This chapter explores the varying meanings and importance of form in the Canterbury Tales. Overall, the focus is on Chaucer’s understanding of form as integral to interpretation. The opening section contextualizes Chaucer’s approach to form within later medieval poetics, contrasting ideas of formal perfection and imperfection in the work of Dante and the Pearl-poet with Chaucer’s responsive and unpredictable forms. The Canterbury Tales is compared with tale-collections by Gower and Boccaccio, and with Chaucer’s other tale-collections – the ‘Monk’s Tale’ and the Legend of Good Women. The chapter explores the interplay and juxtaposition of forms both across the Tales, and within an individual tale (The Nun’s Priest’s Tale). Moving to a micro-level, it analyses one specific form – rhyme royal – by close-reading several stanzas from The Man of Law’s Tale. Finally it argues that Chaucer problematizes the conventional allegorical idea of seeing through form to reach meaning, suggesting instead that form and content cannot be divided. Meaning is inherent in Chaucer’s complex, kinetic, and, above all, multiple forms.

No Middle English writer takes up as many different moral genres as Chaucer; the Canterbury Tales explores saints’ Life, pastoral treatise, fürstenspiegel, de casibus tragedy, Marian miracle, and exemplum-style tales oriented toward civic, spiritual, and domestic uses. That his work, so often associated in modern criticism and in the contemporary classroom with a genially ironic outlook, also appears to correspond with late medieval tastes in serious and devotional reading has tended to present something of a problem. This chapter explores the ways in which critical disagreements about the significance of the moral and religious tales can be a proxy for questions about alterity, that is, the problem we inevitably face when we read the works of the past. What we think about “moral Chaucer” will often enough be a reflection of what we think about “medieval Chaucer” and about our relationship with a middle ages whose affective and aesthetic attractions very often exceed the ethical appeal of its devotional commitments and conventions.