Lit201 - Wk 4 - Canterbury Tales

Canterbury Tales

All of the characters are middle class (the knight is on the verge) - making money and going far in life are the motivations of the characters. We know they are middle class by the fact that they are travelling and eating together. They were wealthy enough to afford the pilgrimage but not wealthy enough to hire their own slaves, servants and guards.


D.R Evans.
Genres:

The legend of a saint
Canticle tale in the Nun's priest tale
Fairy tale found in the squires tale
Chivalric romance in the Knight's tale
Tragedy in the Monk's tale.

The simple thing we should take from this is that he is drawing on all these different genres and incorporating them into the weft of his poem. Sort of like a tapestry made up of characters and different literary genres.

the Exemplum (see the camrbidge companion to chaucer, the essay by botani) an exemplum is a tale that gives advice (irony)

romance, involves comedy, has similarites to latin nature poetry, as well as aspects of social poetry.

Dazzling variety of stories and styles. Radical literary individuality of the canterbury tales. The diversity of genres is paralleled by the diversity of moods, outrageous humour, melancholy, irony approaching cynicism. All of these are united in Chaucer's great empathy for the human kind in its fallen condition. Where dante weeps for some of the sinners in the Inferno, there by showing his compassion, Chaucer shows his compassion by a largely unconditional refusal to condemn, even when he judges, assesses the morality of different characters, he doesn't condemn. There is a benevolence to all his characters. He has an acute eye for hypocrisy, and he is not unsparing in his criticism. Showing us that most characters have a likeable side, a potentially redeemable feature. The motley crew is united by the faith, symbolised at different points by there unification as tellers of tales, by their unity in taking their drink together under the watchful eye of the Host, who is a bad bad priest. So we find here the Church militant, warts and all. The comparison of the Host and the priest seems less incongruous at first when you consider how the priest hood is represented in the work. We see the best of the priest hood and the worst of the priest hood.

There is a sense of unity, and then, diversity, because of the possibility of these characters to emerge as unique types. Such as the pardoner represents the corrupt clergy, the knight, represents his order. Chaucer's drawing of his characters is characteristically medieval. As David traversy says, (find the quote) - perhaps the most compelling examples of this are the Wife of Barth (voluptuous, loose, warm hearted and good woman), the pardoner who is so corrupt, and who is, apart from his corruption with finances and his abuse of indulgences and confession and relics and so on, apart from that, he is morally corrupt (there is a suggestion that he is sexually deviant) he has some redeeming qualities, whether it's his humour, or the sense of his own understanding of himself. Whatever it is he has some redeeming feature. So the wife of Barth, has been married a number of times illicitly, at the church door, which means she has been able to pay off a priest to do it, despite all of that there is warmth in her personality. The relationship between the pardoner and a particular character, the type that he represents, is important.

Sometimes we see the palpable presence of God, in the humanity that he created in his image. This sense of living in an almost unconsciously integrated society is typically medieval. This is a world ordered to the things of God, and the things of God permeate this world. (D. R. Evans). Another important point is the remarkable integration of the medieval sensibility. The frequent mixture of religious and sexual imagery is typically medieval. In other words... everything somehow connects, everything is either a sign of something else, or an analogy of something else.

Courtly love poetry soon came to be used in the writings of St. Bernabeth Clairveu. You see it in the counter reformation in the writings of St John of the Cross, the art of Bernini, his famous St Avala in ecstasy. You get the sacred and the profane (the earth, the ordinary) all mixed up.

that was all about the medieval sensibility

The symbolism of pilgrimage

a pilgrimage from the death of sin to the life of Christ. Heaven is our home and we strive after it, Eternity is our end and we strive after it. On this road, there are many diversions, just like in life.

On these pilgrimages there are the over-zealous (White-cliff[ians]), the luke-warm,