Chaucer for today

Chaucer for today

The General Prologue and The Nun's Priest's Tale

Sections of Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales frequently feature on A Level syllabuses. The Tales and the descriptions of their tellers are funny and inventive, particularly coming to life when read aloud as they were originally intended. Because Chaucer was portraying the jobs and personality types familiar to his medieval hearers it helps to get a window into the world that they knew.

• How much of a say did women have in that society?
• Why were people in the Middle Ages so fussed about death and judgement?
• Why did they accept that some were superior to because of their birth?
• Why was the Church so influential in people’s day to day lives?

Quick solutions to the questions

The latest helpful student resources from Crossref-it.info this week are focused on The General Prologue and The Nun's Priest's Tale and link you to all the most helpful sections of the website. If you are studying or teaching either work look out for:

Context links: The General Prologue

Context links: The Nun's Priest's Tale

The world of Chaucer

Whichever part of The Canterbury Tales you may be studying for A Level English, you will discover helpful information about the world Chaucer inhabited and for which he wrote, at www.crossref-it.info.

A recent addition to the site is The world of Chaucer. It provides answers to intriguing queries like why death seems to play on people’s minds. It helps explain the weekly routine of medieval life. If you need to make sense of the expectations of women in the era, you can read about courtly love and women’s economic status.

Although there were significant shifts in society as a result of the Black Death, one of the key concerns in medieval society was keeping harmonious social order. This was founded on the idea of there existed a ‘chain of being’ which predetermined a person’s ‘position’ in life. This ‘chain’ started with God at the top, as the creator of all life, and ended with stones at the bottom. Take a look at The world of Chaucer > Making sense of the intangible world > The chain of being for more info.

Within human society, deference was to be paid to those in authority because it was believed that they had been raised to that position by God, who had ultimate authority. Each person’s status, or ‘degree’, needed to be recognised. Those who rose ‘above their station’ were regarded with unease.

We might baulk at such a concept today, but the actual economic and social difference between the wealthy and the poor was far narrower in medieval times than the extreme gap between the rich and poorest in most western societies which exists today.