"Chaucer's Retraction" is the final section of The Canterbury Tales. It is written as an apology, in which Geoffrey Chaucer asks for forgiveness for the vulgar and unworthy parts of his past works, and seeks absolution for his sins.
It is not clear whether this declaration of remorse on Chaucer's part was intended as sincere or ironic. It is not even certain if the retraction was an integral part of the Canterbury Tales or if it was the equivalent of a deathbed confession which later was attached to the Canterbury Tales, his most popular work. It appears in many of the best manuscripts dating from just a decade or two after Chaucer's death, including the Harleian and Ellesmere; however, it is absent from the Hengwrt manuscript.
Roper (2000) postulates that the Retraction is Chaucer's authentic confession, an "opportunity [...] to learn the lesson he taught others in the Parson's Tale." The narrative voice, at first indistinguishable from the Parson's own (he refers to "this little treatise," a term more applicable to the Parson's Tale than to the Canterbury Tales as a whole), changes to Chaucer's own voice as he begins to apologize for his lack of literary skill (his "uncunning"); but then changes again to an apology for his "inditing of worldly vanities" in fiction. Roper writes: "The speech itself has driven him to a deeper understanding of his failings, creating greater shame, contrition, and a more significant self-examination. [...F]ar from simply running from his fiction in a hasty and belated attempt to save his soul, he uses the Parson's Tale and Retraction to question the very act of fiction-making[.]"
The Retraction refers to Chaucer's "Book of the Lion." It is the only place Chaucer himself mentions this otherwise unknown work, though it is also mentioned in the prologue to Lydgate's The Fall of Princes. This "Book of the Lion" is usually supposed to have been a redaction of Guillaume de Machaut's Dit du Lyon (1342).