The Canterbury Tales

Chaucer left “The Cook’s Tale” unfinished. Write an ending for it based on the stories you’ve seen around it. What might become of Revelling [sic] Peterkin and his lowlife friends? What in the rest of The Canterbury Tales makes you think so?

Pick two adjacent tales in which the tellers seem to get on each other’s nerves (there are plenty to choose from!). How do these tales play off each other? What similar ideas are being addressed differently in each, and how do the poem’s themes evolve through different tellers?

Many of the stories in The Canterbury Tales are influenced by (or directly taken from) earlier writers, from Boccacio to Dante to Boethius to Petrarch. Find the source of one of Chaucer’s retold stories and compare the two. How do the echoes of the original writers contribute to the poem’s philosophy and its choral effect? How does Chaucer play on and with his sources?

A number of the Tales are retellings of stories that would have been familiar to Chaucer’s audience, from folklore to the lives of saints. (It’s akin to the way we all know the basic fairy tales, but there are countless versions of each.) How does the idea of retelling fit in with some of the poem’s bigger ideas about perspective and character?

Why might The Canterbury Tales be framed as a religious pilgrimage? What does the idea of pilgrimage bring to the stories?

How do Chaucer’s female storytellers compare to the women in the Tales? What can you glean about medieval ideas (and ideals) of womanhood from these stories, and from Chaucer’s portraits of his female characters? (Hint: The Wife of Bath might have a thing or two to say here…)

Chaucer left The Canterbury Tales incomplete, and scholars have different opinions about the order of the tales. How does the unfinished quality of The Canterbury Tales affect your reading of the poem? What might that very unfinished-ness contribute to the book’s atmosphere or meaning?

Why do you think Chaucer has the Host interrupt his own parodic “Tale of Sir Topaz” with such undisguised disgust? How do you read the relationship between Chaucer (as the real “man behind the curtain”) and the Host as the master of these revels? Why might Chaucer include himself as a character in his own book?