The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer

Both. It's a frame narrative primarily crafted in verse — specifically rhyming couplets in Middle English — where a group of pilgrims share their stories. Some of these tales are poems, while a few are in prose. You can think of it as a long poem that includes shorter poems and stories within it.

Chaucer wrote in Middle English, the version of the language spoken in England during 1380–1400. It may seem odd at first glance, but when you read it aloud, a lot of it starts to sound familiar. Modern English evolved from this earlier form, so words like 'love,' 'knight,' and 'tale' are present, albeit spelled differently.

No. He intended to tell around 120 tales (two for each pilgrim both going and returning) but managed to finish only 24, and some of those are just fragments. Scholars believe he spent the last fifteen years of his life working on it. This unfinished quality adds to its vibrancy—it halts mid-journey, much like life itself.

She argues that women should have sovereignty—meaning authority and control—in marriage. She supports this with her experiences with five husbands and a selective interpretation of the Bible. For a text from the 1390s, it presents a surprisingly direct feminist argument.

The surface moral is that 'greed is the root of all evil' — which is precisely what the Pardoner preaches. The deeper irony lies in the fact that the Pardoner himself is entirely motivated by greed. Chaucer raises the question of whether a genuine moral can emerge from a corrupt source, leaving the answer uncertain.

In the Retraction, Chaucer expresses regret for any stories that may have stirred sinful thoughts and gives thanks to God for his religious works. Some readers interpret this as a sincere act of piety on his deathbed, while others view it as another ironic act from a writer who often blurred the lines between sincerity and pretense. Both interpretations have merit.

Almost all of medieval English society is represented here: the nobility (the Knight and his son the Squire), the clergy (the Prioress, the Monk, the Pardoner, the Parson), the rising middle class (the Merchant, the Franklin, the Wife of Bath), and the working class (the Miller, the Cook, the Plowman). Bringing them all together on the same road and sharing their stories equally was a bold social statement.

Both use a frame device—a group of people sharing stories—and Chaucer directly borrowed plots from Boccaccio for several tales. However, while Boccaccio's narrators are all aristocrats hiding from the plague, Chaucer's pilgrims come from all walks of life and are traveling. The road and the diverse social mix are Chaucer's unique contributions, and they transform everything.