Professor Marion Turner

speaker

759 appearances 2 recordings 1 series first heard Feb 2026 last heard 29 May

Professor Marion Turner’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 1.

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Fabulous.

A group of people meet.

They meet in the Tabard Inn, which was a real pub just south of the river in Southwark.

They're all going off on pilgrimage to Canterbury.

And they decide that, you know, to make it less boring so they don't just have to think about pilgrimage and God all the time.

They're going to tell stories on the way there and on the way back.

And they're going to compete for a free meal.

And the host, the innkeeper, Harry Bailey, is going to kind of run this tale telling competition.

So you get this kind of group of people together who are all going to tell stories.

But it's really different from Boccaccio's.

And the big difference is the nature of the tale tellers.

So Boccaccio's tale tellers are all of the same class, which is high class.

Chaucer's are not.

So the highest class person is the knight, who's not that high.

And there is a ploughman at the bottom.

The vast majority are in between.

So, you know, we have a summoner, a friar, a merchant, a man of law, a lawyer, a sailor, a cook, all of these.

Yeah.

The miller, the reaper, all of these kinds of people.

So that's really, really important.

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