Chaucer's Canterbury Tales
Geoffrey Chaucer was uniquely positioned to write the Canterbury Tales. A customs official, diplomat, and courtier who had traveled to France and Italy on royal business, he encountered French romance traditions, Boccaccio's Decameron, and Petrarch's Latin poetry at first hand, and brought all of these influences to bear on a work entirely English in its social observation and moral sensibility. The Tales present a cross-section of English society assembling at the Tabard Inn in Southwark to make the pilgrimage to the shrine of Thomas Becket at Canterbury: knight and plowman, prioress and wife of Bath, miller and monk, pardoner and franklin, physician and cook. The decision to write in Middle English — the vernacular London dialect — rather than French (still the prestige language of the English court) or Latin (the language of the Church and learning) was as consequential as Dante's choice of Tuscan sixty years earlier. Chaucer had read Dante and Boccaccio, and he understood what was at stake. By the time of his death in 1400, English had been definitively established as a literary language capable of the full range of human expression: comedy, tragedy, romance, fabliau, sermon, beast fable, saint's life, and philosophical debate. The social satire of the Tales is pointed and often savage. The Pardoner sells fake relics and admits openly that his preaching is designed not to save souls but to extract money from credulous parishioners. The Monk ignores his monastic rule and hunts instead. The Friar avoids the poor and sick — the people his order existed to serve — and cultivates the wealthy. The Prioress affects delicate courtly manners that sit oddly on a religious vocation. Yet these critiques are delivered with such comic warmth that they read as human observation rather than polemic; Chaucer's satirical targets remain recognizable types in any institution in any era. The Wife of Bath stands apart as perhaps the most remarkable character in medieval English literature. Her prologue — longer than many of the tales — is a raucous, erudite, and surprisingly modern argument for female authority within marriage, drawing on Scripture, classical authorities, and her own five-husbandly experience to demolish the antifeminist tradition that the Church had built up over centuries. That Chaucer could create such a character — and give her the best arguments — reflects both his intellectual range and the genuine complexity of gender debates in fourteenth-century England. The Canterbury Tales was left unfinished at Chaucer's death; he had planned 120 tales but completed only 24. Nevertheless the work as it stands constitutes the foundation of the English literary canon. Spenser called Chaucer the 'well of English undefiled'; Shakespeare pillaged him for plots; Dryden translated him; in the twentieth century, the Tales inspired everything from Pier Paolo Pasolini's film to modern graphic novel adaptations. Chaucer's genius was to see English society whole — its pretensions, its humor, its brutality, its tenderness — and to render it in language that has never entirely gone stale.
- Year: 1387 CE
- Category: Cultural
