Condemnation of Corruption in the Canterbury Tales

Abstract

In The Canterbury Tales, Geoffrey Chaucer assembles 24 stories of people going on a pilgrimage. As the journey suggests, it can be said that the main theme in the text is religion. In the tales, different attitudes towards religion and the church can be discerned. And these attitudes of the characters mostly evolve around corruption within the churchmen. Hereby, the tales reveal the corruption in the order, but four different characters, which are the Prioress, the Monk, the Friar and the Pardoner convey the message considerably clear. Since four of the characters belong to the Medieval church, they seem to reflect the moral decay of the order quite notably. They are presented in a way that reflects the corruption of not only the church, but also the society and its elements all together. Moreover, Chaucer’s method is a reminder of Aristotle’s teachings, as he embraced the idea of literature as an instrum ent to enable the reader -or rather the audience- to be enlightened through the delight of the literature. The faulty aspect of the people and the Medieval Church are shown through the characters that are distorted from their true purpose. In that sense, it is possible to create or rather observe a correlation between Aristotle and Geoffrey Chaucer. For sure it can be said that Chaucer does not follow the classical ideology entirely in his writing, but there are certain aspects in the tales that enables the reader to recognize some similarities with Aristotle.

Keywords

• Catholic Church
• Corruption
• Immorality
• Medieval Era
• Moral Teaching

References

1. Asbury, C. (1951). An Aristotelian Theory of Comedy as Exemplified in the Comic Characters of the Canterbury Tales (MA dissertation, Loyola University Chicago, 1951). Chicago, Illinois. doi:https://ecommons.luc.edu/luc_theses/900
2. Chaucer, G., & Coghill, N. (2003). The Canterbury Tales. London: Penguin Books. Greenblatt, S. (2018). The Norton Anthology of English Literature (9th ed., Vol. A). New York, New York: Norton.
3. Hawkins, S. (1964). Chaucer's Prioress and the Sacrifice of Praise. The Journal of English and Germanic Philology, 63(4), 599-624. Retrieved February 20, 2021, from http://www.jstor.org/stable/27714511
4. Hodges, L. (2000). Chaucer's Friar: "Typet" and "Semycope". The Chaucer Review, 34(3), 317-343. Retrieved February 20, 2021, from http://www.jstor.org/stable/25096098.
5. Millichap, J. (1974). Transubstantiation in the "Pardoner's Tale". The Bulletin of the Rocky Mountain Modern Language Association, 28(4), 102-108. doi:10.2307/1346527.
6. Wurtele, D. (1987). CHAUCER'S MONK: AN ERRANT EXEGETE. Literature and Theology, 1(2), 191-209. Retrieved February 20, 2021, from http://www.jstor.org/stable/23924409