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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
The Prologue to The Canterbury Tales is, indeed, a story for all ages. Using the Prologue to include what is known as "estate satire," Chaucer ridicules the abuses of the three traditional estates,...
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The Canterbury Tales
Author: Geoffrey Chaucer was born in approximately 1343 and died on 25 October 1400, probably in London or nearby. He came from a family of prosperous tradespeople. He was educated at St. Paul’s...
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The Canterbury Tales
I'm not actually sure if Chaucer disliked any of the pilgrims per se. One of Chaucer's main goals is to represent people from many different classes and social circles, and so he's trying to...
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The Canterbury Tales
In Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales, the author paints a less-than-complimentary view of "the Monk," one who has sworn to serve the Roman Catholic Church during the Middle Ages. The Church was the...
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The Canterbury Tales
Chaucer shares specific physical characteristics about the Pardoner that actually provide a great deal of insight into his character. In the medieval period, many people were believers in the...
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The Canterbury Tales
"The Pardoner's Tale" is enjoyable because both the prologue and the tale itself satirize human failings. In the prologue, the Pardoner, himself a greedy character who is open about his cupidity,...
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The Canterbury Tales
The Wife of Bath is one of Chaucer's most enduring characters, especially since she functions as a remarkably early example of a feminist. Indeed, the Wife seems to reject traditional notions of...
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The Canterbury Tales
In order to understand Chaucer's attitude toward Prioress Madame Eglentyne as he depicts her in the General Prologue to The Canterbury Tales (ca. 1380-1392 CE), we need to understand the Tales is...
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The Canterbury Tales
Chaucer's Canterbury Tales was the work that put English on the literary map as a language capable of producing great literature. Before the 'Tales, most great works had been written in Greek,...
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The Canterbury Tales
There are technically two nuns mentioned in "The General Prologue" to Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales. There's a main nun—more typically known as the Prioress—and another nun who travels with...
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The Canterbury Tales
In many ways, Chaucer was a master of description, and he brought many of his characters to life in "The General Prologue." Chaucer described two characters who deserve special attention: the Wife...
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The Canterbury Tales
In the General Prologue, the Knight is described as a "worthy man" (line 43). He has the highest class level out of all the people on the pilgrimage, so that is most likely the reason he is...
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The Canterbury Tales
Chaucer's realism is inextricably linked to the way his poem The Canterbury Tales mirrors English society in the 14th century. To see how this trend works, it helps to look at the "General...
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The Canterbury Tales
The Merchant's Tale is about marriage. January, an old man, loves a woman named May who is much younger than he and also very beautiful. Though he is warned that old men should never marry young...
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The Canterbury Tales
In Medieval times, there were people called Manciples, whose specific job it was to buy and store food for different types of institutions, including schools, monasteries, and Inns. In Chaucer's...
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The Canterbury Tales
This quote can be found in the General Prologue of Geoffrey Chaucer's "The Canterbury Tales." It is used when describing a Person of a Town, who is surprisingly a good and learned man. He preached...
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The Canterbury Tales
The Clerk of Oxenford can be viewed as an early feminist. He is chided for looking like a “maiden” and he attempts to convince his audience about the value that women hold in society. He...
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The Canterbury Tales
In Geoffrey Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales, the knight's tale is the first we read. As one might expect, the knight is the epitome of courtly honor and nobility, since he represents the noble...
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The Canterbury Tales
Because The Canterbury Tales is written about a pilgrimage during the medieval time period, spiritual lessons are prevalent in the text. Some examples include: The Man of Law's Tale is about a...
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The Canterbury Tales
Geoffrey Chaucer's medieval poem The Canterbury Tales tells the story of a group of pilgrims on their way to the shrine of the martyr Thomas Becket. On their way to the shrine the pilgrims pass the...
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The Canterbury Tales
The Wife of Bath’s prologue initially hints at, and then tells her companions the purpose of her tale. She opens by asserting her authority in marriage, saying that because she has had five...
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The Canterbury Tales
The Reeve is one of the characters Chaucer describes in detail during the General Prologue of The Canterbury Tales. Physically, Chaucer says the Reeve is "a slender, choleric man" (1) whose legs...
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The Canterbury Tales
The Man of Law, or Sergeant of the Law as he is called in some texts, is not particularly distinctive in appearance. He is dressed in "modest," or simple and plain, clothes; his coat is held closed...
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The Canterbury Tales
Although Chaucer describes the physical appearance of many of the pilgrims in The Canterbury Tales, he does not actually tell us what the manciple looks like. The only description we get of the man...
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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
In terms of chivalry, Chaucer definitely stacks the deck in the squire's favor in the prologue to Canterbury Tales. The first character introduced in the prologue is the knight, who is obviously a...
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The Canterbury Tales
The Wife of Bath is quite a character. Of all the characters in Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, she is probably the most memorable. What makes the Wife so memorable is her brash manner. She is...
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The Canterbury Tales
I see someone else is already working on answering your question, so I'll just add this: a list of modern day "pilgrims" that would be fun to stereotype today, from the humorous literary website...
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The Canterbury Tales
The Pardoner’s Tale is an exemplum, a story which tells a well-known lesson; in this case, that lesson is that the love of money is at the root of all evil. Since the Gothic fiction genre began...
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The Canterbury Tales
The Wife of Bath comes across as one of the more abrasive characters in The Canterbury Tales, the kind of person it would probably be very tiresome to spend a long journey with. Still, she is also...
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The Canterbury Tales
In Chaucer's "The Pardoner's Tale," the Pardoner, who is a very corrupt clergyman who is only interested in becoming rich from the donations of his parishioners, tells a story that is meant to warn...
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The Canterbury Tales
In addition to being an invaluable part of the English literary canon, Chaucer's Canterbury Tales offer an incomparable account of an important historical era. Chaucer's epic poem is primarily...
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The Canterbury Tales
The Wife of Bath primarily relates to feudalism by flouting it, or at least by providing an alternative to the traditional structure of feudalism. As a starter, it's important to remember the...
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Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
Beowulf: Of these three characters, Beowulf is probably the one who conforms to the relevant stereotype the most. Beowulf is a typical epic hero. An epic hero is a character who is larger-than-life...
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The Canterbury Tales
Geoffrey Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales, written in the fourteenth century, is notable for several reasons, one of which is his satirical look at some aspects of English society in his time. One of...
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The Canterbury Tales
This gender-bending tale strongly undermines the medieval belief in the natural hierarchy of male superiority over women. First, the tale's narrator is a strong, feisty woman who knows her own...
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The Canterbury Tales
The tale-telling game proposed by the Host is very much a functional oral contract. First, it is to be noted that the participants voluntarily enter into an agreement concerning a transfer of...
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The Canterbury Tales
Geoffrey Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales include so many characters and stories that it is difficult to narrow the entire work down to just a couple of themes—you could probably assign a different...
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The Canterbury Tales
Chaucer's Wife of Bath is an amazing character, especially considering the time period in which Chaucer created her. Her bold frankness is surprising for a woman—this attitude by itself defies...
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The Canterbury Tales
Geoffrey Chaucer portrayed the Oxford Cleric in a neutral light. He didn't include any negative descriptions nor characteristics about the Oxford Cleric, but he didn't overly praise him either....
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The Canterbury Tales
"The Cook's Tale" in The Canterbury Tales is up for debate because Chaucer left it unfinished. "The Cook's Tale" comes directly after the Reeve and Miller's stories, in which the two men insult...
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The Canterbury Tales
Geoffrey Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales is a vast and sweeping work that grapples with many important issues, so it's impossible to answer this question by providing all the reasons why the poem...
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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
The Wife of Bath represented a semi-independent woman of that time period in the sense of her career, wealth, and relations. She worked as a seamstress, which seems fitting as she came from the...
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The Canterbury Tales
The apparel of the persons who are going to Canterbury is very revealing of the true character of these pilgrims. In his Canterbury Tales, Geoffrey Chaucer utilizes "estate satire"; that is, he...
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The Canterbury Tales
The Plowman does not have a tale in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. There have been several stories by writers other than Chaucer that claimed to be the Plowman's tale in the fifteenth and sixteenth...
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The Canterbury Tales
Geoffrey Chaucer inserts himself into his masterpiece, The Canterbury Tales, as the narrator. In general, Chaucer doesn't have much of an active function in the poem itself, and his primary purpose...
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The Canterbury Tales
Journeys are an important part of many literary works. The journey is a plot device that makes it possible for Chaucer to have all his characters together long enough to tell their stories. It...
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The Canterbury Tales
Irony is, generally, the difference between what you expect to happen and what really happens. In the case of Chaucer's "The Pardoner's Tale," from The Canterbury Tales, dramatic irony is used....
