Index 1
Manuscripts 5
The medieval ‘writer’ 6
Medieval Society 7
The Feudal System - Three estates 7
Nobility/Aristocracy 7
Clergy 7
Peasantry 8
Manorial system 8
The Calamitous fourteenth Century 9
Political unrest: Warfare 9
Religious upheaval: The Great Schism 9
Religious dissent: Lollardy 9
The Black Death (1348-1352) 9
Social upheaval: Peasants revolt (1381) 10
Romance as a Genre 11
General characteristics 11
Background 11
Origin and form 11
Courtly Love 12
What is courtly love? 12
History 12
Chivalry 13
Love conventions 13
Stages of courtly love 14
Man’s Three Souls 15
Plato’s tripartite soul (4th c BC) 15
Medieval Soul (13th c AD) 15
Sensible soul and chivalry 15
Physiology 16
Contraries 16
The elements 16
Humours and relative temperaments or complexions. 16
Bestiaries 18
School System 19
Exempla 19
1
, Scholasticism 19
For and Against 19
Division and subdivision 20
Medieval learning 20
Clergy and Nobility 20
Peasantry and the middle class citizenry 21
Clergy 21
Song schools 21
Mendicant schools 21
Monastic schools 21
Cathedral schools (aka Grammar School) 22
The seven liberal arts 23
Cosmology (astrology) 24
Chaucer 24
Ptolemy 24
Ptolemaic universe 24
The Zodiac Man 24
Faith 24
Boethius on foreknowledge vs. free will 25
Sin 25
The Seven Deadly Sins 25
Guilt and punishment 25
Purgatory 26
God’s grace 26
Auctoritas / Authority 26
Sources of auctoritas 26
Allegory 27
A technique for… 27
Allegory as exegesis 27
Allegorical vs. exemplary writing 27
Fourfold of meaning 28
The Canterbury Tales 29
Manuscripts 29
Structure 29
Why it's a rich work: 29
Reason for the ‘pilgrimage’ 29
Style of the Canterbury tales 29
Literary genres of the tales 30
Chaucer and antifeminism: 31
Literary stereotype characters 31
2
, The four ‘voices’ and two audiences of The Canterbury Tales 31
Geoffrey Chaucer 32
Chaucer’s life and career 32
General acknowledgements 32
Chaucer’s view on his times 33
Why he became so famous 33
Chaucer’s versification 33
Chaucer’s use of imagery (imagery in general and animal imagery in particular)34
Chaucer’s literary works 34
Rise of Standard English 35
Five Middle English Dialects 35
Major distinctions between Middle English dialects 35
Studying ME dialects 36
boundaries maps 36
LALME & LAEME 36
LALME and the ‘Dot maps’ 36
Boundaries maps and ‘dot maps’ 36
A standard language 37
East Midlands 37
London as country’s capital 37
Chaucer 37
The Chancery 37
Rise of English as a literary medium 38
Caxton and the printing press in England 38
Caxton’s spelling 38
Chaucer’s language 38
The Middle English Language 39
Periodization 39
Why is Chaucer worth studying according to Horobin? 39
1100-1400: trilingual England 39
French loanwords in ME 40
English vs. French (Anglo-Norman) 40
English ~ French doublets 40
Differences in semantics 40
Synthetic vs. analytic languages 41
Synthetic to analytic 41
ME vowels and consonants 42
Determiners 42
Nouns 42
Plural nouns 42
3
, Pronouns 42
Chaucer’s 3rd plural pronouns 44
formal/informal forms of address 44
Adjectives 44
Strong and weak verbs 45
Moods 45
Infinitive 46
Auxiliaries (of tense, ‘modal’ auxiliaries, be, gan) 47
Impersonal verbs 47
Phrasal verbs 48
Negation 48
Adverbs 48
Relative pronouns 49
Interrogation 49
Sentence structure 49
Summaries of the Tales 50
The General Prologue 50
Chaucer’s apology 51
The Franklin’s Tale 52
Prologue 52
Tale 52
The Wife Of Bath’s Tale 54
Prologue 54
Tale 54
The Miller’s Tale 56
Prologue 56
Tale 56
The Pardoner’s Tale 58
Prologue 58
Tale 58
The Nun’s Priest’s Tale 60
Prologue 60
Tale 60
The Reeve’s Tale 62
Prologue 62
Tale 62
4
, Manuscripts
Manuscripts (sometimes called a Codex, plural codices) are incredibly important
texts of which only some survived. They were expensive to make and are unique
and vulnerable as well, hence that there are so few nowadays. Many of them fell
victim to water and fire.
These manuscripts weren’t made of paper, but of parchment (aka vellum → animal
skin). The pages were handwritten with a quill, which led to the name manuscript.
These pages formed a quire (little booklets) and were bound together in books.
The people who wrote the manuscripts often wrote tiny things on the bottom of the
works after weeks or months of copying. Each manuscript is unique as mistakes are
made, which can be different in the plethora of copies. Chaucer made a poem about
these mistakes and ridiculed his scribe with it
Miniature
indicates a small illustration used to decorate an ancient or medieval illuminated
manuscript
Scriptorium
The room in a monastery where monks copy or translate texts and books.
Numbering of Pages
Numbering of pages is a practice which developed in medieval manuscripts only
gradually. At the beginning, only quires were marked by catchwords. Later the
indication of the sequence of quires by numbers or letters was introduced. All these
signs were drawn by the same scribe who copied the text, for the binder to know the
order in which to join quires to each other.
There are multiple types of numbering:
- catchwords → the first word of the first line of the following quire, was
normally written on the margin, in the lower right-hand corner of the last verso
of the preceding quire.
- foliation → numbering the folios of a manuscript (two leaves)
- bifoliation → numbering the bifolios of a manuscript (A sheet of writing support
material folded in half to produce two leaves [four pages])
- pagination → continuous numbering of the pages of a manuscript
Shelfmark
A notation on a book showing its place in a library.
5
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