The Canterbury Tales

The Canterbury Tales is both one of the most accessible and also one of the most challenging works of medieval literature. It offers a rich and varied story collection, within the framework of a social and spiritual pilgrimage. The individual stories spread across a wide spectrum of tone, and of genre, woven by parallel and contrast, theme and narration, into an intricate and complex whole. The aim of the course is to explore a range of different individual tales, within the context of the work as a whole. So it will look at the different narrative kinds and modes used by the pilgrim storytellers: romances, parodies, farcical fabliaux, comic fables, and moral and religious tales. Among the themes that will be explored are the recurrent and insistent focus of the tales on gender relations, as well as on courtly love and romantic desire, and the strikingly different responses of men and women to the institution of marriage. But in addition to the tales; engagement with the social and cultural life of the time, they also draw attention to themselves as narratives, and in so doing both reflect upon and question the nature of storytelling itself. This literary self-consciousness; which is both playful and sophisticated is central to The Canterbury Tales, and will be one of the central concerns of the course. Moreover, in the collection overall, the social and cultural significance of fourteenth-century pilgrimage interacts with the literary notion of the quest, and the ultimate spiritual significance of pilgrimage itself. And throughout the duration of the course we will examine the different ways in which literary and religious models and idea overlap and intersect.   Credit level: 10 Year taken: Year 3 Undergraduate SCQF credits: 20