The Canterbury Tales Lesson Plan

Chaucer has been dubbed "the Father of English Poetry" by his contemporaries, later authors and modern critics. The Canterbury Tales are his most ambitious and popular work. They are comprised of dozens of tales linked by a "frame narrative" of pilgrims from all walks of medieval life on a funny kind of springtime pilgrimage, telling stories to each other to pass the time. The stories themselves are rich and varied, covering most medieval genres and drawing from classical, Biblical, philosophical, oral and other sources. But the whole of the Tales is more than just a collection of good stories: the ordering of the tales and the interactions between the pilgrims put the tales into...