Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales
Geoffrey Chaucer (c.1340-1400) lived and took an active role in 14th century English court, so we actually know a fair bit about his life -- much more, in fact, than we ever will about Shakespeare. For our purposes it’s enough to know that as a court emissary he was sent throughout Europe, including repeatedly to Italy, where his fertile mind was exposed to and able to cultivate the full breadth of Medieval literature.
The Canterbury Tales 1390
Language: Middle English
A collection of 24 stories, told from among 30 various pilgrims to the shrine of St. Thomas Becket, at Canterbury, England (in, we are told, 1387).
They meet at Tabard Inn, and their host, Harry Bailly, suggests that they swap stories to pass the time – two each on the way out and two each on the way back. This conceit gives the overall narration its organization or "frame".
Together, the stories are a rough anthology of medieval styles, offering: fabliaux[i], an epic, romances, saints’ lives, a lay[ii], animal fables, exempla [moral tale] and prose political treaties.
Influence
Second to Shakespeare, Chaucer is England’s first and foremost gift to world
literature. And without Chaucer there may not have been a Shakespeare.
Chaucer:
Opens England to the full brilliance of the Italian Renaissance .
Proves to the English that their literature can and should be written in English (not French or Latin).
The Canterbury Tales: Medieval Society Meets Renaissance Humanism
In literature, the Italian Renaissance is considered to begin with Dante (1265-1321) and his Divine Comedy (1308 -1321) and to have reached England in the very early 1500s (English Renaissance: 1500-1660).
This places The Canterbury Tales nearly 100 years earlier, in the late Middle Ages, but in many ways Chaucer’s work, deeply influenced by his reading of Dante, prefigures and eventually shapes English Renaissance literature – compare the Tales to Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, written at the same time, for a sense of how radically “modern” the Tales are.
In this way Chaucer also mirrors Dante in that both are Renaissance men living in a Medieval world, so they could be said to offer Renaissance perspectives on their Medieval cultures (the most striking contrast between the two authors, though, is in how the two view the human body and sexuality).
The "Modern" Individual
The characters are all common, fairly realistic medieval people, and many of the compiled stories were common medieval tales, but Chaucer approaches them in a completely new way.
The character are all drawn from real life, represent the whole of society, and are strikingly individual; they are not simply caricatures, idealizations or types, but very human, unique people – we are as interested in who each traveler is and his or her unique psychology, as we are in the stories they tell, and the stories are interesting in part because of the way each story explains that character’s psychology.
This itself marks a shift toward more modern (Renaissance) literature – in Hamlet, for instance, we are interested in this person, this individual, Hamlet, himself, in relationship to his unique and individual family, choices , condition and fate. We don’t read Hamlet or The Wife of Bath’s Tale to learn about Ideal virtue or some God or gods, to but to understand the wife of Bath and women, as real human beings.
In other words, Chaucer attends to the unique, individual psychology of his characters with the type of attention to unique detail da Vinci and Michelangelo brought to the human body. In contrast to Michelangelo, however, Chaucer offers a less idealized, “beautiful” vision; witness the Miller and his tale, for example; he is no David. Nor is the Wife of Bath a Madonna. Well, not in the Medieval sense.
Religion
The Tales have one foot planted in Medieval Christendom – these are religious pilgrims, after all – and the other in secularism and a new society where the Church plays a much smaller role in determining lives and values. Henry VIII will break England from the Catholic Church in 1534 -- 150 years after these stories are written -- but already we find in Chaucer characters perfectly comfortable critiquing the church and turning to their own minds and collective wisdom to determine what is right and wrong. Christians, yes, but also, probably first, individuals.
Like Absalom in the Miller's tale, most of the other religious officials in the tales are corrupt; the Pardoner (a man who travels about selling Church Indulgences) expressly admits to abusing his power for personal wealth (and he may be homosexual), and the Summoner (one who "summons" sinners to Church for trial) is guilty of the very sins he condemns.
This attitude should remind us that the European rebellion against Roman Catholic power occurred first and primarily where both Rome and Christianity last arrived: in N. Germany (and Scandinavia) and Britain. Chaucer reminds us that Britain has always been a long ways from the seat of Roman power.
We should also note that this religiously skeptical tone is one that we haven't heard since the Classical era of Greeks and Romans, and that the break from Medieval Christianity will also lead British culture toward leading the Late Scientific Revolution, Enlightenment and Industrial Revolution.
See:
Reading and Lollardy
[i] A fast-paced, action-packed, French bawdy (indecent, racy) poem told strictly for fun and or to challenge social conventions: the Miller, Reeve, Friar, Summoner and Merchant’s tales...any Ben Stiller, Judd Apatow, Seth Rogen movie.
[ii] Romantic ballad in strict metrical form, usually about knights and ladies.
Moral tale.