The Canterbury Tales
Geoffrey Chaucer (1400)
“A drunken, bawdy, razor-sharp portrait of every social class in 14th-century England — told by the classes themselves.”
Language Register
Ranges from elevated courtly romance (Knight) to bawdy vernacular (Miller, Reeve) — the register IS the characterization
Syntax Profile
Middle English iambic pentameter couplets (heroic couplets) with enormous syntactic flexibility. Chaucer can write a single sentence spanning ten lines or deliver a devastating judgment in five words. The verse form adapts to each teller: the Knight's sentences are long and subordinated; the Miller's are short and punchy; the Wife of Bath's are digressive and self-interrupting.
Figurative Language
Moderate — Chaucer relies more on irony, understatement, and telling detail than on sustained metaphor. When he does use metaphor, it tends to be specific and physical (Alisoun compared to a weasel, the Pardoner's hair like rat-tails). The General Prologue portraits are masterclasses in metonymy — a single detail (the Monk's bridle bells, the Wife's gap teeth) stands for an entire character.
Era-Specific Language
Nobility of character (not just birth) — a key concept separating worthy from unworthy pilgrims
'Handy/clever' — applied to Nicholas in the Miller's Tale with obvious double meaning (sexually 'handy')
'Repay/requite' — the mechanism by which tales answer each other. The Miller 'quites' the Knight.
'Mastery/sovereignty' — the central term in the marriage debate: who rules in a marriage?
'Truth/fidelity/promise-keeping' — broader than modern 'truth,' encompassing honor and sworn word
'Various people' — Chaucer's phrase for the social cross-section of the pilgrimage
How Characters Speak — Class & Identity
The Knight
Formal, Latinate, philosophical. Long sentences with subordinate clauses. Classical allusions to Boethius, Statius, Boccaccio.
The aristocratic voice: educated, measured, accustomed to authority. His language assumes an audience that shares his frame of reference.
The Wife of Bath
Garrulous, digressive, mixing biblical citation with bedroom anecdote. Self-interrupting. Colloquial but rhetorically powerful.
A woman excluded from formal education who has educated herself through experience and selective reading. Her language performs what she argues: that the unlettered voice carries authority.
The Miller
Short sentences. Anglo-Saxon monosyllables. Body parts named directly. Puns (often sexual). Verse as joke-delivery.
Working-class speech: physical, direct, unapologetic. The Miller's language refuses the Knight's abstractions and insists on the body.
The Pardoner
Two registers: intimate, confessional prose in the prologue; thundering homiletic rhetoric in the tale. The gap between them IS the character.
A professional performer of virtue who has no virtue. His language is his only real skill, and he knows it.
The Clerk
Austere, precise, minimal ornament. Academic restraint. Emotional power through understatement.
The scholar's voice: controlled, careful, aware of sources and authorities. His plainness is a moral position — he distrusts rhetorical excess.
The Prioress
Liturgical, Latinate, consciously elevated. Rhyme royal stanza form (more formal than couplets). Tender and sentimental.
A woman performing a social role (courtly lady) inappropriate to her religious vocation. Her refined language masks — or enables — moral blindness.
The Host (Harry Bailly)
Blunt, bossy, colloquial. Commands and insults freely. Swears constantly ('by cokkes bones'). Interrupts.
Middle-class authority: the innkeeper who controls the pilgrimage through personality, not rank. His language is the language of practical power.
Narrator's Voice
Chaucer-the-pilgrim is a deliberately diminished version of Chaucer-the-poet. He presents himself as naive, easily impressed, and slightly dim — praising the Monk's worldliness, admiring the Pardoner's preaching. This bumbling persona is a mask that allows devastating irony: the 'naive' narrator describes corruption so precisely that only a genius could have written it.
Tone Progression
General Prologue
Observational, ironic, generous
Chaucer introduces his cast with apparent goodwill and surgical precision. The satire is embedded, never stated.
Early Tales (Knight through Cook)
Competitive, varied, escalating
The tales argue with each other — high romance answered by bawdy fabliau. Genre itself is contested.
Marriage Group (Wife through Franklin)
Debating, philosophical, unresolved
The tales engage a sustained argument about marriage, sovereignty, and gender. No winner emerges.
Late Tales and Parson
Darkening, penitential, final
The pilgrimage approaches its destination. Comedy gives way to moral seriousness. The Retraction silences the storyteller.
Stylistic Comparisons
- Boccaccio's Decameron — similar frame narrative, Italian source material, but Chaucer adds social range and individuated voices
- Langland's Piers Plowman — contemporary alliterative poetry, more overtly religious, less ironic, narrower social focus
- The Roman de la Rose — French allegorical tradition that Chaucer translated and then spent his career dismantling
Key Vocabulary from This Book
Notable words used in this text — click to see full definitions