Contexts
The world behind the Tale
AO3 asks for context worked into the reading, not delivered beside it. Each section here gives the ground a paragraph of essay might stand on: what a first audience knew, what traditions the Tale plays against, and where its images come from.
Chaucer and the 1390s
The Canterbury Tales belongs to the last decade of Chaucer’s life: a court poet, customs official and diplomat writing through plague’s aftermath, the Rising of 1381 in recent memory, and a court under Richard II where marriage was property, alliance and career. The Merchant’s obsession with wealth, contract and purchase speaks that world fluently.
This section grows as the class materials arrive.
The Canterbury Tales and the marriage group
The Merchant speaks inside a running quarrel. The Wife of Bath claims sovereignty for wives, the Clerk answers with patient Griselda, the Merchant answers the Clerk with two months of marriage and a lifetime of spite, and the Franklin will try to close the argument with a marriage of equals. Where a tale sits in this sequence is part of what it means.
This section grows as the class materials arrive.
Fabliau and courtly romance
The Tale splices two kinds of story that despise each other: the fabliau, a low comic plot of trickery and adultery built for laughter, and courtly romance, with its gardens, service and idealised desire. January furnishes his lust with romance trappings; the plot he is actually in is fabliau, and the collision is where the satire lives.
This section grows as the class materials arrive.
The antifeminist tradition
Theophrastus, Jerome and a shelf of clerical warnings against wives stand behind the Prologue and the mock praise of marriage. Chaucer knew the tradition intimately and used it the way the Wife of Bath does: quoted, weaponised and turned over to show its workmanship. Deciding how far the Tale endorses what it quotes is one of the central problems an essay must face.
This section grows as the class materials arrive.
The garden and the pear tree
January’s walled garden remembers Eden, the enclosed garden of the Song of Songs and the Roman de la Rose all at once, and the pear-tree trick itself is older than Chaucer, a folk tale told across Europe. What Chaucer adds is ownership: a garden built to keep a wife in, with one key, and what happens when the key is copied.
This section grows as the class materials arrive.