Chaucer

  • The Read Along: Neda Semnani

    The Read Along: Neda Semnani

    I picked up The Odyssey because I wanted to read about wanders and refugees. A story about a man who takes a decade to get home and is on a quest for safety seemed like a good place to start.

  • The Detainees’ Tales

    A group of authors in Britain is using the format of Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales to raise awareness of the plight of modern-day refugees: They don’t feel safe enough to share their stories themselves … but they have a tremendous frustration at being voiceless. So we came…

  • In Favor of Reading the Literary Canon

    The canon is what it is, and anyone who wishes to understand how it continues to flow forward needs to learn to swim around in it. Responding to Yale students’ protesting the English department’s course requirements, Slate’s Katy Waldman argues…

  • A Room of Chaucer’s Own

    With the help of a wonderfully ingenious pattern of inferences — in particular an architectural drawing from 200 years later which happened to include a sketch of Aldgate’s north tower at its margins — Paul Strohm is able to reconstruct…

  • A Chaucer Christmas

    To the sound of silver trumpets, knokke thrice on the doore. When thy distant relaciouns emerge, present them publiquely wyth the gifte of a fullye-funded pilgrimage to the locacioun of their choyce. NPR shares some old school holiday wysdom from…

  • Ye Olde Fart Jokes

    Meanwhile in England, a troupe of 24 modern day pilgrims re-enacted Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, walking the 1637 pilgrimage route and raising money for the National Literacy Trust. The group stopped at the landmarks mentioned in the tale and each pilgrim…