Canterbury Tales (General Prologue) by Geoffrey Chaucer

About this episode

This episode explores Geoffrey Chaucer's 'The Canterbury Tales' and its significance in literature, focusing on the General Prologue and the storytelling competition concept.

Talent shows like The X Factor, Got Talent and their many spin offs began in the 1380s, not the 1980s! They were invented by Geoffrey Chaucer, who wrote his masterpiece The Canterbury Tales at the end of a successful and glamorous diplomatic career in medieval Europe. This is the literary pilgrimage to top all literary pilgrimages, the imagined story of a group of medieval odds and sods, who meet up to in a London pub and walk to Canterbury Cathedral. The owner of the pub, a local MP named Harry Bailey (a real guy), decides that they’ll have a storytelling competition to pass the time while they travel. The winner will get dinner at, you guessed it, Harry's pub. No one had ever written anything remotely like this before, and Chaucer’s version of pub-mike night became a literary sensation. The Canterbury Tales is one of the most famous works of English Literature ever, and a perennial favorite on "Intro to English Lit" syllabuses. It's written in Middle English, which isn't an easy read now, but has a lot of fascinating local color that has disappeared from modern English. In the first installment of our “Long(ish) Poems” series, Sophie and Jonty explain why the Canterbury Tales…

People in this episode

Hosts: Sophie Gee, Jonty Claypole

Topics covered

• Geoffrey Chaucer
• Canterbury Tales
• medieval literature
• storytelling
• Middle English
• literary pilgrimage

Keywords

• Canterbury Tales
• Geoffrey Chaucer
• medieval literature
• storytelling competition
• Middle English
• literary pilgrimage
• General Prologue

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Harvard

Books & works: The Canterbury Tales

Places: Canterbury Cathedral

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