Sexuality In The Canterbury Tales

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The Canterbury Tales are about a tale-telling competition, which pilgrims embark on their way to Canterbury. This competition is supposed to be friendly, but it becomes rather sexual as we see in the prologue. In the first 18 lines known as the general prologue of The Canterbury Tales, the narrator Geoffrey Chaucer, the father of English poetry, sets the scene in April and at the return of spring. The opening to the general prologue mentions both lust and noble love. It describes April as the time of year when everything is starting to change and bare fruit in fertility and abundance of life of a sexual desire. Another key point to the general prologue is that Chaucer falling into a group of pilgrims. In this excerpt, a pilgrimage is a religious form of a journey and was a way for them to take a break off of work and to go on holiday. Reflecting back to when I took Latin, the word is translates to a traveller in foreign lands. Connecting this with the passage to Chaucer,…show more content…
It is in April for a reason. This time period was long before automobiles to it had to be good traveling weather for traveling long distances. This meant that pilgrims combined vacations and their religious journeys together. Chaucer does an incredible job describing the cross section of the people that lived in the Middle Ages. Throughout the rest of The Canterbury Tales, Chaucer really captures the essences of what it would be like to be from that time. For example in “The Miller’s Tale” it relates to todays society because it is vulgar, but this tale takes it to the next level. It is interesting to find equivalent characteristics from the Middle Ages to the modern days like when he later describes the character of the Wife of Beth. I think that is why the prologue is a key to the rest of the tales and the rest that is to come in The Canterbury Tales and a taste of why it serves as such an important piece of
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