Introduction to Chaucer's Canterbury Tales

Introduction to Chaucer's Canterbury Tales

The Prologue

• 27 characters and the Narrator (Chaucer)
• Traveling to Canterbury
• The host, Harry Bailey, asks each character to tell two stories about their lives on the way to Canterbury and two on the way back.
• The winner earns a meal at Bailey's house.

Pilgrimage

Geoffrey Chaucer

• So what's a pilgrimage?
• It's a journey from one place to another. It is a journey that is taken for someone to seek either moral or spiritual growth.
• They're taking a pilgrimage to Canterbury to worship the relic of Saint Thomas Beckett.
• Beckett engaged in conflict with Henry II of England over the rights and privileges of the Church and was murdered by followers of the king in Canterbury Cathedral. Word of his murder soon got out and his statue became a place of worship.
• In fact, traveling to the birth or death place of a founder or saint was very common during the Middle Ages.

• Known as "The Father of English Literature"
• Born around 1343 and died in 1400
• Worked as a public servant and also for the royal family
• Published the Canterbury Tales in 1475
• Radical!
• When he wrote the Canterbury Tales, he wrote them in English, which sparked controversy.

Social Classes Continued

• Your social class essentially defined who you were.
• Chaucer utilizes this by describing the characters in the prologue. For example:
• The Knight portrays a noble upperclassman, the Miller a peasant/tradesman, the Wife of Bath representing the women middle class, and the Pardoner portraying the Clergyman.
• Classes are expanding during this time, especially merchants and tradesmen.

Social Classes

Satire

Romance

The use of humor, irony, exaggeration, or ridicule to expose and criticize people's stupidity or vices, particularly in the context of contemporary politics and other topical issues.

"the crude satire seems to be directed at the fashionable protest singers of the time"

The romance, a tale about knights and ladies incorporating courtly love themes, was a popular literary genre in fourteenth-century literature. The genre included tales of knights rescuing maidens, embarking on quests, and forming bonds with other knights and rulers (kings and queens). In particular, the romances about King Arthur, his queen, Guinevere, and his society of “knights of the round table” were very popular in England. In The Canterbury Tales, the Knight’s Tale incorporates romantic elements in an ancient classical setting, which is a somewhat unusual time and place to set a romance. The Wife of Bath’s Tale is framed by Arthurian romance, with an unnamed knight of the round table as its unlikely hero, but the tale itself becomes a proto-feminist’s moral instruction for domestic behavior. The Miller’s Tale ridicules the traditional elements of romance by transforming the love between a young wooer and a willing maiden into a boisterous and violent romp.

• Monarch (Highest)
• Had the most power and was considered a symbol of God
• Nobility
• Rich members of the Catholic church
• Gentry
• Males.
• Generally wealthy
• Landowners
• Merchants
• Shop or trade owners
• Moderately wealthy
• Very popular
• Yeomen/Farmer
• Owned land
• Provided for themselves
• Made money by selling harvest
• Peasants/Laborers
• Very poor
• Did petty work/jobs for little money
• Indigents (Lowest)
• No work or land
• Essentially full time beggars

The Corruption of the Church

By the late fourteenth century, the Catholic Church, which governed England, Ireland, and the entire continent of Europe, had become extremely wealthy. The cathedrals that grew up around shrines to saints’ relics were incredibly expensive to build, and the amount of gold that went into decorating them and equipping them with candlesticks and reliquaries (boxes to hold relics that were more jewel-encrusted than kings’ crowns) surpassed the riches in the nobles’ coffers. In a century of disease, plague, famine, and scarce labor, the sight of a church ornamented with unused gold seemed unfair to some people, and the Church’s preaching against greed suddenly seemed hypocritical, considering its great displays of material wealth. Distaste for the excesses of the Church triggered stories and anecdotes about greedy, irreligious churchmen who accepted bribes, bribed others, and indulged themselves sensually and gastronomically, while ignoring the poor famished peasants begging at their doors.

Irony

History

The use of words to express something other than and especially the opposite of the literal meaning. Whenever a person says something or does something that departs from what they (or we) expect them to say or do.

• Written during a time of great Historical Hardships in the 15th Century.
• Western Schism (Catholic church splits)
• The Black Death
• Reduces world population by an estimated 450 MILLION people
• Social classes
• The stories are meant to make fun of the classes. Both within the context of the stories and within those telling them.

The Pervasiveness of Courtly Love

The phrase “courtly love” refers to a set of ideas about love that was enormously influential on the literature and culture of the Middle Ages. Beginning with the Troubadour poets of southern France in the eleventh century, poets throughout Europe promoted the notions that true love only exists outside of marriage; that true love may be idealized and spiritual, and may exist without ever being physically consummated; and that a man becomes the servant of the lady he loves.

Together with these basic premises, courtly love encompassed a number of minor motifs. One of these is the idea that love is a torment or a disease, and that when a man is in love he cannot sleep or eat, and therefore he undergoes physical changes, sometimes to the point of becoming unrecognizable. Although very few people’s lives resembled the courtly love ideal in any way, these themes and motifs were extremely popular and widespread in medieval and Renaissance literature and culture. They were particularly popular in the literature and culture that were part of royal and noble courts.