Common approaches to the Canterbury Tales Prologue—and how to improve upon them
It took me many years to feel comfortable with my approach to the Canterbury Tales Prologue. It was one of those texts that I appreciated because of the artful humor in the spot-on observations of humanity, but students didn’t seem to connect with it, despite the (misguided) efforts I made with my fellow 12th grade teachers to draw parallels to modern American society. Truthfully though, we dissected the text in ways that were tedious and didn’t do much in the way of building students’ skills for analyzing literature. I was never quite satisfied with my approach until I set time aside to explore what could be the most valuable skills and concepts students could learn from Canterbury Tales. I’m excited to share them with you!
Read on for my takes about how to create better opportunities from the Prologue for students to develop their reading, thinking, and writing skills!
Common approach: Give students a table to record every detail about each pilgrim’s clothing, physical characteristics, and personality traits.
Improved approach: Give students specific reading questions to analyze each pilgrim.
Completing a table with details about the pilgrims is little more than an exercise in taking notes. Also, some of the pilgrims have lots of detail about their clothing or behavior, while others’ descriptions are very limited, so studying them all in the exact same way doesn’t work well. Instead, I think it benefits students’ reading comprehension skills more when they have specific questions that scaffold the reading experience, especially when it comes to making inferences from the evidence in the text. For example:
Questions like that make reading feel more like a (manageable) puzzle, which makes the text more engaging.
Related resource:
Canterbury Tales Prologue Reading Questions
(These questions will also help you address what I discuss in #2 and #3: the moments of satire and timelessness of each pilgrim.)
Common approach: Present the whole Prologue as a satire of immoral people.
Improved approach: Point out the instances of satire.
Many resources describe Canterbury Tales as a satire. And sure, when you’re explaining it to students, it makes it simpler to label it one way. But if you’re asking students to identify what each pilgrim helps to satirize, it doesn’t really hold up. Although Chaucer offers scathing descriptions of how the Monk and Friar abused their privileges as church officials, he’s not using the other pilgrims as a way to call for change. For the most part, Chaucer’s gently poking fun at common quirks and minor failings of humanity—not spotlighting each pilgrim for purposes of moral inspection. Don’t worry about it seeming inconsistent to students. They’ll get it!
Common approach: Align each pilgrim with a modern occupation or stereotype.
Improved approach: Identify what’s timeless about each pilgrim.
It’s too much of a stretch to try to find equivalent professions for each pilgrim in modern society. And when you try to compare them to modern stereotypes, something offensive is bound to come up (and why encourage students to think of people so reductively?). Instead, get students to think about which characteristics of the pilgrims we’d be likely to see in people today (and forever), regardless of the jobs they do.
For example, as students consider the Prioress, it’s difficult for them to align her with a specific modern-day job or celebrity, but considering her behavior in a more general way makes it easier to see how she’s a timeless character. She wears expensive jewelry, adopts the moniker “Madam Eglantyne,” attempts to speak French (which was considered a marker of the upper class at the time), and dines lavishly even though she lives in a convent. Altogether, these details show us that she’s a bit of a social climber. People like her exist in any era. Today, of course, we’d be more likely to snicker at this type of behavior from Instagram influencers than we would from nuns. So keep in mind that with some pilgrims, students will be challenged to make astute observations about which of their characteristics are timeless (and which are stuck in the 1300s).
Common approach: Tell students that Chaucer is funny (and get blank stares in return).
Improved approach: Get students to analyze the irony in selections from the Prologue.
Chaucer’s humor is subtle. Students don’t usually get it without a lot of explanation, which gets tedious for everyone involved. To make it more efficient, I created an assignment that provides selections of irony from the Prologue. For example, some situational irony:
For each selection, students identify whether it aligns with situational irony or a form of verbal irony (sarcasm, overstatement, or understatement) and explain how it works that way. The exercise eliminates the vague sense that there’s a joke there and makes it clear what’s funny. Providing students with the selections to analyze prevents them from getting frustrated about hunting around for them. It’s more important that students have the time to explain in writing how the irony works.
Related resource:
Canterbury Tales Assignment: Analyzing Irony
Common approach: Give students a test that requires them to match the pilgrims’ names to their descriptions.
Improved approach: Give students an open-book test that requires them to identify the purpose each pilgrim serves in the text.
I don’t see the value in assessments for Canterbury Tales that are essentially matching games. Plus, so many students bomb that kind of test, so in their minds it’s another strike against the value of studying literature altogether.
It makes more sense to leverage a test on the Prologue as an opportunity to develop advanced reading comprehension skills. My multiple-choice test asks students to determine the purpose each pilgrim serves in the text. For example:
In some cases, the pilgrim’s description serves as commentary on changes that would benefit England in the 1300s, while other times the pilgrim simply represents a timeless human behavior. When students apply the inferences they gathered from the reading questions, they can reason their ways through to the best answers. It’s my hope that teachers give it as an open-book test!
Related resource:
Canterbury Tales Prologue Test
Common approach: Give a final assignment that involves illustrating the pilgrims.
Improved approach: Give a writing assignment, but make it fun.
Just as students don’t learn much from having to memorize details about the pilgrims for a test, they don’t learn much from having to draw the pilgrims based on their descriptions. Even adding little creative extensions like coming up with mottoes for the pilgrims or giving them morality ratings isn’t much of a mental workout. High school students know it’s silly.
My students were most engaged with a Canterbury Tales wrap-up when I gave them a creative writing assignment. It requires them to imagine that the pilgrims are stopping for dinner and they have to act as the host who creates seating arrangements to foster interesting conversations. Students enjoy imagining those scenarios, which makes them more willing than usual to explain their choices in well-constructed paragraphs. Sure, it’s not like they’re going to need to write about fictional characters in the “real world,” but they will need to come up with ideas and justify their thinking. This is a fun way to get practice with that.
Related resource:
Canterbury Tales Writing Assignment: Seating the Dinner Party
In conclusion
The common ways of approaching the Canterbury Tales Prologue always left me feeling frustrated that students weren’t learning enough from the text. But since I’ve taken the time to develop resources that strengthen students’ abilities to make inferences, analyze irony, and justify their ideas in writing, I feel much more convinced that the Prologue is a valuable text in the high school curriculum. If you’re ready to bump up the rigor in the way you teach the Prologue, I hope you’ll check out my new bundle of resources now available in my TpT store!
P.S. Grab my fun freebie for the Prologue: Canterbury Tales Yearbook Superlatives!
