The Canterbury Tales

geoffrey chaucer frank grady donald howard

The father of English literature shines in this authoritative selection from the greatest collection of narrative poems in the language.
@AprilFools Oh and the Wyfe of Bathe. Talk about a woman who likes to be perced to the roote.

From The World's Greatest Books in Twenty Tweets or Less

Genres fictionpoetryclassicsliteratureschoolshort storieshistorical fictionclassic literatureread for schoolhigh school

400 pages, Mass Market Paperback

First published January 1,1400

Series

Landmarks of World Literature (New)

Places

england,

This edition

Format: 400 pages, Mass Market Paperback
Published: February 1, 2005 by Signet Classics
ISBN: 9780451529688
ASIN: 0451529685
Language: English

Characters More characters

The Wife Of Bath

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About the author

geoffrey chaucer

Geoffrey Chaucer (c. 1343 – 25 October 1400) was an English poet, author, and civil servant best known for The Canterbury Tales. He has been called the "father of English literature", or, alternatively, the "father of English poetry". He was the first writer to be buried in what has since come to be called Poets' Corner, in Westminster Abbey. Chaucer also gained fame as a philosopher and astronomer, composing the scientific A Treatise on the Astrolabe for his 10-year-old son, Lewis. He maintained a career in the civil service as a bureaucrat, courtier, diplomat, and member of parliament.
Among Chaucer's many other works are The Book of the Duchess, The House of Fame, The Legend of Good Women, and Troilus and Criseyde. He is seen as crucial in legitimising the literary use of Middle English when the dominant literary languages in England were still Anglo-Norman French and Latin. Chaucer's contemporary Thomas Hoccleve hailed him as "the firste fyndere of our fair langage" (i.e., the first one capable of finding poetic matter in English). Almost two thousand English words are first attested to in Chaucerian manuscripts. As scholar Bruce Holsinger has argued, charting Chaucer's life and work comes with many challenges related to the "difficult disjunction between the written record of his public and private life and the literary corpus he left behind". His recorded works and his life show many personas that are "ironic, mysterious, elusive [or] cagey" in nature, ever-changing with new discoveries.