Consolation on destiny and free will and juxtaposing its
theme of faithlessness against the providential ordering
of the universe through “Love, that of erthe and se hath
governaunce” (Tr 3.1744, Consolation 2.met.8).
The interpretations of Troilus over the centuries
form an index to the varying responses to Chaucer: to
his contemporaries it was most notable for its philoso-
phy, the 15th and 16th centuries took it as a model of
rhetorical eloquence; to the age of naturalism it was the
fi rst psychological novel; the search for values of the
1960s read it as a condemnation of inadequate secular
goals; our own text-centered age stresses Chaucer’s
refusal to commit himself to motive, meaning, or fact.
The God of the closing stanzas is the one fi xed point,
the unwritten author (Dante’s “uncircumscript, and at
maist circumscrive,” Tr 5.1865), but the protagonists,
as pagans, cannot have access to him, and the questions
they raise remain unanswered.
The reason, or excuse, that Chaucer gives for writ-
ing his Legend of Good Wo m e n, is that his portrayal of
Criseyde provoked objections; in its dream prologue
(extant in two versions) he describes how the God of
Love and Alcestis, model of the faithful wife, com-
manded him to do penance by telling the stories of good
women—in practice, wronged women. Nine stories fol-
low, mostly drawn from Ovid’s Heroides—of Cleopatra,
Thisbe, Dido, Hypsipyle and Medea, Lucretia, Ariadne,
Philomela, Phyllis, and Hypermnestra; the last breaks
off in mid-sentence. It has generally been assumed that
Chaucer found such writing to formula restrictive; his
only similar assemblage of single-subject stories forms
the Monk’s Tale, which is interrupted by the restless
pilgrim audience.
The Canterbury Tales (ca. 1387–1400) is a story
collection that achieves the maximum variety within a
unifying frame. The tales are told by a group of pilgrims
journeying to St. Thomas Becket’s shrine at Canterbury,
and both the pilgrims and their tales are selected to give
a cross-section of human and literary possibility. Each
pilgrim represents a different profession or social estate,
on the model of the satiric social analyses offered by
medieval estates literature. Chaucer’s ideal fi gures, the
Knight, Parson, and Plowman, mirror the basic tripar-
tite division of society into those who fi ght, pray, and
labor; the Clerk represents a fourth ideal, of those who
learn and teach. The other portraits are more equivo-
cal; Chaucer’s persistent mode is superlative praise,
but often aimed at the “wrong” attributes—the Friar’s
skill in begging, the Physician’s fi nancial success, the
Prioress’s social accomplishments. Women were often
treated as an estate to themselves, and the one laywoman
among the pilgrims, the Wife of Bath, is well capable
of counterbalancing some 27 men.
The Host of the Tabard Inn, who accompanies the
pilgrims as master of ceremonies, suggests that each
pilgrim should tell four tales, competing with each
other to tell “tales of best sentence and moost solaas”;
the winning teller is to be given a dinner on their return
to the Tabard. Whether or not Chaucer ever intended
to write such an extensive work is unknown; he wrote
only 24 tales within an incomplete framework. These
stories are linked to form seven to twelve distinct frag-
ments (the number is arguable); most editors opt for
ten. There is some variation in the manuscript order of
these fragments, but the most widely accepted order is
that of the Ellesmere manuscript of the Tales, copied
shortly after Chaucer’s death:
I. General Prologue; Knight’s Tale (a high-style
romance based on Boccaccio’s Teseida, of the
love of Palamon and Arcite for Emily); Miller’s
Tale and Reeve’s Tale (rival fabliaux in which
one Oxford student seduces one woman, and
two Cambridge students have sex with two); the
fragmentary Cook’s Tale (of a London reveler
condemned by a battery of proverbs).
II. Man of Law’s Tale (the trials and miraculous
preservation of Custance, taken from Nicholas
Trevet’s Cronicles but treated as a pious ro-
mance).
III. Wife of Bath’s Prologue (a defense of marriage
against the hostile clerical establishment, es-
pecially St. Jerome, in the guise of her autobi-
ography); her Tale (the folktale romance of the
knight who has to discover what women most
desire); Friar’s Tale (an elaboration of a preach-
ing exemplum, of a rapacious summoner carried
off by the Devil); Summoner’s Tale (a fabliau of
a scatological bequest to the friars).
IV. Clerk’s Tale (from Petrarch’s version of Boc-
caccio’s story of Patient Griselda); Merchant’s
Tale (a fabliau given high-style treatment, of the
blind old knight January, whose sight is restored
as his wife commits adultery in a pear tree).
V. Squire’s Tale (an unfi nished romance of magic
gifts and an abandoned falcon); Franklin’s
Tale (described as a Breton lay though actually
adapted from Boccaccio, of a suitor who fulfi lls
his lady’s supposedly impossible condition to
remove the rocks that threaten her husband).
VI. Physician’s Tale (Livy’s story of Virginia and
the unjust judge, taken from the Roman de la
Rose); Pardoner’s Prologue (on his methods of
extorting money) and Ta l e (presented as a sample
homily and including the widely disseminated
tale of three rioters who fi nd death in the form
of gold).
VII. Shipman’s Tale (a fabliau apparently once as-
signed to the Wife of Bath, of an adulterous
wife and a monk); Prioress’s Ta l e (a miracleCHAUCER, GEOFFREY