­or­ated it alongside their own, so readers using other more recent edi-
tions should still not have too much problem in locating citations. In my original
writing, I also kept alongside me the eight volumes of Manly and Rickert, with
their comprehensive lists of textual variants; Skeat’s magnificent edition; and a
number of volumes of the never-­completed Variorum Chaucer. Of more recent
single-­volume editions, I have most consistently consulted that of Jill Mann,
supplemented by that of David Lawton. As no edition of a work such as the
Canterbury Tales can replace the manuscripts, I have also relied heavily on
facsimiles, especially those of Hengwrt and Ellesmere; and I have frequently
consulted those and other manuscripts available online, and occasionally the
manuscripts themselves. Full details of the printed editions I have used,
including the old Chaucer Society prints, are given below. An increasing number
are available in digital form.
I have profited from reading many excellent critical works on the Tales as a
whole, and some of the most important for the development of criticism of the
work are outlined in the following chapter. These are given a full reference at
their first mention and are listed in the General Bibliography at the end of this
Introduction 7

volume; I give abbreviated references to them in the bibliographies to individual

tales when I owe them a specific debt, or where their discussion is of particular
importance. An outline of Chaucer’s recurrent sources is also given there, as a
locus for basic information about them. Each section of the discussion of the
individual tales is also followed by its own brief annotated bibliography. This
stands in for footnotes to specific items used in compiling the section; suggests
further reading; gives some indication of older lines of interpretation that have
fashioned modern views of the tale in question; and indicates intersections with
current preoccupations. Articles relevant to just a small number of tales are
given a full reference in the section bibliographies at first mention, and either a
cross-­reference or an abbreviated reference sufficient to identify the source on
later mentions.
As the URLs for online publications are rarely stable, I suggest search terms
where these are not obvious.

Textual Bibliography

All quotations from Chaucer in this book are taken, unless otherwise specified, from The
Riverside Chaucer, general editor Larry D. Benson (Boston, 1987; Oxford, 1988; 3rd edn.
intro. Christopher Cannon, Oxford, 2008), and I have profited greatly from the scholar-
ship of its many contributors. This edition is itself based on the second edition of The
Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, ed. F. N. Robinson (Boston and Oxford, 1957). Retaining the
Riverside numbering in this book eases access to almost all criticism before 2020.
The number of online editions and manuscript facsimiles is constantly increasing, so
readers are advised to check for the latest updates. There are in addition a number of
printed editions under way, notably of Chaucer’s complete works, that had not
appeared in time to be taken into account for this volume, including those by Julia
Boffey and A. S. G. Edwards (Cambridge), and by Christopher Cannon and James
Simpson (Oxford).

The following is an alphabetical selection of other editions of the Tales:

Boenig, Robert, and Andrew Taylor (eds.), Geoffrey Chaucer: The Canterbury Tales
(Peterborough, Ontario, 2008). A student edition with thorough glossing and an
appendix of ‘background documents’.
Kolve, V. A., and Glending Olson (eds.), The Canterbury Tales: Seventeen Tales and the
General Prologue (New York, 2018), is the third in a sequence of Norton editions con-
taining an increasing number of tales, all with selected source and background texts;
the first edition, with nine tales, appeared in 1989.
Lawton, David (ed.), The Norton Chaucer: The Canterbury Tales (New York, 2020), with
associated ebook and audio recording, is excerpted from his complete Norton Chaucer
(2019), which itself replaces E. T. Donaldson’s Chaucer’s Poetry: An Anthology for the
Modern Reader (New York, 1958) (which excluded the prose works).
Manly, John M., and Edith Rickert (eds.), The Text of the Canterbury Tales (8 vols.,
Chicago, 1940). This describes the manuscripts and records all textual variants.
8 OX F O R D G U I D E S T O C HAU C E R : T H E C A N T E R BU RY TA L E S

Mann, Jill (ed.), Geoffrey Chaucer: The Canterbury Tales (London, 2005). Excellent
edition that combines scholarship and readability, with particularly generous
annotations and commentary.
Skeat, W. W. (ed.), The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer (7 vols., Oxford, 1894–1900). Although
his scholarship is often outdated, Skeat is still a lucid and valuable source of essential
information.
A Variorum Edition of the Works of Geoffrey Chaucer (Norman, Okla., 1979–2002) is a
multi-­volume edition, never completed, under the general editorship of Paul G. Ruggiers.
Volumes on individual tales are listed in the appropriate tale bibliographies.

Selected Manuscript Facsimiles and Transcripts

Ellesmere: The New Ellesmere Chaucer Facsimile and its accompanying volume of essays,
The Ellesmere Chaucer: Essays in Interpretation, ed. Martin Stevens and Daniel Woodward
(San Marino, Calif., and Tokyo, 1995). Also useful is The Ellesmere Manuscript
Reproduced in Facsimile (2 vols., Manchester, 1911), reprinted as The Ellesmere
Manuscript of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales: A Working Facsimile, with introduction
by Ralph Hanna III (Cambridge, 1989). Also online at the Huntington Library website.
Gg.4.27: The Poetical Works of Geoffrey Chaucer: A Facsimile of Cambridge University
Library MS Gg.4.27, with introductions by M. B. Parkes and Richard Beadle (3 vols.,
Cambridge, 1979–80). Also online at the Cambridge University Library website.
Hengwrt: The Canterbury Tales: A Facsimile and Transcription of the Hengwrt Manuscript,
ed. Paul G. Ruggiers (Variorum I, Norman, Okla., 1979). Also online at the National
Library of Wales, Aberystwyth; and with comparison with Ellesmere and other
information on CD-­ROM ed. Estelle Stubbs, The Hengwrt Chaucer Research Edition
(Scholarly Digital Editions, 2002).
Chaucer Society transcripts edited by Frederick J. Furnivall, now available in a variety of
reprints and now also all digitized online:

[Cambridge University Library] Cambridge MS Dd.4.24 (1901–2).

[Corpus Christi College, Oxford] Corpus MS [198] (1868–77).
[British Library] Harleian MS 7334 (1885).
[British Library] Lansdowne MS [851] (1868–77).
[Petworth House, Sussex] Petworth MS (1868–77).
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