How Does Chaucer Present Courtly Love In The Knight's Tale

The Knights Tale The Knight’s Tale is a very romantic story as it is presented, of two knights who have fallen in love with a maid without ever physically touching her. This tale is supposedly a true story passed down among the knights of the day. Chaucer presents it with over-stressed traditions of romantic literature. Some of the oddities of the tales are really presented when taken into a whole with the Canterbury Tales. The Knight’s Tale is the first of the Canterbury tales.

The Knight and Miller tale have similar characters which play very similar roles but with totally different personalities. The Knight's Tale is told by a famous person, and it is an historical romance which barely escapes a extremely sad ending (involves death or suffering). The Miller's Tale has a plot, but not themes. The Miller’s Tale is seen as a lower class point of view and it turns the knight’s idea of courtly love into a shorter, disgusting farce.

In The Canterbury Tales, Geoffrey Chaucer delivers a myriad of humorous anecdotes of 26 traveling pilgrims. Throughout the story, Chaucer accurately depicts and addresses social injustices of his time in a subtle manner, satirizing the social roles of typical English citizens, ultimately revealing the values and norms of the Middle Ages. The author carefully and cleverly crafts his arguments through the use of figurative language and satire. “The Wife of Bath’s”, the tale centers around a medieval knight who commits a crime by raping a young girl. Ironically, knights are thought of as righteous figures, men who carried themselves with dignity and high morals.

Chivalric romances are often centered upon the efforts of gallant knights seeking to achieve a concept known as “true knighthood” which involves embarking on quests or adventures to obtain honor, love, and Christian virtue. The brave knights of these stories are met with many obstacles to overcome, commonly in regards to rescuing or protecting a lady. In other words, the typical role of women in this period is that of the damsel in distress or a helpless, dependent lady in need of a hero. However, the stories of Chrétien de Troyes’ Yvain, the Knight of the Lion and Friedrich Heinrich Karl La Motte-Fouqué’s The Magic Ring strays from the typical role of women as the damsel in distress.

Through The Canterbury Tales, Chaucer shows how love is portrayed in a completely different light based on whether you are a part of the lower or upper class. Through his descriptions of Emily in “The Knight’s Tale” and Alison in “The Miller’s Tale”, Chaucer envisions woman as the source of two different types of love based on the social class she belongs to. The upper class version of love would be presented as something noble in the way the male goes about trying to earn the woman’s love. In the upper class version love it takes far more of an effort to win the girl over and it must be done in a polite/kind manner. The lower class type of love contains far more primal tactics, in which the male does not have to try very hard to have the woman leave behind her current partner for the new male.

Robert Olen Butler, a fiction writer, enjoys that he is able to create a story in which it can take any route. When he says, “Fiction is ultimately the art form of human yearning” he is referring to his own work in a sense. One of his texts, “Fairy Tale,” tells about a nonstandard fairytale. A Vietnamese immigrant comes to the United States and works as a prostitute as she is trying to make a living for herself in her new home (“Fairy Tale” 1). Miss Noi ultimately meets her prince charming and ends up living in “a nice little house and she is a housewife with a toaster machine” (“Fairy Tale” 7).

One of Chaucer’s most detailed, extensive and studies works is The Canterbury Tales. It tells the story of pilgrims both of noble and common classes within society, travelling from London to Canterbury. While they are staying at an inn they decide to take part in a story telling game or competition. Stories are heard from those such as the Knight, the Miller, the Pardoner and the Wife of Bath to name a few. Each tale is very different in the subject and virtues or morals it portrays.

A Code of Conduct         In the Medieval era, aristocrats considered knights the nobility in feudal society. Arthurian Knights are equipped with weapons and armor, while partaking in violence and bloodshed. As highly skilled fighting men, they hold power over other members of society. The only way to restrain a knight’s actions is through chivalry, or a code of conduct they have to follow. Without chivalry, Gawain, the “Prologue” knight and the “Wife of Bath’s Tale” knight would not have been able to call themselves knights.

King Arthur Iron clad warriors engaged in combat, enormous castles which contained miniature cities, wizards and other type of magic. These are just a few of the things that are pictured when talking about the medieval times. Another incredibly familiar one is King Arthur. The great king who, as a young boy, pulled a sword from a stone proving that it was his destiny to be king. He was also the proprietor of the round table, where knights would gather together.

A Knight’s Tale The Canterbury Tales is about twenty nine pilgrims who are gathered at an Inn and while waiting for the pilgrimage, the Host proposes for the pilgrims to tell a tale. This paper summarizes three of the tales told by the pilgrims; The Knight’s Tale, The Man of Law Tale, and The Friar’s Tale. These tales are included in the Canterbury Tales, written by Geoffrey Chaucer.