The Canterbury Tales

On a spring day in April--sometime in the waning years of the 14th century--29 travelers set out for Canterbury on a pilgrimage to the shrine of Saint Thomas Beckett. Among them is a knight, a monk, a prioress, a plowman, a miller, a merchant, a clerk, and an oft-widowed wife from Bath. Travel is arduous and wearing; to maintain their spirits, this band of pilgrims entertains each other with a series of tall tales that span the spectrum of literary genres. Five hundred years later, people are still reading Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. If you haven't yet made the acquaintance of the Franklin, the Pardoner, or the Squire because you never learned Middle English, take heart: this edition of the Tales has been translated into modern idiom.

From the heroic romance of "The Knight's Tale" to the low farce embodied in the stories of the Miller, the Reeve, and the Merchant, Chaucer treated such universal subjects as love, sex, and death in poetry that is simultaneously witty, insightful, and poignant. The Canterbury Tales is a grand tour of 14th-century English mores and morals--one that modern-day readers will enjoy.

• The Faerie Queene
• Four Great Comedies: The Taming of the Shrew; A Midsummer Night's Dream; Twelfth Night; The Tempest (Signet Classics)
• Francis Bacon: The New Organon (Cambridge Texts in the History of Philosophy)
• Pensées and Other Writings (Oxford World's Classics)
• The Complete English Poems (Penguin Classics)
• Four Great Tragedies: Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth (Signet Classics)
• The Complete Poetry
• The Major Works (Oxford World's Classics)
• The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia (Oxford World's Classics)
• Descartes: Meditations on First Philosophy: With Selections from the Objections and Replies (Cambridge Texts in the History of Philosophy)