When Kittredge first wrote about the issue of marriage in the Canterbury Tales he referred to a ‘Marriage Chapter’ in the larger ‘Human Drama’, by means of these simple phrases associating the Tales in formal terms with both the novel and Dante's Divine Comedy. When he later expanded on these views in his famous lectures on Chaucer, the ‘Marriage Group’, as he now always called it, was presented as if it were fully substantiated by the fragments of the Tales when placed in what we now usually call Ellesmere order: in this account, the appearance of the Wife of Bath's Prologu;starts the debate’ and the tales that follow in fragments IV and V are ‘occasioned’ by her remarks. Such questionable textual presumptions, coupled with Kittredge's old-fashioned confidence that marriage is not usefully discussed by ‘theorists’, might seem to bring Kittredge's entire discussion into disrepute, and yet his concerns also precisely anticipated the strong sense in any number of important recent studies that issues of gender and sexuality are central to the Tales as a whole. The idea of a ‘Marriage Group’ has also proved helpful to the least old-fashioned of such approaches, as, for example, where queer readings have demonstrated that Kittredge's ‘argument … gains even greater purchase’ when the Friar's and the Summoner's tales are shown to be about marriage (‘same sex contracts’) too.