Geoffrey Chaucer and The Canterbury Tales The Historical

Geoffrey Chaucer and The Canterbury Tales

The Historical Background of Chaucer’s Advancement The breakdown of three “estates” (the nobility, the church, the commoners) and the rise of the middle class: A complex, interrelated unstable system of strata where birth was no longer the only factor deciding the interaction Chaucer coming from the growing and prosperous middle class

Life and Civil Career The son of a wine merchant: born in London, fluent in French and educated in Latin Serving as a page in a powerful noble house: the beginning of connection with the ruling class Once captured and ransomed in the Hundred Years War Several Diplomatic Missions to Spain, France, and Italy Serving as Customs officer (Controller), justice of peace, and Member of Parliament

Life and Civil Career Married into the Nobility: bridging the classes of commoner and nobility Buried in a corner of Westminster Abbey, now called “the poet’s corner” However, his poetic activities were not recorded in contemporary documents

Poetic Career: Never Mentioned in Official Records French Period: French as the fashionable language of the court Chaucer’s models: leading French poets of the day, Guillaume de Machaut and Jean Froissart, whose lyrics and narratives about courtly love, in the form of dream vision— derived in turn from the 13 th-century Romance of the Rose, a dream allegory Chaucer’s works: partial translation of the Romance and The first original work Book of the Duchess

The Romance of Rose

Poetic Career: the Italian Period Literary inspiration during his trips to Italy In direct contact with Italian Renaissance: new verse forms, subject matter, modes of representation Chaucer’s works: The House of Fame (still a dream vision, whose beginning affectionately parodies Dante’s Divine Comedy), The Parliament of Fowls (will all social classes represented by different kinds of birds gathering to talk and think about love), Troilus and Criseyde (one of the best love poems in English), Legend of Good Women (a defense of women in the religion of love; his first experiment with a series of tales; unfinished) (all these poems are in the form of dream vision or allegory) Boccaccio’s influence: story plots for The Knight’s Tale and Troilus and Criseyde

Poetic Career: Latin Influence and English Innovation moral and religious works, usu. translations Prose translation of Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy, a didactic book popular in the Middle Ages, teaching the transience of worldly fortune English Period: the climax of his poetic career at The Canterbury Tales

Chaucer’s Poetic Vision based on his ambivalent social position, wide range of learning, and exposure to latest literary currents in the Continent Belonging to a new class of civil servants: overlapping bourgeois and aristocratic social worlds, without being securely anchored in each Being involved in and detached from a given situation at the same time: to view with both sympathy and humor the activities of different social levels

Canterbury Tales

Original Plan: 120 stories Two stories told on the way to Canterbury and two more told on the way back for thirty pilgrims Only twenty two are actually written, with two fragments An ending, however, was already written

Inspiration Witnessing the pilgrimage to the shrine of Thomas à Becket at Canterbury The idea of medieval pilgrims as notorious story tellers Medieval collections of stories under a framing story: a common device in late medieval literature, cf. Boccaccio’s Decameron

New Twists to the storycollection tradition The Diversity of story tellers in social background: Unlike what it is in Decameron, in The Canterbury Tales, the story tellers represent a wide spectrum of ranks and occupations. The Diversity of story types: The tales told match the story tellers in genre, style, tone, and values (cf. the Miller’s tale and the wife of Bath’s tale) Two fictions created at the same time: that of the story teller and that of the story itself The ingenuity of “links, ” interchanges among pilgrims connecting the stories: a sort of literary comment and dramatic interest added Varied and lively interaction between the frame and individual stories

The General Prologue Characterization: drawing from figures already existing in medieval literature, particularly the genre of estates satire, but representing an epitome of late medieval social life The portraits depicted in the way our mind perceives reality randomly: details actually chosen carefully All details are clues not only to the pilgrims’ social ranks but to their moral and spiritual conditions as well as to the conditions of late medieval society Avoidance of overt moral judgment: a seemingly naïve narrator whose comments betrays deeply ironic implication of his portrayals

Discussion of the Text The order of appearance: traditional aristocracy, ecclesiastics, down to the lowclass laity, followed by newly rising middleclass professions (p. 17) The order in which the characters tell their stories are supposed to follow this class hierarchy, but it is disrupted right after the Knight’s tale; instead of the Monk, the drunken Miller tells his obscene tale. The outer appearance of a pilgrim reflects the inner quality: ugly physical features representing obscene character traits

The Chivalric Knighthood: Its Two Aspects The knight and the squire: representing respectively the Christian knightly code (lines 43~78) and its degeneration by the code of “courtly love” (lines 79~100)(p. 18) The knight once joins the Crusade in defense of the Christian faith while the squire displays artistic talents, gallantry, and fights for his Lady’s love, with nightingale as an appropriate symbol of his love of secular enjoyments

The Abuses of the Ecclesiastic Order Higher level Church figures as derived from aristocratic order: hence retaining aristocratic manners and values The corruption of the wealthy, powerful Church The Nun: (1) fastidious about table manners; (2) misplaced charities to animals; (3) behaving like a courtly lady (lines 118~162) The Monk: (1) cultivating the expensive hobby of hunting; (2) ignoring old regulations on monastic activities; (3) generally a noble lord in a monk’s habit (lines 175~207) The Friar: (1) a beggar and a con man equipped with devious flattery and holy habits; (2) craving for worldly gains like money and food; (3) abuse of Catholic rites; (4) associating with rich, shunning the down and out; (5) Reflecting the general, not individual, corruption of the Church as an institution (lines 208~271)

The Abuses of the Ecclesiastic Order The Parson: (1) the model of the Church as it should be; (2) No ironic implication in the narrator’s praise of this figure; (3) exhortation against the Church voiced (lines 479~530) The Summoner: (1) corrupt derivative of the Church: a petit officer turned annoying spy; (2) ugly appearances matching his love of sensual pleasures; (3) overbearing vanity in his use of Latin; (4) taking bribery (lines 625~671) The Pardoner: (1) thoroughly a cheat that sells pardons and fake relics; (2) blatant animal imagery to highlight his obscenity (rat, hare, goat, mare, etc. ) (lines 672~716)

The Secular, Amoral, Profit. Oriented “Professions” The newly rising middle classes: secular-minded, profitoriented, highly skillful about their trades, even if educated, still ignoring niceties of the Christian ethics The merchant’s proto-capitalistic way of running business (lines 272~286) The skipper’s half-pirate style of managing his career (lines 390~412) The doctor’s care of his body health, his love of gold, and being educated but non-religious (lines 413~446) The miller’s boorish manners and dishonest way of doing business (lines 547~569) The manciple’s illiteracy but shrewdness (lines 569~588) Professionalism highlighted for the Sergeant of Law, the cook, the reeve

The Eccentrics Diversity of the late medieval world suggested by these figures The Oxford Cleric: (1) other-worldly in a nonreligious way (lines 287~310) The Wife of Bath: (1) weaver as her trade, making great profit out of it and her marriage career; (2) luxuriously dressed and openly licentious (lines 447~478)

The Use of Animal Imagery Usually, though not always, with critical implications, highlighting certain characters’ immoralities and obscenities Nightingale for the squire to imply seeking worldly pleasure; puppy for the friar to imply his fawning; sow or fox for the miller to imply his obscenity and treachery, sparrow or parrot for the summoner to imply his lechery and ignorant conformity to the authorities; rat, hare, goat, gelding, or mare for the pardoner to imply his thievery and lack of masculinity

The Narrator’s Naïveté Observing the figures around him with a consistently optimistic perspective about human nature Generally taking each figure’s excuses or selfdefenses at the face value The narrator is deliberately distanced from the author, who thus voices his critique of the late medieval society in a light-hearted manner The narrator’s eulogies of three figures—the knight, the parson, and the farmer—apparently go without irony. The three figures happen to represent the three basic “estates” of the medieval social theories.