Relic

Burger's article “Kissing the Pardoner” asserts that the Pardoner is an instrumental element of redefining social and political constructions, specifically those of Chaucer’s time. He criticizes other writers who propose that the pardoner is a kind of present “absence” that opposes coquettish feminity, or that he is too extreme in flouting any sort of categorization. On the face of the Pardoner’s image, the reader receives a clear binary when he’s interacting with Harry Bailey, effeminate and…

The Pardoner’s Words: Life as a Game for the Craftiest and Blind to the Slowest While the Pardoner of Geoffrey Chaucer’s poem The Canterbury Tales, is undoubtedly a prime model of hypocrisy and evil intent, and his ability to survive on earth as an aberration of all norms shows that the norms leaves the travelers, and people in general, open to folly and sin. Chaucer appears to be inspired by the Fals Semblant character of the famous poem Roman de la Rose by Guillaume de Lorris, another…

Gregory Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales was a satire on the corruption of the Catholic Church in the medieval period. The story is centered on the trip of pilgrims going towards St. Thomas Becket's shrine each member of the group telling stories along the way. Each of the characters, excluding the parson, the knight, the plower, and some less important characters, have some form of religious or moral corruption displayed in their introduction and in the story they tell. An argument can be made…

City, Church, and the Empire Many people depict medieval Europe as times of kings, knights, and epic battles that end in great bloodshed and loss. While these things are true, medieval Europe was much more than that. It was a time of controversy, strong and terrible leaders in politics as well as the church, and many changes in population and how the Europeans structured their culture. Writers and historians of this time period, like Thomas Aquinas and Thomas More, produced many works that told…

turn to enter one of the hottest tourists sites of Paris—Notre Dame de Paris. This Cathedral that was once a place of worship has lost most of the prayerful atmosphere it once would of held and now hosts a gift shop as well as a museum including a relic of the crown of thorns (that of course, people can see for a fee). At first glance the throngs of tourists may deter people from appreciating Notre Dame de Paris, but in truth, the architects who created Notre Dame used beauty to educate and…

The Parthenon and Acropolis in Greece is the first of the two sacred spaces I chose to write about for activity three because of my fascination with ancient Greece. The Chartres Cathedral in France is the second sacred space I chose because I felt an instant attraction to the architectural style of the cathedral. I will go more in depth about what makes these two sacred spaces important and unique, as well as what similarities they share. The Acropolis of Athens is an ancient citadel located in…

In the 1500 the Roman Catholic Church was super powerful in western Europe. The Catholic Church guarded its position and anybody who was deemed to have gone against the Catholic Church was labelled a heretic and burnt at the stake. The Catholic Church did not tolerate any unusual behavior from anyone if they were to “go soft” might have been a sign of weakness. The catholic church's power had been built up over many centuries and relied on ignorance and superstition on people from other lands…

a few of the sins and hypocrisy that occurred within the Catholic church in the middle ages. Some of the biggest and most widespread sins that the church committed in the middle ages were simony, sexual immorality, selling indulgences and selling relics. The Black death caused panic amongst the people of Europe in the mid 1300s, and some believe that this was one of the main causes of the church beginning to become corrupt. There were many powerful people in the church, mostly popes, that were…

This painting illustrates an event that is said to have taken place shortly after the relic of the True Christ had been given to the Scuola in 1369. During the annual march to the church of San Lorenzo, the relic fell from the bridge into the water but somehow remained suspended above the water and escaping all that tried to capture it until Andrea Vendramin, Grand Guardian of the Scuola, jumped in…

For over decades, speculation regarding the tip of the planet has run rampant—all in conjunction with the arrival of the new millennium. Identical was true for our spiritual European counterparts who, before the year 1000, believed the Second Coming of Christ was close, and therefore the thoughts of the end of the world was high. When the apocalypse didn't occur in 1000, it had been determined that the proper year should be 1033, cardinal years from the death of Jesus, then again that year…