Modern Canterbury Stories

Students in the Advanced Placement English Literature and Composition class at Alliance High School faced a daunting assignment earlier this year: to write a modern version of Geoffrey Chaucer’s much-loved Canterbury Tales.

We decided as a group that our stories would be told by characters in the waiting room of a hospital. Students worked in groups to create characters for the prologue, and then worked individually to write stories (in verse) that those characters might tell.

The results can be found on the following pages. We sincerely hope you enjoy our efforts, and we hope that you might be inspired to read or re-read the original Canterbury Tales as a result. 

Christopher Schillig
AP English teacher
Alliance High School