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"The Canterbury Tales," or the perfect "sociological systematization" of the English Middle Ages and beyond, including all or nearly all the facets and contingencies, both positive and negative, typical of the Middle Ages. And it is certainly the realistic and concrete approach, perhaps exaggeratedly stereotypical, of the civilization in the early centuries of the second millennium that grants this work a not even mild "revolution" with a humanistic imprint. While Dante’s Comedy aims at the elevation, the ascension of the Christian Spirit through a magnificent compendium of its philosophical history starting from the Late Antiquity, "The Canterbury Tales" renounces celestial abstraction to concentrate on the world of the medieval civitas, often criticizing, even mockingly demystifying the many authoritative dogmatic impositions promoted by the Clergy and the societas it built with the "Sword of Satan."
The title of Chaucer's magnum opus suggests a priori the type of narrative proposed, namely a heterogeneous collection of novellas, indeed tales, illustrated by a large group of pilgrims who wish to travel from Southwark to the Cathedral of Canterbury in order to venerate the remains of St. Thomas Becket (an archbishop martyred in the 12th century by Henry II of England) in the Shrine dedicated to him. A prologue introduces the character of the host Harry Bailly: he states that each of the participants in the informal gathering would be required to tell four stories, half during the journey to Canterbury and the remaining on the way back. In reality, this intention will not be realized in the work and additional tales from the protagonists will be absent.
Subsequently, the announced, large series of stories from equally singular figures appear: there is the Knight, the Friar, the Miller, the Cook, the Priest, the Prioress, the Wife of Bath... a motley collection of stereotyped characters designed to represent in the most effective and realistic way possible the vast social reality of the medieval system with its respective controversies and contradictions. What’s more, Chaucer associates each individual, each representative of their "estate," with specific moral, ethical, spiritual connotations, which perhaps are also too rough and irreverent, non-abstract metaphors of the social complexity of the time. For the Knight, therefore, an "epic" narrative inspired by Orlando and classical myths is binding, for the Prioress the theme of Christian martyrdom and medieval anti-Semitism, and so on. It's curious to note the presence of stories and counter-stories, real narratives of "ideological clashes" between two or more characters: a striking example is the fierce back-and-forth between the Friar and the Summoner, where each presents a debunking story, particularly with the Summoner condemning the opportunism of the Friars always ready to pocket with deception and "spiritual" threat some false coin from the most naive.
The extraordinary richness of ideology in the background of the Tales resides in the multitude of realities embodied by the individual characters: each "loads" a specific world with its own peculiarities and uncertainties derived from their social condition; for this purpose, concerning the individual analyses of the illustrated worlds, Chaucer circumscribes merits and defects, critiques and knockdowns, exploring a vast range of themes linked to the Middle Ages: the overbearingness of the Clergy, the falsehoods and hypocrisy of the corrupt Church (an Evil, in fact, already predicted by the Anglo-Saxon world well before their Latin counterparts), but also Courtly Love, ascetic and a tool for elevation to the Divine, praised by the already established Dolce Stil Novo of Dante and Guido Cavalcanti, the patristic-scholastic Christian tradition, the chivalric and noble aristocracy of "Arthurian" inspiration extolling honor and arms, the Woman, her spiritual and carnal purity, the general morality and ethics expected to disdain avarice and corruption. In short, a cauldron, a "Bible" of all that the Middle Ages was able to offer to Man, benevolences and malevolences, right and wrong, noble and corrupt, honor and dishonor, life and death.
The profusion of themes embraces a decided contrast between modesty/raucousness in the narrated tales: elevated and intimate stories clash paradoxically with equally violently expressed tales, alluding even to eroticism and the carnal. There is no moral/ethical literary ideal type from which Chaucer cannot deviate: he is solely interested in the candid debunking/praise of certain behavioral models typical of late medieval man, in the name of abstract values inserted into the immanent culture of the time which, however, can be the subject of harsh criticism from the author, "incarnated" in the individual subjects. A glaring example is, as previously highlighted, the corrupt Church, the supplanting of spiritual power by temporal power by the Pontiffs, the first sign of decline of the "two-headed" model Pope - Empire in favor of emerging national monarchies. In conclusion, Chaucer attempts to manifest his indispensable "medieval nature," yet freeing himself from that pathetic rigor and from that erroneous Christian radicalism, which was more interested in crude profit than in the gratuitous dissemination of Christ's message, a proto-humanistic mentality linked to similar minds like Petrarch and more closely to "neighbor" Boccaccio, whose Decameron, although very close to the Canterbury Tales, is limited to examining only some social and cultural components of his era.
The Canterbury Tales. Absolute masterpiece. Highly acclaimed and absolutely recommended to everyone.
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