{"product_id":"the-canterbury-tales-isbn-9780451416780","title":"The Canterbury Tales","description":"While Geoffrey Chaucer composed several magnificent works of poetry, his reputation as “the father of English literature” rests mainly on \u003ci\u003eThe Canterbury Tales\u003c\/i\u003e, a group of stories told by assorted pilgrims en route to the shrine of Thomas à Becket in Canterbury Cathedral. From the mirthful and bawdy to the profoundly moral, the tales, taken in their entirety, reflect not only the manners and mores of medieval England, but indeed, the full comic and tragic dimensions of the human condition. Considered the greatest collection of narrative poems in English literature, \u003ci\u003eThe Canterbury Tales\u003c\/i\u003e was composed in the Middle English of Chaucer’s day, possibly to be read aloud at the court of Richard II. However, their grandeur, humor, and relevance are timeless, as readers of this authoritative edition will discover.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eUNIQUE FEATURES OF THE SIGNET CLASSICS \u003c\/b\u003e\u003ci\u003e\u003cb\u003eCANTERBURY TALES \u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003eFull critical Introduction by editor Donald R. Howard * Normalized spelling system for easier reading and pronunciation * Extensive footnotes \u003cbr\u003e* Special section “On Pronouncing Chaucer” * Glossary of basic Middle English words With a Foreword by Frank Grady and a New Afterword  by Paul Strohm“A delight . . . [Raffel’s translation] provides more opportunities to savor the counterpoint of Chaucer’s earthy humor against passages of piercingly beautiful lyric poetry.”—\u003ci\u003eKirkus Reviews\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Masterly . . . This new translation beckons us to make our own pilgrimage back to the very wellsprings of literature in our language.” —Billy Collins\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“\u003cb\u003eThe Canterbury Tales\u003c\/b\u003e has remained popular for seven centuries. It is the most approachable masterpiece of the medieval world, and Mr. Raffel’s translation makes the stories even more inviting.”\u003ci\u003e—Wall Street Journal\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003eThe son of a wealthy and high-connected vintner, \u003cb\u003eGeoffrey Chaucer\u003c\/b\u003e (c. 1342–1400) received a classical education prior to becoming a page at the court of King Edward III. As soldier, statesman, public official, and court poet, he remained in contact with the most important people of his time. Chaucer was sent on several diplomatic missions to Italy, where he read and was deeply influenced by the works of Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio. The Italian influence is evident in his masterpiece, \u003ci\u003eCanterbury Tales\u003c\/i\u003e, on which he worked intermittently for at least twenty years. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eDonald R. Howard\u003c\/b\u003e was the Olive H. Palmer Professor in the Humanities at Stanford University and the author of a number of noted books on medieval literature, including \u003ci\u003eThe Three Temptations: Medieval Man in Search of the World\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eThe Idea of the World \u003c\/i\u003e(1966), \u003ci\u003eThe Idea of The Canterbury Tales \u003c\/i\u003e(1976), and \u003ci\u003eWriters and Pilgrims: Medieval Pilgrimage Narratives and Their Posterity \u003c\/i\u003e(1980).  \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eFrank Grady\u003c\/b\u003e is Professor of English at the University of Missouri–St. Louis, where he teaches medieval literature, literary theory, and film. He has published essays on both late medieval English literature and contemporary American popular culture, and he is currently editor of the annual of the New Chaucer Society\u003ci\u003e, Studies in the Age of Chaucer.  \u003c\/i\u003eThe Knight’s Tale\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    1\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e      Introduction\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    1  The Knight’s Tale, which mostly takes place in   ancient Athens, is the conflicted love story of two royal Theban cousins  who love the same woman. Because “The Knight’s Tale” is by far the longest  and most complex of the Canterbury Tales presented in this volume, a quick  summary of the action of the four parts of the tale may help readers  encountering it for the first time:\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003ePart I. On his way back to Athens with his bride, Hypolita, and his  sister-in-law, Emily, Duke Theseus responds to the pleas of some grieving  widows by defeating Creon, the tyrant of Thebes. Among the bodies of the  defeated army, he finds near death the royal cousins Palamon and Arcite.  Rather than kill them, Theseus takes them back to Athens and places them  in prison. From their barred prison window, the two young men see the  lovely Emily and both fall in love with her. Arcite after a time is  released but banished from Athens on pain of death, while Palamon remains  in prison. The two are envious of each other’s condition.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Part II. Arcite disguises himself as a common laborer and comes back to  Athens, where he gets a job working in Emily’s household. Meanwhile,  Palamon escapes from prison, and the rival cousins chance to meet in a  grove near Athens. While Palamon and Arcite are fighting a bloody duel,  Theseus, Hypolita, and Emily, out hunting, by chance come upon them in a  grove. At first angry, Theseus soon relents, sets both of his enemies  free, and invites them to return in a year, each with a hundred knights,  to take part in a glorious tournament, with Emily’s hand going to the  winner.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Part III. Theseus builds a splendid amphitheater in preparation for the  tournament and places on its west, east, and north borders elaborately  decorated temples to Mars, Venus, and Diana. When the two troops of  warriors come back for the tournament, the three principals each pray to  one of the planetary deities. Palamon prays to Venus, not for victory but  for the hand of Emily. Emily prays to Diana to be spared marriage to  either Palamon or Arcite, praying instead to remain a maiden always.  Arcite prays to Mars for victory in the tournament.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Part IV. Just before the tournament begins Theseus declares that he wants  no lives to be lost and restricts the kinds of weapons that may be used.  He sets out the rules of the game, the primary one being that the winning  side will be the one that takes the loser to a stake at the end of the  field. After vigorous fighting, Arcite’s men drag the wounded Palamon to  the stake. No sooner is Arcite declared the winner than Saturn commands  Pluto, god of the underworld, to send a diabolical fury to frighten  Arcite’s horse. Arcite is thrown and crushed by his own saddle bow. After  an elaborate funeral and the passage of some years, Theseus tells Palamon  and Emily to marry, and they happily do so.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Arching over the story of the warriors and lovers down on the earth below  is a heavenly conflict among the gods or, more precisely, among the  planetary or astrological influences that were thought to control the  affairs of men. Indeed, a key feature of “The Knight’s Tale” is the  prayers of the three principal characters to these influences. Closely  tied up with the question of whether Palamon or Arcite will get the young  woman they both love is the question of how the powerful Saturn will  settle the conflicting demands on him of Mars, Venus, and Diana.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Chaucer’s main source for “The Knight’s Tale” is Giovanni Boccaccio’s  several-hundred-page-long Teseida. Readers who are upset at having to read  Chaucer’s long and leisurely story of Palamon, Arcite, and Emily should  thank Chaucer for streamlining a story that is less than a quarter the  length of Boccaccio’s Italian story of Palemone, Arcita, and Emilia.  Chaucer reduced the story in lots of ways, particularly by staying focused  on the love story. He cut out, for example, Boccaccio’s long opening  description of Theseus’s journey to the land of the Amazons, his defeat of  them, and his acquiring as his bride the Amazonian queen Hypolita. But  Chaucer did more than reduce the Teseida, which focuses on Arcite as the  main character, who in Boccaccio is almost a tragic figure who makes the  mistake of praying to the wrong deity. For Chaucer, Palamon is raised to  equal importance, if not more importance, than his rival. And Chaucer  transforms the vain and coquettish Emilia of his source into a more  innocent object of the love of rival cousins.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    One of Chaucer’s most important changes was to give the story a  philosophical overlay by introducing into it the ideas of the ancient  philosopher Boethius. One of Boethius’s key ideas was that there is a  great God who designs a far better plan for human beings than they could  possibly design for themselves. That design sometimes involves what looks  like adversity, but the adversity is always (for Boethius) part of a  design that leads to happiness. We should then, according to Boethius, not  resist or fight against the troubles that come our way, but cheerfully  accept them, trusting that in the end things will work out for the best.  The ending of “The Knight’s Tale,” then, reflects this reassuring  philosophy by showing that although the three principal characters all  seem at first not to get what they want most, in the end all of them do  get what they want, or perhaps something even better.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    For this and the other tales in this volume, readers should reread the  portrait of the teller given by Chaucer in the General Prologue. The  portrait of the Knight (lines 43–78) shows him to be the idealized  Christian soldier who fought with valor and honor at most of the important  late-fourteenth-century battles against heathens. We know less of his  marital than of his martial life, but he does have a son who is with him  on this pilgrimage. The Knight seems, all in all, an ideal teller for the  long tale of war, romance, honor, and philosophy that Chaucer assigns to  him.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Notes\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Part I\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Femenye (line 8). A race of warlike women, led by Hypolita, who decided  that they could live and protect themselves without the help of men. They  are sometimes called Amazons, their land Scithia.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Saturne, Juno (470–71). Two forces that Palamon blames for the setbacks  that Thebes has suffered. Saturn is the powerful planet. Juno is the  jealous wife of Jupiter, who had made love to two Theban women.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Part II\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Hereos (516). Eros, a sickness associated with the intense emotion of  falling in love.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    manye (516). A kind of melancholy madness or mania brought on by the  frustration of his love for an inaccessible woman.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Argus (532). In classical mythology, the jealous Juno had set the  hundred-eyed Argus as guard to Io, who was a lover of her husband,  Jupiter. Argus was killed by Mercury (see line 527), who first sang all of  Argus’s hundred eyes to sleep.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Cadme and Amphioun (688). Cadmus and Amphion are the legendary founders of  the city of Thebes, home to Palamon and Arcite.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    regne of Trace (780). The reference in this and the next lines is to the  Thracian kingdom in which a hunter prepares himself at a mountain pass to  meet a charging lion or bear.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Part III\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Citheroun (1078). Venus’s supposed mountainous island of Cytherea, though  Chaucer may have confused the name with the name of a different location.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Ydelnesse, Salamon, Hercules, Medea, Circes, Turnus, Cresus (1082–88).  Various literary, historical, and classical allusions, most of them  demonstrating the follies and miseries associated with the snares of love.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    qualm (1156). Probably a reference to the “pestilence” or bubonic plague  that killed millions in Europe during Chaucer’s lifetime. See also line  1611 below, where Saturn claims to have the power to send the plague. The  reference to the bubonic plague here is anachronistic, since “The Knight’s  Tale” is set in the classical pre-Christian era.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Julius, Nero, Antonius (1173–74). Three famous rulers slaughtered in time  of war—exemplary of the mayhem and death caused by mighty Mars. The last  is Marcus Aurelius Antoninus Caracalla, a Roman emperor murdered in AD 217.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Puella, Rubeus (1187). Two astrological references to Mars as cast by a  complicated process called geomancy, a pseudoscience involving dots and  lines.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Calistopee, Dane, Attheon, Atthalante, Meleagre (1198–  1213). Various classical and legendary allusions to hunters or the hunted  whose unfortunate tales are depicted on the walls of the temple of Diana,  goddess of the hunt.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    griffon (1275). A griffin was in Greek mythology a fearsome beast with the  head and wings of an eagle on the body of a lion.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    in hir houre (1359). Palamon picks his hour of prayer carefully. The  various planets were supposed to have special powers on certain hours of  the day, hours in which it was particularly propitious to make prayers for  their astrological influence. Venus would have had special strength on the  twenty-third hour of Sunday night (see line 1351), when it was not yet two  hours before dawn on Monday morning (line 1352).\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    the thridde houre inequal (1413). The medieval astrological day was  divided into twenty-four “inequal” or planetary hours. In this system the  time between dawn and dusk was divided equally into twelve hours, the time  between dusk and the following dawn into twelve more. Except at the two  equinoxes, when the daylight hours would have been exactly equal in length  to the nighttime hours (that is, sixty minutes), the daylight hours would  have been longer or shorter than the hours of darkness, depending on the  time of the year—thus the inequality. Emily prays to Diana on the third  inequal hour after Palamon prayed to Venus. That would have been the first  hour of Monday (“moon day”), or the dawn hour, the hour at which Diana’s  power would have been the greatest. Like Palamon, Emily picks her prayer  time very carefully.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Stace of Thebes (1436). The Thebaid of Statius, though Chaucer’s more  direct source was actually Boccaccio’s Teseida, which he does not mention  by name here or elsewhere. Chaucer was often eager to claim an ancient  source, not a contemporary one.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Attheon (1445). While hunting, Acteon accidentally saw Diana while she was  bathing. In her anger she changed him into a stag, which Acteon’s hunting  dogs then killed, not realizing that they were killing their master. See  lines 1207–10 above, where Acteon’s unhappy story is artistically  summarized on the walls of Diana’s temple.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    thre formes (1455). As suggested in lines 1439–42 above, the goddess was  imagined to have appeared in various forms. The three referred to here are  probably Luna, the moon (in the heavens), the chaste Diana, the huntress  (on earth), and Proserpina, the reluctant wife of Pluto (in the  underworld).\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    the nexte houre of Mars (1509). Mars’s next hour, the hour that Arcite  would have selected for his prayer to Mars, would have been the fourth  hour of that Monday.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Part IV\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    al that Monday (1628). Monday is given over to partying and celebrations  so that the tournament itself takes place the next day, on a Tuesday, or  Mars’s day (“Mardi” in French). Since Tuesday is the day when the  influence of Mars is strongest, it would not have surprised a medieval  audience that Arcite, who had prayed to Mars, wins the tournament.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Galgopheye (1768). Probably a valley in another part of Greece, perhaps  Gargaphia.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Belmarye (1772). Probably Benmarin in Morocco but, like the previous name,  perhaps just meant to be an exotic place where wild animals were rampant  and dangerous.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    furie infernal (1826). A fury was an avenging spirit usually confined to  the underworld but released from time to time to influence the affairs of  men, sometimes to see that justice was done.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    vertu expulsif (1891). This “virtue” involved the ability to expel certain  harmful poisons from the body. This complex account of the mechanics of  Arcite’s dying, the technical details of which are not important here,  shows Chaucer’s awareness of the medical terminology of his day.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Firste Moevere (2129). This First Mover who creates the links in the great  “chain of love,” though later in the passage identified as Jupiter, may  perhaps be read as an anachronistic stand-in for the Judeo-Christian  godhead, the all-  loving deity who stands above and beyond the planetary gods and goddesses  that seem to control the fates of men. This prime mover determines the  number of years indi-  vidual men and women get to live on earth and arranges things better for  them than they could arrange them for themselves.","brand":"Signet","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46303428378853,"sku":"NP9780451416780","price":6.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9780451416780.jpg?v=1767738593","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/es\/products\/the-canterbury-tales-isbn-9780451416780","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}