Chaucer, a Writer of His Times

Often times, cultural values unconsciously shape an author's worldview and as a result, the way he writes and the subject matter he writes about. Though in some instances, authors will purposely extenuate and exaggerate their culture's values and behaviors to skewer them in satire. Chaucer's Canterbury Tales chooses to do the latter. Chaucer is fully aware of the idiosyncracies of the culture he lives in, so instead of letting simply influence him unconsciously, he brings them to the forefront to critique them and challenge his contemporary reader's ideas. The Canterbury Tales is a patently English story that reflects the time and place it was written.

Chaucer frames The Canterbury Tales in a pilgrimage starring a diverse cast of archetypical characters that could be found in his home of fourteenth century England. Among them were a knight, cook, monk, miller, and dozens of other characters who form a cross-section of the different social classes who made up the culture. On their trip to Canterbury, each narrates two stories in a contest to see who can tell the most interesting one. This device allows Chaucer to objectively step into the minds of each character representing his culture and critique them. Jill Mann concisely describes the makeup of the pilgrims in "The Literature of Social Classes and the General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales". "The rascals far outnumber the admirable figures [though] Chaucer seems to admire them all, without regard to their moral status." In effect, Chaucer was trying to show the degraded ethical character permeating all classes of English culture.

Much of The Canterbury Tales is an attack on the most pervasive part of fourteenth century English culture, the Catholic Church. Its extravagant displays of wealth, and its hypocritical clergy who advocated simple lives but were more interested in nobility was a stark contrast to the poor majority struggling to survive. Chaucer's contemporaries saw the church and those who ran it as aristocratic hypocrites, so he created characters who represented this in the Pardoner, the Prioress, the Summoner, and the Friar. The Friar and Summoner both charge a fee to hear confessions which should be free. The Summoner is so irreverent as to claim he possesses religious relics that he does not own. The Friar takes bribes, and the Monk does not conform to his Benedictine rule of work and prayer preferring to live a life of aristocratic leisure.

Unlike many authors whose writing was unconsciously shaped by the culture they lived in, Chaucer knowingly imitates and exaggerates some of the elements of his culture in order to critique them. Among other things, Chaucer's Canterbury Tales satirizes a lack of ethics of the people in England and the debased morality of the English Catholic Church.

"The Canterbury Tales." Geoffrey Chaucer. Librarius, 1997. http://www.librarius.com.

"The Life of Chaucer." The Geoffrey Chaucer Page. 27 July 2000. http://www.courses.fas.harvard.edu/~chaucer/special/varia/life_of_ch/ch- life.html.