Theme: Social Significance of The Canterbury Tales contents

Theme: Social Significance of The Canterbury Tales
CONTENTS:

Introduction 3
1.Language of The Canterbury Tales 7
2.Dream Vision in Canterbury Tales 10
3.Story and Storyteller 15
Conclusion 20
GLOSSARY 22
Bibliography 26

Introduction

The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer offer a glimpse of society and culture in medieval England. Discover how Chaucer uses people from a wide variety of social classes in his stories to reflect different aspects of classism, religion, and daily life. Updated: 01/06/2022
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The Middle Ages
Despite covering nearly a thousand years of history, the Middle Ages are often reduced to a political insult or a video game backdrop. Studying the literature of the Middle Ages is a great way of breaking down stereotypes, whether negative or positive, about what 'medieval' really means.
In fourteenth-century England, Geoffrey Chaucer was a minor civil servant who wrote literary romances on the side. He's chiefly remembered today as being one of the major authors of English-language literature.
The Canterbury Tales is the best-known of Chaucer's works. Its vivid portrayal of a diverse group of travelers reveals much about the composition and values of society in late medieval England. It shows us shifting dynamics of social power, an economy in flux, and diverse expressions of faith and doubt within late medieval Christianity
Social Classes
A look at the characters in The Canterbury Tales can tell us a lot about the social classes of the time. The established aristocracy is represented by the gentle Knight and his Squire. The wealthy Merchant and the London guildsmen represent the increasingly prosperous and confident middle classes who thrived in late medieval Europe's cities. The professional classes also flourish, although they were sometimes regarded with suspicion. The Physician, for instance, is characterized as greedy as well as learned¹.
The linked stories of The Canterbury Tales are written in styles that correspond to their tellers' personalities. The Knight, for instance, tells a historical romance, written in elegant rhymed couplets. Both the genre and the style reflect the fact that he is well-educated and a little old-fashioned. While the knightly classes were still important in Chaucer's England, their hold on wealth and influence was less exclusive than in previous generations.
In Chaucer's England, artisans such as the weaver, carpenter, tailor, and others mentioned in the General Prologue, enjoyed growing prosperity. This prosperity could be a source of resentment, as illustrated by the fact that no one likes the Miller very much.
In the lean years following the mid-century epidemic called the Black Death, there was a shortage of workers to farm the land and harvest and process crops. Consequently, people like the Miller could, and often did, overcharge for their services. All of Chaucer's pilgrims are delighted when the Cook tells a story in which one such greedy Miller gets his comeuppance.²
The question of whether The Canterbury Tales is a finished work has not been answered to date. There are 84 manuscripts and four incunabula (printed before 1500) editions[4] of the work, more than for any other vernacular English literary text with the exception of The Prick of Conscience. This is taken as evidence of the Tales' popularity in the century after Chaucer's death.[5] Fifty-five of these manuscripts are thought to have been originally complete, while 28 are so fragmentary that it is difficult to ascertain whether they were copied individually or as part of a set.[6] The Tales vary in both minor and major ways from manuscript to manuscript; many of the minor variations are due to copyists' errors, while it is suggested that in other cases Chaucer both added to his work and revised it as it was being copied and possibly as it was being distributed.
Even the oldest surviving manuscripts of the Tales are not Chaucer's originals. The very oldest is probably MS Peniarth 392 D (called "Hengwrt"), written by a scribe shortly after Chaucer's death. Another famous example is the Ellesmere Manuscript, a manuscript handwritten by one person with illustrations by several illustrators; the tales are put in an order that many later editors have followed for centuries.[7][8] The first version of The Canterbury Tales to be published in print was William Caxton's 1476 edition. Only 10 copies of this edition are known to exist, including one held by the British Library and one held by the Folger Shakespeare Library.
In 2004, Linne Mooney claimed that she was able to identify the scrivener who worked for Chaucer as an Adam Pinkhurst. Mooney, then a professor at the University of Maine and a visiting fellow at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, said she could match Pinkhurst's oath in the Scriveners' Common Paper to the handwriting in the Hengwrt manuscript, which she theorized might have been transcribed from Chaucer's working copy.[9][10] Although this identification has been generally accepted, some scholars have expressed doubts.[11]
In the absence of consensus as to whether or not a complete version of the Tales exists, there is also no general agreement regarding the order in which Chaucer intended the stories to be placed.[12][13]
Textual and manuscript clues have been adduced to support the two most popular modern methods of ordering the tales. Some scholarly editions divide the Tales into ten "Fragments". The tales that make up a Fragment are closely related and contain internal indications of their order of presentation, usually with one character speaking to and then stepping aside for another character. However, between Fragments, the connection is less obvious. Consequently, there are several possible orders; the one most frequently seen in modern editions follows the numbering of the Fragments (ultimately based on the Ellesmere order).[12] Victorians frequently used the nine "Groups", which was the order used by Walter William Skeat whose edition Chaucer: Complete Works was used by Oxford University Press for most of the twentieth century, but this order is currently seldom followed.[12]
FragmentGroupTalesFragment IA
General Prologue
The Knight's Tale
The Miller's Tale
The Reeve's Tale
The Cook's Tale
Fragment IIB1The Man of Law's TaleFragment IIIDThe Wife of Bath's Tale
The Friar's Tale
The Summoner's TaleFragment IVEThe Clerk's Tale
The Merchant's TaleFragment VFThe Squire's Tale
The Franklin's TaleFragment VICThe Physician's Tale
The Pardoner's TaleFragment VIIB2The Shipman's Tale
The Prioress's Tale
Sir Thopas' Tale
The Tale of Melibee
The Monk's Tale
The Nun's Priest's TaleFragment VIIIGThe Second Nun's Tale
The Canon's Yeoman's TaleFragment IXHThe Manciple's TaleFragment XIThe Parson's Tale.³
An alternative ordering (seen in the early-fifteenth century manuscript Harley MS. 7334) places Fragment VIII before VI. Fragments I and II almost always follow each other, just as VI and VII, IX and X do in the oldest manuscripts. Fragments IV and V, by contrast, vary in location from manuscript to manuscript.