• Dragon lady myth, 15-16: could read it as a romance structure of encountering the other, of encountering the other -> openness -> troth/contract -> gift. If the men kept their part of the deal, they would be rewarded. The woman is repeatedly betrayed by men. A failed romance, a lose-lose situation. However, ‘she’ll not live long’ afterwards – therefore, is she an object through which men coming to power is the centre of the story? Or is it that once a feat is accomplished she isn’t needed? Or that assimilation is impossible?
• 26: the phoenix, which lives for 500 years then comes to a specific temple in Jerusalem to resurrect itself, is ‘a token of Our Lord Jesus Christ’
  
  • Phoenix is REAL, thus proof of Christ and miracles. Like the relics from him?
• 72: people from Ethiopia only have one foot, which is so massive that it can provide shade from the sun.
  
  • idea of curiosity as a sin.
• 77: In India, through ‘idols’, aka ‘false gods’, the devil speaks to people. Idols are bad!
• The people of various Eastern lands and islands are seen as kind of unhuman, certainly not the kind of human that people from England are. Although, it does talk about the equality of beings on earth.
• hawk/lady: the man wanting her body was granted with ‘war without peace for nine generations’ ‘because she was not an object’, man who wanted a prosperous business was extremely successful, man who wanted a purse always full of gold ‘had wished for his own undoing’.

Religion

• Land and religion: the ‘Promised Land’ is rightfully Christians’, therefore any that can ‘should fortify himself to conquer our rightful heritage and chase out those of an evil creed’. Right now, men are busy ‘making their neighbours destitute’ and being generally sinful, but Mandeville asserts that this conquer is possible.
• Wicked people of Christianity at home, whose wayward ways are the reason Saracens aren't converted: ‘they who should be converted to our good example to the faith to Jesus Christ were being drawn away by our evil manner of living. So it’s no wonder that the call us wicked.’
• on the ‘island of Brahmins’ or ‘land of faith’ there are people who are not Christians but are naturally pious and good, complying with the ten commandments. ‘God indeed loves them.’
• ‘people should not look down upon other people because of their laws, because we don’t know whom God loves or hates.’

Class

• If someone wishes to travel overland to Babylon, they should implore directly to the Sultan – no way that lower classes could do this. Only the rich/high up travel.
• Quite insulting to indigenous peoples of the more rural areas near to places with more infrastructure: people living in Arab desert as hunter gatherers, living in tents and not subscribing to the Sultan’s rule, are described as ‘stinking, perfidious people’ and those of the barren lands in Tartary have a 'wicked nature'.
  

General

• Hawk and lady tale: man who wanted a prosperous business was extremely successful, man who wanted a purse always full of gold ‘had wished for his own undoing’.
• the people of Lamuri are communist, sharing partners and all land and crops. The word ‘however’ in the sentence ‘they do, however, have one wicked habit’ (eating human flesh) suggests that the narrator supports the previous things

• Length of time spent depicting each place dwindles as we go further out. Less information, more sensasionalist? Becomes more symbolic? (eg 6 pages on constantinople and 5 on 10 South-East Asian islands).
• Nonjudgmental descriptions. eg Ethiopians with big foot, Nubians that would paint the devil white and angels black.
• the Sultan says that Saracens aren’t persuaded to convert because Christians live so sinfully; that it’s because of their sins, not Saracens’ ‘own strength’. Narrator says he was ‘astounded’ that ‘they who should be converted to our good example to the faith to Jesus Christ were being drawn away by our evil manner of living. So it’s no wonder that the call us wicked.’
• Indians worship 'idols', 'false gods' - although Indians make bigger sacrifices than Christians.
• 81: relates a story of a man that travels all around the world, not realising that he had come back to his own country, so turned around.
  
  • Suggests an inability to return to home culture and identity, perhaps the façade of the home country as central, when the rest of the world has been experienced. Maybe realising other places carry truth causes one to disbelieve the supremacy of their home, then maybe they no longer belong there.
• Mandeville was in the Great Khan's court for a while because he ‘had heard a great deal of gossip about him and we wanted to see the grandeur of his court, and if it was like people had said' - satiating curiosity of him and the reader.
• on the ‘island of Brahmins’ or ‘land of faith’ there are people who are not Christians but are naturally pious and good, complying with the ten commandments. ‘God indeed loves them.’
• 'earthly paradise' linked to Prester John's lands and the surrounding lands.
  
  • It ends here, so the centre is actually displaced structurally

Sensationalism at marvels

• Length of time spent depicting each place dwindles as we go further out. Less information, more sensasionalist? Becomes more symbolic? (eg 6 pages on constantinople and 5 on 10 South-East Asian islands).
• Notes that ‘many people take great pleasure and comfort to hear talk of unfamiliar things' - writing for an audience.

Summoner's Tale

• Criticism of religious hypocrisy, exploitation and neglect close to home. Summoners and Friars are both people of authority. Competition and spite between the Friar and the Summoner maybe suggests wider corruption - far from Jesus' 'love thy neighbour'
• Class: friar tells his townsfolk that God prefers the ‘humble, chaste, and poore’, that ‘glotonye’ will get you chased out of heaven. Seems a way, particularly in this story, to deceive the public into keeping steady the dichotomy of rich and poor. Thomas is rich, though, but uneducated.
• ‘How hadde this cherl ymaginacioun / To shewe swich a probleme to the frere?’ – a disruption of status boundaries that Thomas present a problem of logic to a friar.
  
  

Nun's Priest's Tale

• Folly of the powerful, also of self-indulgence. Conceitedness and superficiality.
• ‘So was he ravysshed with his flaterie’
• Chauntecleer’s ‘coomb’ was ‘batailled as it were a castel wal’ – notched, indented. Links him to kings and authority.
• Allusion to greek myth agrandises the situation, which is absurd.

Social issues aren't discussed explicitly, though - eg only the peasant's revolt is only briefly alluded to in the Nun's Priest's Tale. Different to other writers, like Gower and Langland.

The Summoner's Tale

• Critique of competition between two figures of religious authority - suggests corruption of the church. This tale in particular critiques corruption from a figure of authority.
• He ‘planed away’ the names he’d promised to pray for, serving people with ‘nyfles [trifles, silly stories] and with fables’. Disgusting deceit.
• Class: friar tells his townsfolk that God prefers the ‘humble, chaste, and poore’, that ‘glotonye’ will get you chased out of heaven. Seems a way, particularly in this story, to deceive the public into keeping steady the dichotomy of rich and poor. Thomas is rich, though, but uneducated
• ‘How hadde this cherl ymaginacioun / To shewe swich a probleme to the frere?’ – a disruption of status boundaries that Thomas present a problem of logic to a friar
  
  

Merchant's Tale:

• What constitutes a good marriage? Political in its misogyny.
• Humour: satirically asking rhetorical questions, what could be so great as to have a wife? 1338-9: ‘How myghte a man han any adversitee / That hath a wyf?’
• We get, particularly here with the spite at women, both our own opinion and the Merchant's opinion to process. Because the stories come from a character that's described, we know their motives better in order to distinguish between subjectivities.
• Proserpina says she'll give May, and all women after, excuses when they’re adulterous, so that for lack of excuse ‘noon of hem shal dyen’.
  
  

The Nun's Priest's Tale

• This story parodies epic poetry, medieval scholarship, and courtly romance. It can be taken as parody of Aesop’s fable of the rooster and the fox (fox tries to trick the rooster to come down form a tree, he fails and is tricked instead) in the style of a romance/epic. Alternatively, it can be taken as an allegory, warning us of deception by the devil, represented by the fox. (Spark Notes)
• Maybe an element of pure fun and absurdity in that makes it memorable?
• Mocking authority and its superficiality and conceitedness
• Chauntecleer’s ‘coomb’ was ‘batailled as it were a castel wal’ – notched, indented. Links him to kings and authority.
• Chauntecleer and Pertelote copulate 20 times
• ‘So was he ravysshed with his flaterie’

ARGUMENT:

• Dialogic nature, no obvious overarching moral standpoint. Same for Mandeville, actually. Chaucer more directly concerned with home politics (religious structures and class and marriage), presenting issues within these structures, leaving lots of room for critique

The Merchant's Tale

• Idea of freshness, jubilance, fertility, existing amongst nature; January is barren, May is fertile.
• Fucking in a pear tree.
• Proserpina gives women excuses so that for lack of excuse 'noon of hem shal dyen' - maybe illuminates cruel practices towards women?
  
  

Franklin's Tale

• Dorigen to Aurelius: ‘remoeve alle the rokkes’ from Brittany’s coast.
• Magic: it is learned, instead of a supernatural, unexplained thing. He calls it ‘magyk natureel’, and ‘sciences’.
  
  

The Knight's Tale:

• Set in Athens. Exoticising of place to aggrandise subject matter
• Travel is more about symbolising unattainable love than the travel itself.
• The fact that this is one of the only stories with
  
  

Man of Law's Tale:

• Takes place in Rome, with characters from Syria - this is to enforce dominance and moral superiority of Wester Christianity.
  
  

Idea of the pilgrimage itself links to Mandeville. A pilgrimage, especially in the spring when it is warm and fresh, can be both a journey of devotion and a little bit of a holiday - maybe making fun slightly of that whole concept.

COMPARISONS:

• Class and delineating characteristics onto groups: indigenous/nomadic peoples of Mandeville (and general generalisations of characteristics as we get further away), and Chaucer's (as Jill Mann notes) characters' dispositions and stories generally reflect the stereotypes of their backgrounds (this is fairly socially accurate though, in that literary tastes diverged with social background.
• History as accretion: idea of straying away from the purity of religion that is present in Mandeville's Jerusalem - the jobs of summoner and friar in the Tales are maybe an example of this.

CONTEXT

• Simpson: encountering the other. An encounter, openness, troth/contract, gift.
• Heng: it was the most ‘authoritative and reliable account of the world’. Taken as fact, gives it more weight.

CONTEXT:

• Jerusalem was the centre of the earth. Is value located in Jerusalem or where we are?
• The book was popular among the European elite - it was the most ‘authoritative and reliable account of the world’.
• It describes a 'marvelous and moralised view of the world'
• Lavezzo: ‘‘Marginality and exceptionalism’’ are the ‘‘two mutually constitutive traits that define England’’ - exceptionalism could be used to suggest superiority over other places
  
  • As Heng writes, the strange alongside the familiar gives people a chance to imagine 'domination at a distance'
• Phillips: violence of crusades brought home an idea that it was Europeans that were barbarous.

CONTEXT/CRITICS

• Polyvocality allows us to make our own interpretations. Bakhtin
  
  • Polyphony, no single objective world, dialogism
• Genre reflects character: fabliau, high romance
• Chaucer was of a class that could be called 'civil service', working for the king.
• Work probably would have been read aloud - he wrote for his own class, but probably wanted higher classes to listen
• Marriage was much less clear-cut then. God was the ultimate witness, If a couple were engaged, having sex made them legally married. The only wasto legally end a marriage was to insist that it hadn’t happened in the first place, or was invalid.