Chaucer - Helpful Websites

A lot of people seem to think they know a lot about the middle ages. Please use these sites. There is much good openly available information. Note that some of these lead you back to copyrighted sources that you can find via the Library's electronic databases.

Chaucer and his Time

The Geoffrey Chaucer Page at Harvard should be your first go-to site; it includes scads of information, tutorials, introductions, and links relevant to Chaucer studies which are aimed primarily for student researchers. This site also gives inter-linear translations: please feel free to take advantage of these as you learn to read on your own.
The second is your textbook, the Norton Chaucer. You will have received an access code with the hard copy of the textbook. Among other help, you will be able to hear the tales out loud.
The New Chaucer Society, which includes information and a wonderful index of on-line resources for Chaucer studies, including a bibliography.
The Open Access Companion to the Canterbury Tales includes a series of chapters on Tales and general introductions to Chaucer's language and contemporary issues.
Map of Chaucer's London and the Pilgrimage to Canterbury is a project I have compiled with a list of places mentioned in the Tales along with an array of other locations in London and Canterbury.
Medieval London, the product of a class at Fordham, describes locations around the city, many of which can help to understand Chaucer's time there.
A Chaucerian Cookery: everything you ever wanted to know about food in later medieval England, including recipes and a discussion of food in the Canterbury Tales. Especially good if you like late 1990s webpage design.

Medieval Literature and Culture

The Internet Medieval Sourcebook is a great collection of primary and secondary source texts. This section specifically on Late Medieval States and Society pertains especially to Chaucer's period, as does the section on Historical documents about later Medieval England.
The Global Medieval Sourcebook from Stanford includes translations of medieval texts from all over the world.
My timeline of Middle English Literature gives an overview of the period, and includes links to more sources on the web.

On-Line Texts and Concordances

Chaucer:

Of course, your textbook, the Norton Chaucer.
Here is the Riverside Chaucer on-line from UVa. This has been for decades the standard edition of Chaucer's works.
The New Chaucer Society includes a page of Resources with links to a number of on-line texts.
The Hengwrt manuscript contains one of the earliest versions of the Canterbury Tales. The Ellesmere Manuscript is another. You can see more images from the Ellesmere here.
For translations, please use this site:
The Texts and Translations page on the Chaucer Harvard Website includes inter-linear versions of all of the Canterbury Tales: this is a huge help for learning!

Chaucer and Contemporaries:

The Lollard Society Website, on not only the medieval heresy which developed during Chaucer's life, but also later medieval popular religious studies in general.
The Database of Middle English Romance includes searchable versions of dozens of texts.
The Glossarial Database of Middle English will let you look up the occurences of specific words in texts by Chaucer and his contemporary John Gower.
The Corpus of Middle English Verse and Prose from Michigan allows similar searches for a much wider range of texts.
TEAMS Middle English texts on-line. This includes a wide variety of texts, including an anthology of Breton Lays, dream visions and complaints in the Chaucerian Style, and are several apocryphal Fifteenth Century Additions and Continuations to the Canterbury Tales.
The Middle English Dictionary is for word searches of ME texts, including Chaucer.

Chaucer Out Loud

The Harvard Chaucer site also includes a number of introductory lessons: https://chaucer.fas.harvard.edu/lesson-1-0

Here are sites with audio files:

Murray McGillivray reads lines 1-541 of the General Prologue: https://vimeo.com/56602418
Julia Bolton Holloway's Umilta.net includes recordings of the Tales and others of Chaucer's works.
Alan Baragona, The Criyng and the Soun: Chaucer Audio Files: https://alanbaragona.wordpress.com/the-criyng-and-the-soun/ (hover over the link, click on it, and then scroll down to play it)
The Teams Middle English site contains audio files of selections from John Gower's works.

On-Line Bibliographies

You have access to JSTOR and other databases via Bailey Library.
MESA is an on-line index to search for authoritative sources in medieval studies, both open-source and inside of subscription databases.
The Chaucer Bibliography On-line is the single best non-subscription bibliographical resource on Chaucer. You can use the "expert keyword" function to search for articles on a specific tale or issue. It is also annotated. Its references begin in about 1975.
The Geoffrey Chaucer Page at Harvard, a first go-to site, includes a page with several annotated bibliographies.
There are two journals devoted to the study of Chaucer, his contemporaries, and his period:
One is the Chaucer Review. You can access all of its articles via JSTOR. Here is an on-line and annotated index of articles, covering its first thirty years (up to 1997).
The other, published by the New Chaucer Society, is Studies in the Age of Chaucer.