The Canterbury Tales

English 201 (Spring 1999)

Required Text: The Riverside Chaucer, Ed. Larry D. Benson; secondary reading materials will be found on-line or in course packets.

Course Requirements: Over the course of this semester, we will be reading almost all of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. Don't worry if you have never read Middle English before-- you will learn, and extra tutorial help will be available for those who want it. Requirements for the course, beyond keeping up with the reading, include the following graded assignments:

• weekly reading responses posted to the discussion group (10%)
• a brief research project/presentation (10%)
• 2 short papers (15% each)
• a final examination (40%)
• class participation (10%)

There will also be regular ungraded assignments; doing these, or failing to do them, will be factored into your participation grade:

• pilgrim project
• online tutorial on Chaucer's time, to be completed by January 25 (this is fun)
• equizzes to check your reading progress
• brief creative assignments

Attendance is also a requirement, of course, but you knew that already, didn't you?

Syllabus: All readings, primary, secondary, and on-line are listed here. Any changes to the schedule will be indicated here. Please check it regularly!

Web Stuff: If you have never participated in an online discussion group before, don't worry. It's just as easy as reading Middle English. Some people even think it's fun. If you need help, let me know. Within the first two weeks of class, you will also be asked to take the online tutorial mentioned above; this is intended as an alternative to reading a background history textbook, and it shouldn't be scary. Just try it and see.

There is a huge amount of Chaucer related material on the Web. Perhaps the best way of accessing this is to start with the Chaucer Metapage, which provides links to other pages like this one, to online texts of Chaucer and his contemporaries, to bibliographical information, and much more. For your research project, this should probably be your first stop online (don't forget, however, that that old fashioned technology known as the book is still very useful-- and no further away than Magill Library.

Below, you will find a few links selected because they are particularly useful for the purposes of this course, or because they are particularly entertaining. The Metapage is the place to go for a comprehensive collection of links.

Related Authors and Works	The General Prologue Read Aloud in Middle English (J. Zatta)
Online Essays on Chaucer	Images
Life of Chaucer (Harvard)	Edwin Duncan's Guide to Chaucernet
Middle English Grammar	Chaucerian Cookery
Student Work: Check here to see what your classmates are up to
More about relics: Miraculous Blood, Corpus Christi, Reliquaries

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