 And in the general prologue to the Canterbury Tales, we begin this narrative frame where we're introduced to all these characters who are going to eventually tell their own tales. And the first person we meet is the one noble, and that is the knight. And the knight, we get a pretty typical character. This is the way knights are described in a lot of stories about knights. Of course, we have a lot of stories about knights. We have King Arthur's knights, Charlemagne's knights, you know, more recent knights in England going to Crusades, and this sort of thing. And it seems that this character of the knight is pretty much that sort of chivalric, you know, noble. He's described as being valorous and prudent, and yet he was as meek as a maiden in his bearing. In other words, he's so strong, he could push people around and be a bully, but he's not. He's showing this reservation, and that is what chivalry was, or how it was defined. Having the power to fight, but having the maturity and respect and modesty not to. But then we don't have his appearance. We have a few clues that he's not exactly the same as the cliche stereotypical knight, and that comes when we have his garments described. To tell you of his equipment, his horses were good, but he was not gaily clad. He's not dressed in a lot of expensive clothes or armor. He wore a jerkin of coarse cloak, all stained with rust by his coat of mail, for he had just returned from his travels and went to do his pilgrimage. Some scholars, one scholar in particular, has suggested that this indicates that this knight was of the noble class, but he was like a lot of nobles during this time period, had lost a lot of his money. Either through going on crusade, or through some other circumstance that we're not told of, he's part of the nobility, but he doesn't have the wealth that the nobles typically had, and the fact that he's gone to certain particular battles that are mentioned later that are described, these are all battles in which the English employed mercenaries. So they weren't just nobles that were going there on their own dime. They were people that were there that were there because they needed to be paid. And there's an implication. It's not stated outright that Chaucer doesn't come out and accuse him of being a mercenary. In fact, he's described as the perfect noble, quote unquote, knight. But there is at least a hint that he may have sort of fallen on hard times and be a mercenary who's actually going to Canterbury on this pilgrimage in order to seek forgiveness for things that he's done in battle at these particular battles that are listed. The scholar who makes that argument first is named Terry Jones. And I only mention him because he's more famous if you've ever seen any of the Monty Python movies or TV shows. He's a member of the Monty Python troop. He was a medieval scholar before he was an actor. He's one of the ones that, thanks to him, movies like Monty Python and the Quest for the Holy Grail actually do make fun of things that historians recognize as accurate. It's actually one of the better, more historically intelligent King Arthur movies. In fact, I'd go out on a limb and say Monty Python and the Quest for the Holy Grail is the most intelligent and historically based of all the King Arthur movies, if that tells you anything. But the fact that we have this ambiguity in this character is something that we want to pay attention to because this description gives us some of the things we expect from the stereotype, but then it gives us a few hints that maybe the stereotype doesn't fit. Maybe we need to pay closer attention to some of the details about this character. And once we're sort of aware of that, maybe pay attention to some of the details of some of these other characters. But this is a character exposition. This is the first time we see a character that we're going to learn more about later on. These character expositions in the hands of a good author are never gonna be totally random. The author is gonna give us specific details that we're going to apply later in our understanding of a character. But that's essentially what the general prologue is. It's a series of character expositions. All of these characters are gonna eventually tell their own story. But before that happens, we need to know something about them. Something about their outward appearance, about the sort of the jobs they do and the things that we might expect to learn about this character type, but also a little bit about their inner life, or at least hints of who they are beyond these surfaces. And that's something that's very important and Chaucer wouldn't be including this in the character exposition if it wasn't really important. There are a few other subtleties in a lot of these characters. Another example is the prioris. The prioris, this is someone who is in charge of a priory, someone who comes from a noble family but dedicates her life to the church. And the prioris, we might expect a typical sort of very saintly, very sort of non-worldly lady. But actually, this prioris, there are a few clues that she's still more of the lady, the nobility, a member of the upper aristocracy. As much or more than she is fitting the type of a woman of the church. In particular, the way she's described, the way that Chaucer as a narrator describes her, matches a description in another work that was a little bit older and a little bit more famous than at Chaucer's time. And that is the romance of the rose. The romance of the rose was just a few generations older than Chaucer, it was written in French originally. But Chaucer actually translated this, and it's a really large work. He translated it into English. He was very much aware of it and it was in Chaucer's time already, very, very famous. But in that work, there is a woman who's just described as an old woman because the romance of the rose is full of stereotypes. Every character is an allegorical character. They stand in for a character type. And this one old woman says she remembers how to seduce men, how to get what she wanted from being a proper lady, but the proper lady being someone who's defined as being good at following social rules but also getting other people's attention. And she said, to be one of these ladies, to get what you want by getting men's attention. This kind of woman, she must be very careful not to dip her fingers in the sauce up to the knuckles when she's eating, nor to smear her lips with soup or garlic or fat meat, nor to take too many pieces too large or a piece and put them into her mouth. In other words, she needs to eat very delicately, not just sort of stuff her face, things that your parents probably told you to do when you were growing up, just as part of sort of how to eat civilly in public. But this is the Middle Ages. So this is a sign of nobility, a sign of class, but also a way to sort of maintain people's attraction, men's attraction especially, without sort of giving in too much to your hunger or to habits that might not suit a polite company. She must hold the morsel with the tips of her fingers and dip it into the sauce, whether it be thick, thin or clear, and then convey the mouthful with care so that no drop of soup or sauce or pepper falls onto her chest. When drinking, she should exercise such care that not a drop is spilled upon her. For anyone who saw that drop happen might think her very rude in course. And she must be sure never to touch her goblet where there is anything in her mouth. Let her wipe her mouth so clean that no grease is allowed to remain upon it, at least not upon her upper lip, for when the grease is left on the upper lip, globules appear in the wine, which is neither pretty nor nice. This might not seem very relevant. Why am I picking this random passage? Because it's almost a line for line, or it's almost translated line for line in the description of the prioress. Now again, a prioress is not someone who's trying to get attention from other people. She's not someone who's trying to appear lady-like. You know, we might think this is necessarily a lady-like, it's just civil. But that specific advice translated line by line into English is Chaucer's way of letting us know that this prioress has more in common with this woman from The Romance of the Rose, who is very concerned with what other people think, with blending in with the aristocracy, with getting attention from men and maintaining their attraction and definitely not losing it while she's eating by appearing crude or coarse. And so when Chaucer says she'd been well-taught in the art of eating and letting no morsel fall from her lips and wet but her fingertips in the sauce, she knew how to lift and how to hold a bit so that not a drop fell upon her breast. Her pleasure was all in courtesy. She wiped her upper lips so well that not a spot of grease was to be seen in her cup after she drank, and very dainty she was in reaching for her food. And surely she was of so fine behavior, pleasant, amiable, and bearing. She took pains to imitate court manners, to be stately in her demeanor, and to be held worthy of reverence. She's very much following the advice of this woman who's sort of giving advice to young ladies who are out to win a husband, let's say. Now, what does that mean? Does that mean that she's not a very good woman of faith or something like that? Well, no, but just like with the knights through dirty clothes or rust-stained clothes, it's just a little hint that there's more going on with this character than the stereotype would typically indicate. So this may be a bit of digression, but remember the digressions in Beowulf, they usually had a purpose. And like a lot of the digressions in Beowulf, they were allusions to stories people were expected to know. And a lot of the allusions in Beowulf seem like things that the audience is supposed to know, but we don't know because we don't have the stories they refer to. Fortunately, we do have the romance of the rose, and we get some of these allusions. Now, there may be a lot more allusions that we don't even notice in Chaucer. He may be referring to texts that we don't have anymore, we don't know, but this one that we can get. And it's clear that Chaucer expected his audience to make this connection. Then we have a character of a monk. And of course, a good monk is supposed to spend his time in the monastery. He's supposed to spend his time reading the Bible, reading the works of the church fathers, praying, and that sort of thing. That's not this monk. This monk is very different. This monk, we're told, was very fine and handsome. He was a great writer about the countryside and a lover of hunting. Okay, well, if he's writing around the countryside, that's not staying in the cloister now, is it? Monks are supposed to eat very modestly, just like they're supposed to dress very modestly. And eating venison is not modest. That is, that's the good stuff. You're not supposed to demand the finer things in life when you're a monk. You're supposed to renounce the finer things in life. He had many fine horses in his stable, and when he rode, men could hear his bridal jingle and whistling wind as clear as a loud chapel bell where the Lord was prior. But Chaucer tells us that because the rule of St. Morris or of St. Benedict, so the Benedictine monks, where that was a particular order of monk, and St. Benedict creates these rules for monks that tells them not to do this sort of thing, not to pursue the signs of wealth and not to be self-indulgent the way this monk seems to be. But because the rule of St. Morris or St. Benedict was old and something austere, this same monk let such old things pass and followed the ways of the newer world. He gave not a plucked-in for the text that hunters are not holy, that a careless monk that is to say one out of his cloister is like a fish out of water. For that text, he would not give a herring, and I said his opinion was right. Why should he study and lose his wits ever pouring over a book in the cloister or toil with his hands and the labor as St. Augustine bids? How shall the world be served? Let St. Augustine have his work to himself, therefore he rode hard, followed the Greyhounds, his hunting dogs, as swift as birds on the wing. So this monk is being described as not following the rules of monasticism, the rules that define what a monk is. So he's got this job, but he doesn't follow the basic expectations of that job and Chaucer's not criticizing that, or at least it doesn't sound like he's criticizing it. He says, I said his opinion was right. So does that mean that Chaucer, Jeffrey Chaucer, the author approves of this monk who doesn't follow the rules of monasticism? Maybe, but maybe not. Keep in mind, Chaucer himself has written himself in as a character in the Canterbury Tales. In the general prologue, he's talking in the first person. He says, I went to the Tabard Inn. I became one of their company, going to Canterbury. And it's that voice that Chaucer uses as a narrator that that is the voice, that this character of Jeffrey Chaucer is saying, he gave not a pluck 10 for that text that says, hundreds are not holy. And I said his opinion is right. So is this I, is this Chaucer, the historical person saying that this is the way monks ought to act, or this is fine? Or is he sort of creating a self-parody? Is he creating this character? When we read a text like this, we always want to separate the narrator from the author, even when the author does as Chaucer does and says I. It speaks in the first person. This is, we allow him to have, to create himself as a character within the text and not necessarily hold the historical author to that same character. And Chaucer the author seems to give us a lot of indication that this is what we're supposed to do. Just like he doesn't come out and tell us that the knight may have been a mercenary or that the pariah was a little too concerned with aristocratic niceties and herself. And the monk was a little too concerned with self-indulgence. Also, he's creating himself as a character, but giving us a few details that lead us to wonder, is this actually, are we supposed to take this at face value, or are we supposed to be a little skeptical of this? Are we supposed to look deeper? Is Chaucer the narrator really the same person as Chaucer the author? And for us, we want to be very clear in our distinction. Chaucer the author had a motivation, whatever it was, for creating Chaucer the character in the way that he did. So we're going to keep those separate. And we'll discuss it in this class. So Chaucer the character exists within a narrative frame. He's within a narrative, and of course, this narrative frames other narratives. He can be self-critical. He can sort of maybe give himself as a caricature. But because he's within this narrative frame, we're going to be suspicious of his voice. We're going to treat him just like a character rather than treating him like the author. As the one who sort of necessarily knows everything whose explanations are necessarily the ones we want to listen to. So a narrative frame, and we've talked about this before, a narrative frame is the narrativization. This is when you take all these different events, all these different people that may have existed in history or not, but they could have been stories that were passed down in oral tradition. But you select which ones to focus on. You select where to start. Which event is going to be the first event? Which one are you going to tell first? Which one are you going to tell last? What are the beginning and ending going to be? And then which events are you going to put in the middle and how are you going to explain them? How are you going to say, did this thing cause this other event or did one thing just happen after the other without a cause? I might say that a character did this thing, but when it comes to deciding why he or she did it, I have to sort of add a little bit. This is all narrativization. Now, if the events within that narrative are themselves other narratives, like a character within the story tells his or her own story, then this is a framed narrative. So we have a narrative frame, and then within that frame narrative we have lots of other little narratives as we do in the Canterbury Tales. But this technique of using this frame calls attention to the way that narrators shape the stories according to their own limited perspectives and agendas. So the people telling the story within the story don't know everything. And when narratives are embedded within other narratives, each narrator creates his or her own frame. The character now is telling a story the way he or she thinks they ought to be told. And sometimes characters are gonna dispute how to tell that story. That's why we need to keep the narratives within that frame distinct and be aware of the difference between those or what actually happens in the larger narrative. So the reader has to recognize how each narrator's individual point of view structures his or her narrative frame. Now, we've done this before. In the Epic of Gilgamesh, we recognized in Tablet 11 when Atrahas or when Utna Pishtim starts to tell the story of the flood, we have read this before line by line when we read Atrahasis. It's not the narrator of the Epic of Gilgamesh telling the story of the flood. It's Utna Pishtim saying back when I was younger, there was a flood, Aya or Inky told me to build a boat. So the Epic of Gilgamesh is the framing narrative. The story of Atrahasis or Utna Pishtim in Tablet 11 is the narrative that is framed within that larger narrative. Similarly with the Odyssey and with the Aeneid, both Odysseus and Aeneis tell their own stories of their adventures. When we hear the story of Polyphemus the Cyclops in the Odyssey, it's not Homer or the narrator of the Odyssey telling us that this happened. It is Odysseus telling that story to the Phaetians. When we hear about the Trojan horse in the Aeneid, but especially when we hear the description of Helen of Troy, that's not coming from Virgil, that's coming from Aeneis when he's telling the story. Helen is described from the perspective of a Trojan who sees her as the reason for the destruction of Troy. Does that mean that Virgil thought of her that way? Well, we don't know. It's not Virgil immediately telling the story. It's Virgil telling the story of Aeneis telling the story of Helen of Troy. Chaucer does this kind of thing, but like Bacchaccio he has a lot of characters telling their own narratives within this narrative frame. And he introduces something that we haven't seen before in the Iliad or the Odyssey or the Aeneid. He introduces an unreliable narrator, a narrator of whom we are suspicious, a narrator who fails in some way to tell the story accurately or objectively. So we don't have to take this narration's word for it. It seems clear that Chaucer the author is being critical of the monk in a way that Chaucer the narrator is clearly not. So that's why we need to distinguish Chaucer the author from Chaucer the narrator. Chaucer the narrator seems to approve of the monk not acting like a monk. But Chaucer the author by calling attention to that seems to be holding it up for skepticism although he doesn't himself give an explicit criticism of that. But that makes our job as readers a little bit more difficult. We have to, in order to understand what's happening, we're reading about the monk and we're making up our own minds about the monk, but at the same time we wanna compare that like our own oppression of the monk with the narrator's impression of the monk. And I see, okay, Chaucer the narrator is describing the monk this way, but here's what I know about the monk. I can sort of cross out lines in my head sort of mentally as I read and see when he says things like, and I said his opinion was right, I can sort of say, well, I might not agree with that opinion. I can create, using theory of mind, I can create an impression of the monk. I can create my own judgment about the monk that is separate from what the narrator tells me he thinks about the monk, but I can still compare that to the way the narrator does. So I have to do both. There are a lot of lyric critics especially in the early 20th century that said it's wrong to read a character and make up your own mind about that character as if that character was a real person. Instead, what you're supposed to do is always remember that this character was created by an author. Well, you should, but think about this as listening to gossip, a term that I'll get into, that actually comes from this time period and meant something different. But when you hear gossip, when you hear one of your friends saying, talking about another person, you might just take at face value whatever your friend tells you and just assume, okay, well, I'm gonna believe everything he says about this other person, but usually you're gonna be kicked out with a grain of salt. Okay, well, I understand why he would say that about him, but I don't know that I think that about him. It's the same thing we're reading this unreliable narrator. We get his position, but then we also compare that. We keep both versions, our own version and the narrator's version in mind at the same time. Now, like the monk, there's several other clerical figures, people who work for the church. And these seem to be some more obvious than others, subjects of ridicule by Chaucer the author and maybe or maybe not Chaucer the narrator. And the friar is one of these because he's a person, this type of official is someone who's coming under a lot of scrutiny at this time. Remember that the great schism has happened and that has sort of forced people to recognize that the church is not infallible. If there's two popes and they disagree with each other, this is a new problem. So people start to look at the different institutions of the church and the people who work in those institutions a little bit more skeptically now. And friars are people that travel from place to place. They can absolve you of sins just like your local priest or parson can. But sometimes they're gonna ask for a donation. And the more of a donation you get, the more easily this friar is gonna pardon your sins, gonna give you an absolution for your sins. And of course, if you invite him over to dinner, he's gonna be even more friendly. And you start to wonder, is there a connection between the amount of my resources I give to this person and the status of my soul? Well, there shouldn't be, especially, if the things I'm giving up are just going to serve one person. But that is the thing we're sort of confronted with, with Hubert, the friar. And Chaucer, the narrator, says that he calls him a begging friar, which is the friars are supposed to not demand money, they're supposed to beg for it. And if people don't give them something, they'll accept that and be a good representative of the church anyway. We're told that he knew all the town taverns and every innkeeper and barmaid better than the lepers and beggar women. For it accorded not with the man of his importance to have acquaintance with the sick lepers. It was not seemly, it profited not, to deal with any such poor trash, but with all rich folk and sellers of victual. In other words, he's not doing the sort of Christ-like mission of administering to the least of these, to the people who are sick and the people who actually need this sort of thing. He's too busy flattering the people that can do things for him. The people who are a little bit better off, who have a little bit more to offer him, rather than him offering guidance and that sort of thing to people who actually need it. In fact, it's clear that he's looking down on these people, he's judging these people. And the narrator is complicit with this. The narrator says, you know, it's, of course, well, it's not seemly. There's no profit to deal with such poor trash, but rather deal with the rich folk and the people who can sell him or donate the things that he wants. So again, Chaucer the author seems to be portraying this character in a negative fashion, but Chaucer the narrator is saying, oh yeah, that's fine. There's nothing wrong with that. And similarly, we have the partner, who's somebody who, like the friar, is able to supposedly help people purify their soul. And give them a pardon from sin, but this is an even more economic exchange than just a friar who, like a priest, would listen to your confession and maybe say, here's what you need to do to be right with God. The partner has it down to almost like he's selling get out of hell free coupons. This was an institution of the medieval church that was starting to come under a lot of scrutiny during Chaucer's lifetime. And that is people like the partner would travel to Rome, would get papal pardons, would get these official documents from the church that is just, here's the absolution to whoever buys this pardon. So the partner would buy these and so the church is getting this money, then he would go back to England and he would then sell those for a marked up price. Just like any other trinket, just like any other commodity. And this is the kind of thing that clearly Chaucer the author is portraying as a very dubious practice and the person doing it seems to be very self-interested and not at all concerned with actually helping people change their spiritual condition. But he is clearly good at winning people over. And besides these pardons, he also sells fake holy relics, pig's bones that appear to be the bones of saints because they thought that once a saint dies and his body decomposes, if you get like a finger bone or something like that then there's holy power in that. Well, get somebody to buy this and say it's got this holy power because it was from a saint but actually it was from a dead pig. This person is very much underhanded but Chaucer the narrator is not condemning this person even as Chaucer the author brings this forward and asks us to judge it ourselves. But that doesn't mean that Chaucer is anti-clerical or that he's against the church, much less that he's criticizing Christian religion or Catholicism or anything like that. We're still, there has been a sort of Protestant reformation but we're still a long way from Martin Luther and the actual, the larger scale Protestant reformation. It's, he's being critical of individual people, individual actions, individual ways of thinking but there are still people that work for the church like the parson that he describes. He tells us that the parson would give to his poor parishioners out of the church alms and also of his own substance. In other words, not only is he not demanding a lot from people that his parishioners give money to him but if they're in need he'll actually take money from the church that is his to spend and he will spend it on them as they need it. In little he found sufficiency. In other words, he was okay not having much. The monk needed to have these fur lined robes and all these horses in his stable and so he can go hunting all the time. The partner needed to have this fancy dress, fancy clothes but the parson got by with very little. He wasn't concerned with these things. This is the kind of person we expect the clergy to be. Very modest, very poor, deliberately poor so that they can give to God and give to their communities. Unlike the friar, unlike the monk, we're told that the parson, even in thunder and rain he would go visit the farthest of his parishioners, great or small, in sickness or misfortune, going on foot, his staff in hand, not riding on one of his many horses the way the monk does. To his sheep metaphorically as the pastor, pastor literally means shepherd but as the shepherd to his congregation, his flock, did he give this noble example which he first said into action and afterward taught. These words he took out of the gospel and this similitude he added also that if gold will rust what shall iron do? In other words, if the leaders of the church, the gold, if they are showing this corruption, then you can imagine what's gonna happen to the common people, the ordinary people that aren't part of the church. But though he was holy and virtuous, he was not pitiless to sinful men nor cold or haughty of speech. In other words, even though he is very righteous but he doesn't judge other people who are not so righteous. But he's both discreet and benign in his teaching to draw folk up to heaven by his fair life and good example. This was his care. In other words, not commanding them. Here's, you know, thou shalt do this but leading by example. But again, Chaucer the narrator doesn't say anything other than praise. He just seems to, Chaucer the narrator seems to approve the parson but also approve the friar and the monk and the partner even though these guys all act very differently. That leaves it to us as the reader to decide, well wait a second, doesn't it seem like the parson is the way the men of the church should behave or as the others aren't? The narrator doesn't give us this but Chaucer the author clearly confronts us with these comparisons. Gives us the comparisons but doesn't tell us how to think about it. Or even when he does tell us how to think about it, he's that sort of unreliable narrator that we're not really sure how much we should believe. And then there are characters that we're not told really how to think about. We have this clerk from Oxford who has a lot in common with the parson in that he's satisfied with little. He doesn't try to exploit his knowledge. He's not really concerned with gathering things and having all sorts of fine clothes and horses and that sort of thing but he does want books. He wants to connect himself with the learning of the past and it's biblical and church literature but it's also secular literature. It's also classical literature from Greece and Rome. He has 20 volumes of Aristotle and his philosophy. And just like the great schism has led people to be suspicious of certain members of the church. People like the friar, people like the monk and the partner. So too they're starting to look to secular people like the clerk as someone who has moral teaching. So we're told the clerk about the clerk all that he said tended toward moral virtue. Gladly would he learn and gladly teach and except his learnings, his virtues that he's teaching and learning about comes from Aristotle rather than from the Bible. This is something that might have seemed heretical at other times but Chaucer clearly seems to be showing the sort of moral authority in a secular official that rivals the authority and surpasses some of the authority of some of the other church officials that he notes. And I'm not gonna go through all of the characters. I just wanted to sort of look and see how Chaucer asked us to examine these characters on our own without giving us necessarily a narration that will tell us what to think about each one. He gives us a sort of type but then he undermines that type with certain details. And maybe no character is as popular and is recognized for this sort of the multitude of ways that she can be interpreted as the wife of Bath. Probably one of the most famous characters in literature. And so that's, since you read the wife of Bath's tale, we'll talk about her in the next lecture.