The Idea of the Canterbury Tales

In The Idea of the Canterbury Tales, Donald R. Howard reimagines Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales not as an unfinished fragment of medieval literature but as a deliberately conceived whole, “unfinished yet complete.” Howard argues that Chaucer’s masterwork is best understood as an anatomy of human experience—an imaginative architecture that interweaves irony, morality, memory, and form. Drawing on intellectual history, medieval aesthetics, and close readings of the tales and their framin...