The Canterbury Tales
A group of pilgrims meet at an inn and agree to tell stories on the road to Canterbury. The frame lets Chaucer move between a knight, a miller, a wife from Bath, a pardoner and a nun, and the voices are so distinct that the poem still reads as a set of arguments rather than a single lesson.
The General Prologue is the place to start: a series of portraits that are funny, exact and never entirely kind. The language is Middle English, so most readers use a facing-page translation at first. Read the Miller's Tale and the Wife of Bath's prologue if you want the range in two sittings.
Public-domain status
First published in 1400. In the United States, works published before 1930 are in the public domain. In the European Union the general term is the life of the author plus 70 years; Geoffrey Chaucer died in 1400, so this work has been free to republish there since 1471.
Read the text free
- Project Gutenberg, ebook no. 2383 — plain text, EPUB and Kindle, checked by us
- Internet Archive — scanned editions and free audiobooks
- Open Library — edition history and borrowable copies
Keep reading
- Leaves of Grass — Walt Whitman, 1855
- Troilus and Criseyde — Geoffrey Chaucer, 1385
- Childe Harold's Pilgrimage — Lord Byron, 1812
- Gitanjali — Rabindranath Tagore, 1912
- Canterbury — the city behind the books
- Reading lists — 19 ways through the collection
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