Who wrote the Canterbury Tales?

• A. Geoffrey Chaucer
• B. Dante Alighieri
• C. William Shakespeare
• D. Leonardo da Vinci

Answer: (A)

Geoffrey Chaucer is the author of The Canterbury Tales. This landmark collection, written in late 14th-century Middle English, centers on a group of pilgrims telling stories as they travel to Canterbury. Chaucer is celebrated for elevating English as a language of major literature, moving away from Latin or French and showing how vernacular storytelling could be sophisticated and varied. Dante Alighieri wrote The Divine Comedy in Italian about a century earlier, Shakespeare belongs to the late 16th and early 17th centuries and is known for his plays, and Leonardo da Vinci was a Renaissance artist and thinker rather than the author of this work.