Saint Thomas Becket, Archbishop of Canterbury, had been murdered in Canterbury Cathedral by knights of Henry II during a disagreement between Church and Crown. A valiant and experienced crusader who lives by the code of chivalry, Son of the knight, a finely dressed and artistically talented bachelor, A woman with impeccable table manners who wears a brooch reading, An avid hunter and horseman who disdains the rules of his order, A wealthy lawyer known as much for his personal extravagance as for his professional skill, Companion of the man of law, a pleasure-seeking landowner who dines on every kind of food and drink, A haberdasher, carpenter, weaver, dyer and tapester, all described together, A five-time widow who has traveled throughout the world, The parson's brother, who loves God and his neighbor and plows poor men's fields for free, A brawny and profane tradesman who overcharges and steals from his customers, A gluttonous, lecherous, intemperate man who notifies people to appear at ecclesiastical courts, A close companion of the summoner who sells, An alchemist and confidence trickster who encounters the pilgrims on the road, then rides away when his yeoman speaks too freely, This page was last edited on 22 September 2020, at 12:38. Rearden, p. 458. English had, however, been used as a literary language centuries before Chaucer's time, and several of Chaucer's contemporaries—John Gower, William Langland, the Pearl Poet, and Julian of Norwich—also wrote major literary works in English. Glosses included in The Canterbury Tales manuscripts of the time praised him highly for his skill with "sentence" and rhetoric, the two pillars by which medieval critics judged poetry. The winner received a crown and, as with the winner of The Canterbury Tales, a free dinner. Evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins used The Canterbury Tales as a structure for his 2004 non-fiction book about evolution titled The Ancestor's Tale: A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Evolution. Below is an IPA transcription of the opening lines of The Merchant's Prologue: Although no manuscript exists in Chaucer's own hand, two were copied around the time of his death by Adam Pinkhurst, a scribe with whom he may have worked closely before, giving a high degree of confidence that Chaucer himself wrote the Tales. His meter would later develop into the heroic meter of the 15th and 16th centuries and is an ancestor of iambic pentameter. Chaucer was a courtier, leading some to believe that he was mainly a court poet who wrote exclusively for the nobility. He avoids allowing couplets to become too prominent in the poem, and four of the tales (the Man of Law's, Clerk's, Prioress', and Second Nun's) use rhyme royal. Gower was a known friend to Chaucer. [9] The Tales vary in both minor and major ways from manuscript to manuscript; many of the minor variations are due to copyists' errors, while it is suggested that in other cases Chaucer both added to his work and revised it as it was being copied and possibly as it was being distributed. [8] Fifty-five of these manuscripts are thought to have been originally complete, while 28 are so fragmentary that it is difficult to ascertain whether they were copied individually or as part of a set. Jean Jost summarises the function of liminality in The Canterbury Tales, Both appropriately and ironically in this raucous and subversive liminal space, a ragtag assembly gather together and tell their equally unconventional tales.

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