The Knight's Tale

Throughout the Canterbury Tales, Chaucer uses different literary devices to develop tone and attitude about his character’s and their actions. Chaucer specifically satirizes the Miller in the General Prologue, Miller’s Prologue, and the Miller’s Tale to present his opposing views on education and religion by developing the Miller’s appearance, ignorance, and immaturity undesirably. Throughout literature, undesirable features are given to characters authors disdain, dislike, and satirize. In this…

contrasting yet similar positions based on the underlying theme of a passage. In the three passages from the Canterbury Tales, Chaucer describes love differently through the viewpoint of each speaker in relation to the nature of the rules of courtly love, utilizing diction, juxtaposition and multiple rhetorical devices to emphasize the idea of submission between the lovers involved. ((The tale of the knight, the miller, and the wife of bath are similar despite their conflicting outtakes and…

meaning in a tale or story, especially middle English literature. Geoffrey Chaucer and John Gower were two famous authors of that time and conveniently wrote tales that seem to relate to each other in many ways, and are opposite in many ways as well. Both tales have knights being asked to make a choice, one that will affect their knighthood as well as their future. Both tales have an old hag challenging the morals of the knights, but only one tale seems to have that quintessential fairy tale…

Tsz Pui, Tong (Zarah) Dr. Susan Hagen EH 350 – Chaucer May 11 2016 Draft - Sin of Pride in the Canterbury Tale Back to the fourteenth century, numbers do not only contain numerical values, but also symbolic meanings. Numerological symbolism plays an important role in medieval literature. Lucas Scott points out the significance of medieval people’s belief in numbers: “[medieval reader’s] treatment of numerological prognostication would be incomplete without a discussion of the link between…

Canterbury Tales, Geoffrey Chaucer makes fun of many aspects of medieval society. He shows how corrupt society was through the characters. The Pardoner sells fake relics and scams the poor. The Monk disobeys his vow of poverty and his vow to stay and pray in a monastery. The reeve steals from his master. Chaucer uses all these flawed characters to show different medieval ideas. One of these ideas is the relationship between men and women. The Clerk is unhappy with The Wife of Bath’s tale and…

The Merchant’s Tale follows a genre of the narrative common to the medieval French literature known as a “fabliau.” According to Christina von Nolcken “these types of stories are often short, comic, and involve a person stealing another person’s wife.” The key plot of The Merchant’s Tale fits this, especially with the stock features of the lustful old man cuckolded by a young woman. Von Nolcken continues, “part of the comedy of a fabliau of this kind is the folly of the old man who thinks he can…

In his famous frame narrative, The Canterbury Tales, Geoffrey Chaucer satirizes the thirty pilgrims on their pilgrimage using a story within a story. The thirty pilgrims consist of a cross-section of fourteenth century England, including aristocrats, clergy, middle class, trade class, and the peasants and omitting only royalty and serfs. They congregate at the Tabard Inn, Southwark, directly outside of London, and make their journey to their final destination, Saint Thomas Becket’s shrine in…

Charley Bates from Charles Dickens' Oliver Twist is frequently referred to as Master Bates. The word "masturbate" was in use when the book was written, and Dickens often used colourful names related to the natures of the characters. The title of Damon Knight's story To Serve Man is a double entendre which could mean "to perform a service to humanity" or "to serve a human as food". An alien cookbook with the title To Serve Man is featured in the story which could imply that the aliens eat…

century often portrayed many patriarchal influences against women in their writing. Such was the case with Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, since a majority of the characters were males expressing patriarchal ideology through their prologues and their tales. However, Chaucer also includes a female character that diverges from the patriarchal…

The Wife of Bath’s and The Pardoner’s tales are both part of the Canterbury Tales. In many ways these two stories are similar in what they talk about. In The Wife of Bath we are given a story about a knight that is attempting to save his life after he raped a woman and was sentenced to die unless he can answer one question about women. In The Pardoner’s Tale there are three guys who are all trying to steal the treasure all three found. In The Pardoner’s Tale the men do not know it but they are…