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The Canterbury Tales
Chaucer's Clerk is a hard-working, devout student at Oxford University. He comes across as a gentle, thoroughly decent young man, if a tad unworldly. He never has any money because he spends it all...
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The Canterbury Tales
The Wife of Bath shares with the Crone the conviction that women want the upper hand in marriage and romance. In her prologue, she makes it very clear that with the exception of her last, younger...
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The Canterbury Tales
Between the telling of the different tales, Chaucer usually features the characters reacting to the previous story and then setting up who will share the next one. The subsequent tale is usually a...
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The Canterbury Tales
The Franklin of "The Canterbury Tales" is a bright and jovial man who appears to live a comfortable and rich lifestyle. In the general prologue, Chaucer provides a brief description of the...
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The Canterbury Tales
There are numerous examples of dramatic irony in The Canterbury Tales. Overall, Chaucer skillfully uses irony as a way of putting distance between what appears on the surface to be the case and...
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The Canterbury Tales
Both of these tales are infused with the personality and worldview of their tellers to the point where they would not be the same if anyone else told them. The "Wife of Bath's Tale" is a chivalric...
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The Canterbury Tales
The Wife of Bath states that she had her husbands under her power and that they would bring her gifts to keep her happy: I governed them so well, by my own law,That each of them was happy as a...
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The Canterbury Tales
The Wife of Bath is quite open in saying that she manipulates her husbands through lying: You wise wives, that can understand. Thus should you speak and accuse them wrongfully, For half so boldly...
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The Canterbury Tales
The "blood libel" was commonplace among Christians throughout medieval Europe and even later. Essentially, it was the belief, or rather the accusation, that Jews used the blood of Christians in...
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The Canterbury Tales
"The Miller's Tale" is largely a reaction to the tale before it, "The Knight's Tale." "The Knight's Tale" is a chivalric romance depicting a love triangle between a fair princess and two knights....
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The Canterbury Tales
The Prioress in the General Prologue appears worldly and superficially refined. She speaks French, but has learned it in the East End of London rather than in Paris. She pays great attention to...
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The Canterbury Tales
The ongoing debate about the anti-Semitism that permeates the “Prioress’s Tale” seems fairly divided about whether Chaucer himself was anti-Semitic, or if he is using the character of the Prioress...
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The Canterbury Tales
The phrase means "love conquers all" in Latin and comes from the Roman poet Virgil. It refers to amorous or physical love, not spiritual love, and so should not be the motto of a religious woman—a...
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The Canterbury Tales
The Prioress's Tale is a particularly unpleasant example of medieval anti-Semitism. The story is set in Asia. It tells of a young Christian boy murdered by Jewish people and then thrown on a...
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The Canterbury Tales
In "The Pardoner's Tale," Death is personified as a killer and a thief. When three young scoundrels who are hanging around in a tavern, drinking, gambling, and swearing, hear that their friend has...
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The Canterbury Tales
In telling his bawdy tale, the Miller pokes fun at the conventions of courtly love. The Knight has just told his classic tale of courtly love, and the drunken Miller is in no mood to follow suit....
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The Canterbury Tales
Chaucer satirizes religious leaders and characterizes them as hypocrites in The Canterbury Tales by making them look foolish next to society's less respected men. When Chaucer speaks of the Monk in...
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The Canterbury Tales
The Wife of Bath's Tale is well suited to her character. In her tale, the protagonist, a young knight, is condemned to death by King Arthur. Guinevere, however, is able to persuade Arthur to let...
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The Canterbury Tales
"The Nun's Priest's Tale" is one of the many stories told by pilgrims on their way to worship at the shrine of Thomas A. Becket in Canterbury. As this pilgrimage is religious in nature, this tale...
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The Canterbury Tales
At the end of the prologue, Harry Barry proposes that “whose story is best told/That is to say who gives the fullest measure/ Of good morality and general pleasure” (lines 816-819) will get a...
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The Canterbury Tales
In “The Wife of Bath’s Tale” there is a recurrent theme of death as the ultimate punishment. An interesting first example is the Wife of Bath’s loaded revelation about the death of fairies....
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The Canterbury Tales
And especially, at this time of the year, people from every corner of England journey to Canterbury to visit the shrine of the martyr Saint Thomas a Becket. Geoffrey Chaucer's The Canterbury...
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The Canterbury Tales
The overall plot of The Canterbury Tales revolves around a religious pilgrimage. The featured characters, referred to as pilgrims, accompany one another from London to Canterbury to visit the...
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The Canterbury Tales
The main point of comparison would be in the way that Chaucer views them. The pardoner and the monk are both members of the clergy, an institution that Chaucer typically holds up for ridicule due...
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The Canterbury Tales
The structure of Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales is key to understanding the text. The long poetic story is told as a frame narrative, also referred to as a story within a story. Whenever I...
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The Canterbury Tales
The plot of The Canterbury Tales is as follows: Chaucer, the narrator of the story, comes across a group of pilgrims who have gathered in an inn because they are going to take a pilgrimage together...
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The Canterbury Tales
Satire is defined as the opposite of what is expected either in oral or written work. In the Franklin's case, he is revealed in the general Prologue as a wealthy man who likes to be well thought...
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The Canterbury Tales
I honestly do not believe Chaucer's point was to prove that people are inherently good, bad, or a mixture of the two. Much of what Chaucer wrote was satirical about the religion in Britain....
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The Canterbury Tales
Indirect characterization is a technique an author uses to provide a sense of character through speech, clothing, or actions. Direct characterization involves what the narrator says about the...
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The Canterbury Tales
First, The Canterbury Tales are the most extensive example of Middle English literature in existence. At the time Chaucer wrote the tales, most literature in Britain was written in French. This was...
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The Canterbury Tales
Chaucer had a difficult time with the hypocrisy he so often saw in the Roman Catholic Church during the medieval period. Priests who were to be celibate, taking a vow of poverty, often kept women...
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The Canterbury Tales
Readers are told in the prologue of Geoffrey Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales that the pilgrims are gathering for their journey in April. The first day of spring occurs in the later half of the month...
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The Canterbury Tales
One thing we know about the Wife of Bath from the General Prologue is that she's very much a woman ahead of her time. Married five times and actively on the lookout for husband number six, she's a...
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The Canterbury Tales
Chaucer idealizes the following pilgrims: the knight, the parson, and the plowman. The knight is idealized as a “true, a perfect gentle knight.” Chaucer lists his accomplishments for us, including...
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The Canterbury Tales
The Knight's Tale and The Miller's Tale (both of which are in Group A of The Canterbury Tales) share only one meaningful similarity--they are both told by pilgrims on their way to Canterbury. The...
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The Canterbury Tales
In the Prologue to The Canterbury Tales, Chaucer describes The Miller as a large man known for his ability to wrestle and open doors with his head. The large pilgrim is described as having a bright...
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The Canterbury Tales
Chaucer is commenting here about the narrow rules and confines women had to live by within a male-dominated society. In the Middle Ages, it was believed that men were born with the "higher" human...
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The Canterbury Tales
At the time that Chaucer wrote The Canterbury Tales, the plague had killed many people, and the society began to change as there was much conflict and social upheaval, with a middle class arising...
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The Canterbury Tales
In the prologue, Chaucer satirizes the prioress by having the narrator praise characteristics that are not representative of nuns. When we think of nuns, we think of women who have taken vows of...
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The Canterbury Tales
Chaucer included many religious figures in The Canterbury Tales, including a friar, a nun, a priest, and a pardoner, among others. It’s important to note before discussing the commentary about...
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The Canterbury Tales
All of the tales on The Canterbury Tales are indicative of their tellers' social class, worldview, and eccentricities. "The Miller's Tale" is bawdy and irreverent, much like the Miller himself. The...
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The Canterbury Tales
It is perhaps never possible for anyone, including the author, to say exactly why any book was written. George Orwell observes: Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout...
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The Canterbury Tales
Both tales are strongly moralistic in tone, albeit with different messages to convey. This is perhaps related to the differences in character between the two narrators. The Wife of Bath is a...
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The Canterbury Tales
The Wife of Bath makes no secret of her desire for sex. She has been married five times and is looking for another husband. She claims that God has created people to be good at different things,...
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The Canterbury Tales
Chaucer uses a character's appearance consistently to tell us something about that person. For example, the Wife of Bath has wide hips, wears red stockings, and is gap-toothed, all which say...
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The Canterbury Tales
Chaucer mocks the Catholic Church. This can be seen in both The Prologue and in the tales. Although he mocks the church and its practices, he is respectful of religion itself. First, he uses the...
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The Canterbury Tales
To identify celebrities who are similar to characters within Geoffrey Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales, one must be able to characterize them (the characters). Once characterized, one will be able to...
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The Canterbury Tales
An estate satire is a work from the Medieval period which attempts to satirize and therefore criticize the social and class systems of the time. The three primary classes of society were the...
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The Canterbury Tales
The Wife of Bath is interrupted several times during the Prologue to her story. The first time she is interrupted by the Pardoner, who wants to know why in the world he would marry at all after...
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The Canterbury Tales
All of the pilgrims in The Canterbury Tales have a public identity that defines them in the eyes of society. The Knight, for example, is a brave, noble warrior; the Prioress, head of a religious...
