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the divine comedy and paradise lost
John Milton and Paradise Lost
John Milton and Paradise Lost
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The Canterbury Tales, written by Geoffrey Chaucer, was written in the 14th Century during the Hundred Years War. Each of the characters was made to represent one of the 7 sins. In Paradise Lost, written by John Milton, every character has a direct connection to an earthly comfort. Both stories are written with the intent to teach its readers; however, Paradise Lost was written in in the 17th century, which means the writing style and the social standard on what the difference is between right and wrong, and how salvation is received is very different.
In the 14th century, war, and violence were prevalent. The Canterbury Tales were written during the Hundred Years War, when the Catholic Church was dealing with the Western schism, and “Against the darkest period of his life…” (Bloom 14). The story is centered on a group of thirty pilgrims who are traveling to the shrine of St. Thomas at Canterbury (Bloom 14). The pilgrims are all focused on a theme which is backed by the story’s underlying tone of religion.
The characters are on a pilgrimage which is a clear indicator that the text is of religious genre. The Catholic Church, at the time, was losing many followers due to the Black Death and their lack of faith in the importance of the church. The Summoner and the Pardoner, who both represent the Catholic Church, are both described as greedy, corrupt, and abusive. This is a direct correlation to how Chaucer and many others felt about the Catholic Church during this period. The Monk and the Prioress are not described as being corrupt like the Summoner and the Pardoner; however they are described as falling short of what is considered ideal for people of their position. They both are described as being in a depressed state. Also bot...
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... Eve are able to feel penitent and pray for forgiveness” (Nutt 225). Milton is also very concerned with the correct process of how man is saved. “…how, through the divine gift of grace, mankind can seek salvation” (Nutt 66).
Both plays argue their ideas and opinions about salvation, the hypocrisy of the church and the hypocritical, selfish gains, masked by ‘pious’ work by man, in The Canterbury Tales. The difference in time displays the level of depth that each author can go into challenging the norm and arguing their ideas. In Paradise Lost it is obvious that temptation can come in very attractive forms but only by God’s grace, are we saved. Both authors agree that mankind is flawed and but the knowledge of said shortcomings and the study of what is right is what makes life interesting and worth living and this is what determines salvation: fighting the good fight
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.
The Canterbury Tales is about a religious journey, a Catholic pilgrimage to visit the shrine of Thomas Becket. Chaucer does not disparage the mission itself; rather he seems to uphold the value of such an expedition, even though he may question the motives of the individuals who are taking this journey. I believe that the major point that Chaucer was trying to advance was that the beliefs, rites, and customs of the Cath...
The Canterbury Tales, written by Geoffrey Chaucer, has gone through many adaptations. Some authors decided to translate the story into verse, while others chose to write the as a narrative in prose. Although all adaptations are based off the same story, they are vastly different and can be the result of opposing interpretations of the original work. After reading a text translated by Nevill Coghill (referred to as Version I) and a text translated into a narrative by a different author (referred to as Version II), it is obvious that for each similarity they share, there are many more differences in language, syntax, and imagery as well.
Many pilgrims in Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales held a religious position. Some of these people’s personal ideas have caused debates and criticism over Chaucer’s opinion of the Catholic Church. Critics have discussed the ideas that were presented both subtly and openly. Two of the pilgrims and their tales will be discussed: the Prioress and the Pardoner. Both of these tales offer points of criticism in the Catholic Church.
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.
The theological aspects that arise in the excerpt are original sin, grace, atonement, and the resurrection of Christ. Lines 203 through 209 speak about man’s wrong doing to God. “But yet all is not done; Man disobeying, Disloyal breaks his fealty, and sins Against the high Supremacy of Heav’n,…” Milton puts emphasis on the fact that all men must die “He with his whole posterity must die.” These lines introduce the concept of original sin in the excerpt. The doctrine of original sin is that because of Adam’s fall in the garden and their disobedience to God in eating the forbidden fruit, men are held accountable for their sin because of Adam’s disobedience men take on a sin nature.
In Paradise Lost, Milton displays the Christian worldview by integrating truths and values of his faith in place of humanistic values. Key elements such as the nature of the protagonist, the setting in which the epic takes place, and rudiments of the plot convey the fundamental aspects of Christianity. Milton took his worldview and applied it to a worldly genre, revolutionizing the epic
Critics of the Romantic Period have claimed that John Milton was unconsciously allied with the forces of evil. In Paradise Lost Milton’s accounts of “Devils & Hell” are much more elaborate and awe inspiring than those of “Angels & God.” Hell and Satan are portrayed extensively whereas the reader is given brief and inconclusive glimpses of Heaven. The apparent dichotomy is explained by William Blake: “The reason Milton wrote in fetters when he wrote of Angels & Gods, and at liberty when of Devils & Hell, is because he was a true Poet and of the Devil’s Party without knowing it.”
...an see, when reading a work such as The Canterbury Tales, there are many advantages and disadvantages to the work being in both middle and modern English. Before reading such a work, one must realize his or her own purpose for reading the work and then decide on which version to read. It is the opinion of many that it is beneficial to read both versions in order to educate one self about both languages as well as to experience the evolution of the English language. The English language has changed greatly over the many centuries since the time this work was written. However, this work helps create a bridge between the languages of the middle and modern English worlds. This was a work that transcended any work previously written and one that will continue to have an important place in the history of English literature and the English language as a whole.
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.
In conclusion, Paradise Lost can be seen through a historically contextual lens that allows us to see the parallels between Milton’s life and experiences during the reign of Charles I, and the predominant themes in his epic poem. Many of the themes in Paradise Lost, from the broader situational occurrences to the behavior of individual character’s and their attitudes toward the situations in which they find themselves can be seen as directly influenced by Milton’s time as a Parliamentarian in 17th century England.
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.
Throughout Paradise Lost, Milton uses various tools of the epic to convey a traditional and very popular Biblical story. He adds his own touches to make it more of an epic and to set forth new insights into God's ways and the temptations we all face. Through his uses of love, war, heroism, and allusion, Milton crafted an epic; through his references to the Bible and his selection of Christ as the hero, he set forth a beautifully religious Renaissance work. He masterfully combined these two techniques to create a beautiful story capable of withstanding the test of time and touching its readers for centuries.
Paradise Lost is one of the finest examples of the epic tradition in all of literature. In composing this extraordinary work, John Milton was, for the most part, following in the manner of epic poets of past centuries: Barbara Lewalski notes that Paradise Lost is an "epic whose closest structural affinities are to Virgil's Aeneid . . . "; she continues, however, to state that we now recognize as well the influence of epic traditions and the presence of epic features other than Virgilian. Among the poem's Homeric elements are its Iliadic subject, the death and woe resulting from an act of disobedience; the portrayal of Satan as an Archillean hero motivated by a sense of injured merit and also as an Odyssean hero of wiles and craft; the description of Satan's perilous Odyssey to find a new homeland; and the battle scenes in heaven. . . . The poem also incorporates a Hesiodic gigantomachy; numerous Ovidian metamorphoses; an Ariostan Paradise of Fools; [and] Spenserian allegorical figures (Sin and Death) . . . . (3)