The Knight's Tale

The notion that medieval authors treated their pagan precursors in a totally ahistorical fashion , allegorizing their narratives and " Christianizing " their philosophies , has in recent years come under closer scrutiny , and has been found wanting . A.J. Minnis¹ has demonstrated quite clearly that there was a variety of attitudes to be found in Chaucer's England concerning both the successes and the limitations of classical thought , and that a subtle intellect such as Chaucer's was capable of manipulating all of them for his own poetic purposes . The opening lines of Chaucer's Parliament of Fowls² offer an interesting test case for determining a range of attitudes toward pagan thought , for they are based on one of the more generally respected pieces of classical philosophy , but place it into the rather unusual context of a dream vision whose major topic is a gathering of birds who are choosing their mates . Most previous critics have begun , I think , from the belief that Chaucer is here showing full admiration for his source text , and so have seen in his modifications of it nothing more than the desire to update Ross G. Arthur teaches Humanities , English and Classics at York University in Toronto , Canada . He is the author of Medieval Sign Theory and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight ( Toronto : University of Toronto Press 1987 ) , and is currently working on the Provençal Arthurian Romance , Jaufré . Dr. Arthur has recently been named a Canada Research Fellow .

The concept "road" as a multivalent symbol is widely encountered in world literature since ancient times and depending on the context is not always used in its direct meaning. However, in all cases the road is a metaphor of movement, change and progress. In literary works, the road mainly acts as a symbol of spiritual journey, efforts of self-discovery and new beginnings. In medieval English literature, the road as a multivalent concept representing both physical and symbolic journey symbolises the path to truth, enlightenment and salvation. This article examines philosophical, religious, spiritual and other aspects of the concept of "road" in the context of analysing two literary monuments of medieval English literature-the epic "Beowulf" and "The Canterbury Tales" by G.Chaucer. In the context of the characters' fates, the concept of the road is analysed as a multilayered symbol uniting the physical and spiritual dimensions of human existence.

A considerable amount of literature has been dedicated to interpreting the possible nuances behind Chaucer's depiction of the breaking of brotherhood oaths in The Knight's Tale . However, there is comparatively less focus placed on the value and function of brotherhood oaths in comparison to other social and moral obligations and pledges medieval men were bound by. This paper aims to draw an analogy between medieval matrimonial oaths and brotherhood oaths, taking the multidimensional relationship between Arcite, Palamon and Emelye as a point of departure. Upon discussing that, I would further argue that Arcite and Palamon's act of breaching the brotherhood oath did not terminate its validity, but equated it first to the marital bond between Arcite and Emelye, then to that of Palamon and Emelye. Stretter identifies sworn brotherhood as a "solemn, legally binding oath of mutual support" (Stretter, 2003, p. 236) which ritually transformed men, usually of aristocratic station, into "wed brothers" with an array of legal, social, and moral obligations (Stretter, 2011, p. 501-502). Here, despite the fact that "wed" does not denote a state of matrimonial union, it indicates a contract that carries a legal and personal pertinence equivalent to a marital relationship. The brotherhood oath between Arcite and Palamon, as described by Palamon in the poem, is one that was mutually sworn very sincerely (Chaucer, Line 1132). That nevere, for to dyen in the peyne, Til that the deeth departe shal us tweyne, Neither of us in love to hyndre oother, Ne in noon oother cas, my leeve brother,

This paper explores Geoffrey Chaucer’s Reeve’s Tale through the lens of genre, arguing that the tale blends elements of fabliau and fable to create a morally complex narrative that transcends its traditional classification. While scholarship has long recognised the tale’s bawdy humor and trickery as hallmarks of the fabliau, this study highlights how Chaucer also draws from the didactic tradition of the fable—particularly through the tale’s use of the trickster archetype and its thematic focus on karmic justice. By analysing Chaucer’s portrayal of Symkyn, the miller, alongside canonical fable tricksters such as Reynard the Fox, the paper demonstrates how Chaucer repurposes fabliau conventions and delivers a moral lesson: those who deceive will themselves be deceived. This moral is further underscored by the frame narrative’s use of the trickster trope in the rivalry between the Miller and the Reeve. The paper situates this genre blending within the broader medieval literary tradition and argues that Chaucer's integration of fable-like maxims and moral resolution elevates the Reeve’s Tale beyond comedic relief. Ultimately, the tale emerges as a hybrid form, in which comic disruption and ethical instruction co-exist, revealing Chaucer’s literary innovation and the tale’s enduring relevance.

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This annotation outlines a discussion on the pronouns of power and solidarity highlighted by Brown & Gilman (1960). These authors exemplified the pronoun "you" which is mostly used in English spoken and written interactions, not merely for a singular person but also for plural ones. Additionally, the pronoun "you" in the past was particularly used for the singular of both polite distance and of reverence, and for the invariable plural. According to them, in some languages much nearly related to English, such as German, Spanish, Italian, and French, there are still two singular pronouns of address. In German and French respectively, for instance, such difference between a second person singular du and a second plural ihr, or the distinct usage of tu and vous still exist (Helmbrecht, 2022).

This book assesses the conduct of Chaucer's Duke Theseus in relation to the moral and political ideals set out in medieval mirrors for princes, particularly Giles of Rome's 'De Regimine Principum'. It argues that when judged by these standards, Theseus can be seen as a model prince in terms of his rule of the self (ethics), his household (economics) and of his realm (politics). The Knight's Tale can thus be seen as a mirror for medieval princes in the form of a romance about pagan antiquity.

In the Miller's Tale, a story of a man whose cuckolding by his tenant is exposed to his community, the category of privacy appears frequently: the words pryvetee, privy, and prively appear thirteen times in the course of the tale. But the way in which privacy is fictionalized in the tale requires that it be discussed not as a separate category connected with the concept of intimacy and opposed to the category of the public, but rather as part of a structure in which inside and outside always turn into one another. What I am referring to here is the structure of extimacy or extimité, that is, the presence of what is Other at the place thought to be most intimate. 1 The expression extimité, coined by Jacques Lacan, "is necessary in order to escape the common ravings about a psychism supposedly located in a biopartition between interior and exterior." 2 As Jacques-Alain Miller explains, "it is not enough to say that this biopartition is unsatisfactory. We must also elaborate a relation instead." This relation is coined in the term extimacy: "Extimacy is not the contrary of intimacy. Extimacy says that the intimate is Other-like a foreign body, a parasite." 3 Dylan Evans defines extimacy as the problematization of the opposition between inside and outside, between container and contained. 4 Such problematization of oppositions entails a desire for and deferral of the limit between inside and outside, between private and public. In other words, the polarity between what is socially accessible and what is intimate, between public and private worlds, is in fact not a polarity at all, but a distinction that collapses before it is even formulated. The Miller's Tale questions and repositions the notion of privacy not as opposed to what is public, but in terms of extimacy. Privacy, as Chaucer fictionalizes it in the Miller's Tale, is not the privatus related to a master's control of his property. 5 It is privacy with extimacy built in. 6 It is both proximity to and distance from an object. Understanding Chaucer's deconstruction of the intimate and the exogamous is key to understanding the apparent contradictions in the Miller's Tale. Space in this tale forms the arena in which various relationships-male/female, husband/wife, landlord/ tenant-are negotiated. This essay examines physical, architectonic

The medieval outlaw appears in historical, religious, and legal texts of late Medieval England and is imagined in fiction as well, specifically in the romance narratives of Geoffrey Chaucer. Outlawry was a legal state that could be imposed. Chaucer found himself occasionally outside the law at different points of his life, an item to consider when examining Chaucer's representation of knights acting outside the chivalric code. He populates his romances with outlawry, illustrating the ethical, legal, and social assumptions of their own times. In Chaucer, knights can sometimes be outlaws, and when they are, they are often portrayed as running amok or going mad, leading them to a quest or to an act that must be completed before they can be reintroduced into society. Early critics Maurice Keen and Eric Hobsbawm narrowly defined what they saw as outlawry in medieval literature, but the more recent work of Timothy S. Jones renews the possibility of better examining outlawry's intersection with medieval romance. Outlawry has traditionally been associated with the narratives of Robin Hood. Yet broadening the definitions of what constitutes an outlaw narrative can lead to fresh readings of Chaucer's work. To be outlawed, in medieval fiction, carries with it an additional displacement of a character's connection to others. In this project, I examine fictional knights tarrying in outlawed space while grounding my argument in historical narratives. In doing so, I illuminate how outlawry intersects with medieval romance, unveiling chivalry's ideological blemishes.

The Knight's Tale has often been cited as an example of Chaucer's use of "conventional" or formal style, in contrast to the naturalism of the General Prologue. As Charles Muscatine observes, "When Chaucer writes at either end of the scale of values, indeed, his style becomes correspondingly extreme. When he writes at the Knight's end of the scale 'Of storial thyng that toucheth gentillesse,/ And eek moralitee andhoolynesse,' he leans heavily on conventional forms." This formalism is characterized not only by the use of rhetoric and a "high style" of writing but also by the use of a classical setting and the patterns and correspondences found in such Latin epics as the Aeneid and the Thebaid. Chaucer's development of the idea of correspondence between gods and men, for example, yields an ordered, symmetrical set of characters. When this ordering of form is considered alongside the prominent presentation in Theseus' sermon of t...

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century essays in vernacular life-writing influenced later work in English. Equally striking, given the historical and contextual thrust of the book, is the omission of any reference to the Peasants' Revolt, especially given Steven Justice's convincing claims for how the rebellion challenged attitudes about writing, texts, labor, and social order. Finally, it would be interesting to know whether the new masculinities being developed by writers in and about post-Plague London had counterparts in other major European cities of the period, for example Paris and Florence. These criticisms and questions aside, Isabel Davis has written a stimulating book, one that is likely to spur yet more nuanced accounts of life-writing and masculinity in later medieval England.

In his term pitee, Chaucer develops in the Knight’s Tale a concept of pity that draws upon Seneca’s De clementia and Statius’s Thebiad. In his version, he conflates pity’s role as a virtue of sovereignty (in acts of clemency and mercy in judgment) with its affective forms (compassion and sympathy). Chaucer emphasizes a vulnerability common to all, but also uses the resulting fellow-feeling to shore up patriarchal sovereign power. Principally, Chaucer produces through his concept of pitee a male fantasy of female resistance to patriarchy: rather than depicting the political collective action (and just violence) of the Amazons in Boccaccio’s Teseida, the Knight’s Tale limits female resistance to a non-violent desire for autonomy, a female subjectivity that men can appropriate emotionally through shared feeling, but that does not threaten patriarchy. Chaucer moves the reader to value non-violence, but only after Theseus’s patriarchal power has accomplished its conquests. By both engaging and shaping readers’ affectivity, Chaucer obscures with seemingly universal emotions the justice of collective female resistance to masculine domination.

In the woods outside Athens, two knights, Palamon and Arcite, engage in a fierce struggle. Cousins and former friends, the knights are determined to destroy each other so that one of them may have a chance at earning the love of Emily, the queen's sister. While they are in the midst of their bloody duel, the Duke of Athens happens to see them and decides that they should settle their disagreement in an official tournament. This violent scene is just one of the memorable moments in Chaucer's story, "The Knight's Tale." In "The Knight's Tale," Chaucer suggests that although many circumstances in life seem to be determined by fate, our own individual efforts make a significant difference.

Овај рад бави се симболиком храма посвећеног Марсу у Чосеровом делу "Витезова прича". Нарочит нагласак је на аналогији између пустоши око Марсовог храма и пустоши које остављају за собом ратови савремене цивилизације.

This paper deals with the symbolism of the temple of Mars in Chaucer's "The Knight's Tale". A special emphasis is placed upon the analogy between the desolation surrounding the temple of Mars and the one produced by the wars of the contemporary civilization

Carolyn P. Collette, Rethinking Chaucer's Legend of Good Women (The Boydell Press in association with York Medieval Press, 2014), pp. xi + 168. Reviewed by THOMAS E. SPRAY Ph.D. candidate in English Literature, Durham University Chaucer's Legend of Good Women has not had the warmest academic reception. A strong critical engagement aside, it naturally does not draw the same attention as Chaucer's longer works. Past scholars were often disillusioned by the poem's incomplete nature or baffled by Chaucer's selection of virtuous women. This misunderstanding has been reversed in recent decades, alongside movements with an emphasis on rethinking medieval texts. Building on this

The genre of courtly love demands that one lover be a lesson, rather than an autonomous being, and thus is the ideal canopy under which to explore the yielding of power in The Canterbury Tales. Chaucer uses the romantic trope of women being transcendent entities rather than self-actualizing people to provide two views of passivity grounded in the Knight and the Clerk, and in doing so explores the relation between external and internal perceptions of social dominance. The portrayals of the two central women in the Knight's Tale and the Clerk's Tale point to key differences in the tellers; the former erases women's agency, the latter gives power where none is seemingly present.

This formalist (pehaps even structuralist) reading of Chaucer's Knights Tale involves an ironic reading of Theseus (of Theseus as Theseuses, as a series of effects). I take in hand definitively modern questions of strategies of mastery, how they operate (through their representative, Theseus), and how they appropriate challenges to their operation (“disorder”). In the process, I will touch on Dale Underwood’s point that the celebrated “order” and “symmetry” of the tale contain, and in some sense produce, disorder and dissymmetry (and vice versa).

The houses in the Miller’s and Reeve’s Tales mutely speak to Chaucer’s characterization of John the Carpenter and Symkyn the Miller in ways that hitherto have been only partially recognized. Since medieval houses determined social interac- tion via their layouts, tra c patterns, and entrances/exits, all of which are crucial in the two tales, this article demonstrates how archaeology and literary criticism together can illuminate the satirical implications of the tales’ two houses. Recognizing the clarity and purposefulness of Chaucer’s architectural logistics, we reconstruct the houses of John the Carpenter and Symkyn the Miller, showing how they support Chaucer’s satire of their owners’ economic aspirations and social pretensions.

This essay examines Chaucer's use of the Roman goddess Venus in “The Knight's Tale.” It looks at the astrological, mythological, and allegorical meanings that he gives to the figure of Venus in the poem. The essay also considers imaginative techniques, including ekphrasis and allegory, that Chaucer uses to express philosophical ideas within a chivalric romance. Ultimately, it argues that Chaucer uses Venus in “The Knight's Tale” to imaginatively unfold the Boethian idea that love governs the world.

This paper is the second part of a longer study to which I gave the title “False Brotherhood in Chaucer’s ‘The Knight’s Tale.’” In the first part (“Sworn Brotherhood and Chaucer’s Sources on Friendship”) I explored the traditions of sworn brotherhood and the sources through which Chaucer got acquainted with it, from classical Antiquity (the Aristotelian‒Ciceronian model) to contemporary romances (e.g. Amis and Amiloun), and to real-life sworn brothers (e.g. Sir William Neville and Sir John Clanvowe, who belonged to Chaucer’s circle). I also touched upon Ovid, Boccaccio, Aelred of Rievaulx’s De spiritali amicitia, and Le Roman de la Rose, and showed how all these works are interrelated. I needed to write that first part in support of my argumentation in this second part of the study, in which I analyse the specific case of Chaucer’s most famous pair of friends, Palamon and Arcite’s brotherhood.

citation: Zsuzsanna Simonkay, "Friendly Knights and Knightly Friends: Sworn Brotherhood as Amicitia Perfecta in Medieval English Romances," Első Század 14 (2015)/1-2, pp. 101-119

ABSTRACT:

In the present paper I demonstrate that sworn brotherhood in English romances is depicted as an association of knights which meets almost all the requirements of a “true” or “perfect” friendship described by the ever-popular Roman philosopher Cicero in his work De Amicitia and his Greek predecessor, Aristotle in his books 8 and 9 of Nicomachean Ethics. These two works were the primary canons for medieval literates who wished to engage themselves in the study of friendship – only they added a little taste of  courtliness” and Christianity to them. Thus, in my paper I follow suit and found my analysis on the two above-named philosophers in order to point out the main characteristics of sworn brotherhood, the medieval amiticia perfecta, which seems to have been regarded the supreme kind of association – just like its classical antecedent.
I analyse three romances from the 14–15th centuries (Amis and Amiloun, Eger and Grime and Athelston), in which the protagonists are sworn brothers and the main plot is based on the various challenges through which their friendship is tested. I also investigate a fourth one, Sadius and Galo, which is an odd one out for it is in prose, written in Latin, and the knights do not in fact pledge friendship; what is more, it was written in the 12th century, at the peak of courtliness, while the others at the decline of it. Still, I believe that regardless of their distance in time all the four romances agree in the principles of the friendship they depict and in the standards of the parties’ actions.

A close reading of three selected passages of the Middle English alliterative romance Sir Gawain and the Green Knight provides a detailed picture of fictional and fairy-tale manifestations of courtly and polite behaviour in Middle English, a period that imported many new terms of courtesy and politeness from French. In the three passages Sir Gawain is visited in his bedchamber by the lady of the house, who tries to seduce him and thus puts him in a severe dilemma of having to be courteous to the lady and at the same time loyal to his host and to the code of chivalry. The analysis shows how Sir Gawain and the lady of the house engage in a discursive struggle of the true implications of courteous behaviour. It also shows how the two characters use nominal and pronominal terms of address to negotiate their respective positions of power, dominance and
submission towards each other. And, finally, an analysis of requests reveals how the lady carefully selects appropriate strategies to reflect the severity of the imposition of her requests and her momentary standing in their discursive struggle.

This paper explores how Chaucer may have met the traditions of sworn brotherhood, and what his influences were when writing the Knight’s Tale. This is the first part of my essay "False Brotherhood in Chaucer’s The Knight’s Tale," in the second part of which (going to be published soon) I analyse The Knight's Tale itself and the bond between Palamon and Arcite on the basis of the rules of sworn brotherhood.

citation: Simonkay, Zsuzsanna. “False Brotherhood in Chaucer’s The Knight’s Tale / Part 1: Sworn Brotherhood and Chaucer’s Sources on Friendship.” HUSSE 11: Proceedings of the 11th Conference of the Hungarian Society for the Study of English. Ed. Veronika Ruttkay and Bálint Gárdos. Budapest: L'Harmattan, 2014. 159-171. Print.

The traditional narrative of 'medieval English literature' is based on philology, which traces a clear trajectory from Anglo-Saxon, to early Middle English, and then to the 'golden age' of Chaucer (often ending up there with a sigh of relief). This seems to provide us with

The purpose of this essay is to examine the power structures in Chaucer’s The Knight’s and The Clerk’s Tales alongside the medieval concept of dulia and latria and Sarah Stanbury’s application of these concepts to both gender and gaze. It is my intention to argue that Chaucer’s physical and narrative placement of both Emelye and Griselde in relation to their male counterparts in their respective tales blatantly challenges the power structures usually inherent to the male gaze. The concept of the gaze can be analyzed as an exertion of masculine privilege on feminine passivity, but it can also be taken a step further to a question of reverence and visual worship. This subversion begs the question: who has the power, the viewer or the object?