World Literature- Ovid, Dante, Chaucer, and Perarch

World Literature- Ovid, Dante, Chaucer, and Perarch

The Canterbury Tales is a collection of stories written in Middle English by Geoffrey Chaucer at the end of the 14th century. The tales are told as part of a story-telling contest by a group of pilgrims as they travel together on a journey from Southwerk to the shrine of Saint Thomas Becket at Canterbury Cathedral. In a long list of works, including "Troilus and Criseyde", "House of Fame", "Parliament of Fowls", the Canterbury Tales is Chaucer's magnum opus, and a towering achievement of Western culture(Pearsall, 2005).

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The question of whether "The Canterbury Tales" is finished has not been answered. The combined elements of Chaucer's quadri-lingual expertise in law, philosophy, and other subjects, the uncertainty of medieval English historical records, issues of manuscript transmission, and Chaucer's method of telling his stories through a multi-perspectival prism of subjectivity make the "Tales" extremely difficult to interpret(Cooper, 2006). There are 83 known manuscripts of the work from the late medieval and early Renaissance period, more than any other vernacular literary text with the exception of The Prick of Conscience.

Language

The Canterbury Tales were written in Middle English, specifically in a dialect associated with London and spellings associated with the then emergent chancery standard. Although no manuscript of the Tales exists in Chaucer's own hand, two were copied around the time of his death by Adam Pinkhurst, a scribe whom he seems to have worked closely with before, meaning that we can be fairly sure about how Chaucer himself wrote the Tales. Chaucer's generation of English-speakers was among the last to pronounce e at the end of words (so for Chaucer the word was pronounced, not as in modern English).

This meant that later copyists tended to be inconsistent in their copying of ...