Or can they? The Canterbury Tales are written in a society that, to some extent, believed you could judge a book by its cover – that the physical characteristics, or the mere category of a person, might reveal something about what was on the inside. In some ways, the pilgrims' portraits in The Canterbury Tales confirm the common stereotypes: the lower-class person is extremely physical, the consummate wife is lustful. But, as the Tales progress, these people have the chance to speak for themselves. What happens then isn't exactly a contradiction of the stereotypes about them, but it isn't exactly a confirmation of them, either. As so often happens when you really get to know someone, what you find out in The Canterbury Tales is that people, even the ones we think we have figured out, are never one-dimensional and always worth getting to know better.