Canterbury Tales
David Laing Purves (1870)
Geoffrey Chaucer's unfinished masterpiece, composed between roughly 1387 and his death in 1400, is a frame narrative in which a cross-section of fourteenth-century English society — knight, miller, wife, pardoner, prioress, parson — tells stories on a pilgrimage to Canterbury. The tales range across romance, fabliau, sermon, saint's life, and beast fable, and their collective portrait of English character in the age of Richard II effectively founded a national literature in the vernacular. This edition is David Laing Purves's modernized prose-and-verse rendering, which smooths Middle English spelling for nineteenth-century readers while preserving Chaucer's rhythm, humor, and moral ambiguity.
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