little prospect for survival. The Wife's tale is bawdy but in this light, understandable.

The Pardoner's Tale: Serves as a warning about trust. Though the Pardoner preaches that "the root of evil is greed" he uses the money handed to him in good faith to line his own pockets. It is also instructive about being wary of false gods, as the "preacher" (pardoner) promises that his relics will provide miraculous results. The objects are, of course, powerless.

In these and all of the other tales, Chaucer has a double purpose: to delight, but also to inform.

There are 24 tales in total in Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales, which cover a wide variety of themes and styles. All of the tales offer fascinating insight into life in medieval England. The following is a list and brief summary of each of the tales:

The Knight’s Tale is a chivalric romance with ancient Greek inspiration, in which two knights both fall in love with the same princess. Their competing love ruins their friendship, and eventually a tournament is held to see who will win the princess’s hand.

The Miller’s Tale is a much more bawdy story in which a carpenter’s wife and her lovers trick the carpenter into thinking that a biblical flood is imminent. While he is distracted preparing for the flood, the wife and her lovers are free to engage in their affair.

The Reeve’s Tale is a very dark tale in which two Cambridge scholars plot to get revenge on a miller who has been overcharging them for corn. The students plot to rape the miller’s wife as a way of exacting vengeance upon him, leaving the miller and his family humiliated.

The Cook’s Tale follows in the less-than-noble trend of the two preceding tales. In this tale, an apprentice who has been dismissed by his master for his drunken revelry moves in with a friend and his wife. Only after moving in, however, does the apprentice discover that his friend’s wife works after hours as a prostitute, using her shop as a false front.

The Man of Law’s Tale follows in the hagiographic tradition which was popular in medieval literature, telling the story of a noble Christian woman, Constance, whose faith is tested. She is married to a sultan whose mother attempts to convert her to Islam, but after refusing she is banished and set adrift on the sea. Constance miraculously survives, and endures several other ordeals with in which she similarly proves her faith.

The Wife of Bath’s Tale is one of the most famous stories in The Canterbury Tales. After a knight of Arthur’s court is found guilty of raping a young woman, Queen Guinevere sets out his punishment: to discover what women most desire. After searching for an answer for a year, and with the help of an old witch, he returns with the answer that women most desire mastery over their husbands. Guinevere is pleased with this answer, but the knight is not out of the woods yet: he must marry the old witch!

The Friar’s Tale tells of a summoner (tasked with collecting debts) who unwittingly makes a pact with a demon. The two journey together and have a sort of contest to see who can out-devil the other, but the summoner gets more than he bargained for when he is tricked into allowing the demon to take his soul.

The Summoner’s Tale is a response to the Friar’s Tale and centers on a Friar who attempts to extort money from the people of a small village under the guise of charity. The Friar is unsuccessful, and draws the ire of the townspeople.

The Clerk’s Tale is a rather dark tale in which a wealthy lord takes a young peasant woman as his wife and devises multiple cruel tests to prove her loyalty to him. He has her children kidnapped, and makes her believe they were killed, and years later convinces her that he is going to have their marriage annulled. But through it all, she remains loyal, and in the end she is reunited with her long-lost children.

The Merchant’s Tale is another entry in the group of bawdy tales. This time, and elderly lord is tricked repeatedly by his young wife into building a massive garden. Unbeknownst to the lord, however, the garden affords the young wife and her lover a secret place to carry out their affair right under the lord’s nose.

The Squire’s Tale is a very confused and fragmentary tale, a blend of Arthurian tradition and the story of Genghis Khan (or at least, Genghis Khan as he was understood in medieval England). The Squire tries his best to tell a tale on par with the other older members of the party, but he rambles and is eventually cut off by the Franklin before he can finish his meandering story.

The Franklin’s Tale tells of a woman who attempts to fend off a relentless suitor by telling him that he can have her love if he makes every rock on the coast of Brittany disappear—no small feat, as the coast of Brittany is notoriously rocky. Through the help of a magician, the suitor succeeds, setting up a test of conscience and loyalty for the woman.

The Physician’s Tale is another morality tale which warns against the consequences of sin. A judge falls madly in love with a young woman and plots to take her as his bride, and he concocts false charges against her father as a way to extort her into marriage. The young woman is not so easily tricked though, preferring to die rather than be shamed into marriage by a corrupt old man.

The Pardoner’s Tale is also a warning against sin—this time, the sin of greed. The tale tells of three young men who go on a quest to kill Death himself. However, they become distracted by a pile of gold at the place where they were supposed to find Death, and each of the men secretly plots to kill the others and take all the gold for himself.

The Shipman’s Tale is a rather humorous tale in which a merchant’s wife seeks to flee her husband and run away with a young monk, but must pay off some debts before she can do so. Unbeknownst to her, the monk borrows the money from her husband, and leaves town before his trick can be discovered!

The Prioress’s Tale is one of the darkest of all the tales, telling of a young Christian boy who is killed by a group of Jewish men and thrown into a sewer. Miraculously, the boy’s body begins to sing praises to the Virgin Mary, allowing his mother to find him and unleashing the wrath of the town against the Jewish men.

The Tale of Sir Thopas is told by the character of Chaucer, who begins a story of a noble knight who tried to win the hand of an elf queen. Chaucer offers this tale as a kind of parody of chivalric romances, but he is interrupted by the Host, Harry Bailey, before he can finish telling the tale.

The Tale of Melibee is also told by the character Chaucer and satirizes the kinds of morality tales told by several of the other pilgrims. The tale is intended less as a full-fledged story and more as a snarky response to the Host’s interruption of Chaucer’s previous tale.

The Monk’s Tale features several stories-within-a-story, all of which have to do with the tragic downfalls of famous historical and mythical figures, including Hercules, Lucifer, Alexander the Great, and Julius Caesar. The Monk says he knows of hundreds of such stories, but the other pilgrims can only take so much tragedy, and cut him off after he tells 17 of these morose short stories.

The Nun’s Priest’s Tale is a retelling of the popular fable of Chanticleer and the Fox, in which the rooster Chanticleer is tricked into letting his guard down and allowing a fox to slip into the henhouse. The fox makes Chanticleer think that he’s not there to steal hens; he only wants to hear Chanticleer’s beautiful singing. Chanticleer, overcome by vanity, bursts into song, allowing the fox to do his devious business.

The Second Nun’s Tale is similar to the Man of Law’s Tale in its hagiographic content. In this tale, two brothers are led to convert to Christianity by a godly woman named Cecilia, but the brothers are captured by a heathen lord and told to abandon their faith or be killed. The brothers remain steadfast in their newfound faith, and their souls ascend to heaven after their earthly lives are ended.

The Canon’s Yeoman’s Tale tells the tragicomic story of an alchemist who tries to find the philosopher’s stone but sells most of his possessions in pursuit of this goal, descending into abject poverty. The moral of the story, as the Yeoman puts it, is that “al thyng which that shineth as the gold / Nis nat gold,” which in Middle English roughly means “all that glitters is not gold.”

The Manciple’s Tale tells of a man with a talking crow who reveals the secret of his wife’s affair. In a rage, the man kills his wife, but then is overcome with grief and remorse and blames the crow for telling the truth rather than letting them live in peaceful ignorance.

The Parson’s Tale appears as the final tale in The Canterbury Tales and is more of a religious meditation than a story. The Parson talks of the seven deadly sins and the steps needed for true penitence and forgiveness, and the Parson’s sermon leads Chaucer to close the Tales with an apology in which he asks for forgiveness for his own sins (though scholars continue debate whether or not this apology is actually a sincere confession).

The Canterbury Tales is an anthology of satirical stories written in Middle English by British poet, philosopher, and diplomat Geoffrey Chaucer, who is commonly regarded as the "father of modern English poetry and literature." In it, the narrator (Chaucer) meets with a group of twenty-nine pilgrims at the Tabard Inn in London. These pilgrims are getting ready to go on a trip to Canterbury to visit Saint Thomas Becket's shrine at Canterbury Cathedral.

The host of the tavern, Harry Bailly—who also joins the pilgrims in their journey—comes up with an interesting proposition to make the trip easier and less boring: each of them will have to tell two stories on the way to the cathedral and two stories on the way back to London. The one who will prove himself or herself to be the best storyteller of the group will win a free meal back at the inn, paid for by all of the other pilgrims. The pilgrims agree, and together, all thirty-one of them start their journey.

There are only twenty-four tales in The Canterbury Tales, as Chaucer unfortunately passed away before finishing the book. Nevertheless, the text remains one of the most important works in English literature as it helped establish English as a legitimate language of art alongside Latin and French.