AreThe Canterbury Talesa Book?

Abstract

This article offers a new interpretation of the pilgrimage framework for Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. I argue that the Tales have an ironic relationship to books that bear them, one that confronts readers with the difference between their own experience and the author’s fictions. My case is empirical as well as literary: it relies on transnational taxonomies of multi-text codices, and overlooked physical evidence of fifteenth-century bookbinding techniques. I suggest that in their ordering of Chaucer’s text and in their various and dynamic forms, manuscripts of the Tales successfully instantiate Chaucer’s dynamic idea of his text, the complex conditions for pre-print book production, and the disaggregated forms of the medieval codex. The Tales are thus shaped as an answer to the question posted by my title—are The Canterbury Tales a book?—and to some of Chaucer’s broader questions, about experience, authority, and the limits to human modes of knowing.

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