Who Is The Wife Of Bath's Tale?

In the intro of “The Canterbury Tales” the setting and mood of the town of Canterbury is set. The time period is around spring, I can identify this from lines 1-4 in the introduction. It states that rain in April ended the drought in March,and “generated” the flowers. These lines sound like a modern nursery rhyme “ April showers, bring May flowers”. Englishmen that traveled to Canterbury can be described as loyal or pure at heart. I believe that this foreshadows the personalities of the characters that will described throughout the text. From the into I can already tell that the characters will vary, but all have a friendly spirit in common. In lines 22-26 a hotel scenery is described to be prone to fellowship between the occupants. The narrator explains how they observed and described each one of the occupants. I am curious that the narrator might be a traveler or storyteller themselves. In the Middle ages oral storytelling was very common and popular among common folk, however since this is a written text, the poems might simply be profiles of each character.
I believe that the introduction is a back story, and the actual text …show more content…
However the mention of a “pilgrimage” appears multiple in the sections that I have analyzed. A pilgrimage is an extensive trip , commonly related to a “spiritual pilgrimage”. A spiritual pilgrimage for example would be a Muslim taking a trip to the holy city of Mecca. Nevertheless this collection of profiles, gives a first hand account of a diverse group of characters in a Middle Age European region. Along with the repetition of a pilgrimage, some holy figures pop up in the midst of the text. For example the prioress/ nun, the monk and “holy blessed martyr” present in the introduction. This give leeway that this “pilgrimage” could actually be religious based on the presence of different religious