Chaucer's best-known poem, The Canterbury Tales

is justly celebrated for its richness and variety, both literary - the Tales include fabliaux, romances, sermons, hagiographies, fantasies, satires, treatises, fables and exempla - and thematic, with its explorations of courtly love and scatology, piety and impiety, chivalry and pacifism, fidelity and adultery.

Introduction to the Companion

Students new to Chaucer will find in this Companion a lively introduction to the poem's diversity, depth, and wonder.

For Returning Readers

Readers returning to the Tales will appreciate the chapters' fresh engagement with the individual tales and their often complicated critical histories, inflected in recent decades by critical approaches attentive to issues of gender, sexuality, class, and language.