"Canterbury Tales"

Paper Summary:

This paper studies the twenty-nine pilgrims in the prologue of "Canterbury Tales" by Geoffrey Chaucer. The paper attempts to understand the life, culture, values and thought patterns of Chaucer's England through his characters. The paper begins with an overview of the opening lines of the prologue, with their minute details of common, everyday life and the physical body. Then the paper analyzes each of the pilgrims' attributes, character and symbolic value. The pilgrims discussed are: the knight, the knight's son (the young squire), the yeoman, the merchant, the clerk, the sergeant, the franklin, the cook, the shipman, the physician, the wife of Bath, the plowman, the miller, the reeve, the prioress, the monk, the summoner, the pardoner, and the parson.

From the Paper:

"When Geoffrey Chaucer passed away in 1400, he left unfinished his most memorable and resourceful literary endeavor, The Canterbury Tales. The completed portions and existing fragments of the work actually comprise only about one fourth of his intended one hundred twenty or more tales. Even so, what remains of his partial creation occupies over seventeen thousand lines of masterful, clever, detailed and often bawdy verse, offering a rare and animated view of Late Middle Age life and thought. From the spiritual concerns and moral questions raised by the actions of the righteous Parson and the self-serving Friar, to the mundane and even comical physical observations of the Miller's warty nose and the Wife of Bath's remarkable dental display, the reader is moved by this rare personal visit with our forebears and their concerns. After all, our contact with historical figures is too often limited to formal treatments of stuffy characters about whom we seldom hear of frailties, worries, warty noses and blue humor."

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