The Canterbury Tales: The Best Bits

by Geoffrey Chaucer, Edward Burne-Jones (Illustrator)

A group of pilgrims assembles at the Tabard Inn in Southwark and sets out for the shrine of Thomas à Becket in Canterbury. Along the way they tell tales to one another, painting pictures of their varied lives. When The Canterbury Tales first appeared it was groundbreaking - showing characters speaking in the vernacular, giving readers for centuries to come an insight into medieval England. This annotated, illustrated edition collects the most enjoyable, witty and crude pieces into a unique collection, and is the perfect edition for those who have yet to meet The Canterbury Tales, as well as those who know and love it.

96 pages, Paperback

Published May 31, 2025

About the author

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.

Reviews

[Mariska de Wit · Rating 3 out of 5]

De uitleg in de kantlijn was helaas niet duidelijk genoeg om de originele tekst goed genoeg te kunnen snappen om de verhalen helemaal te kunnen volgen.