The Canterbury Tales

By God, if women had written stories,
As clerks had within here oratories,
They would have written of men more wickedness
Than all the mark of Adam may redress.

The 14th century work that everyone remembers Geoffrey Chaucer for¹ - the Tales is a framed anthology story written in Middle English². A group of pilgrims are traveling together to Canterbury, and pass the time along the way telling each other tales - letting us get a collection of stories in different genres, while the form also reflects the speaker to a degree.

Footnotes

1. Though he has a truly impressive set of other works. ↩

2. One of the first works solidifying vernacular English as a core part of literature, rather than people just writing in Latin, etc.

   This era was broadly a time the vernacular languages of Europe started gaining legitimacy as “real” (but also mainstream) art.

   It also seems specifically like these anthology stories seem to have an oversized influence here, at least compared to our current uses of the genre.

   The earlier Decameron in Florentine Italian and the later Heptaméron in French play similar roles. I don’t know if that’s a meaningful trend, or just coincidences that I’m chasing. I just found the relationships interesting. ↩