Canterbury Tales General, Chaucer Flashcards
CT General: community
- Competition: the best romance, the best saint’s life, beast fable, etc.
- Spectrum of society (plowman to knight)
- Each person described by their work or occupation
- Estate satire: 3 estates (knight, parson, plowman); class
- Wllm Blake: “The characters of Chaucer’s Pilgrims are the characters which compose all ages & nations . . . some of the names or titles are altered by time, but the characters themselves forever remain unaltered, & consequently they are the physiognomies or lineaments of universal human life, beyond which Nature never steps.”
- Wllm Blake: “As Newton numbered the stars, and as Linneus numbered the plants, so Chaucer numbered the classes of men.”
CT General: ideology
- Competition: the best romance, the best saint’s life, beast fable, etc.
- Each person described by their work or occupation
- Wllm Blake: “As Newton numbered the stars, and as Linneus numbered the plants, so Chaucer numbered the classes of men.”
- Interruption: order of delivery meant to reinforce a respectable hierarchy of rank: knight to be followed by monk—but miller rudely interrupts with bawdiness and throws off the order
- Pardoner: ability for moral arbiters to abuse their power
CT General: old/new
- Interruption: order of delivery meant to reinforce a respectable hierarchy of rank: knight to be followed by monk—but miller rudely interrupts with bawdiness and throws off the order. A subversion with threatening implications about the lower classes’ willingness to remain in their place—diminished by the drunken silliness of the Miller but sustained by the fact that the Miller’s disruption carries the day by pulling others into the brawl.
- Talk about innovations versus his borrowing of preexisting material
CT General: art, artifice
Storytelling, tales: order of delivery; the tales are as unique as society in that each is filtered through its predecessors—the stories don’t emerge from a platonic, other-wordly realm but are causally inflected.
CT General: genre
I see two possible attitudes Chaucer brings to genre: one focuses on the past and present–the desire to gather up this bouquet of popular genres, especially French ones, and celebrate them in English.
-The other is on a scale with this, but has to do with the future– Chaucer was surely thinking about the direction of the language in written literature–he’s has a distinguished profile at the time and would have every reason to believe he was contributing in an important way to tilling the genre soil. Genres inevitably interact in this poem, breeding, appropos to the story’s beginning with spring and new life
CT General: Chaucer bio
- Chaucer from a rich merchant family, used to court life
- Relationship with John of Gaunt
CT General: innovation in literature
- Adapting French techniques to English–whether genre, formal conventions, and so on
- First to use rhyming couplets of five-stress lines; flexible in choice of which pronunciation of a word he’ll use
CT General: multilingualism, adaptation, translation
Chaucer importing from French and Italian models; adapting those; he takes advantage of the options this opens up–he can use the Germanic or the Latin word depending on his needs, and in rhyming he can choose pronunciations from various parts of England.
CT General: gender, sexuality
- Wife of Bath
CT General: race
- Prioress’s antisemitic tale
CT General: eco-criticism
NEED
CT General: textual criticism
The Ellesmere (which resides here in California of all places!), and the Hengwrt (in Wales, a place near and dear to Elaine) manuscript. The Hengwrt is probably a little older by a few years, but the Ellesmere is more finely copied and decorated. Both are likely the work of Chaucer’s personal scribe Adam Pinkhurst (read “Chaucer’s words unto Adam, his own scribe”). I think these both date to right after Chaucer’s death c. 1400.
Beowulf: Finnsburg fragment
The Finnesburg — or Finnsburh — Fragment is a portion of an Old English heroic poem about a fight in which Hnæf and his 60 retainers are besieged at “Finn’s fort” and attempt to hold off their attackers. The surviving text is tantalisingly brief and allusive, but comparison with other references in Old English poetry, notably Beowulf (c. 1000 AD), suggests that it deals with a conflict between Danes and Frisians in Migration-Age Frisia (400 to 800 AD).
- Tolkien thought it was history rather than legend
CT General: religion
CT Tales reflects mixed views about religion. The Parson is reflected in positive terms and the narrator clearly approves of the Monk for all his eccentricities or apparent improprieties. The Pardoner has a sort of Iago-like depravity–a code of conduct that he feels immensely comfortable with and which is blatantly opposed to Christian morals. Open duplicity.
CT General: irony, jokes, opening lines
Chaucer is playing on themes in love/sex poetry (spring, birds, flowers, etc.) until he drops ‘than longen folk to goon on pilgrimages’. That’s hilarious. That would have caught his audience off guard. He’s setting up the poem to be a romping love-fest, then switches the tenor to religious devotion and acts of penance.
