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 framing devices, Howard situates the Tales within Chaucer’s cultural milieu while insisting on its originality and lasting vitality. By treating the poem’s idea as something shared across time rather than locked in the author’s intentions, Howard offers a compelling account of its artistry and coherence. Balancing historical scholarship with a humanist critical method, Howard traces how Chaucer’s comedy of pilgrims on the road to Canterbury became a book about the world itself. He explores how its digressions, multiple voices, and unfinished design participate in the very texture of life, and why readers across centuries continue to find in it both laughter and profound moral inquiry. The Idea of the Canterbury Tales is both a bold reinterpretation of Chaucer’s achievement and a meditation on what it means to read medieval literature in the modern age, reminding us that Chaucer wrote for his contemporaries and for us, crafting a vision of literature as a shared act of memory and imagination. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1976.