Chaucer, Canterbury Tales, “Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale” Chaucer, Canterbury Tales, "Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale," (ca. 1380-1400) (all surviving MSS are posthumous, from early 1400s; editio princeps, London: William Caxton, 1477) Genre: The prologue might be called a fictional autobiography, a confession, a mock sermon (Patterson) or an apologia (L., defense).
Persuasive as Chaucer’s Wife’s voice may be, however, do not mistake it for true autobiography. Chaucer’s immediate source for many of the opinions and strategies described in the prologue are two characters from the Roman de la Rose (by Guillaume de Lorris, 1237, and Jean de Meun, 1275): La Vieille (the Old Woman) and Le Jealoux (the Jealous One). He also draws upon the vast literature of anti-feminist theologians to characterize the views of her husbands, especially Jankyn. [N.B.: Long before there were "feminists," there were many "anti-feminists. "] Characters: a rapist knight (unnamed), Arthur’s queen (unnamed), and the "loathly lady" (unnamed) he meets on his quest.
Final Exam Essay Questions - ENGL 420 Chaucer - Dr. Gastle. Your exam will include two of the following essay questions.
You will be required to answer one of them. Your answer must include: a clear thesis (your answer to the question) analysis of at least three individual works/tales by Chaucer (at least two of these must be from after the midterm) references to specific passages for support. You need not quote – although that would be awesome ;-) – but you need to refer to specific events, passages, images, scenes, dialog, etc. Discussion of how those references support, defend, and develop your thesis. Chaucer’s Narrators One of the most complicated and interesting aspects of Chaucer’s poetry is his use of various narrators and narrative voices.
The Problem of Criseyde Perhaps the most perplexing questions at the end of Troilus and Criseyde are whether or not we should sympathize with Criseyde, and to some extent Troilus. Marriage. ENGLISH 324: CHAUCER. Essays should take up one of the topics below (double-spaced/one-inch margins/12-point type) and be five to six pages (±1600 words) in length.
Be sure to refer as helpfully and specifically as possible to the texts upon which you're basing your argument--and be sure to have an argument or thesis. Your essay should have an original title, and it should not use the word “portray.” Essays are due on FRIDAY, APRIL 26; electronic submissions are strongly preferred (fgrady@umsl.edu) 1. Design your own topic, of suitable specificity and sophistication, about something that interests you in the Canterbury Tales we've read. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7.The Tales may be fragmentary and incomplete, but the fragments themselves often have a certain thematic unity. 8. Chaucer Essay. Canterbury Tales. The Canterbury Tales. The Canterbury Tales. Looking back, it’s difficult to remember just when the idea came to create The Canterbury Tales, but it must have been around 1387.
The work was never finished, but what was written amounted to about 17,000 lines, written for the most part in heroic couplets. In The Canterbury Tales, a party of twenty-nine pilgrims gathers at the Tabard Inn in Southwark in preparation for their pilgrimage to the shrine of Thomas Becket in Canterbury. The host of the inn proposes to go along on the pilgrimage as guide, and as a way to pass the time he suggests that the pilgrims each tell two stories on the way out and on the way back.
That would mean a total of 116 tales all together. The pilgrim with the best stories would have a free dinner once all are returned to Southwark. This is a portrait (from a woodcut published by the Chaucer Society (Original Series, 71) of the Wife of Bath. This is a portrait of the Manciple. Now, who would be the audience for such a work? Geoffrey Chaucer (c.1343-1400)
Welcome to the Luminarium Chaucer page.
Here you will find a Chaucer Biography, Chaucer's Works, Quotes, Essays and Articles, as well as links to study resources and a list of books helpful for further study. Visualizing Chaucer. Chaucer's Canterbury Tales ~ presented by ELF. Article: The General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales. Organization: Alexa Crawls Starting in 1996, Alexa Internet has been donating their crawl data to the Internet Archive.
Flowing in every day, these data are added to the Wayback Machine after an embargo period. this data is currently not publicly accessible. Dringo Bell - The Mediaeval Baebes. LibriVox. Canterbury Tales. NPR: Revisiting the Road to Canterbury.