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Middle english chaucer canterbury tales
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Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales embodies Middle Age ideas while incorporating his own values. He conveys these ideas and values by creating stories for twenty nine different men and women taking the religious pilgrimage to the Canterbury Cathedral. These characters include immoral clergymen, poor, yet virtuous farmers, an honorable knight and more. Chaucer’s value of honesty, humility, and hard work juxtaposes Middle age ideas such as religion, wealth and hierarchy.
Religion plays an important role in Medieval times, being a moral guide for all people to live by. In fact the characters of Canterbury tales are taking their religious pilgrimage to Canterbury Cathedral, where Thomas Becket was martyred. However, Chaucer notices the corruption in religion and many of his characters in the tales hold religious office. Most of these members, except the Parson, contravene their vows of chastity and morality, and live an immoral life that does not reflect the Church. He presents this in the Prologue when the narrator talks about the Pardoner; a Pardoner is someone who travels sellin...
In summation Chaucer’s “The Canterbury Tales” is a story that mocks the church, shows us class separation and uses a language which may today be lost to us. But it has stood the test of time and showed us a pilgrimage of the century that to this day is still a good read.
The Virtue of Men and Women in The Canterbury Tales People never change. In every town you will always be able to find the "rich guy," the "smart guy," the "thief," and the "chief." It has been that way since the first man was swindled out of his lunch. Throughout his life, Geoffrey Chaucer encountered every kind of person and brought them to life for us in "The Canterbury Tales," a collection of short stories written in the 1300's. There are tales of saints, tales of promiscuity, tales of fraud, and tales of love.
Back in the late 1300’s, Geoffrey Chaucer, a famous English poet, wrote a book called The Canterbury Tales. The Canterbury was about a man named Chaucer and a group of his close friends that were traveling to the city Canterbury and had time to kill so each person started multiple short stories and made a competition out of it. As a result as to who won the story telling competition, the rest of the people in the trip had to pay for one of their meals. Boring rides to the destination might be boring but not when Chaucer is around. The Canterbury Tales shows crime, punishment and justice medieval style. Through Chaucer’s various tales he demonstrates corruption, deception, and karma.
When looking back on Chaucer’s life, we can see that he lived in a time period where social rank determined what kind of life you lived. However in Chaucer’s eyes, he didn’t rank characters on wealth but based on their moral values on life. In The Canterbury Tales, Chaucer displays many of his beliefs on firm faith in God, the virtue of charity, giving benefit of the doubt, and how self-righteousness is sinful. Without these moral beliefs given to us, how would mankind use these principles to gain equality in the world? Chaucer wants us as readers to take in the most important principle of looking at both aspects of a person’s personality. Without looking at the other half of that person’s personality, you won’t know what kind of person he or she truly is. That is Chaucer’s true message in writing The Canterbury Tales.
The structure Geoffrey Chaucer chose for his masterpiece, The Canterbury Tales, of utilizing a melange of narrative voices to tell separate tales allows him to explore and comment on subjects in a multitude of ways. Because of this structure of separate tales, the reader must regard as extremely significant when tales structurally overlap, for while the reader may find it difficult to render an accurate interpretation through one tale, comparing tales enables him to lessen the ambiguity of Chaucer’s meaning. The Clerk’s Tale and The Merchant’s Tale both take on the institution of marriage, but comment on it in entirely different manner, but both contain an indictment of patriarchal narcissism and conceit.
Chaucer’s book The Canterbury Tales presents a frame story written at the end of the 14th century. It narrates the story of a group of pilgrims who participate in a story-telling contest that they made up to entertain each other while they travel to the shrine of Saint Thomas Becket at Canterbury Cathedral. Because of this, some of the tales become particularly attractive for they are written within a frame of parody which, as a style that mocks genre, is usually achieved by the deliberate exaggeration of some aspects of it for comic effect. Chaucer uses parody to highlight some aspects of the medieval society that presented in an exaggerated manner, not only do they amuse the readers, but also makes them reflect on them. He uses the individual parody of each tale to create a satirical book in which the behaviours of its characters paint an ironic and critical portrait of the English society at that time. Thus, the tales turn satirical, ironic, earthy, bawdy, and comical. When analysing the Knight’s and the Miller’s tale, one can realise how Chaucer mocks the courtly love convention, and other social codes of behaviour typical of the medieval times.
The Age of Chaucer was an age of unrest and decay in all the fields of life. The corruption and decay was particularly reflected in the Christian Church of that age which gave rise to many satirical writers like Chaucer, Gower and Langland. Geoffrey Chaucer who was a representative writer of the age portrayed with crisp laconic vividness the materialism and avarice of the clergy as well as the moral laxity and luxury of the laity. His `Canterbury Tales' can be called an estates satire, in which the people belonging to the different layers of the class are satirized. As Chaucer himself belonged to the middle class and therefore he has chosen for his theme the portraits of people from the upper middle class and downwards. He has not chosen the very rich or the very poor as they could not be represented with realism as pilgrims on the way to the shrine of Thomas `a Beckett in Canterbury.
The moral compass of mankind has always piqued the interest of authors. The Middle Ages was a time of immoral behavior, corrupt religious officials, and disregard of marital vows. Geoffrey Chaucer used The Canterbury Tales to explore his personal views of this dark time. In particular, he crafted “The Wife of Bath’s Tale,” “The Prioress’s Tale,” and “The Shipman’s Tale” to portray the tainted society, using women in all of them to bring forth his views. In The Canterbury Tales, Chaucer depicts women as immodest and conniving beings to suggest the moral corruption of the Middle Ages.
The Canterbury Tales is a literary masterpiece in which the brilliant author Geoffrey Chaucer sought out to accomplish various goals. Chaucer wrote his tales during the late 1300’s. This puts him right at the beginning of the decline of the Middle Ages. Historically, we know that a middle class was just starting to take shape at this time, due to the emerging commerce industry. Chaucer was able to see the importance and future success of the middle class, and wrote his work with them in mind. Knowing that the middle class was not interested in lofty philosophical literature, Chaucer wrote his work as an extremely comical and entertaining piece that would be more interesting to his audience. Also, Chaucer tried to reach the middle class by writing The Canterbury Tales in English, the language of the middle class rather than French, the language of the educated upper class. The most impressive aspect of Chaucer’s writing is how he incorporated into his piece some of his own controversial views of society, but yet kept it very entertaining and light on the surface level. One of the most prevalent of these ideas was his view that certain aspects of the church had become corrupt. This idea sharply contrasted previous Middle Age thought, which excepted the church’s absolute power and goodness unquestionably. He used corrupt church officials in his tales to illustrate to his audience that certain aspects of the church needed to be reformed. The most intriguing of these characters was the Pardoner. Chaucer’s satirical account of the Pardoner is written in a very matter-of-fact manner that made it even more unsettling with his audience. Chaucer uses his straightforwardness regarding the hypocrisy of the Pardoner, suggestive physiognomy of the character, and an interesting scene at the conclusion of the Pardoner’s Tale to inculcate his views of the church to his audience. The way that Chaucer used these literary devices to subtly make his views known to an audience while hooking them with entertainment, shows that Chaucer was truly a literary genius.
The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer, (written c. 1387), is a richly varied compilation of fictional stories as told by a group of twenty-nine persons involved in a religious pilgrimage to Canterbury, England during the fourteenth century. This journey is to take those travelers who desire religious catharsis to the shrine of the holy martyr St. Thomas a Becket of Canterbury. The device of a springtime pilgrimage provided Chaucer with a diverse range of characters and experiences, with him being both a narrator and an observer. Written in Middle English, each tale depicts parables from each traveler.
Chaucer identifies a pardoner as his main character for the story and utilizes the situational and verbal irony found in the pardoner’s interactions and deplorable personality to demonstrate his belief in the corruption of the Roman Catholic Church during this time. Chaucer first begins his sly jab at the Church’s motives through the description of the Pardoner’s physical appearance and attitude in his “Canterbury Tales.” Chaucer uses the Pardoner as a representation of the Church as a whole, and by describing the Pardoner and his defects, is able to show what he thinks of the Roman Catholic Church. All people present in the “Canterbury Tales” must tell a tale as a part of a story-telling contest, and the pilgrim Chaucer, the character in the story Chaucer uses to portray himself, writes down the tales as they are told, as well as the story teller. The description of the Pardoner hints at the relationship and similarity between the Pardoner and the Church as a whole, as well as marks the beginning of the irony to be observed throughout the “Pardoner’s Prologue and Tale.”
The Canterbury Tales is a very popular and well known set of stories, written by Geoffrey Chaucer. This collection of stories is great entertainment and some even provide very good moral lessons; most of these stories show the contempt Chaucer had for the Church of England which had control at the time over most of England. Chaucer’s bias towards the corruption of the Church is best demonstrated in the Pardoner’s Prologue, in contradiction with the Parson’s Tale, and the level of power within the Church structure. These are two of the stories of the many that are in The Canterbury Tales. Chaucer uses the Pardoner as a high level leader who is corrupt and yet enables him to convert the sinners even if he does it for personal gain. While the Parson is of lower standing in the Church, he is not corrupt, and gives the message to the pilgrims so that they might be forgiven.
The Canterbury Tales is a great contemplation of stories, that display humorous and ironic examples of medieval life, which imitate moral and ethical problems in history and even those presented today. Chaucer owed a great deal to the authors who produced these works before his time. Chaucer tweaked their materials, gave them new meanings and revealed unscathed truths, thus providing fresh ideas to his readers. Chaucer's main goal for these tales was to create settings in which people can relate, to portray lessons and the irony of human existence.
Two of the greatest masters of British literature, Shakespeare and Chaucer, tended to look to the classics when searching for inspiration. A lesser-known example of this lies in an ancient tale from Greece about two star-crossed lovers. There are many variations on the names of these lovers, but for the purpose of solidarity, they shall henceforth be referred to as “Troilus and Criseyde” for Chaucer and “Troilus and Cressida” for Shakespeare. Chaucer’s “Troilus and Criseyde” offers up a classic tale of love that is doomed, whereas Shakespeare’s “Troilus and Cressida” is not only tragic but also biting in its judgment and representation of characters. This difference may be due to the differences in time periods for the two authors, or their own personal dispositions, but there can be no denying the many deviations from Chaucer’s work that Shakespeare employs. Shakespeare’s work, by making the characters and situations more relatable, builds upon Chaucer’s original work, rather than improving it or shattering it.
The Church is the first institution that Chaucer attacks using satire in The Canterbury Tales. Chaucer wants to attack the church’s hypocrisy. Chaucer decides to create the character of the pardoner to prove his point. Cawthorne conveys, “His Canterbury Tales collects together 24 narratives with a General Prologue and an epilogue or Retraction.” Chaucer describes the character before telling their tale. The Pardoner is a man who steals from the poor. Chaucer says on page 127 line 77, “For though I am a wholly vicious man don’t think I can’t tell moral tales.” The pardoner knows what he does is wrong, but he continues to do it anyway.