A Book to Decipher the World: Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales—An Adventure Through Genres

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Takami Matsuda
Faculty of Letters Professor

Takami Matsuda
Faculty of Letters Professor

July 29, 2019

This book is one volume in the "A Book to Decipher the World" series published by Keio University Press. It is a series unified by a fresh book design by Masahiro Okabe, and the publication of the first ten volumes has begun.

There is a Latin sentence that says, "All creatures, like a book and a picture, are a mirror to us." This is the first line of a short poem attributed to the 12th-century European philosopher Alan of Lille, conveying the message that all phenomena in the world hide some kind of message and that the world can be deciphered like a single book. From the perspective that humanity has continued to provide books containing the keys to such decoding—that is, books to decipher the world—this series re-examines various genres of books from both the East and the West.

Candidates include various works such as religious scriptures (the series includes the Bible and the Quran), encyclopedic works (likewise Genkai and the Encyclopédie), and narratives of various scales that prompt reflection on the world view (likewise Journey to the West and Borges); all of these have been read across generations and accepted as classics.

As one such volume, I chose The Canterbury Tales, written by Geoffrey Chaucer, who was active in 14th-century England. This is not only because the work is a classic representing Western literature, but also because it is an adventurous piece of narrative literature written with an eye toward the overall landscape of medieval European literary genres.

The Canterbury Tales is a collection of stories in which 29 pilgrims take turns telling tales on their way from London to Canterbury Cathedral. Under a setting that can only be realized in fiction—where pilgrims of different professions and social statuses share stories from diverse genres with different premises and functions while aiming for the single goal of Canterbury Cathedral—a world view that respects diversity and embraces everything is portrayed.

Other volumes in the series are scheduled to be published one after another over the next one to two years. On behalf of the series guide, "Sekayomu Cat," I highly recommend it.