The Canterbury Tales: a review

1. The Canterbury Tales: a review

2. The Host of the Tabard proposes that each of the thirty pilgrims tell two tales en route to Canterbury, and two more on the trip back.

3. Chaucer began writing the tales some time around 1387…

4. When he died in 1400, The Canterbury Tales was still a work in progress. Chaucer had written 24 of the tales, as well as the “General Prologue” and numerous scenes of interaction among the characters.

5. In his “General Prologue” Chaucer presented a microcosm of medieval life, representing “sundry” people from all walks of life: members of the feudal system, the church, and the growing city classes.

6. Chaucer’s representation of the middle class illustrates some of the alternatives that the city offered to the traditional feudal system, allowing an opportunity for some people to get off the farms and work in a trade. Notice that in the “General Prologue” Chaucer satirizes this growing city class, suggesting that many of its members are overly concerned with their social standing and appearance.

7. Chaucer reserves a harsher criticism for many of the members of the church. During this period there was rampant corruption within the church, and Chaucer is bold in demonstrating this corruption through such hypocritical figures as the Monk, the Friar, the Summoner, and the Pardoner.

8. The pilgrimage, introduced in the prologue, served as a framing story for the tales themselves. Not only had Chaucer attempted to include representatives of all segments of society (with varying personality types and varying degrees of morality), his collection included all types of tales popular during the middle ages: romances, fabliaux, narratives of saints’ lives, miracle stories, sermons, and an animal fable.

9. The personalities and interactions of the storytellers added another level of humor and complexity to the stories themselves.

10. Chaucer was a revolutionary.

11. He was not afraid to satirize and critique any segment of society, high or low, and he easily poked fun of the pretensions of the rising middle class and the hypocrisies and corruption of the medieval church.

12. In his “General Prologue” he warns us that he does not plan to approach these stories according to rank—i.e., social standing. “My wits are not the best,” he apologizes. To disregard the social hierarchy is to write off the very foundation of a feudal society. There was nothing wrong with Chaucer’s wits—he was intentionally shaking up the social order.

13. Also (and this is big, too), he wrote in English.

14. honourcorruption villainy holinessriding in fragrance of sunlight (side by sideall in a singing wonder of blossoming yesriding) to him who died that death should be dead humblest and proudest eagerly wandering(equally all alive in miraculous day)merrily moving through sweet forgiveness of spring(over the under the gift of the earth of the sky knight and ploughman pardoner wife and nunmerchant frere clerk somnour miller and reveand geoffrey and all) come up from the never of whencome into the now of forever come riding alive down while crylessly drifting through vast mostnothing's own nothing children of dust --e.e. cummings (1950)

15. Chaucer was a poet; but he never flinched from the life that was being lived at the moment before his eyes. A farmyard, with its straw, its dung, its cocks and its hens, is not (we have come to think) a poetic subject; poets seem either to rule out the farmyard entirely or to require that it shall be a farmyard in Thessaly and its pigs of mythological origin…. He will tell you what his characters wore, how they looked, what they ate and drank, as if poetry could handle the common facts of this very moment of Tuesday, the sixteenth day of April, 1387, without dirtying her hands. -- Virginia Woolf (1925)