Chaucer’s Canterbury Comedies



Location of Seminar: Canterbury, England
Dates: 27 June – 5 August 2005
Seminar Director: Peter G. Beidler
Lehigh University


Last revised on December 10, 2004

Welcome to Canterbury!

Thanks so much for your interest in the six-week seminar for school teachers on Chaucer’s Canterbury Comedies to be held “on location” in Canterbury, England, from June 27 to August 5, 2005. The seminar is sponsored by Lehigh University with support from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH). It will be hosted at the University of Kent, just up the hill from the medieval town of Canterbury with its towering cathedral. (For a map of Canterbury, click here.) While all school teachers are welcome to apply, the seminar will be particularly useful to high school teachers whose regular course load includes survey courses in the literature of early Britain.

1. The Seminar

The seminar will concentrate on the Canterbury comedies that students typically find to be the most startling and enjoyable, and that are included in many anthologies of British literature: the Miller’s Tale, the Reeve’s Tale, the Shipman’s Tale, and the Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale. I will assume no previous knowledge of Chaucer or his language.

My central goal in the seminar is to provide information, background studies, source materials, some theoretical orientation, training in Chaucerian Middle English, and travel opportunities so that you will be able to teach these famous Chaucerian works with a greater depth of knowledge and renewed pedagogical confidence and enthusiasm. We will study the cultural history behind the various tales, earlier continental stories with similar plots and motifs, the language in which Chaucer wrote the tales, the physical settings of the tales, and the pilgrimage on which the individual pilgrims told their tales.

Having the seminar in Canterbury, within sight of the very cathedral in which Thomas Becket was murdered and to which Chaucer’s Canterbury pilgrims traveled to pay him homage, will give you easy access to medieval sites and ample opportunity to acquire slides and other materials that you will be able to make use of in your classes back home.

As a participant you will receive a stipend of $4200, from which you will pay your own travel and living expenses at the University of Kent. (Please see the Questions and Answers section, for more details on these monetary matters, including the taxability of the stipend.)

The communal work of the seminar will take place largely in two three-hour formal group meetings each week, from 9 AM to noon on Tuesday and Thursday. There will be a lot of reading to prepare for these meetings. Typically we will read background works—mostly short readings in medieval history and non-Chaucerian comic tales—for Tuesday, and a Chaucerian tale for Thursday. For these readings, books and course packets will be provided free of charge to the participants.

We will spend some time each week learning and practicing our reading aloud of Middle English, and I will set time aside every Wednesday afternoon for individual and group assistance with the language of the Chaucerian tale for the following day. We will also spend time together on Friday morning or afternoon for group visits to specific locations in or near Canterbury (and possibly London), for special lectures or presentations by local faculty, or for participant-guided sessions on pedagogy.

Partway through the seminar I hope to schedule an overnight trip to Cambridge, where we will hear some lectures and visit the site of one of Chaucer’s comedies. In addition to the communal activities, I will schedule at least two individual meetings with each of you during the six-week period to discuss the individual projects you will be working on. I will be living in Tyler Court (see below) with the rest of you, and will be readily available for consultations.

2. Rationale

Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales is an absolutely fundamental work in the canon of British literature. Most teachers of British literature courses in high school are expected to teach some Chaucer, even though they may not feel confident about the subject matter. They may not have had the time or opportunity to study the Middle English language of, the literary and cultural backgrounds to, the history behind, or the settings of Chaucer’s tales. Some teachers have told me that Chaucer’s works seem forbiddingly old-fashioned, sandwiched as they so often are between the gory glories of Beowulf tearing the arm from a giant and the romantic glories of Shakespeare’s Romeo pining for his sweet Juliet. They find it tempting to rush through Chaucer’s tales, perhaps apologize for them, and then gallop on to the sixteenth century. By doing so, they and their students can unfortunately miss the early flowering of literature and culture in Chaucer’s fourteenth-century England.

The seminar is designed not only to help you to understand the sounds, styles, and meanings of Chaucerian comedies, but also to help you expand your knowledge of the history of the fourteenth century so that you can help your students to correct their misapprehensions about the period. Let’s face it: too many of our students either know nothing of the fourteenth century or else they come to us with skewed knowledge. They may think that British people were either serfs or the abusive lords of manors; that a monolithic Catholic church dominated human lives and kept people from having fun; that London was a quaint village; that women wore funny-looking clothes and either lived in nunneries praying for salvation or in castle keeps praying for a knight to rescue them; that business was conducted by means of barter rather than money; that kings ruled supreme; that Chaucer, living a century before Columbus set sail, thought the earth was flat; that he wrote in a strange form of English that is impossible for modern readers to understand or pronounce.

In our seminar we will challenge such stereotypes about the Middle Ages. We will learn that a rising, growing, and increasingly independent merchant class rarely went near either serfs or lords; that far from being monolithic, the Catholic church was itself deeply divided and even, during most of Chaucer’s lifetime, had two rival popes, one in Avignon, France, and one in Rome; that the church did not forbid fun, and that, on the contrary, clergymen provided the medieval writers with one of their most consistent sources of humor, both by sponsoring plays and by providing storytellers with clerical objects of satire; that London, while far more than a quaint medieval village, was hit with a bubonic plague of such virulence that perhaps half of its occupants died during Chaucer’s youth; that Chaucer’s character the Wife of Bath did wear striking clothes but neither lived in a nunnery nor was taken out of a castle by any of her five husbands; that medieval business was varied and complex, and that it employed competing currencies; that kings ruled with increasing uncertainty and could generally survive only by sharing authority with barons, with a parliament of growing influence, and even with restive peasants; that Chaucer, who had written a complex treatise on the use of the astrolabe, knew the earth was round well before Columbus was born; and that he wrote not in a foreign language but in an English remarkably close to modern English, an English that with a little training and encouragement, modern readers can both pronounce and understand.

3. Conduct of the Seminar

Rather than do a lot of lecturing, I will arrange the readings and lead the discussions in such a way that the participants will be engaged on a daily basis in the work of the seminar. I will expect participants to do all of the reading so that we can have lively discussion of the various works we read and the issues we raise. In addition, I will expect each participant to lead discussion for at least fifteen minutes or so during the course of the six weeks.

The core focus of the seminar is on the literary, historical, and linguistic content of Chaucer’s comedies, rather than on how to teach them. Because I am always interested in finding new ways to teach old literature to fresh generations of students, however, I will encourage some discussion of practical issues of teaching Chaucerian comic tales to American school students: the nature and sounds of Chaucerian Middle English, to what extent to assign Chaucerian works in the original language, how to deal with matters of sexual and scatological content among hormone-popping young people, and what to do about worried parents and anxious administrators. We will need to talk about which tales to teach and how to teach Chaucerian comedy in such a way that American students learn to see beyond the humor (some of it raunchy) to the literary quality and cultural significance of the works of Geoffrey Chaucer, the writer whom most scholars place in importance second only to Shakespeare—whom he influenced—in the grand sweep of British literature.

I will encourage participants to work on brief and practical research or writing projects or teaching units to take back to their schools. I hope to collect these at the end of the seminar and make up binders or a website to file with the NEH and to share with the other participants in the seminar. I will give what help I can with these projects in the course of the seminar.

4. Some Special Highlights of the Seminar

5. Canterbury

One of the most exciting aspects of this seminar is its physical location in Canterbury, England. Parts of Canterbury were bombed by the Germans during World War II, but enough of the old city, its historic gates, its narrow cobbled streets, and its ancient dimensions remain so that participants in the seminar will have opportunities to explore and get a strong sense of the place. Canterbury still has remnants of the ancient Roman city that preceded the medieval English one, but it is also a thriving modern city with many attractions for twenty-first-century tourists, gourmands, and consumers. There is frequent bus service from the University of Kent to downtown, but participants in our seminar can easily take the 25-minute stroll down the hill through the campus footpath and the outskirts of the town to the city center. Canterbury is served by convenient train service to London (about a two-hour ride). A day-return ticket to London costs around £20 (around $40, depending on exchange rates).

6. Living Arrangements at the University of Kent

We will be designated as “visiting scholars” at the University of Kent, which has agreed to host the seminar and to provide housing for us at favorable group rates. The accommodations will be in a new residence hall called Tyler Court in en-suite single rooms (that is, single rooms each with private bath facilities) at £23 pounds per night, which in U.S. dollars comes to around $46. (Exchange rates, of course, fluctuate, so dollar equivalents are estimates.) That is a special group rate for us on which you would pay no VAT (Value Added Tax) because of the academic nature of our endeavor. The University provides bedding and towels and some cleaning. That rate is a “bed-and-breakfast” one that includes a daily breakfast in the nearby Rutherford Dining Hall. There are dining halls on campus for other meals to be paid for on a pay-as-you-go basis, and of course participants are free to buy their meals off-campus. Coin-operated laundry facilities are available in Tyler Court. Residential rooms are not wired for computer access to the internet, but for a nominal one-time fee of £10 ($20) for the six weeks, participants can access internet and e-mail accounts and use computing stations at any of several locations around the campus, one of them a 24-hour site.

Tyler Court is considered a “self-catering” hall because there are group kitchens in which residents can do some cooking for themselves. The University of Kent can also rent you a self-catering five-bedroom house a ten-minute walk away from the center of campus. The daily rate for a five-bedroom house (with a kitchen but only one bath) is £54, or around US $108, per night (depending on the then-current exchange rate). That does not include any breakfasts, though participants can purchase breakfasts in one of the residence halls if they like. Participants can perhaps arrange other housing in town on their own, but the rents would not be VAT-excluded, and the rates would most likely be higher than those at the University. Participants who do not stay with others in Tyler Court would miss out on some of the close camaraderie that our group will develop by living, studying, and eating in close proximity.

The University of Kent is a bustling modern university. Participants would have access to the library (though they may not sign books out), to computer facilities, and to a well-quipped fitness center. The attractive Gulbenkian Theatre on campus will have a summer program of plays, and there are drama and cinema theaters down in Canterbury, as well. For more information on these and other matters, please see the Questions and Answers linked to this web page.

7. The Seminar Director

I am a published scholar with a dozen books and more than a hundred articles to my name, but I centrally think of myself as a teacher. Nothing else matters in my professional life as much as what happens in the classroom among a community of learners. I have won a number of teaching awards at Lehigh University, as well as two national teaching awards. I was, for example, in 1983 named National Professor of the Year by the Carnegie Foundation and the Council for Advancement and Support of Education.

I think a lot about what it takes to be a good teacher and how I can improve my own teaching. I have spent almost all of my professional life with the English department at Lehigh University, though I have also taught for a year at Baylor University in Waco, Texas, and for another at Sichuan University in mainland China (as a Fulbright professor). Over the years I have been fortunate enough to be selected to participate in several NEH institutes and seminars, but this is my first stint as a director of one. I have enjoyed teaching your students at the university level, and now I look forward to learning from you about the difficulties and joys of teaching medieval literature to pre-college students.

On a more personal level, I am the proud father of four grown children and grandfather of seven growing ones. My wife Anne and I, with our four then-young children, spent a wonderful sabbatical year in Canterbury in the late 1980s. Canterbury has changed in the nearly two decades since then, but in most ways it is still very much the same. I am eager to return and to share some of its Chaucerian and medieval delights with those who take part in Chaucer’s Canterbury Comedies. Incidentally, my last name rhymes with “idler”—the “ei” pronounced like the “Ei” in Eisenhower. But you’ll be calling me Pete.

8. How to Apply

Important information about eligibility and procedures, checklists, and deadlines is included in Application, Instructions, and Cover Sheet on this web site. Your completed application must be postmarked no later than March 1, 2005, and should be addressed to me as follows:

Peter G. Beidler
Department of English
Lehigh University
35 Sayre Drive
Bethlehem, PA 18015

 Perhaps the most important part of the seminar application is the application essay that you submit as part of your application. This essay should include relevant personal and academic information: your reasons for applying to the seminar, your interest, both pedagogical and personal, in Chaucer’s Canterbury comic tales; your qualifications to do the work of the seminar and to make a contribution to it, and the relationship of the seminar to your teaching and other career objectives. Perhaps you can work into your essay information about how you would hope to engage with the subject matter of the seminar, about how eager and cooperative and uncomplaining and resilient and funny you are, and about what project you might want to work on (if any)—and do it all in the four double-space pages you are permitted. Please read very carefully the Application, Information, Instructions, and Cover Sheet linked to this web page. That document and the one-page cover sheet are provided by the NEH and apply to all seminars and institutes. It would be a good idea to put your last name and the page number on each page of your essay.

In the materials attached, there is a checklist of the materials you will need to send me as part of your application: a cover sheet, a fairly detailed resumé, and the application essay. Please send me three collated copies of these application materials. They must be postmarked no later than March 1, 2005. The two reference letters are sent separately and must reach me no later than a week after that deadline. Note that you are permitted to apply for only one NEH seminar or institute. There are lots of good choices this time.

I will arrange for a panel of teacher-scholars to read all of the applications and to help me select the fifteen participants. At least one person on the selection panel will be a secondary school teacher of English. Selected applicants will be notified by April 1, and will not long after that be issued checks for $4200, minus the cost (around $1800) for the six-week on-campus accommodation at the University of Kent.

If you have read this far, you probably have lots of questions. I think that you will find most of them answered on the linked Application Information, Instructions, and Cover Sheet and on the linked set of Questions and Answers. The first of those is official policy provided by the National Endowment for the Humanities. The second is my own attempt to anticipate some of your questions and to give my best answers to them. Should you be interested in applying for this seminar and have further questions, write to me at my e-address: pgb1@lehigh.edu, where the fourth character is the number 1, not the letter l. If that does not work, you may try to call me at my office (610) 758-4441, or at my home (610) 258-0119. I think, however, that you will find that your questions are answered in the documents attached to this web site.

Sincerely yours,


Peter G. Beidler

Back to Main Page

Questions and Answers