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FREE THE CANTERBURY TALES PDF Geoffrey Chaucer,Nevill Coghill | 528 pages | 23 Dec 2008 | Penguin Books Ltd | 9780140424386 | English | London, United Kingdom The Canterbury Tales The framing device for the collection of stories is a pilgrimage to the shrine of Thomas Becket in The Canterbury TalesKent. The 30 pilgrims who The Canterbury Tales the journey gather at the Tabard Inn in Southwarkacross the Thames from London. They agree to engage in a The Canterbury Tales contest as The Canterbury Tales travel, and Harry BaillyThe Canterbury Tales of the Tabard, serves as master of ceremonies for the contest. Chaucer did not complete the full plan for his book: the return journey from Canterbury is not included, and some of the pilgrims do not tell stories. The use of a pilgrimage as the framing device enabled Chaucer to bring together people The Canterbury Tales many walks of life: knight, prioress, monk; merchant, man of The Canterbury Tales, franklin, scholarly clerk; miller, reeve, pardoner; wife of Bath and many others. The The Canterbury Tales and links together offer complex depictions of the pilgrims, while, at the same time, the tales present remarkable examples of short narratives in verse, plus two expositions in prose. The pilgrimage, which in medieval practice combined a fundamentally religious purpose with the secular benefit of a spring vacation, made possible extended consideration of the relationship between the pleasures and vices of this world and the spiritual aspirations for the next. Probably influenced by French syllable-counting in versification, Chaucer developed for The Canterbury Tales a line of 10 syllables with alternating accent and regular end rhyme—an ancestor of the heroic couplet. Print Cite. 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By signing up, you agree to our Privacy Notice. Be on the lookout for your Britannica newsletter to get trusted stories delivered right to your inbox. The Canterbury Tales The General Prologue Summary & Analysis | LitCharts The Canterbury Tales Middle English : Tales of Caunterbury [2] is a collection of 24 stories that runs to over 17, lines written in Middle English by Geoffrey Chaucer between and The tales mostly written in versealthough some are in prose are presented as part of a story-telling contest by a group of pilgrims as they travel together from London to Canterbury to visit the shrine of Saint Thomas Becket at Canterbury Cathedral. The prize for this contest is a free meal at the Tabard Inn at Southwark on their return. After a long list of works written earlier in his career, including Troilus and CriseydeHouse of Fameand Parliament of FowlsThe Canterbury Tales is near-unanimously seen as Chaucer's magnum opus. He uses the tales and descriptions of its characters to paint an ironic and critical portrait of The Canterbury Tales society at the time, and particularly The Canterbury Tales the Church. Chaucer's use of such a wide range of classes and types of people was without precedent in English. Although the characters are fictional, they still offer a variety of insights into customs and practices of the time. Often, such insight leads to a variety of discussions and disagreements among people in the 14th century. For example, although various social classes are represented in these stories and all of the pilgrims are on a spiritual quest, it is apparent that they are more concerned with worldly things than spiritual. The Canterbury Tales, the collection resembles Boccaccio's Decameronwhich Chaucer may have read The Canterbury Tales his first diplomatic mission to Italy in It has been suggested that the greatest contribution of The Canterbury Tales to English literature was the popularisation of the English vernacular in mainstream literature, as opposed to French, Italian or Latin. English had, however, been used as a literary language centuries before Chaucer's time, and several The Canterbury Tales Chaucer's contemporaries— John GowerWilliam Langlandthe Pearl Poetand Julian of The Canterbury Tales —also wrote major literary works in English. It is unclear to what extent Chaucer was seminal in this evolution of literary preference. While Chaucer clearly states the addressees of many of his poems, the intended audience of The Canterbury Tales is more difficult to determine. Chaucer was a courtierleading some to believe that he was mainly a court poet who wrote exclusively for nobility. The Canterbury Tales is generally thought to have been incomplete at The Canterbury Tales end of Chaucer's life. In the General Prologue[5] some 30 pilgrims are introduced. According to the Prologue, Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales was to write four stories from the perspective of each pilgrim, two each on the way to and from their ultimate destination, St. Thomas Becket's shrine making for a total of about stories. Although perhaps incomplete, The Canterbury Tales is revered as one of the most important works in English literature. It is also open to a wide range of interpretations. The question of whether The Canterbury Tales is a finished work has not been answered to date. There are 84 manuscripts and four incunabula printed before editions [7] of the work, dating from the late medieval and early Renaissance periods, more than for any other vernacular literary text with the exception of The Prick of Conscience. This is taken as evidence of the Tales' popularity during the century after Chaucer's death. Determining the text of the work is complicated by the question of the narrator's voice which Chaucer made part of his literary structure. Even the oldest surviving manuscripts of the Tales are not Chaucer's originals. Another famous example is the Ellesmere Manuscripta manuscript handwritten by one person with illustrations by several illustrators; the tales are put in an order that many later editors have followed for centuries. Only 10 copies of this edition are known to exist, including one held by the British Library and one held by the Folger Shakespeare Library. InLinne Mooney claimed that she was able to identify the scrivener who worked for Chaucer as an Adam Pinkhurst. Mooney, then a professor at the University of Maine and a visiting fellow at Corpus Christi College, Cambridgesaid she could match Pinkhurst's signature, on an oath he signed, to his handwriting on a copy of The Canterbury Tales Canterbury Tales that might have been transcribed from Chaucer's working copy. In the absence of consensus as to whether or not a complete version of the Tales The Canterbury Tales, there is also no general agreement regarding the order in which Chaucer intended the stories to be placed. Textual and manuscript The Canterbury Tales have been adduced to support the two most popular modern methods of ordering the tales. Some scholarly editions divide the Tales into ten "Fragments". The tales that make up a The Canterbury Tales are closely related and contain internal indications of their order of presentation, usually with one The Canterbury Tales speaking to The Canterbury Tales then stepping aside for another character. However, between Fragments, the connection is less obvious. Consequently, there are several possible orders; the one most frequently seen in modern editions follows the numbering of the Fragments ultimately based on the Ellesmere order. An alternative ordering seen in an early manuscript containing The Canterbury Talesthe early-fifteenth century Harley MS. Fragments IV and V, by contrast, vary in location from manuscript to manuscript. Chaucer wrote in a London dialect of late Middle Englishwhich has clear differences from Modern English. From philological research, some facts are known about the pronunciation of English during the time of Chaucer. In some cases, vowel letters in Middle English were pronounced very differently from Modern English, because The Canterbury Tales Great Vowel Shift had not yet happened. Although no manuscript exists in Chaucer's own hand, two were copied around the time of his death by Adam Pinkhursta scribe with whom he may have worked closely before, giving a high degree of confidence that Chaucer himself wrote the Tales. No other work prior to Chaucer's is known to have set a collection of tales within the framework of pilgrims on a pilgrimage. It is obvious, however, that Chaucer borrowed The Canterbury Tales, sometimes The Canterbury Tales large portions, of his stories from earlier stories, and that his work was influenced by the general state of the literary world in which he lived. Storytelling was the main entertainment in England at the time, and storytelling contests had been around for hundreds of years. In The Canterbury Tales England the English Pui was a group with an appointed leader who would judge the songs of the group. The winner received a crown and, as with the winner of The Canterbury Talesa free dinner. It was common for pilgrims on a pilgrimage to have a chosen "master of ceremonies" to guide them and organise the journey.