ENL 4311 - Fall 2025 - Sprenkle

This course will introduce students to Geoffrey Chaucer’s most famous work, The Canterbury Tales. An experimental frame narrative including many medieval genres (knightly romance, bawdy bar-worthy tales, sermons, autobiographies, saints’ lives, confessions, and revenge narratives in both poetry and prose) told by diverse range of storytellers, this unfinished piece serves as a compelling window into fourteenth-century medieval life. Written entirely in Middle English, The Canterbury Tales is also inextricably bound up in the history and politics of medieval language, national identity, and fluctuating royal power. This course will consider Chaucer as part of both a 14th-century flourishing of poetry in Middle English (as opposed to the more prestigious French or scholarly Latin) and provide a more global perspective, as Chaucer was heavily inspired by continental and especially Italian writers such as Petrarch, Dante, and Boccacio. We will be engaging the Middle English text directly, spending quite a bit of time honing our pronunciation and translation skills. We will also read primary source documents that provide important insight into the history of Chaucer’s England and the cultural movements that impacted his work.

We will explore Chaucer’s perspectives on authorship and readership; social dilemmas and class conflicts; and racial, religious, and gender differences (including medieval traditions of antifeminism and antisemitism). Students can expect to write two shorter papers, a translation of a passage of Middle English, and a final research paper, as well as giving a presentation that explores and elucidates an important aspect of 14th-century medieval English culture.