Geoffrey Chaucer: Medieval Father Of Satire And Pr

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Geoffrey Chaucer: Medieval Father of Satire and Prose The Catholic Church during the Medieval Era was far from righteous. In a time when the bubonic plague was wiping out over a third of the population in Europe and the poor starved to death, the church and those employed by it ate well, lived lavishly, and took money from the hands of the poor to absolve them of sin and help secure a spot in heaven, or so they proclaimed. The Catholic Church, which ruled England at the time, was fraught with corruption, and it was not going unnoticed. Geoffrey Chaucer, in his Canterbury Tales, took authors privilege to show this corruption through satirical representations of those members of the church who, along with the others, were making that pilgrimage to Canterbury. Three of the characters that Chaucer used to embody this corruption in within the church were the Friar, the Pardoner, and the Summoner. All three men were employed by the church, and had the power to help absolve from sin the masses; but each of the men also had a price. Just as the Catholic Church was enshrined with riches, gold churches built on the backs of the masses, the men who worked in it did just the same. The absolute hypocrisy of the church, and their willingness to use power and money to rule would end up being their downfall, as it was the masses were quickly becoming wise to the dishonesty within the church and the people running it. Chaucer used his craft to highlight this dishonesty, and through stinging satire he shows us just what he thought of the Catholic Church, with his descriptions of the Friar , the Pardoner, and the Summoner. All three of the men were employed by the church, and by looking at Chaucer’s representations of all three separately, a clear picture of how Chaucer views the church will come in to focus. The first of the three characters we meet in the General Prologue is
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