The Canterbury Tales And Other Poems Illustrated

Why This Book Exists and Whether It's Worth Your Time

I picked up a copy of The Canterbury Tales And Other Poems Illustrated maybe three years ago, after buying a bare-bones paperback that made me realize I had no idea what half the tales were actually about. Middle English is rough on the eyes when you're reading it straight. The illustrations in this particular edition don't just decorate the pages. They fill in gaps that the original text leaves wide open. The version I have is the one with Gustave Doré's plates. Doré did the engravings in the 1860s specifically for William Whittaker's edition. He never read Chaucer in Middle English. That sounds like a problem, but it turned out to be kind of useful. Doré was working from French and English translations side by side, which means his vision of the tales is a composite rather than tied to any single line of the original. Some people find that annoying. I found it accurate, honestly. That's what the stories feel like to a modern reader.

Where to find a legal copy

You can get The Canterbury Tales And Other Poems Illustrated through Project Gutenberg for free as a plain text or EPUB file, but that strips the illustrations. If you want the plates intact, your best bet is the Internet Archive, where the Doré edition is available as a scanned PDF that you can read online or download for offline use. Amazon and Barnes & Noble carry newer reprints, usually the Dover Thrift Editions or the Norton Critical editions. Dover tends to reproduce the plates at a reasonable size without blowing up the price. Don't bother with the $60 leather-bound facsimiles unless you're buying as a gift. Most people don't expect Doré's engravings to affect how they understand the narrative. They assume illustrations are decorative. With Chaucer they're not. The general prologue describes each pilgrim in detail. Doré renders those descriptions, and his choices reveal things that readers consistently overlook when they're reading the text alone. Take the Wife of Bath. The text describes her gap-toothed smile and her red stockings. Doré draws her with a specific posture and expression that the text only hints at. She carries herself like someone who has spent years winning arguments she already won. When you see that visual, the next time you read her tale you notice the strategic cruelty in her narration instead of just the feminist reading most people go for. Both are there. The image pushes you toward the cruelty first.

Here's a practical tip that took me a while to figure out. Don't read the text first and then look at the illustration. Look at Doré's plate for the pilgrim before you read their tale. His characterization is consistent across all his engravings for the same person. Once you've seen the Monk as a hunting man with a greedy watchful look, you'll notice that look reappearing subtly whenever the Monk shows up again later in the general prologue. It changes how you hear his self-justifications.

Common problems and what to do about them

The biggest issue people run into with this edition is the plate placement. In the original Doré printing, the engraved plates are inserted as folding inserts. In modern reprints, they're often printed directly on the page at reduced size. When they're reduced too much, the detail disappears and the image becomes a dark smudge. This is especially bad in the Dover paperback. The Wife of Bath's face becomes a vague oval. My workaround was simple. I borrowed the scanner from a friend's print shop and scanned the plates from the library copy at 600 DPI. It took about forty minutes for the whole set. Having them on my tablet meant I could zoom in when a detail mattered and then flip back to the text. If you can't scan, the Internet Archive version is usually large enough to read clearly at full resolution on a laptop screen. Don't try to read the plates on a phone. You'll miss half the detail and get frustrated. Another issue is the lack of commentary. Doré's edition has no annotations. If you're reading Middle English for the first time, you will get stuck. A lot. Not on vocabulary. On cultural references. Who is Godric? What exactly is the "miracle of Our LORD" the Prioress is bragging about? The illustrations don't help with any of that.

I got around this by keeping a copy of F.N. Robinson's Riverside Chaucer open in a browser tab alongside the Doré edition. Robinson's notes are the standard for a reason. Cross-referencing them took maybe five extra minutes per tale, which is nothing compared to the hours you'd spend guessing. Combine the two and you get the full experience. The visuals ground the scenes and the notes fill the gaps.

What beginners get wrong

Beginners almost always start with the General Prologue and then jump into whichever tale sounds funniest. The Miller's Tale, right? Wrong approach. Start with theKnight's Tale. It's the longest and most formally structured. It's also the most important for understanding what Chaucer is doing with the whole project. The Knight represents courtly romance. Almost every other tale either agrees with him, argues with him, or laughs at him. If you don't understand the Knight's tone first, the rest of the book reads like a random collection of stories. It's not. It's a debate. The second mistake is skimming the religious tales. The Prioress's Tale and the Parson's Tale get dismissed as preachy. Skip them and you miss Chaucer's actual religious framework. He wasn't a pious man by modern standards, but he understood the medieval mind. These tales show you what he's reacting against. The humor of the rest of the book depends on that foundation being there. The third mistake is assuming the illustrations solve any language problem. They don't. Doré was depicting the tales as he understood them from translations. Sometimes his understanding diverges from the original text in small but meaningful ways. The Friar's beggarly companions look sympathetic in Doré. In Chaucer's text, they're outright scammers. Trust the text, use the image for atmosphere and character tone, not as a literal translation of the scene.

The downsides nobody mentions

This edition has real limitations. The Doré plates are black and white engravings. They work beautifully for character portraits and dramatic moments. They are almost useless for the landscape descriptions that appear in tales like the Franklin's Tale or the Squire's Tale. Doré fills those gaps with generic European scenery that has nothing to do with Brittany or anyplace mentioned in the text. It looks pleasant. It's historically and geographically wrong. Some modern illustrators have done color versions that attempt more accuracy. The 1995 edition with illustrations by Brian Froud is completely different in tone but takes far more interpretive liberty. Froud's Canterbury pilgrims look like they walked out of a fairy tale. That's charming but misleading if you want to understand medieval England. Neither edition is perfect. Pick the one that matches what you're trying to get out of the book. The Dover reprint of Doré is cheap but the paper is thin. Ink bleeds through from the plates onto the facing pages. It's manageable but annoying. The Norton Critical Edition costs more and includes essays that actually help with context. If you're reading this for a class or serious personal study, spend the extra money. If you're reading it once for pleasure, Dover is fine.

The Canterbury Tales And Other Poems Illustrated as a long-term project

I read through this edition over six months. Not because it's long. The tales themselves aren't that long. The illustrations slow you down. You stop to look. You look again. Then you go back to the text with a completely different sense of what the characters are doing. It's not a speed read. It's a slow read. That's the point of having illustrated plates in the first place. They force you to pay attention to the physical world Chaucer is describing, even when he barely describes it at all. Download the free Internet Archive version to preview it. Check whether the plate sizes work for you before committing to a purchased edition. Read the Knight's Tale first. Keep Robinson's notes handy. Scan the plates if your copy is too small. These are small adjustments that make a large difference in how much you actually get from the book.