The Canterbury Tales Essay Example

greed, hypocrisy, and pride were punished, so too were things like old age and the foolishness of husbands who tried to protect their wives' chastity.In essence, the fabliau is a cheerfully rebellious genre that mocks the norms of religion, citizenship, and courtly literature, making light of the socially disdained but cunning protagonists like lewd clergymen, vagrant monks, and impoverished scholars, canny peasants, and enthusiastically promiscuous wives. The targets of their schemes are generally the well-to-do merchant class, industrious craftsmen, and imprudent women who remain chaste. These tales frequently parody high-class literary ideals and behaviors, as well as the working-class efforts to emulate them. (The Riverside Chaucer, p.)

8.) The writers of the fabliaux exhibit an aristocratic perspective in their work, with a particular harshness towards social climbers, as seen in Guerin's Berenger of the Long Arse. This is not unexpected, given that some fabliau authors were courtly writers, including Jean Bodel who wrote several romances and the fabliau Gombert and the Two Clerks, as well as Marie de France, whose fables feature two fabliaux depicting women's deceit. It is likely that Marie's audience for her refined lays of courtly love also enjoyed her fabliaux, as both genres often displayed a disregard for conventional morality.

To justify this morality, one can refer to works such as The Wright's Chaste Wife from the late fifteenth century that do not belong to the courtly genre and even oppose it. This work examines the fabliau world from the perspective of the laboring classes.