Excerpt from a Paper on Chaucer

The Canterbury Tales

On the backdrop of the late fourteenth century, painted with this fracturing and these corruptions and sandwiched between the crusades and the Reformation, Geoffrey Chaucer appears on the stage with his damning indictment of the hierarchical church, The Canterbury Tales. Even the language of choice for Chaucer is revolutionary, he writes in a vernacular English, low language for the Latinate and a defiant move against the French tongue of a church in exile.  These tales are pointed barbs at a Church oligarchy and a self important emerging Merchant Class. Within the ranks of his almost thirty  pilgrims we have six who represent the clergy, The Monk, The Friar, The Parson, the Prioress, the Summoner and the Pardoner. These pilgrims were created as criticism. We have the greedy Pardoner selling indulgences and pocketing the profits. He sells fake relics to parishes and lulls them into being robbed with a lovely voice. The Monk is luxurious and idle, the Friar wanton and lecherous. All save the Prioress and the Parson are portrayed in a overtly pejorative manner. Of these latter two, the Prioress tells an anti-Semitic tale. The pilgrims are more caricature than characters, each clergyman symbolic of an individual illness of the church, saving the Parson as the humble parish priest and man of honest faith.

            The prologue seems to be a direct answer to the problems with the Church in Chaucer's time. A short dissection of Chaucer's clergy reveals a response to many of the major ills of the contemporary Catholic Church. Greed is personified in the  Monk who is described as a shiftless dandy with "sleeves purfiled at the hand/ with gris, and that the fineste of a land" (Chaucer 248 Lines 193-194), as well as the avarice of the Friar, Pardoner and Summoner. The sexual immorality of the time is best found in the Friar who had made "ful many a mariage/ of yonge wommen at his owne cost" (212-213). While all are guilty of a certain convenience in their adherence to dogma, the Summoner may believe none of what he prosecutes. He was willing to sell you either virtue or sin and "He wolde suffre, for a quart of win/ a good felawe to have his concubin" (651-652). The Prioresse suffers a vanity with a casual anti-Semitism that was likely zeitgeist. This is not a church for those seeking a relationship with God, it is a Church employing and administered by those who seek a profit rather than a prophet from God.