PRINT
EMAIL
“Chaucer's Canterbury Tales” is a four-week school teacher seminar for participants on Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, held in London with additional site visits to Canterbury and Oxford. Co-project directors David Raybin (Eastern Illinois University) and Susanna Fein (Kent State University), co-editors of The Chaucer Review, lead this summer project on Chaucer’s “masterpiece of narrative styles, dramatic voices, interwoven themes, and poetic expressions.” In their exploration of Chaucer’s “wide range of social networks,” as well as his “mastery of rhetoric and tone,” participants connect their literal and intellectual journey to that taken by Chaucer’s pilgrims from London’s Tabard Inn to the shrine of St. Thomas of Becket at Canterbury Cathedral. Participants read the tales in the original Middle English, while absorbing “a great deal of knowledge by exposure to locales associated with Chaucer” in London, in Canterbury, and in Oxford. The participants progress through the General Prologue and twenty-four tales, while making discoveries about the “distance that separates us from the lived details of Chaucer’s fourteenth-century England; about the continuities of artistry, philosophy, emotion, and meaning that render Chaucer’s writings still important;” and about how shared responses by readers to the work lead to “understandings inherently richer than what might be achieved by reading alone.” Individual-led discussions and group presentations, along with writing projects, further shed light on the Tales. Participants have access to the library and computer facilities at the University of London’s Mile End Campus.