How The Canterbury Tales drew on Metamorphoses
A documented line of influence: Geoffrey Chaucer demonstrably engaged Ovid’s work. The commentary below is Gröblé’s, verbatim from each work’s page.
The source
Metamorphoses
Ovid · 8
Ancient RomeThe influenced
The Canterbury Tales
Geoffrey Chaucer · c. 1400
MedievalRelevance
7/10
On The Canterbury Tales’s page
- Two of the Tales are Ovid wearing English dress — the Manciple's Tale retells Ovid's Phoebus and the crow, and the Wife of Bath's Tale reworks his Midas
- Chaucer treated the Metamorphoses as a working library of plots; reading it first lets you catch exactly what he kept and what he changed
- The clearest way to see Chaucer the magpie at work, borrowing from the great Roman storehouse of myth
On Metamorphoses’s page
- Ovid was Chaucer's quarry — the Tales mine the Metamorphoses at the level of named, lifted plots
- Ovid's tale of Phoebus and the crow becomes Chaucer's Manciple's Tale; the Midas story is reworked into the Wife of Bath's Tale
- The Metamorphoses is the storehouse the medieval English poet kept coming back to for ready-made myth