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Humanity And Flaws In Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales

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In this essay, I am giving three reasons as to why The Canterbury Tales' stories are so engaging. I will be talking about the vitality and humanity of the characters in three parts: how realistic the characters are, the emotion they show and the flaws in all of the characters. This will be in three separate paragraphs. Vitality (realism) The Canterbury Tales shows us lots of small details about everyday life in medieval times and gives us a big insight into what the life of ordinary people was like back then. It also talks about lots of jobs that are not very well known and are very obscure. It talks about how those people act also. This is shown by characters such as the summoner and the pardoner – not many historical documents talk about those types of people because they are not of any significance in any historical events. These were also jobs performed by peasants so they were considered unimportant. The book describes how people act in all of the descriptions, but I am going to quote the prioress’s description here: ‘So kind was she, it made her overwrought And tearful if she saw a mouse caught’ This tells us that she is very sensitive towards animals and gets tearful if she sees one that is hurt. Flaws …show more content…

This was very relevant at the time, as there was a lot of corruption. Some examples of this would be the monk and the doctor. In the monk's description, he is said to, '[be] hunting-mad' and 'not care a pin if told that hunters were unholy men'. The narrator also says that his is 'fit to be an abbot', which suggests that- even though the monk is very corrupt- the abbots are even more corrupt- making it seem as if there is, even more, corruption in the church. The doctor is not as flawed as the monk but is still corrupt. Geoffrey Chaucer - in the description of the doctor- says

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