I don’t think it was tacked on - I think it is an important part of the Canterbury Tales, but unlike some critics I don’t think it is MORE important than the others. Some critics - particularly at a slightly earlier date - felt that the Parson’s Tale had a seriousness that gave it authority. I think it reflects the Parson’s view of the world - and that that view is partial (in both senses) - just like the other pilgrims’ perspectives. Indeed, Chaucer uses the first person more than the sources of the tale do, as if to emphasise that it is a personal view of the world.

The earliest copies date from around the time of Chaucer’s death (early fifteenth century - he died in 1400). The first time the Tales is mentioned in a will, the testator is a merchant and inn/brothel owner! We have other evidence of readership from, e.g., the Tales being referenced by others, and in the first decades of the fifteenth century poets such as Hoccleve and Lydgate talk about Chaucer and emphasise the idea of him as an authoritative figure. The Tales are popular throughout the 15th C, but readership expands hugely after Caxton prints the Tales - one of the earliest books that he prints. And there are many many editions thereafter.

You hit the nail on the head with your focus on the mix of high and low - Chaucer is the absolute master of juxtaposition, of putting next to each other clashing styles, attitudes to life, kinds of people, and seeing what happens. His audiences seem to have been thrilled by what he did - perhaps because people can take what they want to out of the Canterbury Tales. In the fifteenth century, after Chaucer’s death, the more ‘serious’ tales (Melibee, Second Nun, Clerk) were the most popular, and most commonly copied. In the 20th century, people liked the Miller, Merchant, and Wife of Bath. So sometimes people ignore the mixing that is so integral to the text! I don’t think Chaucer was trying precisely to talk about the real world - he is often writing about literature itself, about genre, about the standards of a fabliaux or romance world. At the same time, he can delineate a scene with an extraordinary immediacy - the way he can describe a room or a conversation is sometimes novelistic. That kind of social realism is different, though, from a journalistic kind of realism - Chaucer never wants to talk directly about contemporary events.

The Tabard group is an exaggerated group, but based on a certain amount of reality. Inns were places of social mixing and so, to a certain extent, were pilgrimages, where relative strangers might get to know each other. (Margery Kempe, in the early fifteenth-century, writes about her own experiences being ostracised by groups of pilgrims because of, e.g. her excessive religiosity and her eating habits). But a knight would be very unlikely actually to be riding along and exchanging stories with a ploughman, for instance - there is definitely poetic licence here.

I’d agree that Chaucer is not trying to paint a realistic picture of Genghis Khan’s court. He makes it very like a European court, even mentioning Gawain, Arthurian narrative etc. At the same time, it is ‘exotic’ with the magical gifts. But it is also true that Genghis Khan wasn’t the kind of ‘horror’ figure that he is today, so it wasn’t strange for Chaucer - via the admittedly idealistic Squire - to describe the court in chivalric terms.

Interesting! You are right that Chaucer saw contemporary plays - even refers to them in the Miller’s Tale. I think there are definite connections between the visual aspect of the plays (and royal entry processions etc) and the more slapstick comedy elements of the ‘fabliaux’ tales. But there are also long traditions in other fabliaux and folk tales of similar bawdy motifs - the idea of the ‘misdirected kiss’ in the Miller’s Tale (when Absolon kisses the, er, nether hole rather than the face) isn’t made up by Chaucer, but appears in other sources too.

Well, the Merchant's message is bleak and misogynist. I don't think that's the message of the Tale though. If you look at the tale in context - Fragment IV, two tales set in Lombardy, home of tyranny - I think this is a tale 'about' oppression.

Interesting! I’m definitely not an expert on Dafydd ap Gwilym. But I’d say that their influences are not all that similar. I think they shared a certain amount of common heritage in the great Latin and French traditions, though the forms in which Dafydd ap Gwilym knew these texts is not clear. But Chaucer was engaging with many texts written a bit too late for Dafydd to know (some Machaut texts for instance), and most importantly with many many texts written in Italian (esp by Boccaccio), which no one else in these islands seems to have known in the 14th c.

In one of his poems, the House of Fame (my favourite of all poems), the narrator, ‘Geffrey’ is described as going home after a day of accounting to his rooms and sitting, dazed, at another book. His guide figure tells him he should go to the doorway and listen to his neighbours’ stories. I think we can imagine him going home to his rooms above Aldgate after his day job, and writing, perhaps on a wax tablet. He may have sometimes dictated to a scribe, or taken his rough drafts to his scribe to write up neatly. Later, for much of the 1390s, he did not have so much of a regular day job, and probably devoted himself to his writing full-time, at least some of the time. And that is when most of the Tales were written - though when he was in London he wrote a huge amount of other texts. And his extensive use of sources means that he must have had many books nearby to consult.

It is odd isn't it - his main source! He does mention other recent Italian poets such as Dante and Petrarch too. Authors often don't name sources at this time (and that isn't seen as plagiarism!), and it is also the case that Boccaccio would not have been a big name to his audience. He also, in Troilus and Criseyde, makes a joke by pretending he has a Latin source, Lollius, on whom he slavishly relies, while never mentioning Boccaccio, the main source. I think it is all part of his playing with ideas of authority - I don't think he is hiding his source or anything like that. There are a lot of in--jokes that his coterie readers would get and that we might miss.

In answer to your first question - there isn't firm evidence about performance. He probably did read them out, though, to the kind of friends that I mention in the previous answer, but also perhaps to bigger groups. There are illustrations of him performing in a court setting - but these are later (after his death) and aren't reliable reflections of how he actually shared his work.

He mainly thought he was writing for his literary friends, and friends of friends - courtiers, merchants, scribes, poet-lawyers, bureaucrats…but he did also think about posterity. And as time went on, I think he expanded his sense of audience. The sequence is tricky - we know that each fragment fits together (Knight is followed by Miller is followed by Reeve is followed by Cook) but different scribes and editors have had different ideas about how the different fragments fit together. Chaucer probably did not have a fixed sense of this. But within each fragment, the sequencing can be really telling - the story of Palamon and Arcite on its own is quite different from the Knight’s Tale in the Tales context, parodied and exposed immediately by the Miller. And the idea that no perspective on its own is enough, that you should read multiple versions and viewpoints, think about tales through the lens of other tales, is absolutely fundamental to Chaucer’s idea of how literature functions.

So glad to get a question about the prose! The sources of these texts are in prose. Of course Chaucer would be perfectly capable of turning prose into verse (and did elsewhere). But the Parson specifically tells us that he looks down on more literary forms, and a plainer prose seems to suit him. With Melibee, Chaucer is playing with us: his own persona can’t write poetry. He tells two stories, one in a doggerel form that the Host says ‘is not worth a turd’ and one in prose. The joke is that Chaucer himself has written all the extraordinary poetry in the mouths of the other characters.

Most of the tales do indeed have known sources - sometimes they are a mix, taking bits of many different sources. The idea of ‘originality’ wasn’t privileged in the Middle Ages in the way that it is today. Medieval writers understood that translation, for instance, can be extremely creative. So when Chaucer takes the plot of a tale from somewhere else, he makes it his own, and his use of language tends to make it a more profound and clever version.

I’ve answered a bit on the Wife of Bath in a couple of answers below (answers to dwyer jones and timsde). So as not to repeat myself I’ll make a different point: Chaucer treats the Wife of Bath differently to any of his other pilgrims. She is referenced by other pilgrims, even by characters in other tales as if she is an authority, mixing up the layers of fiction. He also refers to her in a short poem (the Envoy to Bukton). So she gains a life outside her own text in a manner unique among the Canterbury pilgrims. He suggests that we need women to be authority figures, who get referred to by others. A brilliant critic, Carolyn Dinshaw, calls her Chaucer’s favourite character, and I agree. That’s not to say that I would precisely call him pro-feminist, as the term has quite specific connotations now - but I do think that the tale of rape and the education of the rapist is an extraordinary meditation on what it might be like to have your autonomy removed by an attacker - and this tale makes the old, ugly woman (not the handsome young knight) the ethical centre of the story.

I was writing this book for quite a while before June 2016!!

I need hours to answer this - so much to say. You are absolutely right in your reading of the complexities. Devil’s advocate: many of the aspects of the Wife of Bath that some of us today like / see as feminist (she stands up to men, she argues with misogynist clerics, she enjoys her own sexuality) were antifeminist stereotypes in the Middle Ages i.e. examples of why women need to be kept down and certainly not allowed to read books. She is based on some dreadful stereotypes from other texts - not only Jerome’s rant against women and sex but also more recent figures such as La Vielle from the Romance of the Rose. On the other hand - Chaucer makes her far more than the sum of her parts, and gives her life and energy. He also mixes up his sources - the bit that you mention (who peyntede the leon?) comes from a fable, and emphasises the idea that men have written all the stories, that the canon is authored by men so of course it says terrible things about women. She is herself trapped within that - and makes a plea for women to be allowed to tell their own stories, which resonates in any century…

Not silly at all! He probably wrote with a stylus on a wax tablet, or perhaps with pen and ink on parchment, and then took his draft to a scribe to be written up. Paper was coming into England in the later fourteenth century (from Italy) but parchment was more common. Not hard to come by in London; not cheap but ok for someone of Chaucer’s level. And wax tablets could be re-used. He also writes about scraping away at scribal mistakes. We don’t know the extent of his drafts, but he certainly made changes - e.g. the Shipman’s tale was originally the Wife of Bath’s. And he was writing mainly for people of his kind of level - minor courtiers, chamber-knights, merchants, fellow writers - though there are also some outliers both higher and lower in status.

It is my pleasure! Re: Pasolini - I’m not a big fan. I think Pasolini emphasises one specific aspect of Chaucer - the idea of bawdy Chaucer, so he focuses on fabliaux tales, sex, bodies - and adds in extra graphic scenes, so that he skews the impression of what the tales are like. While Chaucer does of course write about the body, he writes about a whole range of things, and it is the mix of different kinds of tales that is at the heart of Chaucer’s art. Pasolini doesn’t get that across, in my view!

Great and important question. I would say you have to approach all the Canterbury Tales as being voiced by someone - not as reflecting an authoritative viewpoint. My own view is that Chaucer goes out of his way to emphasise the Prioress’s hypocrisy (in her begging for mercy at the end of a tale that has utterly refused mercy and has espoused revenge), and to stress that it is not him speaking - there’s a fascinating moment when he inserts a ‘quod she’ in a way very unusual in the Tales. Many aspects of the Prioress and her tale expose her brand of sentimental religion as not only inadequate but brutal.

In answer to your second question, both. He draws on a huge amount of existing traditions and texts. But he was also an extraordinary pioneer: no one had written texts in the style of the courtly French dit amoureux in English before; he developed the ten-syllable poetic line; he showed that English could be used for an extraordinary range of genres. A good example of the balance between tradition and new ground is that, while others such as Boccaccio had written ‘tale collections’ (i.e. it wasn’t Chaucer’s idea), Chaucer invented the idea of having people of all different social classes telling the tales.

Yes, Chaucer mainly travelled around Europe to negotiate trade treaties and marriage alliances - talking rather than fighting was his forte (although he did fight as a teenager in 1359 and was taken prisoner by the French and ransomed by Edward III). England was a relative backwater - not just on the edge of Europe, but on the edge of global trade networks. It wasn’t isolated though, but very much connected precisely through those trade networks that brought, for instance, the spices of Indonesia to London. And there was an international court culture, such that the same, mainly French and Latin texts, were read in the great households of many European countries. At this time, England still ruled parts of France, and royal families intermarried a lot, and every educated person was multilingual.

Great question. Chaucer is the master of the un-ending! Quite a few of his other poems too are unfinished, and I think he found the idea of ending (with the connotations of completion and fixity) really difficult. The programme that Harry Bailly sets out - four tales each - is extremely ambitious. I don’t think Chaucer ever intended to do that. In terms of ordering the text- the order that we can be sure of is that, in the Miller’s Prologue, he foregrounds the principle of disorder, of opposing the idea of telling tales according to hierarchy. After that, the Tales take on their own energy, and I do think that that unruliness and open-ended-ness is crucial to the aesthetics and meanings of the text.