Which Chaucer book does the title The Handmaid's Tale echo?

The title The Handmaid’s Tale echoes Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales.

Margaret Atwood’s title deliberately recalls Chaucer’s structure, in which a group of travelers tells connected stories. The wording also resembles individual Chaucer titles such as “The Merchant’s Tale” and “The Parson’s Tale.” In Atwood’s novel, the phrase suggests that the story is being preserved as a narrated account by a particular handmaid rather than presented as an impersonal historical record.

The 1985 novel is set in the Republic of Gilead, a totalitarian theocracy that has replaced the United States. Its narrator, Offred, is forced into reproductive servitude as a handmaid. The title therefore combines a medieval literary echo with the idea of testimony: one woman’s account survives to be heard and interpreted later.

Readers sometimes choose The Decameron because it is also a famous collection of framed stories, or Dante’s Divine Comedy and Milton’s Paradise Lost because they are major canonical works. However, those books are not the source of Atwood’s title. The direct literary reference is Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales, while the singular “Tale” also emphasizes Offred’s individual voice.