Pop quiz! “The Canterbury Tales” are:

A) Geoffrey Chaucer’s collection of verse following a group of pilgrims in a contest to tell the best story;

B) Something you were supposed to have read in high school but never got around to;

C) the first known account of a rap battle

While A is definitely true, and B might be, Baba Brinkman believes whole-heartedly in the validity of theory C.

“There’s such an uncanny similarity, thinking about it. I don’t think that Chaucer anticipated rap. I don’t know if he would have gotten it,” says Brinkman, perhaps the world’s first Canadian science and literature-based rapper/playwright/performance artist.

“But ‘Canterbury Tales’ is about convergent cultural forces, an underclass without opportunity for social advancement. The feudal system of his time didn’t advocate upward mobility, but he was advocating that through (his work). He wanted to let the audience decide (who was best), to forget about rank, like in hip-hop.”

Or, as Brinkman puts in, in “lit-hop,” a style he’s developed over a decade, spreading the word about everything from evolution to “Beowulf” to “The Canterbury Tales” to intrigued audiences, like those he expects to find at the Kravis Center tonight and Saturday, where he performs as part of the P.E.A.K. (Provocative Entertainment At Kravis) series.

Despite the pithy name, there’s no corniness to Brinkman’s flow. His subject matter might be unconventional, but his rhyming and cleverness is legit. The Associated Press said that his “love of classic hip-hop comes through in his undeniably fluid technique and slick use of samples by A Tribe Called Quest and Big Pun, among others. What sets him apart from other rappers is the acutely academic nature of his rhymes.”

The son of a member of Canadian Parliament and the owner of a reforestation company, Brinkman was first interested in science, getting a degree in biology with an interest in evolutionary theory. But he also had a deep love of words, of the poetry of William Shakespeare, Chaucer and John Donne. Those seemingly divergent loves merged into his hip-hop re-working of “The Canterbury Tales,” and then moved from there.

Like many rappers, Brinkman’s rhymes contain some controversial themes, but you won’t find a lot of references to hos, gun violence or explicit sex. Rather, the controversy in “The Rap Guide To Evolution” or “Creationist Cousins” is in his clever, catchy but no-nonsense embrace of evolutionary science over creationist theory. And in “I’m Am African,” he happily explains evidence that the human race indeed originated in Africa, potentially angering traditional Afrocentrism and people who’d rather not claim Africa as their homeland.

“I think that being controversial is something I aspire to. It’s a different kind of shock value, an intellectual provocation,” he explains. “For some people, Afrocentrism is holy ground. I’m not denying the political potency of the movement, and the valid point that Afrocentrism unites all black people. But it really unites all people. All human beings. I did a performance for 500 high school students in northern Massachusetts, which was (largely) a white audience, and they’re screaming ‘I’m An African’ at the top of their lungs. It was cathartic.”

In addition to their provocative nature, Brinkman’s rhymes prove a theory that anyone who sings the Preamble to the U.S. Constitution or “a noun is a person, place or thing” like “Schoolhouse Rock” taught them has known for years - facts are catchier when they’re musical.

“I do a lot of call and response to help people remember stuff. It’s (in a competition) for mental space. I point that out to teachers all the time. The kids know all the lyrics to all these songs, but (literary and science themes) aren’t catching their interest in the same way. But if you can get them to rap along with the lines, you can link it up to parts of the curriculum. In our time, we’ve chosen rap as a form for potent and relevant information, as a channel for linguistic creativity.”

Even if Chaucer couldn’t have imagined his words being broken down to a hip-hop beat, he may at least have appreciated the subversiveness of it.