No flatulence, no sex in trees: Victorian children’s sanitised Chaucer to go on display

A new exhibition in Oxford charts the different ways the great Medieval poet has been interpreted by readers down the centuries

Husbands and fathers are never humiliated in these copies of The Canterbury Tales and treachery never triumphs. No one ever has sex in a tree or accidentally kisses someone else's hairy bottom - and anyone who expects to read about adultery and farting at friars will be offered moral tales celebrating martyrdom and marital obedience instead.

Children in the 19th century were routinely presented with sanitised Victorian versions of Geoffrey Chaucer's medieval masterpiece, and copies of these are now to go on public display for the first time at the Bodleian Library in Oxford.