A Monk's Tale Analysis

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Writers use the world around them as inspiration. Accordingly, Chaucer was no different in this respect. This 14th century writer observed the death, disease, and senseless violence in the world around him, and exposed the world to these disturbing actualities in the severe, yet veiled spotlight of the page. Even more so than these grim themes of the world, Chaucer uncovers the jarring realities of the culture at the time. He eventually packs all of these medieval sensibilities into an epic poem. A poem came to be, that he named A Monk’s Tale. In the end, Medieval cultural values were one of Chaucer's greatest inspirations for A Monk's Tale.

Even though they were a highly religious society, most Medieval communities left a lot to chance or “fortune”. This was mostly due to several intense disasters during the middle ages, such as the Black Plague, The Hundred Years War, the collapse of the Catholic Church, and the little ice age. In reality, a …show more content…
In fact, the image of fortune, personified as the blindfolded mythical deity that decides the fate of all humans on earth by spinning a wheel becomes a redundant phrase in A Monk's Tale. Furthermore, Chaucer repeats this image almost indefinitely, such as when Chaucer writes “For sure it is, if Fortune wills to flee,/No man may stay her course or keep his hold;” in lines 5-6 of the first stanza , “The sport of fortune” in line 4 of the 2nd stanza, “Who then may trust the dice, at Fortune's throw?” line 2 of stanza 19, or “Wise is the man who well has learnt to know/Himself. Beware! When Fortune would elect /To trick a man, she plots his overthrow/By such a means as he would least expect” lines 5-8 of the same stanza. These are just a few examples out of several references to fortune throughout the entire poem. In fact, the word fortune alone appears 29 times in the entirety of A Monk’s Tale, throughout several

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