Age of Chaucer

The two tales, told by the Wife of Bath and the Clerk in The Canterbury Tales, have parallel plots. “The Wife of Bath’s Tale” begins with a

Robert Browning wrote the two poems, "My Last Duchess" and "Porphyria's Lover." Both poems convey an thoughtful, examination profound commentary about the concept of love.

Chaucer, Geoffrey. "The Canterbury Tales." Trans. Nevill Coghill. Glencoe Literature, The Reader's Choice, British Literature. Columbus: Glencoe/McGraw Hill, 2000. 118-119.

A Comparison of The Lady of Shallot by Alfred Lord Tennyson, My Last Duchess by Robert Browning, La Belle Dame Sans Merci by Keats and To His Coy Mistress by Andrew Marvell

Throughout the three literary periods: The Ancient World, The Middle Ages, and The Renaissance; women have been portrayed and treated in different ways. The Iliad by Homer is about the Trojan War fought by the Achaeans and Trojans which was over the capturing of the wife of King Menelaus, Helen of Troy, by Paris. In The Canterbury Tales by Chaucer, it is about a group of 29 people who are all on a pilgrimage to Canterbury to worship St. Thomas’s shrine; however, as Chaucer describes all these types of people not many of them are very religious and the stories they tell show the perspective and portrayal of women in this time. In Francis Petrarch’s poetry Rhymes, he describes his love and admiration for a woman who doesn’t love him back, yet Petrarch still confesses his love for her through his poetry. Through these stories and poems, The Iliad, The Canterbury Tales, and Rhymes, from the three time periods, the role of women is a progression of how they were looked at and their role in that time period, by men.

I agree with what Condren’s view on Chaucer. Chaucer shows in the story Chaucer talks about how dynamic life is and how different the people are. Life is a crazy thing but Chaucer makes it really different. He makes everything “fascinating” with everything he talks about has to have a story behind it and the people have stories behind them. He makes the people “fascinating” he talks about how they have rashes and have nasty eyebrows and the way they dress. Nothing is boring with them.

In terms of literary quality, Chaucer went great lengths to give all elements a bit of attention. The work is primarily about a knight who is pardoned from a rape on the condition that he acquires the answer to one of life’s

Women’s depiction in literature has typically been stereotypical, hardly ever displaying women in the unique lights that each of them are in. Stereotypical depictions of women have lessened greatly in the present day than it has in the past, but the struggle for correct representation of women has still been a challenge to overcome. Often in times, women are depicted in negative, stereotypical lights as a way to increase the values and highlight the qualities of the men in the pieces of literature. Even though the problem has gotten better through the years, women were shown in terrible stereotypes during the medieval times. In Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, he reinforced and went against medieval stereotypes of women through the Wife of Bath,

The Canterbury Tales, begun in 1387 by Geoffrey Chaucer, are written in heroic couplets iambic pentameters, and consist of a series of twenty-four linked tales told by a group of superbly characterized pilgrims ranging from Knight to Plowman. The characters meet at an Inn, in London, before journeying to the shrine of St Thomas a Becket at Canterbury. The Wife of Bath is one of these characters. She bases both her tale and her prologue on marriage and brings humor and intrigue to the tales, as she is lively and very often crudely spoken. Her role as a dominant female contrasts greatly with the others in the tales, like the prim and proper Prioress represents the

Women in the medieval times were cast into very distinct roles. There was a strict code of conduct that was followed. They were to be submissive to their husbands and follow their lead. A woman's place was also in the home and the responsibilities of cooking, cleaning, sewing, etc. fell into their domain. Women who deviated from these cultural-set norms made for interesting characters. Chaucer's use of women and their overstepping their boundaries and typical roles in society make them most memorable.

The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer is a collection of very well written stories with very complex characters. The most interesting characters are the female characters on their way to Canterbury with the rest of pilgrims as well as the women in the stories that the other pilgrims tell. Among these women, the most notable are Emily from the Knight’s Tale and The Wife of Bath. Both of these women, however different, appear to be strong, capable and self-ruling. In both cases, these women’s stories show Chaucer’s view on relationships with the opposite sex- that they will always be imbalanced, and that women are merely trophies to be won and displayed for all to see and, lastly, that subservience is equal to love.

The Canterbury Tales is a story that incorporates a multitude of stories told by a multitude of characters. Written by Geoffrey Chaucer, he devises a novel in which each character has to narrate a total of four stories as part of a competition; on their way to visit Saint Thomas Becket, the characters would tell two stories going and two stories returning from the journey. The perspective changes through each story, and each story is introduced by a general, opening, third person prologue. Though many of the characters got to share some ideas, Chaucer unfortunately passed away before his story’s entirety. As a result, a winner was never officially clarified. Needless to say, it is evident that the clear winner would be the Miller’s Tale.

The poem begins with a woman luxuriating in "complacencies of the peignoir, and late coffee and oranges in a sunny chair," while "the green freedom of a cockatoo" mingles with the coffee and oranges "to dissipate the holy hush of ancient sacrifice" (1247). The failure-or refusal-of the woman to attend church on a Sunday morning, but to instead stay home and enjoy the ordinary, yet somehow

The Canterbury Tales, a collection of tales by Geoffrey Chaucer, was written in Middle English at the end of the 14th century (Encyclopaedia Britannica, 2011). It is considered to be the best work of literature in English in the Middle Ages (Johnston, 1998). Chaucer uses literary devices as no one had ever done. In addition, he chose to use English instead of Latin. This masterpiece is structured in a similar way as Bocaccio's Decameron. The tales are organized within a frame narrative (Encyclopaedia Britannica, 2011) explained in the General Prologue by the narrator: a group of pilgrims that are going to visit St. Thomas Becket in Canterbury's Cathedral. These pilgrims are from different estates of the medieval society: nobility, the

It was in Chaucer's final phase, which he gained his popularity, The Canterbury Tales (written mostly after 1387). The Canterbury Tales was an unfinished poem. Being his most successful, it consists of 17000 lines. It was one of the most unsullied works in all literature. (Info Please) The Canterbury Tales is a collection of stories written in Middle-English. As a group of pilgrims travels to the shrine of Saint Thomas they decide to tell stories to each other on the way. In a huge list of poems and stories, the Canterbury Tales is Chaucer's most important and visual, and a stacking achievement of western culture and Old English times. While writing the Canterbury tales he use the characters and their lifestyles to create irony and every day events. Describing what the old English church was really like. (Geoffrey Chaucer) The Canterbury Tales were written in Middle English, in the old days, the tone was equivalent to London type style. Although there was never an official copy of the Canterbury tales, Adam Pankhurst made sure that wasn’t true.