I finally finished Canterbury Tales!

What, 20 years after I began?

I could have walked across England by G. K. Chesterton's eccentric route (see, The Rolling English Road) two dozen times in the interum!

A few observations:

• Read it for pleasure, and to better understand the MUCH misunderstood Middle Ages.
• Along with Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.
• Wife of Bath remains the most vivacious character of all.
• I wonder, though, if Chaucer meant Bath and the wife of Melibee as twin embodiments of the loud temptress and Wisdom in Proverbs? The latter tale cites Solomon enough.
• Lots of jokes about cuckolds, and one extended fart joke. (Not my favorite genre, but would have been popular with my students.) These stories seem to set oddly with the long sermon, The Parson's Tale, with which Chaucer finishes his book. Yet that seems true enough to life for a Christian -- I can identify.
• The Summoner, and also the Parson, together do a number on indulgences. Martin Luther could have copied and pasted!
• The general image of women in the MA would I think have shocked an upper-class visitor from other great civilizations of the time: Islam, India, or China. They do not sound down-trodden, and in fact I do not believe they generally were.
• Chaucer alludes to or quotes Greco-Roman authors about as much as he does Judeo-Christian authors. He also sets one or two tales among the Muslims, and mentions favorably a regiment of Indian knights. While he was a Christian, and his parson preached a wicked sermon (which still calls one to holiness), at times he seems quite friendly to other traditions.
• One exception is the Prioress' "blood guilt" tale in which the murdered Christian child goes on singing -- an anti-Semitic trope one might, indeed, hear from such a person.
• Chaucer follows it, however, with an interrupted story in which he goes out of his way to say that Jewish armor is the best. And of course faithful Jewish believers are quoted throughout the book.
• The Knight's Tale, I concluded, might be the best to have my students read. I think they would have liked it.
• And yes, of course, there is also a joke about a crooked lawyer and the devil.

I don't know why it took me so long! I am starting to get into the Middle Ages.