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The Canterbury Tales is the world's strangest road trip. It tells the story of a group of pilgrims (fancy word for travelers) on their way to Canterbury, who engage in a tale-telling contest to pass the time. Besides watching the interactions between the characters, we get to read 24 of the tales the pilgrims tell. And as it turns out, Medieval storytellers had some 'tude.

Geoffrey Chaucer probably wrote The Canterbury Tales in the late 1380s and early 1390s, after his retirement from life as a civil servant. Within this professional life, Chaucer was able to journey from his home in England to France and Italy. There, he not only had the opportunity to read Italian and French literature, but possibly, even to meet Boccaccio, whose Decameron--a collection of tales told by Italian nobility holed up in a country house to escape the plague ravaging their city--might have inspired the frame story of The Canterbury Tales.

Chaucer's decision to compose in his nation's language, English, rather than from the Latin of so a lot of his coworkers, was a large break with learned tradition. However, the risk paid off: we know The Canterbury Tales were enormously popular because so a lot more manuscripts of the stories survive than of almost any other work of this time period. The Canterbury Tales were still going strong when the first printers made their way to England, and William Caxton published the first printed version of The Canterbury Tales at 1476.

One of the things that makes The Canterbury Tales so enjoyable to read is the good (and frequently, uh, grotesque) detail with which the narrator describes each of the pilgrims. We know, for example, that the cook has a pustule on his leg which very much looks like one of the desserts he cooks...and that the miller has a massive, pug nose. For many of his portraits, Chaucer is relying on a medieval tradition of "estates satire," a collection of stereotypes about individuals based on what occupation they had or what social class they belonged to. Another medieval idea his portraits draw upon would be "anticlericalism," a tradition that got its start in reaction to lots of abuses by clergy from the medieval civilization, but that basically became a collection of stereotypes about friars, monks, nuns, priests, and the like.

Sounds funny? It's.

Chaucer draws upon these traditions, however he doesn't necessarily regurgitate them whole: as you'll see when you examine the portraits of the pilgrims more closely, a number of them are not what they appear. What does this say about the strength of the conclusions we draw about people based upon first impressions, or appearances?

What makes for a good story?
Why should we tell stories?
As the pilgrims tell their stories, though, they turn out to be speaking not just about fairytale people in far-off lands, but also about themselves and their culture. This leads to a lot of conflict in a group of pilgrims formed by members of that identical society, who frequently take offense at the versions of themselves they see depicted in the tales.

The General Prologue to The Canterbury Tales and the interactions between the pilgrims that take place in between the stories, then, form a story of their own. Dare we say, a Canterbury tale?

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