Recommendations
Books Like The Canterbury Tales
Best books to read after The Canterbury Tales by Chaucer
The Canterbury Tales gave us the template for the story collection — a frame narrative, a diverse cast of voices, and the insight that social range produces moral complexity. Chaucer's energy, wit, and sympathy for human frailty have never been surpassed. These books share his delight in storytelling as a social act and his range of tone from the bawdy to the sacred.
- 1Buy
The Decameron
by Giovanni Boccaccio
Boccaccio's Italian collection of 100 tales told by ten young Florentines who have fled the Black Death to a country house — the primary source for Chaucer's Canterbury Tales in structure and several individual tales; together Boccaccio and Chaucer are the two great medieval story collections, and Chaucer's transformation of his Italian source is one of medieval literature's most instructive comparisons
- 2Buy
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
by Anonymous
The finest Arthurian poem in the English tradition — a beheading contest, a year of waiting, and a moral test of honor; written contemporaneously with the Canterbury Tales in the Northwest Midlands alliterative tradition; Simon Armitage's 2007 translation is the most recommended modern version and makes clear that the Canterbury Tales and Gawain represent two different but equally sophisticated approaches to the same medieval literary culture
- 3Buy
Piers Plowman
by William Langland
The other great work of Middle English poetry — a dream-vision allegory about Christian salvation written in alliterative verse; together Chaucer and Langland represent the two dominant traditions of 14th-century English poetry, the French-influenced syllabic verse and the alliterative Old English-descended verse
- 4Buy
The Name of the Rose
by Umberto Eco
Eco's medieval mystery novel set in 1327 in an Italian monastery — saturated in the same medieval Catholic intellectual culture that produced the Canterbury Tales, and similarly fascinated by the social dynamics of religious communities, the politics of ecclesiastical authority, and the relationship between high theological culture and popular belief and practice
- 5Buy
The Pillars of the Earth
by Ken Follett
Follett's novel about the building of a medieval cathedral in 12th-century England — recommended for readers who are drawn to the Canterbury Tales' richly peopled medieval world; a sweeping historical novel that gives a more detailed picture of the physical, economic, and social realities of medieval England than Chaucer's London-and-roads view
- 6Buy
One Thousand and One Nights
by Anonymous
The great Arabic frame-narrative story collection — Scheherazade telling stories to survive, each story potentially containing others; the Eastern parallel to the Canterbury Tales in its use of the frame narrative and its commitment to the storyteller as a figure who uses narrative to negotiate power; the most important non-Western influence on the Western story collection tradition
- 7Buy
Orlando Furioso
by Ludovico Ariosto
Ariosto's Italian Renaissance epic about the paladins of Charlemagne — the immediate successor to the chivalric romance tradition that Chaucer both celebrates (in the Knight's Tale) and satirizes (in Sir Thopas); Ariosto's comic handling of romance conventions is the bridge between medieval and Renaissance literary culture and shows how the Canterbury Tales' irony toward its own sources became a dominant mode of European Renaissance writing
- 8Buy
Troilus and Criseyde
by Geoffrey Chaucer
Chaucer's long narrative poem about the Trojan War love story of Troilus and Criseyde — in many ways more technically accomplished than the Canterbury Tales and the best introduction to Chaucer's non-comic range; based on Boccaccio's Il Filostrato and transformed into one of the great English poems about love, fortune, and loss
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