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The Canterbury Tales | The Struggle between Noble Designs and Chaos: The Literary Tradition of Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale

In the following essay, Robert W. Hanning compares “The Knight’s Tale” with epics by Boccaccio and Statius to gain a greater understanding of the themes of nobility and order in the poem.

There is perhaps no better illustration of the processes of continuity and change in medieval literature than the relationship between Geoffrey Chaucer’s “Knight’s Tale” (1386?), first of the Canterbury Tales, and its literary antecedents, both proximate—Giovanni Boccaccio’s Teseida delle nozze d’Emilia (ca. 1340)—and remote—the Thebaid of Statius (ca. 92 AD). Moreover, a comparison of Chaucer’s poem with Statius’s epic and Boccaccio’s epic romance offers important clues to the meaning of one of the most problematic tales in the...

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