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¶ … Canterbury Tales

Chaucer's "The Canterbury Tales" reflects the profound shifts that occurred in medieval culture's attitudes towards the relationship between human beings in social, literary, religious, and economic contexts. Socially, this shift is perhaps most obvious in "The Wife of Bath's Tale," whereby women's emerging place as the holders of wealth and land in medieval society comes to the forefront. However, even on a more subtle level, the fact that the entire series of Chaucer's poems evolves in a framed narrative, through a series of perspectives, illustrates a seismic shift in the religious worldview of Chaucer's day. Now, rather than one, singular point-of-view, society could be expressed through a multitude of first-person perspectives. The naive voice of the pilgrim in the "Prologue" views each character from the outside, and then more about the internal life of the character is revealed as that character tells a story for the delight of the reader.

Many of Chaucer's stories are not ironic only within themselves. They also have a certain ironic tension with the character that relates them. For instance, the pardoner is a pious hypocrite. Chaucer's willingness to highlight this aspect of a religious man's character is noteworthy and bold, and shows a deflationary view of the Catholic Church that was more and more acceptable, as secular political authority came to the helm, and an emerging middle class asserted its right to earn money, status, and property at the expense of the once unquestioned church hierarchy. The contrast between the pardoner and the content of his tale also shows that from a literary perspective, Chaucer was illustrating a new subtly of character. What a character thought he was like (a holy man) might not be who he or she actually was. This could be revealed through involuntary 'slips of the tongue,' like the pardoner condemning greed, even while he was a greedy person in life. What one said, medieval thought now recognized, was not always congruent with what one did, even if one was a member of the clergy.