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Essay / Research Paper Abstract
A 6 page paper providing a chronicle of women's social and legal status during the period of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. The paper looks at two of Chaucer's women in particular -- the Prioress and the Wife of Bath -- examining both their social roles and the way those roles were perceived in their own day. Bibliography lists 7 sources.
Page Count:
6 pages (~225 words per page)
File: D0_Chaucy6.doc
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Unformatted sample text from the term paper:
to live in lechery and adultery after the manner of neighing horses and braying asses" (Taylor, 14). What he meant, of course, was that women had considerably more autonomy than
the Church would have liked. A century later, Alcuin reported things had not changed; even by the fourteenth century, when Chaucer wrote the Canterbury Tales, we find a very lusty
attitude toward sexuality coinciding with austere Christian piety. The status of women, up until very recent times, was inextricably bound up with marriage. In the Middle Ages marriages were
contracts entered into for political, dynastic, or other purely pragmatic reasons; in many instances the groom had not met the bride until the arrangements for the wedding were in full
swing. The goal was to find a bride whose bloodline would complement yours, or whose family, when added to yours, would strengthen the position of your own. Because love or
even attraction was not involved in this type of negotiation, the medieval groom often found himself with a "suitable" wife to bear his legitimate children, and a mistress to share
his heart. By the twelfth century a poet named John of Salisbury noted that most "gentyle men hath a wife and a whore", and gentlewomen had lovers as well (Taylor,
20). This type of arrangement led to the "courtly love" romances of the high Middle Ages, which were not tremendously popular with the medieval Church. The issue was not only
the adultery that the romances implicitly condoned, but the fact that the love object was something other than Christ. The medieval Churchs attitude was that sex was to be avoided
at all costs, even between husband and wife, except for the occasional act required to keep the earth populated with little Christians. Especially dreadful was the thought that sex
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