Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- 1 Theories of looking
- 2 Examples of looking
- 3 The Tristan story
- 4 Chrétien de Troyes
- 5 The Lanval story
- 6 Troilus and Criseyde and The Manciple's Tale
- 7 Partonope of Blois
- 8 The Knight's Tale and The Merchant's Tale
- 9 The Squyr of Lowe Degre
- 10 The Romaunt of the Rose
- 11 The Parliament of Fowls and A Complaynt of a Loveres Lyfe
- 12 The Palice of Honour and The Goldyn Targe
- 13 The Tretis of the Twa Mariit Wemen and the Wedo
- 14 Phyllyp Sparowe
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
8 - The Knight's Tale and The Merchant's Tale
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 20 August 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- 1 Theories of looking
- 2 Examples of looking
- 3 The Tristan story
- 4 Chrétien de Troyes
- 5 The Lanval story
- 6 Troilus and Criseyde and The Manciple's Tale
- 7 Partonope of Blois
- 8 The Knight's Tale and The Merchant's Tale
- 9 The Squyr of Lowe Degre
- 10 The Romaunt of the Rose
- 11 The Parliament of Fowls and A Complaynt of a Loveres Lyfe
- 12 The Palice of Honour and The Goldyn Targe
- 13 The Tretis of the Twa Mariit Wemen and the Wedo
- 14 Phyllyp Sparowe
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Chaucer's Knight's Tale, like Troilus and Criseyde, is set in classical antiquity – ‘the pagan past at its most noble and dignified, imagined from within’. It was a remarkable feat for a fourteenth-century English poet to construct in words, within the limits of his historical knowledge, a culture systematically different from his own and intended to represent that of pagan antiquity, and it seems unlikely that Chaucer could have succeeded in something that none of his contemporaries even thought of attempting had he not had both the opportunity to encounter the Italian trecento and the imagination to respond to that opportunity. Chaucer grasped something of the attempt by trecento poets and thinkers to re-enter a pagan past envisaged as constituting an autonomous sphere of values, and to restore it to life in a modern vernacular. Like Troilus and Criseyde, The Knight's Tale is translated from a poem of some classical learning by Boccaccio – in this case the Teseida, ‘in many ways … an archaeological reconstruction of the world of classical antiquity’. But in their imaginative reworkings of the past, these two Chaucerian narratives differ significantly, especially in their representations of the roles of the sexes.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Medieval Poet as Voyeur , pp. 155 - 176Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1993