Drawing on both Statius’s Thebaid and Boccaccio’s Teseida, The Knight’s Tale uncomfortably sutures the horrors of epic tragedy to the idealism of chivalric romance, inflecting both with the philosophical ambitions of Boethius’s Consolation. This chapter traces the modern engagement with the tale as a history of attempts to understand the tensions produced by its multiple sources, genres, and rhetorical registers, and explores how accounts of its form inflect and are inflected by accounts of its politics. Politics here, as in other Canterbury Tales, is as much a matter of gender and sexuality as it is of class, rule, and social order. Moreover, the problems posed by aesthetic and political form become problems of how to understand the relations among the text, its pilgrim narrator, and the author. Beginning with the high formalist moment of postwar criticism, the chapter follows the development of ideology critique and of feminist and psychoanalytic criticism, each of which remains attuned to earlier formalist questions. The Knight’s Tale that emerges from this history is a text of great aesthetic ambition, whose aims are as much reflected in its incoherences as in its formalist impulses.

No Middle English writer takes up as many different moral genres as Chaucer; the Canterbury Tales explores saints’ Life, pastoral treatise, fürstenspiegel, de casibus tragedy, Marian miracle, and exemplum-style tales oriented toward civic, spiritual, and domestic uses. That his work, so often associated in modern criticism and in the contemporary classroom with a genially ironic outlook, also appears to correspond with late medieval tastes in serious and devotional reading has tended to present something of a problem. This chapter explores the ways in which critical disagreements about the significance of the moral and religious tales can be a proxy for questions about alterity, that is, the problem we inevitably face when we read the works of the past. What we think about “moral Chaucer” will often enough be a reflection of what we think about “medieval Chaucer” and about our relationship with a middle ages whose affective and aesthetic attractions very often exceed the ethical appeal of its devotional commitments and conventions.

Through its overarching frame story but also in the interplay among its diverse tales, the Canterbury Tales again and again troubles our sense of how endings work, promising resolutions that never quite materialize or are undercut as soon as they do. This feature of the Tales offers us the opportunity to consider endings less as a single narrative feature than as a set of persistent and varied problems related to composition, to language, to audience, and to poetry, as a way of considering the cadence of life itself. We follow Rosemarie McGerr in asserting that a certain kind of “irresolution” is a defining feature of the Chaucerian poetic, a poetic of openness and ambiguity, a consideration of the limits and problems of teleology for the poetic enterprise, for an audience of hearers, or for human living. The poet’s troubles with endings date from the start of his career, with his earliest major poem, the Book of the Duchess, offering a particularly useful example, and they extend past the poet’s own ending, as Chaucer’s fifteenth-century audience saw the Canterbury Tales both as an “open” text, ripe for additions, and as an “unfinished” text, a structure begging to be completed.

Chaucer’s Nun’s Priest’s Tale, a version of the well-known tale of the cock and the fox, has been read as a Menippean parody of a spectrum of authors: various forms and kinds of knowledge, from proverbs to dream theory to poetics to anti-Pelagian theology, proffer a myriad of ways in which to read the world without cohering in the slightest with one another, or solving the immediate, practical problem faced by the cock and his hens: the threat of death at the hands of a creature that they have not yet directly encountered. This chapter suggests how modern readers of the tale might negotiate its formidable critical legacy and find their way to a fresh, unique encounter with a tale in which direct experience promises a means of liberation from the plethora of discourses in which narration is always in danger of becoming mired. In pursuing experience rather than authority, the chapter argues, we are following a trail that begins within the tale itself.

Griselda has always challenged the status of the human, even though critics have long sought to elucidate prized human characteristics through her behavior as wife, mother, and political subject. Despite these efforts, our moral investments in Griselda - quite literally, the ways we have sought to associate her with a host of social and moral prescriptions concerning subjectivity, femininity, maternity, and sovereignty - are confounded by her unyielding submission. Griselda is unfeeling, but she gains a horrible autonomy that critiques patriarchal tyranny. Griselda affirms women’s material investment in the household, but to do so she sacrifices all ethical bonds outside those mandated by her pre-marital pact with Walter. Griselda is transcendent, but she is alienated from a common humanity, much less Christianity. This chapter argues that Griselda is not an inhuman monster; rather, through The Clerk’s Tale, Chaucer imagines a different view of humanity, one engendered according to modes of virtue typically associated with women, including patience, pity, humility, steadfastness, and submission.

The Prioress’s Tale, one of only three Canterbury Tales assigned to a female narrator, raises a number of questions related to gender and especially female devotion. But the central question has long been how to grapple with the explicitly antisemitic story she tells, and whether the antisemitism of the tale “belongs” to Chaucer, or, alternatively, to the tale-teller, whom Chaucer treats at least somewhat satirically in his portrait of her in the General Prologue. This chapter puts to one side the ultimately unanswerable question of whether Chaucer himself is or is not antisemitic, instead focusing on how the tale’s antisemitism is structured. The story, analogous to a number of Miracles of the Virgin that circulated widely in England and Europe, deploys several anti-Jewish tropes - concerned with the body and materiality, voice and spirit, spatiality, and temporality - to develop a simultaneous celebration of Christianity and denigration of Judaism. In analyzing the “economy” of antisemitism within the tale, we can begin to understand how powerfully attractive such constructions might be at the same time that we come to understand more fully how to confront and dismantle them.

Secondary school teachers are a natural constituency for expanding the reach of Chaucer Studies, and there are nnunmerous mechanisms, models, and resources already in place to help us reach them

Although each Canterbury tale may be separated from its teller (and thus read as a distinctly Chaucerian statement), this chapter instead follows the majority of recent criticism in tying The Pardoner’s Tale closely to the Pardoner. In keeping with recent trends, it considers the prospect that the Pardoner, following his designation as a “mare,” is gay. This approach affords the opportunity to discuss the misogyny that underwrites ideas of both woman and sodomy during the era. The chapter follows two interpretive trajectories in linking the Pardoner’s performance to its context within the imagined drama of the Canterbury Tales. At the same time that the tale and prologue contain a sodomitic subtext, they also resonate with the actions and investments of the larger group of pilgrims. That linkage enables the Pardoner to “quyte” or avenge himself on a Christian society that demonizes sodomites by exposing the sinfulness of its members and the emptiness of its religious practice. Complicating the oppositional relationship between the Pardoner and the pilgrims is the famous kiss orchestrated by the Knight, which offers some hope, albeit fragile and temporary, for an alternative social order.

The dialectical relation of long-form scholarly work and short-form blogs, social media and other contemporary public writing about how the political meanings of sex in Chaucer’s time speak vividly to our own experience cannot simply be dismissed as crudely instrumentalist or naively transhistoricist. Such approaches can provide a powerful justification for why we teach Chaucer and for his cultural significance today. Flagging the Canterbury Tales as “our cultural legacy” in the context of current considerations of “rape culture” is a rhetorical move that makes a claim for the continued liveliness and urgency of past literatures by showing how the past still inheres in the present, how present discourses can suddenly make the past newly familiar, how the past is still lively.

Often overshadowed by the other works of the “Marriage Group,” the tales told by the Friar and the Summoner powerfully engage with several of the social issues that Chaucer interrogates within the Canterbury Tales, including medieval anti-clericalism and anti-fraternalism, institutional corruption, the fourteenth-century gift economy, and even demonology. Most important, however, The Friar’s Tale and The Summoner’s Tale indulge in a ribald exploration of the tangled relationships among entente, utterance, and performance - a web of social and linguistic concerns that Chaucer invokes as early as the General Prologue and regularly reasserts throughout the Tales. While it pays heed to the vocational rivalry that motivates the Friar and Summoner, this chapter also considers their tales in relation to the broader linguistic problematic of Chaucer’s project. The Friar’s caustic exploration of the performative efficacy of the spoken word and the Summoner’s cynical implication that speech is, quite literally, a lot of hot air offer a gloss of one of the Canterbury Tales’ most enduring puzzles, the ongoing struggle to reconcile the word with the deed and the ethical stakes of doing so.

This chapter shows how The Miller’s Tale introduces the “art of solaas” - the notion that literature can be pleasurable for its own sake - into the Canterbury Tales. It highlights key terms that the Miller introduces or redefines, like “noble,” “quite,” and “privetee,” as part of his aesthetic intervention into the storytelling game established by the Host, and explores the implications of his choice of the fabliau genre. The chapter discusses the Miller’s tale-telling style, examining his use of language and convention to create his characters and the world in which they live. Finally, the chapter anatomizes the Miller’s joke, mapping its careful construction step-by-step, and showing how Chaucer highlights the emotions and sensations of Nicholas, Absolon, and John. Ultimately, the Miller’s joke creates community through shared enjoyment - but that enjoyment has a cost, the punishments of the three male protagonists in the story. The vision of participatory festivity introduced by the Miller is quickly corrupted, however, by the Reeve’s and Cook’s distortions of quiting and pleasure, and Chaucer must turn to alternative aesthetic models for the remainder of the tales.

For generations the conventional “roadside drama” reading of the General Prologue, despite or even because of its undeniable explanatory efficiency, has made it difficult for critics trying to view the Prologue as an object of analysis to view the whole of it. In its construction, Chaucer teases readers with the expectations evoked by the conventional genres of the dream-vision and the estates satire, dangling their promises but leaving them unfulfilled, and uses their features while rejecting their premises and withholding the normal modes of their action. Ultimately what is most distinct about the achievement of the General Prologue is how successfully it seems to ward off grasp of its artifice, organizing the experience of reading to make it seem an experience of something prior to reading.

This chapter groups discussion of The Man of Law’s Tale into four broad topics. First is the intersecting representation of gender, race, and religious difference through which the tale complicates key questions about Christianity’s relationship to Islam, a relationship shaped as much by political and economic concerns as by theological ones. It thus opens equally complicated questions about the relationship between sacred and secular. Third is the tale’s preoccupation with the circulation of people and knowledge. Despite its generic similarity to saints’ Lives, the tale is perhaps less concerned with the truth of Christianity than with its transmission, with questions about the kind of knowledge stories produce, especially as they move across different discursive and territorial frames. The final section turns to narrative presentation and the teller’s status as a “Man of Law.” As an exploration of the impossibility of superimposing a stable system of meaning on a story about overlapping networks of mercantile, confessional, historical, and narrative practices, the tale has much to teach us about the layered, multipart narrative project of the Canterbury Tales itself.

What should we do about the fact that reading Chaucer is hard? The “immersion theory” of learning Middle English, rooted in nineteenth-century philological approaches, is no longer really functional or well-suited to attract our wider and more diverse contemporary audience of students; we might return, productively if paradoxically, to an earlier appreciation of textual difficulty (and reward), which we actually share with our Modernist colleagues. In this we can make translations our allies rather than our antagonists. Moreover, the stereotypes about the Middle Ages that we have traditionally railed against, from “dark-ages” dismissals to pre-Raphaelite romanticizations, may no longer be the ones our twenty-first-century students carry with them these days.