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Welcome to the Open Access Companion to the Canterbury Tales

The Open Access Companion to the Canterbury Tales (OACCT) is a volume of introductory chapters for first-time, university-level readers of Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales. The chapters have been created and edited by professional scholars of Chaucer, and all material is released open access and free of charge for classroom, scholarly, and personal use.

There are two kinds of material available here. Essay chapters explore each of the tales in relation to an engaging topic of broad general interest, while reference chapters provide key context and tools for understanding the Canterbury Tales and its time period. In the future, more material will be added to this project: teaching resources, reader contributions, and new essay chapters that consider tales from additional viewpoints and in relation to different topics.

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Contributors to the OACCT

Editors’ Acknowledgments

List of Chapters and Topics

Essay Chapters

The General Prologue: Cultural Crossings, Collaborations, and Conflicts

Sisterhood and Brotherhood in the Knight’s Tale

Suffering Bodies in the Knight’s Tale

Protest, Complaint, and Uprising in the Miller’s Tale

Wages, Work, Wealth, and Economic Inequality in the Reeve’s Tale

Jokes, Jests, Pranks, and Play in the Cook’s Tale

Race and Racism in the Man of Law’s Tale

Love and Marriage in the Wife of Bath’s Prologue

Rape and Justice in the Wife of Bath’s Tale

The Friar’s Tale: Animals and the Question of Human Agency

Gender and Sexual Identities in the Summoner’s Prologue and Tale

Authority (Familial, Political, Written) in the Clerk’s Tale

Sexuality, Obscenity, and Genre in the Merchant’s Tale: The Case of Fabliau

Environment, Landscape, and Nature in the Merchant’s Tale

Subsistence (Land and Food) in the Squire’s Tale

Emotion, Feeling, Intensity, Pleasure, and the Franklin’s Tale

Children, Violence, and Ethics in the Physician’s Tale

The Body and Its Politics in the Pardoner’s Tale

The Shipman’s Tale: Deciphering, Coding, and Confusion

The Prioress’s Tale: Relating to the Past, Imagining the Past, Using the Past

Imagining the World in Maps and Stories: Sir Thopas

The Tale of Melibee: Local Government, Power, Lordship, and Resources

The Monk’s Tale: Disability/Ability

The Nun’s Priest’s Tale: Entertainment versus Education

The Second Nun’s Tale: Language Politics and Translation

The Canon Yeoman’s Tale: Invention, Discovery, Problem-Solving, and Innovation

Feminism and Women’s Experience in the Manciple’s Tale

The Parson’s Tale: Religious Devotion and Spiritual Feeling

Religious Debate and Polemic in the Retraction

Two Kinds of Anxiety in the Canterbury Tales: A Study of the Host and Framing Narrative

Reference Chapters

Chaucer’s Middle English

Everyday Life in Late Medieval England

English Society c. 1340-1400: Reform and Resistance

Manuscripts of the Canterbury Tales

Chaucer’s Difficult Lives

What Does It Mean to Read a Medieval Text?

The OACCT was conceived, planned, and edited over 2015-2017 by Candace Barrington, Brantley L. Bryant, Richard H. Godden, Daniel T. Kline, and Myra Seaman.

The OACCT as a whole is licensed with a Creative Commons CC-BY-NC license. Individual chapters are licensed with a Creative Commons CC-BY-NC-ND license. 

Contact Information:

To contact the project, please email:

opencanterburytales AT gmail dot com

 Keep up with the OACCT on facebook

https://www.facebook.com/OACCT/

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.