Author Description

When Geoffrey Chaucer died in 1400, his massive project, the Canterbury Tales, lay unfinished and unpublished. This volume includes five works that aim to fill in the gaps in this incomplete masterpiece. The pieces presented here date from the fifteenth century and survive in at least one manuscript collection of Chaucer's tales: John Lydgate's Prologue to the Siege of Thebes, The Ploughman's Tale, The Cook's Tale, Spurious Links, and The Canterbury Interlude and Merchant's Tale of Beryn. These pieces of Chaucerian apocrypha have been collected into one student-friendly edition, including introductions, notes, glosses, and a glossary to accommodate students of all levels of experience in Middle English.