Category: Geoffrey Chaucer

The Canterbury Tales is an estates satire, that not only points out the shortcomings and inequalities, but also the inauthenticity, that exist under feudalism’s code of social stratification. Examples of these characterizations of the estates are found widely throughout the general prologue and the pilgrims’ tales. The first example of inequality in The Canterbury Tales…

The Wife of Bath, with the energy of her vernacular and the voraciousness of her sexual appetite, is one of the most vividly developed characters of ‘The Canterbury Tales’. At 856 lines her prologue, or ‘preambulacioun’ as the Summoner calls it, is the longest of any of the pilgrims, and matches the General Prologue but…

The Canterbury Tales presents the Wife of Bath as an honest woman in conflict with her society. “Honest” here takes on two meanings. It either implies that the Wife of Bath is a moral and Christian member of society or, more literally, that she in fact speaks the truth. If the latter is true, then…

Bestselling American author Orson Scott Card once said, “Metaphors have a way of holding the most truth in the least space.” The Canterbury Tales were written over 600 years before Card made that profound statement, but clearly Chaucer would agree with Card’s assertion. Specifically, in “The Wife of Bath’s Tale” one can see the use…

To the heedless reader, Dante’s Inferno and Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales are generally interpreted as mere works of fiction designed and created for the sole purpose of entertainment. To fully glean the authors’ intended message, though, one must carefully analyze the rhetoric and style of each work. If both pieces of art are not attentively…

Perhaps the greatest pleasure comes at the expense of others. Geoffrey Chaucer seems acutely aware of this, and has his Parson —the final tale-teller in The Canterbury Tales, though the Parson’s is not really a tale at all— include in his sermon on the seven deadly sins a denunciation of envy, the “worste synne that…

While critics and common readers alike have panned Chaucer’s Physician’s Tale as one of the more disconnected and weakly written of all the Canterbury Tales, recent thought, and certainly more abstract views, have worked ignorant of each other to provide us with a new perspective on what may be Chaucer’s most complex and metaphysical of…

Chaucer’s excessively overt satire of the Prioress in the General Prologue is undeniable. With so much emphasis drawn to her misplaced ideals, the words scream of something terribly amiss. A cursory examination reveals a woman severely out of touch with reality and the faith she professes to represent. Keeping this powerful depiction in mind, her…

Canterbury Tales: The Power of Lust Seven deadly sins. Eight tales. In Canterbury Tales, Geoffrey Chaucer offers insight into human characteristics and actions. Of the seven deadly sins, lust remains a reoccurring characteristic in several tales. As romance and marriage are prominent motifs throughout the work, many of the tales address sexual desires and portray…

In the Franklin’s Tale, Dorigen’s hasty (and unserious) promise precipitates a crisis when Aurelius completes a task that Dorigen felt certain was impossible. Aurelius faces a similar problem when, consumed by his inordinate passion, he unthinkingly promises to pay a staggering sum to a magician in exchange for completion of Dorigen’s task. The power of…