Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales and the Auchinleck MS: Analogous Collections?

Discussions of analogues or models for The Canterbury Tales focus almost exclusively on story collections that, like Chaucer’s, frame their tales in a narrative setting – as do Petrus Alfonsi’s Disciplina Clericalis, Boccaccio’s Decameron, Gower’s Confessio Amantis, and Sercambi’s Novelle. Some attention is given to other collections that have no framing structure, like the Gesta Romanorum, or that order their tales according to some external canonical structure, such as the liturgical calendar, as in the South English Legendary. Some collections (like the Decameron and Confessio Amantis, again) select their tales according to topic or theme, while others favor generic principles (collections of saints’ lives; Marie de France’s Fables or Lais). Although ‘earlier literature offers no exact analogue’, all of these are obviously pertinent to discussions of the structure and organization of Chaucer’s last tale collection.

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