Category: Geoffrey Chaucer

In The Canterbury Tales, Chaucer sets up a rich and unexpected portrayal of The Wife of Bath, which is already well established by the beginning of her prologue to her tale. Her honest and shamelessly blunt diction and admissions, along with the inclusion of personal anecdotes, contribute to the unexpected nature of her prologue’s content;…

In The Prologue to the Canterbury Tales, Geoffrey Chaucer uses the character traits of the clergy to exemplify the ideal character. Chaucer’s members of the clergy display ideal characteristics such as generosity, righteousness, and servitude. Through exploration of the lifestyles of the clergy, Chaucer distinguishes the truly ideal, pious servants from secular and self-centered men.…

Chaucer’s Pardoner is hypocritical, selfish and unreliable despite his tacit desire to preach and encourage others to pursue a life free of blasphemy, gluttony and materialism. The Pardoner appears to be highly familiar with the Bible and the authorities of the Church, and generally delivers convincing arguments against sin, but it is impossible for a…

In Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales, “The Wife of Bath’s Prologue” deconstructs misogynist rhetoric proposed in texts such as Valerie, Theofraste, and Against Jovinian (Chaucer 673-83). Respectively, Valerie and Theofraste instruct husbands on how to curtail their wives’ duplicity, and Against Jovinian addresses the issue of female sexuality (Greenblatt 297 notes 5, 6, 7). The…

During the time Chaucer wrote the Canterbury Tales, men viewed women as the lesser of the two sexes. In writing about , Chaucer draws upon much of the antifeminist sentiment of the time to satirize the idea that women are less than men. When Chaucer creates the character of Alison, he uses her as a…

In the Canterbury Tales, Geoffrey Chaucer portrays multiple unique personalities including a conniving, rebellious Monk who selfishly dismisses the church’s rule and lives greedily in his own world. Throughout the Monk’s tale, proof of his irreverence for the church is documented in both obvious and discrete ways; he is disgraceful, sacrilegious, and deceitful, and hides…

Perhaps William Shakespeare is right: all the world may very well be a stage, with all the men and women being but mere players. What happens when, despite their exits and entrances, these actors play but one part? For lack of a complete character development, do these individuals lose their worth? Can this one part…

In Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales there is one pilgrim whose overriding character trait seems to be hypocrisy itself: the Pardoner, basking in sin and, at the same time, preaching violently to the masses against precisely his immoral behavior. Indeed, the difficult task of understanding the Pardoner’s intent is further complicated by the interplay between the different…

In the General Prologue of Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales, the first presented is that of the Knight. Though the knights of Chaucer’s time were commonly perceived as upstanding, moral, Christian leaders in society, underlying Chaucer-the-Pilgrim’s largely complimentary and respectful portrayal of the Knight is Chaucer-the-Poet’s slightly sarcastic and accusatory version of the depiction. By…

Despite its glorified accounts of the chivalrous lives of gentlemen, the Knight’s Tale proves to be more than a tragically romantic saga with a happy ending. For beneath this guise lies an exploration into the trifling world of the day’s aristocratic class. Here, where physical substance is superseded by appearance, reality gives way to disillusioned…