Abstract This article offers a new interpretation of the pilgrimage framework for Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. I argue that the Tales have an ironic relationship to books that bear them, one that confronts readers with the difference between their own experience and the author’s fictions. My case is empirical as well as literary: it relies on transnational taxonomies of multi-text codices, and overlooked physical evidence of fifteenth-century bookbinding techniques. I suggest that in their ordering of Chaucer’s text and in their various and dynamic forms, manuscripts of the Tales successfully instantiate Chaucer’s dynamic idea of his text, the complex conditions for pre-print book production, and the disaggregated forms of the medieval codex. The Tales are thus shaped as an answer to the question posted by my title—are The Canterbury Tales a book?—and to some of Chaucer’s broader questions, about experience, authority, and the limits to human modes of knowing.

中文翻译：

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坎特伯雷故事集是一本书吗？

摘要本文为乔uc的《坎特伯雷故事》中的朝圣框架提供了新的解释。我认为，故事与那些带有故事的书具有讽刺意味的关系，使读者面对的是他们自己的经历和作者的小说之间的差异。我的案例既有经验也有文学意义：它依赖于多文本抄本的跨国分类法，却忽略了15世纪装订技术的物理证据。我建议，按照乔uc的文本顺序和各种动态形式，《童话》的手稿成功地体现了乔text对文本的动态观念，印前书籍生产的复杂条件以及中世纪手抄本的分类形式。