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This course has several parallel purposes. First and foremost, we explore an enormously ambitious and brilliant work of literature, both in its local variety (the individual tales, their prologues and epilogues, their self-conscious placement within late medieval cultural conventions), and in its overarching structures. This of course involves learning about the language in which Chaucer wrote, Middle English. Second, we think about Chaucer’s position in late medieval literary culture, especially in England, and in the social world of his own day: at once a minor royal functionary and increasingly recognized as an important writer; an innovator in his immediate literary context but an historical situation of our own readership, for which Chaucer has become “Chaucer” (as he started to be in his own day), even many kinds of “Chaucer,” which continue to evolve as our reading culture does