Essays on Canterbury Tales

While reading The Canterbury Tales, it’s hard to not think about what made the author, Geoffrey Chaucer, write these various numbers of comical stories. Each story has an incredibly different theme to it and Chaucer never finished writing all of the stories like he had...

The overall purpose of the Canterbury Tales is to show the story of the thirty pilgrims who travel to Canterbury, who are derived from different parts of society. They tell stories to one another to help pass time on the way. Although very famous, these...

Canterbury Tales: The Power of Lust Seven deadly sins. Eight tales. In Canterbury Tales, Geoffrey Chaucer offers insight into human characteristics and actions. Of the seven deadly sins, lust remains a reoccurring characteristic in several tales. As romance and marriage are prominent motifs throughout the...

The characters introduced in the General Prologue of The Canterbury Tales each represent a stereotype of a kind of person that Chaucer would have been familiar with in 14th Century England. Each character is unique, yet embodies many physical and behavioral traits that would have...

The Miller and Reeve’s Tales of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, while being intricately crafted examples of the French genre fabliaux, differ significantly in both progression, resolution, as well as the tales’ overall connotation and voice. While the Miller’s tale seems to follow the more traditional, “good...

Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales introduces readers to several fascinating and dynamic characters. Perhaps the most fascinating of all is the Pardoner, whose prologue and tale are filled with irony. The Pardoner is a complex character whose blatant hypocrisy and spiritual atrophy serve to give...

Chaucer’s Pardoner is hypocritical, selfish and unreliable despite his tacit desire to preach and encourage others to pursue a life free of blasphemy, gluttony and materialism. The Pardoner appears to be highly familiar with the Bible and the authorities of the Church, and generally delivers...

Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales contain his trademark challenges to and reimaginings of the popular literary genres of his time. With each tale, Chaucer takes a common genre and follows its general conventions in order to tell a perfectly genre-appropriate tale — until he makes...

Every “Abril” in fourteenth century England, everyone from the aristocrats to the peasant class, excluding the royals and serfs, was required by the Church to make a pilgrimage to a holy destination. In Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales, rife with satire, thirty pilgrims journey together...

The Pardoner’s Tale’s Lesson The moral of this tale is that “greed is the root of all evil” as shown with the three rioters. They demand to know where they can find Death, a mysterious figure who killed one of their friends. An old man...

“The Miller’s Tale”, a ribald and bawdy fabliaux about the generation gap, youthful lust, aged foolishness, and the selfishness and cruelty of people towards each other, contains a wealth of color terms which add to and expand the meaning of this rustic tale. The teller,...

Born in the year 1340, Geoffrey Chaucer’s life took him through both the dredges and the peaks of medieval civilization. While serving in the retinue of Prince Lionel, Chaucer was captured by the French during the siege of Reims. Seven years after being ransomed for...

The Wife of Bath’s extraordinary prologue gives the reader a dose of what is sometimes missing in early male-written literature: glimpses of female subjectivity. Women in medieval literature are often silent and passive, to the extent that cuckolding is often seen as something one man...

While there are places where the opinions of the medieval listener and the contemporary listener coincide, generally the vastly different contexts in which we assess the Wife of Bath divide our responses. Set in a strict world of Catholicism, aspects of religious blasphemy such as...

‘Both the medieval listener and the twenty-first century reader can be unsure how to respond to the narrative voice of the Wife of Bath’ Discuss with reference to The Wife of Bath’s Prologue While there are places where the opinions of the medieval listener and...

The Wife of Bath’s Tale: Literature’s first feminist.The Prologue to the Wife of Bath’s Tale is clearly longer than any of the other twenty-three Canterbury Tales. It is, in fact, as long as Chaucer’s General Prologue to the entire collection, in which he gives us...

The roles of women in medieval society were deemed insignificant and held no rank of respect due to the depictions in biblical stories and texts that shaped the medieval society. During the Medieval period, women were not a symbol of strength or power. They were...

The Pardoner of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales is representative of the darker side of the corrupt church of the Middle Ages. A pardoner was a church official who had the authority to forgive those who had sinned by selling pardons and indulgences to them. Although the...

Geoffrey Chaucer’s “Knight’s Tale,” written apart from but included in his unfinished anthology The Canterbury Tales, is considered one of his greatest works. It could be at once a number of things: a dark meditation on providence, a parody of the Chivalric stories that happened...

Fifteenth-century England, in which Geoffrey Chaucer wrote The Canterbury Tales, was ruled by a Christian morality that had definite precepts regarding the ideal character and behavior of women. Modesty and chastity in both manner and speech were praiseworthy attributes in any Godfearing, obedient, wifely woman....

Despite its glorified accounts of the chivalrous lives of gentlemen, the Knight’s Tale proves to be more than a tragically romantic saga with a happy ending. For beneath this guise lies an exploration into the trifling world of the day’s aristocratic class. Here, where physical...

When the Miller proposes to “quite,” or revenge, the Knight’s tale in the Prologue to his tale (3127), he alters the host’s use of the word “quite” (3119). Whereas the Host is asking the Monk to match the Knight’s tale, the Miller wants to requite...

In 1381, John Wycliffe led a group of people disenchanted with the Catholic Church called the Lollards in an early Protestant movement. In this movement, he attacked the sale of indulgences, pilgrimages, the excessive class hierarchy in the Church, and the low moral and intellectual...

The Bible is an infinitely plastic text. The Wife of Bath illustrates this plasticity by, in effect, reworking Scripture and molding it to fit her specific argument. In an exploration of both the Prologue to the Wife of Bath’s Tale and the Tale itself, and...

Long before enlightened women of the 1960’s enthusiastically shed their bras, in an age when anti-feminist and misogynistic attitudes prevailed, lived Geoffrey Chaucer. Whether Chaucer was indeed a feminist living long before his time, or whether he simply conveyed an alternate and unpopular point of...

“ Chaucer opens the “Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales” describing twenty-nine people going on a pilgrimage. It can be recognized from the way people behave today, that they had a distinct personality. In comparison with the other people, Chaucer made The Wife of Bath stand out from...

The Wife of Bath’s tale begins by introducing a knight who commits a disgraceful sin when he decides to rape a woman. After the incident, a huge riot overwhelms King Arthur and it is concluded that the knight’s choices were unforgivable, however, a queen intrudes...

In Geoffrey Chaucer’s famous satirical poem The Canterbury Tales, the author describes a pilgrimage which commences in the town of Southwark and continues to the burial sight of Saint Thomas Becket. The pilgrims are quite an assorted lot, comprised of members of all classes of...

In her Prologue and Tale, the Wife of Bath attempts to undermine the current misogynistic conceptions of women. Her struggle against the denigration of women has led to many feminist interpretations of her Tale, most portraying the Wife of Bath as something of a feminist...

The Wife of Bath is often considered an early feminist, but by reading her prologue and tale one can easily see that this is not true. In Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales, the Wife of Bath believes that a wife ought to have authority and...