Canterbury Tales, The

noun

1. an uncompleted sequence of tales by Chaucer, written for the most part after 1387.

The Canterbury Tales

1. A work written by Geoffrey Chaucer in the late fourteenth century about a group of pilgrims, of many different occupations and personalities, who meet at an inn near London as they are setting out for Canterbury, England. Their host proposes a storytelling contest to make the journey more interesting.

The tales, which are almost all in rhyme, have many different styles, reflecting the great diversity of the pilgrims; some are notoriously bawdy. The language of The Canterbury Tales is Middle English.

Some of the more famous stories are “The Knight's Tale,” “The Miller's Tale,” and “The Wife of Bath's Tale.”

Example Sentences

From Chaucer’s supercilious Madame Eglantine in “The Canterbury Tales,” with her spoiled lap dogs and secular French airs, to Ryan Murphy’s ruthless Sister Jude in 2012’s “American Horror Story: Asylum,” a woman who wears a red negligee under her habit and is not above indulging in some communion wine, fictional portrayals of nuns have long captured and confounded the imagination.

From New York Times

That started with what he saw as dirty books, which was an extremely broad category that included, you know, pornographic stuff like The Canterbury Tales, which some of you may have read in high school English.

From Slate

It seemed enough, perhaps, to make readers of Geoffrey Chaucer and his description of showery April in the Canterbury Tales, produce their own shower of tears.

From Washington Post

After the Civil War, the anti-vice crusader Anthony Comstock won support for laws restricting material that he considered obscene - from anatomy textbooks to “The Canterbury Tales.”

From Washington Times

This April, in New York, when the rains have come and the winds have calmed and the cherry trees and hyacinths have hustled into bloom, theatergoers might find themselves making a pilgrimage to the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Harvey Theater, for the New York premiere of “The Wife of Willesden,” the novelist Zadie Smith’s adaptation of a lusty wedge of Geoffrey Chaucer’s “The Canterbury Tales.”

From New York Times