...TITLE · The Canterbury Tales AUTHOR · Geoffrey Chaucer TYPE OF WORK · Poetry (two tales are in prose: the Tale of Melibee and the Parson’s Tale) GENRES · Narrative collection of poems; character portraits; parody; estates satire; romance; fabliau LANGUAGE · Middle English TIME AND PLACE WRITTEN · Around 1386–1395, England DATE OF FIRST PUBLICATION · Sometime in the early fifteenth century PUBLISHER · Originally circulated in hand-copied manuscripts NARRATOR · The primary narrator is an anonymous, naïve member of the pilgrimage, who is not described. The other pilgrims narrate most of the tales. POINT OF VIEW · In the General Prologue, the narrator speaks in the first person, describing each of the pilgrims as they appeared to him. Though narrated by different pilgrims, each of the tales is told from an omniscient third-person point of view, providing the reader with the thoughts as well as actions of the characters. TONE · The Canterbury Tales incorporates an impressive range of attitudes toward life and literature. The tales are by turns satirical, elevated, pious, earthy, bawdy, and comical. The reader should not accept the naïve narrator’s point of view as Chaucer’s. TENSE · Past SETTING (TIME) · The late fourteenth century, after 1381 SETTING (PLACE) · The Tabard Inn; the road to Canterbury PROTAGONISTS · Each individual tale has protagonists, but Chaucer’s plan is to make none of his storytellers superior to others; it is an equal company. In the Knight’s Tale, the...
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...When we dip into the rich variety of novels, poems, and plays which constitute English Literature we are reading works which have lasted for generations, or centuries, and they have lasted because they are good. These works say something worth saying, and say it with artistry strong enough to survive while lesser works drop into obscurity. Literature is part of our cultural heritage which is freely available to everyone, and which can enrich our lives in all kinds of ways. Once we have broken the barriers that make studying literature seem daunting, we find that literary works can be entertaining, beautiful, funny, or tragic. They can convey profundity of thought, richness of emotion, and insight into character. They take us beyond our limited experience of life to show us the lives of other people at other times. They stir us intellectually and emotionally, and deepen our understanding of our history, our society, and our own individual lives. In great writing from the past we find the England of our ancestors, and we not only see the country and the people as they were, but we also soak up the climate of the times through the language itself, its vocabulary, grammar, and tone. We would only have to consider the writing of Chaucer, Shakespeare, Boswell, Dickens, and Samuel Beckett side by side to see how the way writers use language embodies the cultural atmosphere of their time. Literature can also give us glimpses of much earlier ages. Glimpses of Celtic Ireland in...
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...writing to you in order to clear up your confusion on why I believe that your passage on Middle English, in your essay on Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, is plagiarized. First of all, I do not believe that you intentionally plagiarized it although based off of the sentence structure it is a paraphrase of C. Hugh Holman’s definition of Middle English from A Handbook to Literature. You did reword your passage, but in terms of each sentence of your passage, they contain identical information compared to the sentences C. Hugh Holman’s passage about Middle English, in the exact same order as well. Since you did not cite your passage, the penalty would be to receive a grade of zero on the entire assignment. Although, I do believe you when you say it is common knowledge, and I also do believe that you did this unintentionally and not on purpose, so I shall instead disregard that specific passage Middle English, and not evaluate that section. For future reference, there are many techniques that you can use in order to avoid plagiarism. To begin, if you plan on summarizing, paraphrasing, or quoting, you must create a citation no matter what. Aside from those things, to avoid plagiarism in the first place you should record all of your sources when you make your notes, or create a summary of something that you plan on using and then when you are actually writing in your essay, and then write based off of the summary. I hope you understand my reasoning of why I believe that your passage...
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...Chaucer Essay “The Battle of the Miller and Knight” The Miller's Tale, the second tale introduced to us in Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales brings us the saga of a carpenter named John, and his young wife Alison, whom he is very possessive of, afraid that if he let her out of her 'cage', she would fly away. Nicholas, an Oxford student whose talent involved "making love in secret", was a boarder at John and Alison's home, and had taken quite a liking to Alison. Also included in the tale, Absalon, a parish clerk serving the church and best described as a 'pretty boy', was in love with Alison too, and took daily nighttime strolls outside her window, singing love songs and strumming an old guitar. This tale of sexual adventures contains similarities and differences when compared to the first installment in Chaucer's book, The Knight's Tale. The Knight's Tale also included a pair of love-birds, though this time it was two men, two "knight brothers", who had fallen in love with the same girl. They ended up going against each other in a fight to win her hand. In the end, one man, Palamon, ended up winning Emily's hand in matrimony and they lived through a long, healthy marriage. After the Knight had finished his story, the Host pronounced the Monk to share the next tale with the group, assuming they would be going down the royal rankings of the people surrounding him. As the Knight had just told his tale, it would make sense to let the Monk go next. However, as the spotlight...
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...content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org. University of Illinois Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The Journal of English and Germanic Philology. http://www.jstor.org This content downloaded from 182.69.107.77 on Mon, 17 Aug 2015 10:45:38 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions A CONJECTURE ON THE WIFE OF BATH'S PROLOGUE of Bath's the Wife When for the first reading Prologue time, I remember my surprise upon reaching line 193 to find continued for several hundred lines, whereas that the Prologue a tale to follow. With I had expected each reading since, I in adjusting my expecta the same difficulty have experienced found. This repeated experience, tion to what I actually and I suspect it has come to all readers of Chaucer, in finally the matter. The result is a theory cited me to investigate which holds that the first part of the Prologue through line 193 was originally Pro by the present preceded Shipman's a number of lines which were later omitted, and that logue plus to the present the whole served as a Wife's...
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...Iaeudyfgioerjhsdgklasd;fkyyyyyguitvbeoitvbuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuueopwbn oserituboew orituoieruotyb uyrouyo rouyoriuyero roituyeroiuy7o oruyo neoruybw0ruy 0wrt9uy rtuyworiuy b0riuyowperiybn ri5uyrowei wr09tuywe4oy w0rtuyei9ry6t94p 9guyoeir 9r8rtu oey riu 8ory 9eroiugjeuorg oerug eori 79eoeri r8tyg rtetym ryjhdfym m h ry uer y5 356 uy7 67 u rt y yt ui ertu tu7 er y er6uy t I bh gufy gtyd trdseyrw cvrbfuytdestf yugtrdrdtyhguh g6duytgiujhuioy yrytguijhiojuigut uhoijiujiytuv ugiojuioguyrfty oihuyfytghujoljm oguyguihoi jigijiop jtfuytfrt5 ertyf deree ws 5rgy u The Knight The Knight rides at the front of the procession described in the General Prologue, and his story is the first in the sequence. The Host clearly admires the Knight, as does the narrator. The narrator seems to remember four main qualities of the Knight. The first is the Knight’s love of ideals—“chivalrie” (prowess), “trouthe” (fidelity), “honour” (reputation), “fredom” (generosity), and “curteisie” (refinement) (General Prologue, 45–46). The second is the Knight’s impressive military career. The Knight has fought in the Crusades, wars in which Europeans traveled by sea to non-Christian lands and attempted to convert whole cultures by the force of their swords. By Chaucer’s time, the spirit for conducting these wars was dying out, and they were no longer undertaken as frequently. The Knight has battled the Muslims in Egypt, Spain, and Turkey, and the Russian Orthodox in Lithuania and Russia. He has also fought in formal...
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...The function of a pardoner in Chaucer’s time was to collect money for charitable purposes and to be the pope’s special agent in dispensing or rewarding contributors with certain pardons as a remission for sins. He could visit churches, receive money in the pope’s name and dispense indulgences. The pardoner’s tale displayed how greed and avarice can only bring treachery and death, the money causes them to behave in ways that lead to their demise. In the prologue, the pardoner admits that he is a fraud and is motivated by greed and avarice and many sins that he himself displays. He preaches that money is the root of all evil but sells relics to others which is supposed to bring them great fortune; he also states that many of his sermons are the product of evil intentions. When asked to tell a tale he agrees only after he has food and wine to eat and drink. He begins his tale about a group of young people who spend most of their time drinking and partying excessively, he names gluttony, drunkenness, gambling and swearing as a few sins they commit. As they drink a coffin passes and they are told its one of their old friends who was killed by the hands of death; the three personified death and decided to search for him and slay him in order to avenge the death of their old buddy. On the search they passed an old man who searched for youth again, he said “death won’t even take him” when he said this the three demanded to be lead to where death resided, the old man told them death...
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...Middle English Essay In the book of Margery Kempe and the general prologue, the audience is given both examples to emulate and also to avoid the journeys undertaken by these pilgrims. In both texts, one can be very jealous of the quest both writers are encountering. On the other hand, the audience believe that they are living in a much warmer, more welcoming society than the hardships portrayed in parts of these texts. Each audience member takes these texts to heart differently. In Margery Kempe’s adventure, she is giving a detailed account of her interactions on her travels to Jerusalem. In contrast, Chaucer in the general prologue, gives us details of many different characters in his quest to the shrine of Thomas a` Becket in Canterbury. In the following paragraphs, different aspects will convey how Margery Kempe and Geoffrey Chaucer make the audience want to emulate or avoid these writers quests. One can easily tell the difference in society is overwhelming comparing to today`s society. In the general prologue it is clearly shown that the society is extremely autocratic. The life of a monk in today`s society is quite different to the life of a monk in medieval times. A monk is meant to be a religious figure in society, however he is conveyed more as a knight in medieval times. This monk is licensed to go outside the monastery at all times “A monk ther was, a fair for the maistre, An outridere, that lovede venerie, Amanlyman, to been an abbot able” (Chaucer,Geoffery 165)...
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...The Canterbury Tales is an undoubtedly a richly textured work that draws in and combines many different elements of many genres. As a collection of tales it forms a rich tapestry woven from a selection of threads that neatly cover the spectrum of Chaucer's society, and utilises a range of styles which are appropriately diverse and which suit the personality of each individual storyteller. But the casually adopted view that Chaucer utilised a separate genre for each of his tales is an over-simplification of a far more subtle overall generic scheme. For a start, Caroline D. Eckhardt explains that up to the twelfth century, Medieval statements about genre, such as those of Isidore of Seville, Bernard of Utrecht, Honorius of Autun and Matthew of Vendome, usually accounted for no more than four identifiable poetic genres. In the thirteenth century, Geoffrey of Vinsauf and John of Garland extended these lists, though not by much. At this time, the concepts of tragedy and comedy had little to do with humour or pathos, but were instead measures of the movement of fortunes of the characters involved, as well as their social status; Geoffrey of Vinsauf describes comedy as "a rustic song dealing with humble persons, beginning in sadness and ending in joy"(CTC 181) and tragedy as a work "showing the misfortunes of grave persons, beginning in joy and ending in grief"(CTC 181). By today's standards, these interpretations of genre seem rather constrictive...
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...The opening lines of the General Prologue of The Canterbury Tales, with Chaucer’s classically poetic and amorous language, describe the evocation of spring, echoing in the minds of his audience, as if the renewed warmth, sweet sounds and refreshing smells could be perceived by human senses. “When April with his showers sweet The drought of March has pierced unto the root And bathed each vein with such power To generate fresh strength and sire the flower; When Zephyr also has, with his sweet breath, Quickened again, in every wood and heath, The tender shoots and buds, and the young sun Into the Ram one half his course has run, And many little birds make melody That sleep through all the night with open eye (So Nature urges them on to ramp and rage)” The first 11 lines have all the essential elements of the conventional first stanza of a love lyric, indicating the vitality of springtime: April’s sweet showers, budding flowers, burgeoning leaves, the warm Zephyr, the melodious chirps of birds stimulated by the beauty of Nature. The whole imagery triggers narrator’s poetic sensibilities as well as the readers. It is about a sense of relief after the harshness of a long winter and a keen anticipation of all the lovable things that would follow. Besides, Chaucer employs vivid verbs, together with rhythmic phrases like “holt and heath”, “shoots and buds”, “ramp and rage”, which convey a strong sense of masculine energy to further intensify the renewed reproductive...
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...Out of the Ordinary, the Wife of Bath. Novelist and philosopher C. Joy Bell, author of “Saint Paul Trois Chateaux” and “Sun is snowing” once said, “I don’t fit into any stereotype and I like myself that way” (Bell). This is the exact description of the Wife of Bath as she is the kind of person that stands out from the rest. Although she comes from the medieval period, she has characteristics of a modern woman such as power and affluence. During the medieval period, women were viewed as subordinate creatures to men. A typical medieval woman married and began raising children soon after reaching puberty. Husbands had full control over their wives and a wife had to be loyal to her husband and obey him at all times. Blewitt described this saying; “A wife . . . must please her husband and be totally obedient to him, even when he is unjust and violent” (Blewitt 662). A woman’s sole purpose was to bear children, ". . . a wife's first duty was to provide her husband with an heir, and she could be divorced if she were barren"(Rhinesmith 601). They remained largely indoors, having no true chance to receive a formal education or hold economic or social power. The Wife of Bath is a complete opposite of the typical medieval woman. Although she married early, she is not under the control of any man. In fact, she uses sexual power to control her husbands by depriving them of sex in order to get what she wants. Another thing that distinguishes her from the typical medieval woman is that she...
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...Nun Prioress In the General Prologue to The Canterbury Tales, Chaucer describes the character of the Nun Prioress. He does not dislike her and does not think that she is evil, however, he understands that, as a daughter of an aristocrat, she does not belong in the convent among others serving God. Her vanity, misplaced sympathy, and desire to be in love make her unsuitable to be a nun. Chaucer communicates this through criticism by omission, meaning that he purposely avoids commenting on all the details a reader would expect to find in the description of a nun. Chaucer includes details about the Nun Prioress is to prove that he does not think that she is an unpleasant woman. She is “certainly very cheerful, most pleasant, and amiable in bearing” (137-138). She concentrates very hard on appearing well-behaved and proper. She sings and speaks French well and has very excellent table manners. Her features are sweet and she dresses herself very well in a flattering cloak with a rosary made of expensive coral beads and a golden brooch pinned to her. Chaucer also includes that she has “...tender feelings [and is] so charitable and so full of pity] that she weeps at the sight of an injured or dead mouse or if someone hits one of the lap dogs she keeps. The Nun Prioress hopes that by showing she is capable of proper etiquette and appears “to be stately in manner, [that she will] appear worthy of reverence” (140-141). However, she has not been placed in a convent to be admired...
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...development throughout different cultures and historical time periods. The study of the development of the English language has been used to represent the specific ideals and notions that pertain to particular cultures throughout history. Anglo-Saxon poetry express its cultural identity and values that underpin Anglo Saxon society, through ancient texts such as Beowulf exploring notions of heroism and servitude. Middle English literature such as The Millers Tale, unmasks the inner feudal system that deciphers the hierarchal structure within Middle England. The Holkam bible through both visual representation and literature highlights the Biblical understanding at the time and cultural barriers that were associated. The Miller’s Tale by Geoffrey Chaucer is an example of Middle English poetry that represents the societal structure of the time through language. The Miller’s Tale expresses the hierarchal structure in Middle England through denoting each individual characters social standing within society. The Miller’s Tale entails the story of a carpenter who falls in love with a juvenile/adolescent girl (“Of eighteteene yeer she was of age”); a love triangle develops between three men and a woman, further digressing into a story of humor and irony aimed to satisfy the upper class. Geoffrey Chaucer depicts the carpenter as man who acts above...
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...The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer talks about a pilgrimage. In this story “a group is gathered at Tabard Inn to go on a pilgrimage to the shrine of Saint Thomas à Becket at Canterbury.” (Chaucer, Geoffrey. The Canterbury Tales. South Carolina McDougall Little British literature. Ed. Janet Allen et. al. Houghton Mifflin, Co. 2009. p.140 ). The host decided to let the group to tell stories to pass time on their way. In this story there are Chaucer’s saints who are honest, ready to help, faithful and on the other hand, there are scoundrels who are greedy, hypocrites, liars. Chaucer's saints are Knight, Parson, and Plowman, and the rest where bad and good in ways. Every character on this pilgrimage have differences and similarities. Saints and...
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...The Requirement of a Mutually Contented Relationship The Canterbury Tales, by Geoffrey Chaucer, was written in a time where women were often compelled to servitude for men. This was even prevalent in relationships in which men exerted forceful control over women. Despite societal norms, women still strived for some sort of sovereignty in their relationships, which often went ungranted. This imbalance of power caused unhappiness and serious discontent. Chaucer lived in a world where critics were considered heretical and were at risk of capital punishment, i.e. burning at the stake. This caused many faultfinders to resort towards hiding behind fictional characters in order to safely express their beliefs. Chaucer denounces his society’s common...
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