Category: Geoffrey Chaucer

The Pardoner of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales is representative of the darker side of the corrupt church of the Middle Ages. A pardoner was a church official who had the authority to forgive those who had sinned by selling pardons and indulgences to them. Although the pardoner was a church official, they were almost always part…

From corrupt politicians to Real Housewives of Orange County, symbols of hypocrisy in modern day society exude personas that are ripe for criticism. These symbols also exist in Geoffrey Chaucer’s prominent anthropological work The Canterbury Tales, attesting to the endurance of class structure and its affect on human behavior throughout history. To depict his interpretation…

Chaucer’s “General Prologue” to The Canterbury Tales explores the portraits of twenty-eight of the thirty pilgrims, all of whom are taking part in a trip to the shrine of the martyr Saint Thomas Becket in Canterbury. The pilgrims described in passing or extended detail include the following: the Knight, Squire, Yeoman, Prioress, Monk, Friar, Merchant,…

The “Clerk’s Tale” of Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales can be seen as a mirror of society, where social classes have very noticeable tensions between them. This essay shall analyze the “Clerk’s Tale” by putting it in a socio-political context and focusing on the interactions between Griselda and Walter, who belong to different social classes. Introduction…

Long before enlightened women of the 1960’s enthusiastically shed their bras, in an age when anti-feminist and misogynistic attitudes prevailed, lived Geoffrey Chaucer. Whether Chaucer was indeed a feminist living long before his time, or whether he simply conveyed an alternate and unpopular point of view, is inconsequential. His portrayal of the Wife of Bath…

Geoffrey Chaucer’s “Knight’s Tale,” written apart from but included in his unfinished anthology The Canterbury Tales, is considered one of his greatest works. It could be at once a number of things: a dark meditation on providence, a parody of the Chivalric stories that happened to be gaining in popularity at the time of its…

The Miller and Reeve’s Tales of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, while being intricately crafted examples of the French genre fabliaux, differ significantly in both progression, resolution, as well as the tales’ overall connotation and voice. While the Miller’s tale seems to follow the more traditional, “good humored” nature of the fabliaux, the Reeve creates a raunchy…

In Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales, each tale’s genre is an integral component of its respective meaning. The task of interpreting the meaning of a tale from its genre, however, is complicated by Chaucer’s frequent deviation from a genre’s conventions. In some cases, Chaucer even uses the conventions of more than one genre per narrative; this…

The Wife of Bath’s extraordinary prologue gives the reader a dose of what is sometimes missing in early male-written literature: glimpses of female subjectivity. Women in medieval literature are often silent and passive, to the extent that cuckolding is often seen as something one man (the adulterer) does to another (the husband). Eve Sedgwick argues…

The Man of Law’s Tale is in many ways marks a new beginning in the middle of the Canterbury Tales, a break from the bawdy and secular tales that precede it. While Chaucer could have made it a more straightforward recentering of the tales on a Christian theme, Chaucer makes it more complex by introducing…