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Chaucer: his life, his works & his World, Howard D. (Focusing on the…

- - - - "He hath a thousand slain this Pestilence,
        And maister, ere ye come in his presence.
        Me thinketh that it were neccessarie
        for to beware of swich (such) on adversarie
        Beth read for to meet him ever more"
        Chaucer's poeam to the mystic dread of Death
  - - - Such as experience, Chaucer became a cautious, wary person to the violent way of the world. In the Middle Ages, armed seizure, kidnapping, and trumped up lawsuits were common ways to gain possession in merchant classes.
      - Englishmen of Chaucer's day wept freely in public, flew into rages, swore copious and imaginative oaths, carried on almost operatic blood feuds and endless legal battles. The mortality rate was high in medieval times and life more precarious; we find more reckless and terror, more resignation and despair, and more gambling with fortune. More violence, too or violence of more vengeful, ostentatious kind: decapitated heads displayed on spikes or bodies hanging from a gibbet was their style, where mug shots in the post office are ours.
  - - - In an age of 14, Chaucer of London was a courtier for his high ranked status. He traveled from London to the household of Elizabeth, Countess of Ulster, and her husband, Prince Lionel- 2nd son of Edward III of England. Chaucer was exceptional sensitive, intelligent, and mature child. But he's like a hermit, being unruly and inattentive. Talents such as his maybe a genetic accident or in considerable measure, a quality of character & motive.
        
        He learned the niceties of highborn conduct and the arts of war learning how things were done among the nobles and the royals. In 1359, at 16-17 years old, He was captured and taken prisoner: his ransom was paid by the king 16 pounds, about the going rate for a valettus. After that he became a bureaucrat.
- - - - Chaucer used 'Knightlore' into a parody. The Canterbury tales contains half of a dozen bits of romance matter involving various of parody including "The Wife's Bath."
- - - - One of Chaucer's personality can be described as 'repressed': his literary accomplishment was in large of measure an imaginative feat of reading of imitating and adapting, of trial and error. This is a solitary accomplishment, the work of a withdrawn, inward-turning person whose experience comes vicariously from books.
      - He has a sense of humor in his works, he kept his ambitions alive.
    - - The two have no personal significance, living with no happy in matrimonial relations.
        
        Chaucer speaks himself as "Courtly lover" in his poetry- love songs case, her faithlessness. His poetry is suggesting that he knows nothing about love except for what he reads in books.
        
        "love," in Chaucer's time belonged to the upper classes. All of his works are in mannerisms of "dalliance and fair language" is uppity.
        
        He misuses courtly language in hilarious malapropisms, "I mourne as doth a lamb after the teat," he sighs, in the metaphor of his own devising for lambs longing for the mother's teat don't show up in courtly tradition.
        
        'Tragic love,' 'Heroic love,' 'Medieval love'
        
        "Tragic love" in the medieval literature was love frustrated by the husband's jealousy or the lady's fickleness or the knight's unworthiness- by inward failures or by conflicts within their code, as between love and honor, or by fortune.
        
        "Heroic love" (AKA Noble love) is an inordinate love that overcomes reason and makes a man love captive, in which honor transcended utility. Such as ideal of love had been; it elevated the lady into a position of prominence, ladies liked and fostered it.
        
        Medieval love was at the base of sensibility, a mystique. To understand it, you had to be the manner born (unless you were a poet) and a part of what you had to understand was that it excesses could be silly; it had almost from its inception humorous and ironic aspects.
        
        It could be an elevated, tragic sentiment, which raises human experience to the peak of joy and idealism but sees that this peak must like earthly things pass away. It could be a love crowned by a marriage, success both as love and as the union of two noble houses, shattered only by death. It could be long-suffering and self-sacrificing, a love between rivals where one rival may die and in dying code the hand of the lady in marriage to his rival.
        
        1 more item...
        
        4 characteristics of courtly love by C.S. Lewis, "Humility, courtesy, adultery, and the religion of love."
        
        It's a revolution in 'human sentiment,' an aristocratic tradition in large measure literary, which altered men's and women's attitudes and feelings about the relation between the sexes, basing on the bond between the feudal vassal and his overbind. It was a morale-building ethos a lower echelon of knights faced with a shortage of marriageable heiresses; that it was an allegory meant to condeam cupidity.
        
        "Courtly" is, by the way, a modern attributive for it, in its own time, it was simply called 'love' or 'Fin Amor" in French. 'Love' was predictable behavior in the male who is 'the lover' The lover is at 1st indifferent to love, then smitten by Cupid's arrow. He suffers and pines: the lady's remote and distant: where in the end, if all goes well, she will accept him and he will rejoice.
        
        In this respect, courtly love was a form of pseudo-paganism, a fantasy of returning to the religion of the ancients, to the "Age of Nature." The pattern by which love comes into the lover's life is in fact modeled on the pattern of which medieval moralists described the occurrence of sin reason is overcome by passion, and a wrong choice is made. Marriage was constrained, regulated, and one-sided: producing children was its end among nobles it served economic or dynastic goals, the woman was sworn to obey the man.
        
        In spite of his frequent pose as an outsider to love, Chaucer did understand a great deal about passion and sex. He represents these feelings in his character vividly with compassion and insight, and in realistic details- in passages added to the material of his sources, what was to fall in love and fulfill sex desires. In later life, he could reach imaginative experiences rather than his own such as the old woman in the wide's bath.
        
        He had children and almost all his readers, feeling empathy with him, believe in their hearts that he really had a good deal of firsthand experience in passions, affections, and sex. That intuition must be evidence of sort.
        
        He was often separated from wife, even when they were together caring for their children while they were both traveling or occupied at court. It was said that their marriage was happy in its earlier years.
        
        Where then is all purported evidence that Chaucer wasn't happy in marriage? "The Book of Duchess" celebrates a marriage of love; "The Parliament of fowls" celebrated mating in the abstract; "The House of Fame celebrates 'tidings of love' and a royal betrothal, Chaucer's explicit references to his domestic circumstances.
        
        The Wife of Bath's tale of 'Woe that is in marriage' is a high-spirited reflection upon married life and she is, after all, looking for the 6th husband. There're bitter stories of marriage, but they're the stock comedy. What we must remember is that when Chaucer wrote all these conflicting views of marriage in The Canterbury Tales, his wife Phillippa had been dead for several years. The Canterbury tales indeed seem to have personal significance. But it reveals complex feelings, of which unhappiness is but apart. He had written the Wife of Bath's prologue, but the context is humorous and the ending is a resolve not to remarry, not to fall into the 'trap'.