The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer

The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer

The Broadview Canterbury Talesis an edition of the complete tales in a text based on the famous Ellesmere Manuscript. Here one may read a Middle English text that is closer to what Chaucer's scribe, Adam Pinkhurst, actually wrote than that in any other modern edition. Unlike most editions, which draw on a number of manuscripts to recapture Chaucer's original intention, this edition preserves the text as it was found in one influential manuscript. A sampling of facsimile pages from the original manuscript is also included, along with a selection of other works that give the reader a rich sense of the cultural, political, and literary worlds in which Chaucer lived.

The second edition includes a new Middle English glossary, a timeline of Chaucer's life and times, and detailed page headers showing the fragment and line numbers to assist readers in finding a specific section of the poem.

“I can already tell you that this text—unlike any other Chaucer text—makes it easy for students to read and understand ChaucerIt has certainly made my job easier!” — Mary Flowers Braswell, University of Alabama at Birmingham

“This attractive, readable edition features Chaucer’s Middle English text, marginal glosses, explanatory footnotes, and illustrative facsimile pages. Especially helpful are the appended ‘background documents,’ historical and literary, which provide key contexts for the interpretation of Chaucer’s work. A useful bibliography concludes the volume. Highly recommended.” — Ann W. Astell, University of Notre Dame

“Britain’s greatest medieval poem by its greatest non-dramatic poet: this new edition will be attractive to students, scholars, and general readers alike. Facsimiles of individual leaves from the Ellesmere Manuscript have been scattered throughout the volume to give us a real sense of what it would have been like to open The Canterbury Tales for the first time in the years immediately following Chaucer’s death.” — Larry Scanlon, Rutgers University

“With its meticulously edited text, generous glosses and notes, abundant selections from relevant medieval sources, and attractive reproductions of the sumptuous pages of the Ellesmere Manuscript, the Broadview Canterbury Tales will become the obvious choice for teachers, students, and general readers alike.” — John T. Sebastian, Loyola University New Orleans

“This is the best edition of the Tales I’ve found to date.” — John Marlin, College of Saint Elizabeth

Geoffrey Chaucer was born in London in around 1342, the son of a wine merchant, and his life was spent in royal government service, therefore his career is particularly extensively documented. By 1357, Chaucer had become a page to the bride of Prince Lionel, Edward III's second son, and it was while in the prince's service that Chaucer was ransomed when he was arrested in France in 1359-60. Philippa, Chaucer's wife, whom he married around. Katherine Swynford, the mistress (c. 1365), was her sister. 1370) and John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster's third wife (1396), whose first wife Blanche (d.

The Book of the Duchess, Chaucer's ealrist great poem, is dedicated to her. From 1366 and 1378, Chaucer worked as a customs controller on wool in the port of London, although he also traveled overseas on official business, including two visits to Italy in 1372-3 and 1378. The effect of Chaucer's interaction with Italian literature may be felt in the late 1370s and early 1380s poetry he created, such as The House of Fame, The Parliament of Fowls, and a version of The Knight's Tale, and it reaches its pinnacle in Troilus and Criseyde. Chaucer was a member of parliament for Kent in 1386, but he resigned his customs job the following year, while he was appointed Clerk of the King's Works in 1389 (resigning in 1391).

After finishing Troilus and translating Boethius' De consolatione philosophiae into English prose, Chaucer began his Legend of Good Ladies. He worked on his most ambitious effort, The Canterbury Tales, in the 1390s, but it remained unfinished when he died. Chaucer rented a residence in the Westminster Abbey grounds in 1399, but died in 1400 and was buried there.