The Autumn of the Middle Ages: Chaucer and Dante
By the time Geoffrey Chaucer came to write The Canterbury Tales, his narrative poem
about a group of nine and twenty "sondry folk" making their leisurely way to Canterbury, pilgrimages of that sort had
acquired a dubious reputation. Moralists such as the Lollard preacher William Thorpe complained
that pilgrims were merely out for a good time, their minds on partying, not penance and prayer:
…every town that they [groups of pilgrims] come through, what with the noise of
their singing, and with the sound of their piping, and with the jangling of their Canterbury bells, and with the
barking out of dogs after them, they make more noise than if the King came there away, with all his clarions and
many other minstrels. And if these men and women be a month out in their pilgrimage, many of them shall be, a
half year after, great janglers, tale-tellers, and liars.
—From "The Examination
of Master William Thorpe," on the Geoffrey Chaucer
Page
Scholars tell us that Chaucer probably first conceived The Canterbury Tales in 1386, at which time
he was living in Greenwich, some miles east of London. From his house, he would have been able to watch the
sometimes boisterous and noisy bands of travelers— “with the sound of their piping, and with the jangling of
their Canterbury bells”—making their way down the old pilgrim road from London to the
shrine of Thomas á Becket, the
martyred archbishop of Canterbury.
Who could blame them for wanting a holiday? Hit by wave after wave of war, plague, starvation, and rebellion,
threatened by the expansion of the Ottoman Turks, Europe in
the fourteenth century seemed on the brink of collapse. London in Chaucer's day had a crime rate higher than that
of any modern American city and a homicide rate many times that of London today. You can get an overview of
Europe's calamitous fourteenth century on the
EDSITEment-reviewed Internet Medieval Sourcebook; an
excellent introduction to the period is available on another EDSITEment-reviewed site, The End of Europe's Middle Ages. But while the
disasters of late medieval Europe and the particular troubles of England cast their shadows in Chaucer's poem, a
holiday mood predominates.
The story begins, after all, in a tavern: “Bifel that in that seson on a day, / In Southwerk at the Tabard
as I lay / Redy to wenden on my pilgrymage….” For an interlinear translation of these lines, annotated with
informative discussions of Middle English, see The Canterbury Tales on the Geoffrey Chaucer Website. Chaucer's language may at first seem
daunting, but with a little practice you will see what a beautiful language Middle English really is. An
excellent way to appreciate its beauty is by listening to some audio clips of the poem, read aloud in its
original dialect, available on the EDSITEment-reviewed Labyrinth: Resources for Medieval Study. (On the
Labyrinth homepage, you will see links to the new Labyrinth, which
because it runs on Web/database technology permits much more flexible searching of the archive.)
People in the Middle Ages had an intense love of ritualized games and competitions. The framework of The Canterbury Tales is such game. Harry
Bailey, genial host of the Tabard Inn, proposes that each of the pilgrims tells two tales, one on the road to
Canterbury, one on the way back. None of them plays the game with more gusto than the character who is the
subject of an EDSITEment lesson plan, Chaucer's
Wife of Bath. Think of her as a sort of professional pilgrim and entrepreneur, having already “passed many a
straunge strem,” travelling to such exotic destinations as “Rome, Bolonne, Galice, and Cologne,” and having gone
through five husbands. She is worldly, shrewd, and confident—an absolutely fabulous creation, perhaps the most
compelling female literary character in English literature before Shakespeare.
A more familiar figure for most students, when they think of the Middle Ages, will be Chaucer's Knight,
who has also (although for different motives than the Wife's) traveled widely in Europe and the Holy Lands. He is
a noble, romantic, and dignified figure, yet also vaguely sad, with an air of nostalgia about him, reminding us
that, by Chaucer's time, the age of chivalry is over (if ever it existed), a romantic dream. The story he tells,
appropriately, is one of courtly love and chivalric romance. Students interested in those themes will also enjoy
the EDSITEment lesson plan, Exploring Arthurian
Legend, which uses the resources of the Labyrinth website
to introduce students to the vast historical period embraced by the King Arthur legend. The story of Camelot is perhaps the most beguiling romantic dream
of them all, persisting from the 5th century, when the historical Arthur may have lived, to present day stories, films, and even presidential administrations.
Chaucer was deeply influenced by another fourteenth-century poem about a very different sort of
pilgrimage, Dante's La Commedia
(Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso). An intelligent and manageable approach to this vast
poem is provided by an EDSITEment lesson plan, A
Storybook Romance: Dante's Paolo and Francesca, which focuses on theme of courtly love. Available in two
English translations as well as the original Italian on the EDSITEment-reviewed Digital Dante site, Dante's The Comedy (or "Divine Comedy") begins with
lines that suggest it will be a pilgrimage of a rather different sort than the festive trip to Canterbury: “When
I had journeyed half of our life's way, / I found myself within a shadowed forest, / for I had lost the path that
does not stray” (Inferno, Mandelbaum translation, lines 1-3). As with Chaucer's verse, you can best
appreciate the beauty of Dante's poetry by listening to it read aloud: available via a link on the
EDSITEment-reviewed Academy of American Poets are clips of the poet
Robert Pinsky reading from the poem in
Italian as well as from his own highly praised translation.
Dante portrays himself as a pilgrim who will be led by various guides on a vivid journey through Hell and
Purgatory towards a final beatific vision of God. Although the plan is grand, the inviting intimacy of the first
three lines of The Comedy suggests
another reason why Dante, like Chaucer, has survived. For all their differences, both of these poets have the
mysterious knack for combining passages of intense lyrical genius with distinctive narrative voices that remain
accessible and fresh, speaking to us, it sometimes seems, as if they were our contemporaries still.
|