It’s no accident that authors from William Shakespeare to Zadie Smith have taken inspiration from the Canterbury Tales. Chaucer’s collection of tragedies, romances, satires, fantasies, and farces engages with problems that remain urgent today vexed dynamics of gender and power, freedom, servitude, antisemitism, Islamophobia, grief, trauma, piety and hypocrisy. Our task in this class will be to read this multiform masterpiece from beginning to end, learning its original Middle English as we go. The goal: to understand the Tales both in their late-medieval context and as living literature, still capable of teaching today’s writers a few tricks.
