Sophie Gee

It's not going to sugarcoat them.

They're going to be on even footing with one another.

And you're allowed to talk about bad morality as much as good morality and displeasure as much as pleasure.

So what we're realizing is that the world that Shorce is living within is completely shifting and the sources of authority and power

privilege and rulemaking, he, Chaucer, is directly challenging them by having this innkeeper, who admittedly is a local celebrity, but by having an innkeeper claim that the real purpose of this pilgrimage is to tell a fun story that's got a nice moral to it and that he, the innkeeper, gets to judge which is the best one.

Not a priest, not a king, not a member of a royal household, not the knight, but the guy who owns the pub.

That is Chaucer's... Canterbury Tales is, yeah, yeah.

And the significance of iambic pentameter, which we won't go into, but it's five feet to a line and they're stressed and unstressed syllables, is that it comes the closest that you can get to mimicking or replicating the rhythms of normal speech.

That was fabulous.

And I had exactly the same, I hate it when we agree, I had exactly the same experience reading it this time.

I read it often because I teach it often, but I probably hadn't read the Canterbury Tales for a couple of years, three years maybe.

And it just totally blew me away.

And what you just said about how Chaucer basically invents realism, he invents the

mechanisms by which we describe the things that are in front of us and make them feel real, make them feel like you can reach out and touch them.

He does it through the individual word choices.

And it's why you really have to sit with the language itself and just revel in the way that almost every word that Chaucer uses, and you can really see that in that opening sentence, almost every word Chaucer uses, he is using in a way that is pushing back against the way the word seems to want to be used.

Now, that is an incredible achievement for a poet.

And he just, bang, comes onto the stage with The Canterbury Tales.

I mean, he's written other stuff.

But it just bursts across our attention.