The Cambridge Companion to The Canterbury Tales

Chaucer''s best-known poem The Canterbury Tales is justly celebrated for its richness and variety both literary - the Tales include fabliaux romances sermons hagiographies fantasies satires treatises fables and exempla - and thematic with its explorations of courtly love and scatology piety and impiety chivalry and pacifism fidelity and adultery. Students new to Chaucer will find in this Companion a lively introduction to the poem''s diversity depth and wonder. Readers returning to the Tales will appreciate the chapters'' fresh engagement with the individual tales and their often complicated critical histories inflected in recent decades by critical approaches attentive to issues of gender sexuality class and language.