The Canterbury Tales, and Other Poems

About the book

A company travelling towards Canterbury agrees to tell tales, bringing different occupations, experiences, and ambitions into the same narrative space. The stories range through chivalric romance, comic deception, moral exemplum, religious narrative, and arguments about marriage and authority. What a pilgrim tells matters partly because of who tells it and how another traveller responds. The General Prologue establishes this social variety through details that can invite admiration and suspicion at once. This historical edition also includes other poems, with notes identifying several no longer attributed to Chaucer. Purves's presentation abridges the two prose tales and supplies outlines for omitted material. Readers therefore encounter a mediated selection whose central pleasure remains the exchange between individual storytelling and the unruly company that makes each performance possible.

• Storytelling and identity
• Social variety
• Authority and experience

Why read it

For a gathering of distinct voices whose tales challenge one another as much as they entertain their travelling audience.

Edited by D. Laing Purves · prose tales abridged; includes other poems