Canterbury Tales
2
8.0
- proper noun
- Literature
:
Los cuentos de Canterbury
- I did my thesis on The Canterbury Tales.
- Canterbury Tales by Chaucer
- Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales
- read the Canterbury Tales
This line about long spoons and devils originated from Trousers Canterbury Tales.
- This line about long spoons and devils originated from Trousers Canterbury Tales.
Examples
-
The Canterbury Tales are (deliberately) a grab-bag of types, from the purely non-fictional and didactic (The Parson's Tale) through various forms of fictional type.
Blog text (9) -
For example, in the "Retraction" that closes The Canterbury Tales, Chaucer suggests that the world we call Christendom is a system where souls circulate like commodities between heaven and hell.
Fiction book (1994) -
You mention that story from the Canterbury Tales.
Blog text (20) -
I did my thesis on the Canterbury Tales.
-
Further back in time, we find Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales.
Blog text (2) -
It reminds me of the Pardoner's story from the Canterbury Tales.
Blog text (20) -
She had chosen to analyze the 'Clerk's Tale' from The Canterbury Tales, which is the story of Patient Griselda.
Fiction book (1994) -
She pulled Volume I of the little red-and-white paperback set off her lower shelf and settled down on the bed with the General Prologue to The Canterbury Tales.
Fiction book (1991) -
Struggling through the Middle English of The Canterbury Tales, I arrived at the point in the story where the narrator of the poem—referred to by critics as "Chaucer the pilgrim"—becomes a character in it.
Academic text (2004) -
You will spend the next hour answering five essay questions on The Canterbury Tales.
Surface Forms
Morphology
The phrase is compositionally built from a place name + plural noun (Canterbury + tales), so a B1 learner who knows those words can infer it refers to stories associated with Canterbury. However, the full encyclopedic meaning—that it is Chaucer’s specific medieval collection and a cornerstone of English literature—is culturally specific and not derivable from the constituents alone, so the transparency is partial.
Etymology
Canterbury Tales gets its name from Geoffrey Chaucer's idea of a group of 'pilgrims' travelling to the town of Canterbury and telling stories along the way. Because the book is a set of different tales told on that journey, the title now stands for Chaucer's famous collection of stories.