Dalle Novelle di Canterbury

A diverse company of pilgrims traveling to a sacred shrine pass the time by exchanging stories, framed by an extended prologue that sketches each traveler’s appearance, habits, and social position. The narratives collected range from comic and bawdy to satirical, moral, and tragic, alternating between verse and prose and exposing social mores, religious hypocrisy, and human folly. An innkeeper proposes a storytelling contest to enliven the journey, and the surviving material remains fragmentary, preserving a lively, polyphonic mixture of voices and perspectives.