Ever since William Caxton printed his editions of The Canterbury Tales at the end of the fifteenth century, Chaucer's masterpiece has been a bestseller and it has now sold more copies than any other work in English literature except the Bible. This new edition takes the complete text of Nevill Coghill's long-established translation and illustrates it from a wealth of medieval illuminations, manuscripts and woodcuts that have been carefully researched all over Europe and North America. The text is immeasurably enriched by the superb illustrations, which set the Tales in their late medieval context. Chaucer expected his readers to be familiar with a whole range of images, ideas and codes of behaviour, from the wheel of fortune and the gods of pagan mythology to the elaborate rituals dictated by the cult of courtly love and chivalry. His stories are full of allusions and symbols and for this reason it is possible to illustrate them from a variety of historical sources, and for the captions that accompany them to shed further light on the text. The result is a magnificent new edition, both sumptuous and scholarly.