Chaucer’s

Prologue
 Chaucer’s life
• He was amongst the most innovative of fourteenth-century writers,.
• He was born in the early 1340s, of a prosperous family of wine
merchants
• Had connections with court
• So he knew many fields of life
• In 1360 he was captured while serving in the army in France, and the
king himself contributed to Chaucer's ransom, an indication of his
already established court connection.
• During the 1360s he saw further military service abroad, and was sent
on many missions to Italy and France.
• Certainly he came into contact with most of the men of importance in
London.
• He died in 1400, and was buried in Westminster Abbey.
 Chaucer’s works
• Chaucer 's work is often thought of as belonging to three basic
phases, known as the French , Italian and English periods.
• During the first part of his career, he even translated at least
part of the great French romance La Roman de la Rose, which
was a lasting influence on his own work, while The Book of
the Duchess and some early drafts of other tales probably
belong to this period.
• With The Canterbury Tales, however, which probably took
shape during the 1380s, Chaucer entered a new phase.
• As well as his longer poems, Chaucer is known to have written
several lyrics , to have translated Boethius' Consolation of
Philosophy ,a medieval favourite , and even to have written a
scientific manual, A Treatise on the Astrolabe.
 The Canterbury Tales
• The Canterbury Tales ostensibly concerns the pilgrimage
made by a group of some thirty men and women, from
London to the shrine of St Thomas, the twelfth-century
martyr, at Canterbury.
• Pilgrims traveled to visit the remains of Saint Thomas
Becket, archbishop of Canterbury, who was murdered in
1170 by knights of King Henry II. Soon after his death, he
became the most popular saint in England.
• Chaucer describes each pilgrim in The General Prologue
and at the end sets up a framework for the story-telling
which follows.
• Each pilgrim promises to tell four stories , two on the way
to Canterbury and two on the way back.
• The narrator tells us that as he prepared to go on such a
pilgrimage, staying at a tavern in Southwark called the Tabard
Inn, a great company of twenty-nine travelers entered.
• The pilgrims represent a diverse cross section of fourteenth-
century English society.
• Medieval social theory divided society into three broad
classes, called “estates”: the military, the clergy, and the laity.
• In the portraits that we will see in the rest of the General
Prologue, the Knight and Squire represent the military estate.
• The clergy is represented by the Prioress (and her nun and
three priests), the Monk, the Friar, and the Parson.
• The other characters, from the wealthy Franklin to the poor
Plowman, are the members of the laity.
• These lay characters can be further subdivided into
landowners (the Franklin), professionals (the Clerk, the Man
of Law, the Guildsmen, the Physician, and the Shipman),
laborers (the Cook and the Plowman), stewards (the Miller,
the Manciple, and the Reeve), and church officers (the
Summoner and the Pardoner).