3). Canterbury Tales

A woodcut from William Caxton's second edition of the Canterbury Caxton* showing the first specimen of his

Tales printed in 1483. printing to King Edward IV. 

Task 5. Fill in the gaps while viewing.

Geoffrey Chaucer* described those pilgrims in his Canterbury Tales. He began the book in 1387. Chaucer’s narrator meets up with 20 other pilgrims. Each one tells 1)… stories. Canterbury Tales is an extraordinary collection of fables (басен). Chaucer’s pilgrims make up a broad cross-section of the 2) ……. from a knight (рыцарь), a prioress (жена священника) - to a miller (мельник), a carpenter (плотник), a cook. Chaucer’s stories were relevant and accessible (доступны) to every day folk as soap-operas are today.

Chaucer was able of reaching a very 3) …. audience of people because he wrote in English. The amazing thing about Chaucer was that he was writing in the language of the 4) …… . It was for the first time that stories were written in English. Until then all written documents were in Latin or in the language of the Norman ruling class – French. Chaucer was the first to spell the words and started the process of standardizing English. Chaucer was not only the father of English literature, he laid down the English sense of 5) …… and national identity. He was a true forerunner of Shakespeare and Dickens.

Task 6. Discuss some of Chaucer’s famous aphorisms:

Time and tide wait for no man. The guilty think all talk is of themselves.

Love is blind.

The life so short, the crafts so long to learn.

There's no workman, whatsoever he be, That may both work well and hastily.

Murder will out, this my conclusion. (Read more at http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/g/geoffrey_chaucer. )

Cultural Commentary

* William Caxton - William Caxton (ca. 1415~1422 – ca. March 1492) was an English merchant, diplomat, writer and printer. He is thought to be the first English person to work as a printer and the first to introduce a printing press into England. He was also the first English retailer of printed books (his London contemporaries in the same trade were all Flemish, German or French).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Caxton

* Geoffrey Chaucer- (pron.: /ˈtʃɔːsər/; c. 1343 – 25 October 1400), known as the Father of English literature, is widely considered the greatest English poet of the Middle Ages and was the first poet to have been buried in Poet's Corner of Westminster Abbey. While he achieved fame during his lifetime as an author, philosopher, alchemist and astronomer, composing a scientific treatise on the astrolabe for his ten year-old son Lewis, Chaucer also maintained an active career in the civil service as a bureaucrat, courtier and diplomat. Among his many works, which include The Book of the Duchess, the House of Fame, the Legend of Good Women and Troilus and Criseyde, he is best known today for The Canterbury Tales. Chaucer is a crucial figure in developing the legitimacy of the vernacular, Middle English, at a time when the dominant literary languages in England were French and Latin. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/