The precise, unerring, delicately emphatic characterizations for which "The Canterbury Tales" is so famous are no more extraordinary than Chaucer's utter mastery of English rhythms and his effortless versification. Ranging from animal fables to miniature epics of courtly love and savagely hilarious comedies of sexual comeuppance, these stories told by pilgrims on the way to the shrine of Thomas a Becket in Canterbury reveal a teeming, vital fourteenth-century English society on the verge of its Renaissance.