The Canterbury Tales

“A delight … [Raffel’s translation] provides more opportunities to savor the counterpoint of Chaucer’s earthy humor against passages of piercingly beautiful lyric poetry.”—Kirkus Reviews“Masterly … This new translation beckons us to make our own pilgrimage back to the very wellsprings of literature in our language.” —Billy Collins“The Canterbury Tales has remained popular for seven centuries. It is the most approachable masterpiece of the medieval world, and Mr. Raffel’s translation makes the stories even more inviting.”—Wall Street Journal

Geoffrey Chaucer (c. 1342-1400), the son of a wealthy and high-connected vintner, received a classical education before becoming a page at the court of King Edward III. As a soldier, statesman, public official, and court poet, he remained in contact with the most important people of his time. Chaucer was sent on several diplomatic missions to Italy, where he read and was deeply influenced by the works of Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio. The Italian influence is evident in his masterpiece, Canterbury Tales, on which he worked intermittently for at least twenty years.

Donald R. Howard was the Olive H. Palmer Professor in the Humanities at Stanford University and the author of a number of noted books on medieval literature, including The Three Temptations- Medieval Man in Search of the World, The Idea of the World (1966), The Idea of The Canterbury Tales (1976), and Writers and Pilgrims- Medieval Pilgrimage Narratives and Their Posterity (1980).

Frank Grady is Professor of English at the University of Missouri-St. Louis, where he teaches medieval literature, literary theory, and film. He has published essays on both late medieval English literature and contemporary American popular culture, and he is currently editor of the annual of the New Chaucer Society, Studies in the Age of Chaucer.

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