In this course, I will guide you through a reading of The Canterbury Tales: the unfinished masterpiece of Geoffrey Chaucer, the most respected and widely read English poet of the middle ages. In the Canterbury Tales, Chaucer takes a journey with a group of pilgrims, each of whom tells a story on the road. This frame narrative allows Chaucer to tell a wide range of short stories in different voices and genres, and match each story to its teller.

The Canterbury Tales Course is divided into two parts, and you can take one or both, in either order. This course is Part One and is focused on the highlights of the Canterbury Tales. If you’ve read only a few of the Canterbury Tales, we’ll probably be reading those ones in this course. Highlights doesn’t mean these are only good tales though, or even necessarily the best ones. They’re just the tales that are likely to be the first ones most people think of.

This course includes:
The General Prologue
The Knight's Tale
The Miller's Tale
The Reeve's Tale
The Cook's Tale
The Wife of Bath's Tale
The Friar's Tale
The Summoner's Tale
The Squire's Tale
The Franklin's Tale
The Pardoner's Tale
The Prioress's Tale
The Tale of Sir Thopas
The Nun's Priest's Tale