Extract

Whan that Aprille with his shoures soote, the droghte of March hath perced to the roote.

Thirty pilgrims gather at a Southwark inn on an April evening, and before they have reached Canterbury the whole of medieval England has poured out of their mouths. A knight tells of noble love, a miller of bedroom farce, a pardoner of his own magnificent fraud. Geoffrey Chaucer began this unfinished masterwork around 1387, forging Middle English into a literary instrument supple enough to hold bawdry and devotion in the same stanza. The genius is structural: by giving each tale to a distinct teller, Chaucer invented a form that contains multitudes, where the sacred and the profane argue openly on the same road. The pilgrimage never reaches its shrine, and that incompleteness feels honest, even holy.