Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
The Hengwrt Chaucer manuscript is an early-15th-century manuscript of the Canterbury Tales, held in the National Library of Wales, in Aberystwyth.It is an important source for Chaucer's text, and was possibly written by someone with access to an original authorial holograph, now lost.
The Ellesmere Chaucer, or Ellesmere Manuscript of the Canterbury Tales, is an early 15th-century illuminated manuscript of Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, owned by the Huntington Library, in San Marino, California (EL 26 C 9). It is considered one of the most significant copies of the Tales.
The Wife of Bath's Prologue is, by far, the longest in The Canterbury Tales and is twice as long as the actual story, showing the importance of the prologue to the significance of the overall tale. In the beginning, the wife expresses her views in which she believes the morals of women are not merely that they all solely desire "sovereignty ...
The question of whether The Canterbury Tales is a finished work has not been answered to date. There are 84 manuscripts and four incunabula (printed before 1500) editions [4] of the work, which is more than for any other vernacular English literary text with the exception of Prick of Conscience.
The frame story of the poem, as set out in the 858 lines of Middle English which make up the General Prologue, is of a religious pilgrimage. The narrator, Geoffrey Chaucer, is in The Tabard Inn in Southwark, where he meets a group of 'sundry folk' who are all on the way to Canterbury, the site of the shrine of Saint Thomas Becket, a martyr reputed to have the power of healing the sinful.
The tale is told by the Clerk of Oxford, who is a scholar of logic and philosophy. In the General Prologue, he is described as thin and impoverished, hard-working and wholly dedicated to his studies: Yet hadde he but litel gold in cofre; But al that he myghte of his freendes hente, On bookes and on lernynge he it spente.
It is in the form of a fabliau and tells the story of a merchant, his wife and her lover, a monk. [1] Although similar stories can be found in Boccaccio's Decameron, a frequent source for Chaucer's tales, the story is a retelling of a common type of folktale called "the lover's gift regained". [2]
The story is an example of a class of stories, popular at the time, known as the "miracles of the Virgin" such as those by Gautier de Coincy.It also blends elements of common story of a pious child killed by the enemies of the faith; the first example of which in English was written about William of Norwich.