The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer

Welcome Spring (or Summer for us in hot AZ!) Readers:

We are set to begin a four-week study in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. This is a quick reading through these stories, simply to give our readers a taste of Chaucer's wit and style. Feel free to join along with our reading group on this next adventure through late Medieval classical literature.

Lets begin reading through a few of the Canterbury Tales. I chose those which are most often read in college courses (and the ones I could find study
questions on -- LOL!) I think these will give you enough of a feel for these stories without having to read them all. If you want to read more, go ahead at
your own leisure.

Brief Background from Wikipedia

I would suggest reading the background on the Tales themselves, either at Wikipedia, in your own text, or as a general introduction at Sparknotes or Online-Literature.com.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geoffrey_Chaucer
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Canterbury_Tales

Literature Study Guide from Sparknotes

Sparknotes will provide some good summaries of the tales, a great help for struggling readers who need a little hand-holding to help explain the story.

http://www.sparknotes.com/lit/canterbury/

Book Links

http://www.online-literature.com/chaucer/canterbury/

Modern Prose in PDF (each tale is it's own file)

http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/webcore/murphy/canterbury/

Audio from Librivox

http://librivox.org/the-canterbury-tales-by-geoffrey-chaucer/

Schedule

Week 1 - Introduction and Prologue
Week 2 - The Knights Tale
Week 3 - The Miller and The Reeves Tale
Week 4 - The Friar and The Summoner's Tale

Guesstimate on reading: The Knights Tale is fairly long, the others are shorter readings. I would guess four weeks to cover these tales only. If at the end of this period, you all want to read some of the other Tales, we can add a few more in. Let' wait and see how every does with these stories, OK?

Begin date: you are welcome to start this week or next. I will post the first set of questions today and then will try and stay a week ahead of everyone.

I think you will enjoy reading these stories, and will find the modern translation (PDF files linked above) a good source (helpful notes and explanations are included).

Happy Reading!

Spring is Here

The new schedule for Spring has been late in being posted. Partly this was due to some personal challenges that I am facing, and partly because our readers needed a bit more time to get through the holidays. Now that we are finished with Christmas and well into the New Year, it is time to start thinking about reading again.

We have been following the Great Books list from St. John's College. So far, it has proven to be a good program to follow. We have used online books and resources, mostly from the website: http://www.grtbooks.com. Another excellent resource, with links to not only resources that are online, but also to printed books (in several languages).

Presently, we are beginning the Middle Ages, approx. 1000-1600 AD. We just finished reading The Song of Roland, and are heading into more religious works (Aquinas and A Kempis). I am not sure if this is the track we want to take, after all, we spent a fair portion of time reading through earlier church works last year. I am thinking that we should stay with literature (story, fairy tales, etc.) for a while. I think our readers are more interested in story than in deep philosophy.

So with this decision in hand, here is the reading list for Spring 2010:

The Story of the Volsungs and Niblungs

• HTML (56 pages, indexed) at Bartleby.com (Translated by Eiríkr Magnússon and William Morris)
• HTML (364 KB; 128 KB zipped; 342/124 KB text file also available) of The Story of the Volsungs at Project Gutenberg (Translated by Eirikr Magnússon and William Morris)

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

• HTML (Multi-page) at Bibliomania
• HTML (339 KB; 201 KB zipped; 255/97 KB text file also available) at Project Gutenberg, also includes Middle English text (Translator unknown)
  

Canterbury Tales

• HTML frames at Librarius
• Text File (1.62 MB; 639 KB zipped) at Project Gutenberg (includes Canterbury Tales, Troilus and Cressida, and other works)

Le Morte d'Arthur

• Text file, vol. 1 (link page; 902 KB, or 295 KB zipped) at Project Gutenberg
• Text file, vol. 2 (link page; 1.00 MB, or 332 KB zipped) at Project Gutenberg

The Prince

• HTML (36 pages, indexed) at Oregon State's History of Western Philosophy course (Translated by W.K. Marriott)
• HTML (Multi-page, indexed) at Sonshi.com (Translated by W.K. Marriott)
• HTML (Multi-page, indexed; text file and PDF versions also available) at the Constitution Society (Translated by W.K. Marriott)
• Text File (310 KB; 111 KB zipped; 298/109KB text file also available) at Project Gutenberg (Translated by William K. Marriott)

Utopia

• HTML (Indexed, 10 pages) at Oregon State's History of Western Philosophy course
• HTML (Multi-page, indexed) at the Constitution Society
• Text file (231KB) at the Constitution Society
• HTML (258 KB; 94 KB zipped; 254/93KB text file also available) at Project Gutenberg

This reading list will take us through Spring and into early Summer. We will then move into Renaissance literature and begin reading more familiar texts.

A reading schedule (of assignments) will be posted shortly, along with some background information and study help. Check out the Yahoo Group for specifics. Happy reading!