Medieval to Renaissance: Society, Literature, and Cultural Shifts

Posted on Sep 11, 2025 in English Studies

From Medieval to Renaissance: Society, Literature, and Cultural Shifts

Estates Satire: A Social Commentary

William Langland – Piers Plowman

Medieval Social Hierarchy and Feudalism

The 1066 Norman invasion introduced a system where the land belonged to the king, who divided it among his chief warriors. At the top of the order were the king and the Church. The only people who could read and write tended to take over positions where signing documents was necessary; they were important because they held the most important clerical positions. It was a three-tier social system:

King/Queen: Supposed to own the entire country (though the Church often held significant power). They divided it into legal zones under the control of their chief warriors. It was necessary for these warriors to ride on horses to control the population and to travel faster from the castle.
Church: People who could read and write were all from the Church.
Knights: People who rode horses and gained prestige, gradually forming an aristocratic level of the estate by themselves.
Peasantry: People who worked in agriculture. The demesne referred to people who owned the land they worked on, often under a half-acre system, represented by the ploughman (those who worked).

Key Historical Events and Social Change

The Peasant Revolt of 1381

Peasants faced a hard time during harvest, leading them to murder the Chancellor, who was a priest. Taxations were high because they needed to finance the war.

John of Gaunt’s Influence

John of Gaunt tried to tax the Church but was unsuccessful, so he created the poll tax that taxed everyone. England became one of the first countries to abolish the feudal system. He was desperately trying to make the Hundred Years’ War last as long as possible.

Emergence of the Middle Classes

Around 1200, the middle classes started to appear. Peasants began to professionalize, bought their own lands, and started to form a kind of peasant aristocracy. Around 1350, they began to expand radically because the Black Death killed most of the peasants, so educated and rich people had to become peasants to fill the gap they left. One of them was Chaucer. Being a knight was supposed to be hereditary, even though some people couldn’t afford to be one, as it was very expensive.

When people realized you could buy knighthood, the estate of being a knight became a lot less prestigious. People blamed the Church for many of the country’s present evils. The estates became completely disorganized and made no sense anymore. When Chaucer wrote The Canterbury Tales, he started to write an estate satire about how the pilgrims dressed, acted, and what they did. But then he realized that all the people on the pilgrimage belonged to the commons, who were professionalized peasants (the beginnings of the bourgeoisie). For example, the Wife of Bath is very vulgar, yet she wants to be regarded as a lady because she has professionalized; she is the perfect example of a peasant who is a peasant but has a lot of money. You can’t tell which of the estates she belongs to because she wears expensive clothes but is very vulgar. Or the Knight, who isn’t actually a knight but a mercer. Chaucer doesn’t give moral judgment to these people.

Barter Economy

Trueque (barter) was a common practice.

William Langland: Piers Plowman and Social Critique

Piers Plowman is an Estates Satire.

Written between 1375-1381.
Langland criticized those areas of the feudal system that took advantage of feudalists, particularly the Church.
There were Renaissance elements in medieval poetry (humanism, Reformation, and Counter-Reformation).
The Renaissance held a great interest in texts written in Latin and Greek. The art of translation became very important when Wycliffe translated the Bible into English.
The Reformation was started by the Lollards, who advocated for reading the Bible and understanding what was actually in the Bible, not what the Church said was in the Bible. John Wycliffe had been writing anti-Church propaganda since the 1370s. There was a Church upheaval. The head of the English Church was the Archbishop of Canterbury (Simon of Sudbury); he controlled all money from the country. John of Gaunt wanted him to take money from the king for the Hundred Years’ War. After the revolt, they were going to change the constitution.

Estates Satire: French Origins and Late 14th Century Importance

Estates Satire had been present in France since the 1200s and became extremely important at the end of the 14th century (1375-1400).

Geoffrey Chaucer (c. 1340-1400?): Master of Estates Satire

Around 1200, the middle classes started to appear; peasants began to professionalize and bought their own lands, forming a kind of peasant aristocracy.
Around 1350, they began to expand radically because the Black Death killed most of the peasants, so educated and rich people had to become peasants to fill the gap they left. One of them was Chaucer.
The Knight is presented as a true and honorable figure, embodying the ideals of chivalry. However, some modern readers suggest he “wasn’t really a knight” due to Chaucer’s possible irony—portraying him as too perfect or outdated in contrast to later, more realistic characters. While the General Prologue praises his nobility and battle experience, this idealized image may invite subtle critique of the knightly ideal itself.
Chaucer writes about all the pilgrims going to Canterbury; it’s a kind of estate satire. He writes unreliable narratives; you can’t trust him in the descriptions he gives of pilgrims (kind of like a modest proposal). He leaves you to work out some things (he might describe a woman but won’t tell you what’s wrong with her).

The Pardoner’s Tale and Chaucer’s Technique

The General Prologue is like an estate satire, but Chaucer doesn’t give an opinion. The Pardoner finishes his tale, which is all about himself; it’s about how he preaches and makes money. He sells indulgences, which supposedly give you a year off purgatory. He also has relics, and at the beginning, he says that they are all fake and that he is a criminal. He then tells a tale about how he preaches, and at the end of the tale, he says, “Come and take my relic.” He only does an estate satire with the Pardoner’s Tale, where he uses a very direct technique.

By the end of the tale, you see that the Pardoner is not really a pardoner. Chaucer introduces the characters in the wrong estate order. Chaucer models everything deliberately. You have to decide whether he’s being serious (dialogic), unlike Langland, which is monologic; he tells you explicitly whether he’s being serious or not.

Literary Modes: Dialogic vs. Monologic

Monologic

Presents a single, unified perspective or voice. It often conveys a sense of authority or finality, leaving little room for alternative interpretations or interaction.

One dominant voice or viewpoint.
Little or no acknowledgment of different perspectives.
Emphasis on delivering a message or conclusion.
Often associated with texts that aim to construct, persuade, or assert authority.

Dialogic

A text that engages in a conversation either within itself (through multiple voices or perspectives) or with other texts, ideas, or the reader. These texts are usually open-ended, inviting interpretation or discussion.

Multiple voices or perspectives presented.
Often references other texts, ideas, or cultural discourses.
Encourages reader interaction and interpretation.
Open to ambiguity and contradiction.

Chaucer’s Context and The Canterbury Tales

Chaucer wrote The Canterbury Tales in the late 14th century, during a time of social change, religious questioning, and growing criticism of the Church, influenced in part by movements like the Lollards. The work uses a frame tale structure:

Frame Tales

A number of people find themselves in a situation where it is necessary to pass the time. The storytelling is the frame which contains a number of disconnected stories. (The frame in The Canterbury Tales is Canterbury.) Although the stories seem to be at random, they all have the same protagonist. It’s a step towards the picaresque novel. Chaucer introduced each of the individual pilgrims, which is supposedly an estate satire, but not really, because since the estates are so blurred, he doesn’t know which of the estates the pilgrims belong to (people pretending to be who they’re not, but Chaucer doesn’t say this; he only hints at it and he doesn’t judge; he lets you judge yourself).

The Knight tells a love story, and it’s terrible because he isn’t actually a knight but a mercenary who likes to kill people and steal stuff from their bodies, so it makes no sense that he tries to tell a philosophical love story, which is what makes it ironic and funny. No one in the pilgrimage is who they seem to be. The Wife of Bath wants to be a lady but she’s a peasant; the Nun is actually a flirt but she’s a Cockney and wants to be a lady.

Timeline: Events Shaping Chaucer’s Life and Era

The Hundred Years’ War
England had lost all of its holdings in France, which was unfortunate because since 1066, the kings of England had actually been Norman French. England was therefore under Norman French rule and had gained quite a few land holdings in Normandy and in the south of France. Because of the crusades, Britain became bankrupt and began to lose all of its foreign possessions, and by the early 14th century, they lost everything except the Isle of Wight. In 1337, Edward III decided he was going to try to recover every possession from France and declare war. In 1346, he invaded France. The main sufferers were the peasants and lower classes because they were in the frontlines, and the use of bowmen in the frontlines was compulsory.
Starvation and the Little Ice Age
Some volcanoes in Iceland erupted, and the air was covered with volcanic ashes. England was one of the first countries to be affected (called the Little Ice Age); temperatures dropped drastically. There was a year in which it rained every day of the year. Peasants lived very badly during this time; their houses were damaged, they had to live inside with their animals, the crops were damaged as well, and people got ill.
The Black Death’s Impact
England, until the reign of Edward III in the 1340s, was pretty much cut off from Europe, existing as an agriculturally self-supported community. Since people were already frail from the bad weather and volcanic ashes, the first outbreak of plague was recorded in the ports, because of insects in the poorly conditioned goods from the ships. Bad health was already prevalent among people in England, then the Black Death started, and there was also a strain of pneumonia. The first people that were affected were the peasants because of the conditions they lived in. But it affected everyone, especially babies and young people. In the 1300s, the effects of the Black Death were disastrous. The Black Prince, son of Edward III, died due to the plague. The population of England died by a third. There weren’t enough people to do the basic work in both extremes of the social classes. Since the heir to the throne was dead, there was a question of who was going to take over the throne of England. John of Gaunt (Duke of Lancaster) was the person who had more to benefit from the war. John of Gaunt became regent of the throne of England, and he became the most hated man in England because he had a lot of land claims in France, and he wanted the war to last as long as possible, so he started to tax people in order to get more money for the war. The estates became messy because now we had a knight (as a regent) telling a churchman what to do, and then we have the churchman not acting as one but as a tax collector. Under his influence, Simon of Sudbury advised the king not necessarily to increase the taxation of peasants but to tax everyone in the realm (the poll tax). Peasants tended to have bigger families, so they had to pay more taxes. This led to the Peasant Revolt.

The Peasant Revolt: Demands and Aftermath

One of the things they wanted was the replacement of the king’s ministry with peasants and the vote of all men of age. The two leaders were Wat Tyler, who co-led the revolt with a religious leader, John Ball (in 1381, he had been arrested for going around preaching as a Lollard; he was encouraging people to be violent). When they hit London, they tore down the house of John of Gaunt (he wasn’t there, but they still destroyed his house). When the revolt was over, the king and the ministries realized they couldn’t push the third class. When crops became bad and increasingly expensive to maintain estates, a lot of the big landowners started to wonder if it would be easier to get cows and sheep instead of agriculture. In England, they had the half-acre system. The biggest landowner in Europe was the Church, so when you had a rebellion against the landowner class, you weren’t keen on the Church (1360-1400); there were a great deal of people who were anti-ecclesiastical.

William Langland’s Critique of the Church and “Invention”

You weren’t allowed to preach in the Church unless you had taken an exam in Latin, but it was easy, and a lot of people tried to get into the Church for a chance at a better life. So a lot of people were in the Church, and the Lollards rose as a reaction against them. Creation was the work of God, which is why the authors of the Middle Ages did not write about the self, “me,” or “author.”

Langland uses his estate satire, which is basically the introduction to Piers Plowman, to talk about an idea: he begins by criticizing singers and musicians and goes on to criticize pilgrims and then he goes on to criticize preachers. These three blocks have in common that they tell stories; they create, they imagine. If you were creating a picture of something that was going on on Earth or if you wrote about something, you were making a copy of a copy of a copy. Singers who sang in church were okay because they were singing about God and the Bible. The third people Langland criticized were church people because they quoted the Bible without really knowing what the Bible really said (because it was translated from Latin). You can see that he’s building a theme through what is supposed to be just an estate satire; his major target was people who perverted the word of God, preaching and reading from a Bible which they didn’t understand and telling people not what the Bible said but what they wanted it to mean. One of the main things the Lollards did was to go around with translations of parts of the Bible not in Latin but in modern English, saying, “Look, the Church has been lying to you for years.”

Wycliffe was a theologian and wrote various tracts against Catholicism, one of them being about dominion (if a person was not blessed by God, then he did not deserve to have dominion, or earthly powers). That applied to the priest and especially to the king, and also that if you were going to have earthly power over the people, you had to be blessed by God, and that the priest, king, etc., weren’t blessed by God.

Langland was arrested and forced to rewrite his book, taking out all of the anti-ecclesiastical things. Piers Plowman is a personification of the peasant revolt. John of Gaunt was Chaucer’s father-in-law, but he still came from a modest background. John of Gaunt hated these people who were peasants but married into a kind of royalty (gilipollas ricos, commons, bourgeoisie). In a dream vision, he follows the doe, and in following the doe, he falls into a river and wakes up. God decides everyone’s destiny.

Piers Plowman: Poetic Form and Dream Vision

Alliterative Verse Structure

Written in English dialect alliteration (Anglo-Saxon alliterative text).
Eight-syllable, four-stress line divided by a medial caesura.
Two stressed alliterating syllables in the first part of the line (before the caesura).
Two stressed syllables in the second part of the line. The first alliterates with the two stressed syllables of the first part of the line; the second does not.

Langland was breaking the rules of the Anglo-Saxon alliterative text. It’s written in medieval English, but he’s mixing it with Anglo-Saxon verb forms. Langland and Chaucer didn’t follow the rules of estate satire. Langland, although he seems to start with an estate satire, included all the estates, but he believed the estates were failing in their moral and spiritual duties. Writers were frowned upon because they created things, and that was God’s job, so they were thought to be doing a copy of a copy. Writers were called scriptors; they copied. Scriptor meaning a scribe, a copyist. Chaucer says that he has to write every word as it has been said, or else he would be telling his tale unfaithfully. Writers didn’t like to admit authorship because it was creation, and creation was frowned upon by the Church. Langland implies in Passus 1 and in the last lines of the C-texts that his name is Will and he has been a long time on Earth (he’s old). People have taken this information and figured out who he was.

Life of William Langland

William Langland (c. 1330 – c. 1386) was an English poet best known for writing Piers Plowman, a long allegorical poem that criticizes corruption in society and the Church. Little is known for certain about his life, but he is believed to have been born in the West Midlands and possibly trained in a religious or clerical setting. He likely lived in London for some time, as his poem reflects knowledge of city life and legal practices. Langland’s work shows sympathy for the poor and a deep concern with spiritual truth, setting him apart from other writers of his time.

The Dream Vision Poem Genre

A narrative in which the narrator falls asleep and experiences a dream that reveals profound insights, moral lessons, or spiritual truths. The dream often involves allegorical characters, symbolic settings, and complex narratives that reflect on philosophical, theological, or personal concerns. The poem belongs to a literary genre called (probably influenced by The Divine Comedy) a dream vision poem. It always starts with a dreamer. It came into its own because they wanted a new type of romance, something more philosophical, even about women—a romance about the way a woman’s mind works. Dream visions became very popular after Le Roman de la Rose; romances didn’t only have to be about knights going on adventures. These were the first psychological literary texts, about what goes on in people’s minds. Also, the dreams envisioned in this kind of poetry represent symbolic, allegorical worlds, closely related to the real one and to history.

Piers Plowman is first and foremost a dream vision poem; it’s also a didactic poem in which the stated aim is to work out the answer to the question which is bothering this guy, and the question is the need to justify the ways of God to man (same as John Milton in the Renaissance). It’s also a didactic work because it’s meant to teach people and help them improve while also being a harsh critique of whoever Langland deemed an unworthy sinner. It’s a dream vision poem but one that makes moral, religious, and political criticism of the estates. It’s a historical document that’s so beautifully written it’s hard to read.

There’s a difference between the real-life Langland and the version of him in the dream; his dream version is called Will, and he has become part of the symbolism. Will means the opposite of lust; Will is the same but with good intentions; he has a determination to answer a question. The book is divided into sections called passus (steps). Will’s problems can’t be solved with question-solving, so he begins a quest, a journey. He lies down, and when he dreams, his answers are solved, but when he wakes up, he has new questions, and it’s repeated.

He divided his poem into “Passus,” steps, as his visions with God come after he tires from walking. There are eight dream sequences and more steps, and they try to show the world God’s intentions. This is similar to Milton’s Paradise Lost, in which he tries to justify the ways of God to men. The desire to show the will of God comes also from the name itself: “Will,” not the complete “William,” which also means “to will something,” shows that he tries to do just that. So he starts walking on and on until getting tired, where he has his first revelation. And in this journey, he also compares the ones that follow the estates properly with those who don’t, especially the Church, for monopolizing the word of God (and he also compared churchmen to merchants).

Piers Plowman: The Prologue and Social Commentary

The Prologue begins with the narrator, Will, describing a vision he experiences while sleeping in a beautiful valley. He sees a “fair field full of folk” that symbolizes the world, where people from all walks of life are engaged in various activities. These figures represent different social classes and their roles in medieval society, from kings and knights to plowmen, merchants, friars, and beggars.

Langland uses this vision to critique the corruption and moral failings he perceives in society, especially among the clergy and nobility. The Prologue introduces major themes of the poem, such as the pursuit of truth, the struggle between virtue and vice, and the inequities of the social and spiritual order. The vision sets the stage for Will’s spiritual journey, which unfolds in subsequent sections of the poem. Through allegory and vivid imagery, Langland reflects on the challenges of leading a virtuous life in a flawed world. It’s summer, but it could be spring, the time where love is in the air (poems usually started in the spring and with a lover talking).

In a somer seson, whan softe was þe sonne,

I shoop me into a shroud as I a sheep weere,

“I’ve dressed myself as if I were a sheep.” He stays home; he steers clear; he doesn’t go around the world or go in search of wonders. He does have contact with other people, but is dressed as a sheep because… In the field he’s at, he meets groups of people, and he meets a heap of hermits, which are supposed to be solitary, but (he’s parodying an estate satire). Will is saying that he’s going around dressed as a wolf in sheep’s clothing and very oddly disguised as a hermit because, as he will later remind us, hermits will go around in heaps.

He’s doing it to hide himself in a crowd; it’s satirical and critical towards the Church because hermits who are supposed to hide themselves in the wilderness are going around getting rich and doing things they aren’t supposed to be doing. He does it because everyone is doing it as well, and because it’s the best way to disguise who you really are.

The idea of appearance versus what’s inside came during the Middle Ages when the peasantry became rich and started to professionalize, because it was difficult to distinguish between people who belonged to high classes and peasants who were just rich but from lower classes. The first thing you see in the prologue is somebody who disguises himself as a hermit because he wants to be unnoticed in a crowd of hermits, meaning that the world is upside down (just like the estates were at that time).
Line 60: These are the only two lines dedicated to merchants. He’s only saying that merchants make a profit; he basically doesn’t want to talk about them. Because since the 1200s, as the estate satire began, the Fabliau(x) also began (dirty story usually involving someone being cuckolded, meaning the wife is the one cheating). Clerks (office men for the Church from the low orders who had not a lot of prestige) had a reputation for being horny. The clerk cuckolded the miller (as in The Canterbury Tales).

Millers were representatives of the commons. Usually the first people to move off the estate and make a living as private citizens. They were the first of the despised class of the bourgeoisie, because they weighed the corn and they made sure to make a good profit, so they became rich. So they became representatives of this new class and were eventually joined by other people (merchants). When common people became rich, the most important thing was appearance, so it was very difficult to tell what class each person belonged to.

So Langland doesn’t want to talk about merchants because they’re peasants, and they aren’t supposed to thrive and make a big profit. He doesn’t even like to admit that peasants exist, so he only dedicates two lines to them.

Piers Plowman, a dream vision poem in estate satire, gives Langland the opportunity to blur the estates.

The same thing happens with Chaucer in The Canterbury Tales, but because it’s difficult to differentiate between classes (because the peasants are now rich). Langland has this particular thing about musicians, which don’t usually appear in an estate satire.

Satire – Tale Right Romances: At the end of the piece, Will confesses that he has sinned (typical ending of a book, also seen in The Canterbury Tales). He mentions two types of musicians, which is strange because they’re not usually mentioned in an estate satire. So when Langland defends the musicians who sing for the dead and damns those who don’t, what he does is use the estate satire to introduce a theme which has to do with morality in general but doesn’t have to do with the estates in general; he uses the estate satire to talk about something else entirely, which is what differentiates Langland’s estate satire from others.

An estate satire is a direct criticism of people who don’t do what they’re supposed to be doing according to their estate. The theme: the estates are not being recognized.

Line 65-69: And somehow, make entertainment (laughter); some make gold with their singing, “guiltless I believe” (not doing anything wrong). Gilt (copper covered in gold a little bit, so something that doesn’t look like what it really is) playing between “guilt” and “gild.”

Just as there are good peasants and bad peasants, there are good musicians and bad ones. The good ones are his type of musicians, people who sing songs and hymns in the church. Bad musicians are janglers (someone who makes a jangling noise) and jesters (someone who makes jokes). Langland says they are Judas’ sons. Troubadours are the people who make up songs (they had servants whom they hired to do things they didn’t do, to go around and sing their songs; these people were called jongleurs). He then again plays with these two words, Troubadour and Jongleur.

Ac means “but.”

Line 70-78: They make things up; they invent things. // They make fools of themselves. // They should be working on the land. // I will not give evidence of it here. // The person who speaks idiocies is the child of Lucifer.

Fantasy was created by men when they are trying to copy God. (Singing about God is good because you’re singing the word of God, but singing about your ladies or dragons is a sin.) The use of the imagination to create things that God never intended to exist is, for Langland, one of the biggest sins, but it has nothing to do with the estates (what differentiates Langland’s estate satire from others).

This then leads to Langland talking about the Church, who was misinterpreting the Church. The bad musicians should be working on the land because they should be peasants. Langland is a forward thinker in terms of the Church but not in terms of the estates. One of the reasons that Langland wrote this is because he was associated with the Lollards. He’s behaving as a Lollard, but almost.

Line 79: Tramps and beggars // They make false claims, begging for food and fighting over beer // They only exist on sleep and on laziness.

Langland probably wouldn’t have liked The Canterbury Tales because it’s a made-up story about pilgrims competing by telling stories. Langland criticizes pilgrims because they don’t behave as they should, similar to how he criticizes popular musicians for not doing their proper duties. In The Canterbury Tales, the pilgrims tell fictional stories to pass the time during their journey. But in Langland’s view, making up imaginary stories is wrong — it’s like lying or sinning. The pilgrimage gave people permission to tell lies and invent things that don’t really exist, which Langland would have seen as a problem.

Line 106: Herd of hermits. He’s being humorous, because hermits don’t usually travel in herds. He’s also laughing at an estate satire (you don’t talk about a knight in particular but about knights in general, but you have to talk about hermits in singular).

He’s implying that among the hermits, there are people who pretend to be of a higher, ecclesiastical class, because they carry a wooden stave just like the bishops do. One of the reasons that Chaucer’s General Prologue is revolutionary is normally because he confuses classes, but also because there were really two kinds of estate satire (one for men and the other for women; they weren’t supposed to appear in each other’s estate satire). Langland also doesn’t talk about women except about wenches, the only time where you have a mortal woman mentioned.

Line 119: What does gloss have to do with the theme of invention? Glossary, auctor and scriptor. When people wrote glossaries (priests), it would be of biblical texts. Lollardism was trying to correct the misinterpretation of the Bible.

We started out on this deviation from the estate satire with people making up music (juglares) and tales (pilgrims). The point of this deviation was that making up music is bad, making up fake stories is even worse, but the worst form of invention is distorting what is made on the Bible and making your own version of it. The country was in a mess because the king was being led by the nose by a knight (John of Gaunt) and the knight being led by Simon of Sudbury (Archbishop of Canterbury and Chancellor of the Exchequer).

The problem with modern life is invention (main theme). Langland wants to know what exactly is the nature of God’s relation to man, and the entity who most people rely on to explain that relation is the Church, and how would the Church explain it when they were lying about the content of God’s word in the Bible? Its ultimate aim is criticizing the Church for destroying glossing as if transmitting their own interpretation of the Bible as opposed to God’s. When John of Gaunt died, Richard II took all his property and arranged it so that Henry Bolingbroke would fight a duel on the royal grounds, and for that, he banished him and disinherited him and took all his property and that of his father. In 1399, Henry Bolingbroke invaded England with a small army of mercenaries and the Archbishop of Canterbury, and between them, they made sure that the Lollards were outlawed, that Wycliffe’s teachings were banned, and that the power of the Church (which was challenged by the Lollards) was restored.

These were the first Protestants because they were against the Catholic Church (Lollards). We have a movement away from the Catholic Church, a movement against translation of the Bible, a movement against (especially with Chaucer).

Langland in these passages criticizes invention; what Chaucer does is disguise authorial invention as we know it with the word of the scribe. Chaucer apologizes for The Canterbury Tales but says, “Don’t blame me; I’m only a scribe. I was on this pilgrimage, and these people started telling stories. You can’t blame me for stories other people said.” What’s great about Chaucer is he makes the story fit the person who’s telling them. Chaucer is fooling around with texts and asking you to gloss it. Langland is more direct and thinks there’s more of a relation between what is said in the Bible and what the prophet says. Appearance and reality are getting muddled up. Langland is saying that it shouldn’t be that.

The Pardoner: A Figure of Corruption

Pardoners were usually mentioned in estate satires because they were the most hated. They came into existence at the end of the First Crusade in the early 12th century. A group of German knights wished to start their own organization in which crusading knights would also be monks, and that organization became known as the Knights Templar. The idea of someone who was fighting a holy war on behalf of God. They were even supposed to have two suits of armor (one visible, protecting them from weapons, and one invisible, protecting their soul); they wanted to find a method which created a situation in which these people would always be blessed by God.

One way of doing this was confessing their sins. But then the Church thought, “What a great way of making money!” They created two things: (They were “laymen” — people that went to church but weren’t priests — hired by the Church.)

The Summoner
A person hired by the ecclesiastical court so that if someone did something that was against the rules of the Church, they would be sent to be given a piece of paper to let them know they were summoned against the ecclesiastical church. But they were known to be very easy to bribe. It was normal for the Summoner to point the person who wanted their sins to be forgiven in the direction of the Pardoner (they weren’t allowed to do so, but they did).
The Pardoner’s Role and Deception
Licensed to do two things. He would usually carry a reliquary (bones of a saint, for example; most of them were completely counterfeit). The Church also created a bank of pardons which would give your soul benefits in purgatory. They started to pretend to be priests and tried taking on a priest’s duty (for the privilege of kissing a relic or a pardon, they had to pay, and the Pardoners had to take it to church, but some Pardoners were supposed to cover very large areas).
1. Licensed to allow people to come into contact with holy relics at a price.
2. Also sold pardons, which was a piece of paper which didn’t pardon you of anything you did on Earth, but people were afraid of going to hell and waiting in purgatory, and what a pardon did was to let you spend less time in purgatory. Pardoners could not:
1. Couldn’t pardon sins (had no priestly power).
2. Could not give absolution.
3. Take confessions.
4. Say mass or perform church duties.
A lot of Pardoners did all of these things that they weren’t supposed to do. However, a lot of Pardoners could forge the pardoner permit because not a lot of people could read. In The Canterbury Tales, the Pardoner and the Summoner work together (because they’re a couple, because the Pardoner talked like a girl, didn’t have a beard, dressed like a girl).

Line 135: The Pardoner preaches as if he were a priest (in other words, he isn’t a priest). Say he can absolve people who didn’t fast. Ignorant men loved him well and liked his words and came on their knees to cross his license (as if they were taking mass). He banged them on the head with his license of indulgence and made them see stars (meaning they lose all judgment; there’s no hint of realism here; it’s like a cartoon). And he obtained with his false documents rings and brooches (meaning he’s rich because people paid with material things, not money) // Give your lots to help criminals and give your license to those who make his life out of this.

Parson means “vicario” (the priest of a particular village).

Since it has a religious point, Langland doesn’t spend much time on the king or the knight, just as he does with the merchants.

Introduction to The Canterbury Tales: General Prologue

In an estate satire, there is normally a description group, but Chaucer gives specific descriptions of various individuals. You can see traces of his Langlandian approach because Chaucer wanted to make it. There is a process of individualism (as opposed to concentrating on groups, seen in the description of the princess). The first person to be described is the Knight, but he isn’t really a knight because he’s a mercenary. Chaucer starts at the wrong place, and the person described doesn’t belong to the estate being described. Chaucer introduced the estates wrong and blamed it on his stupidity. The Host has attempted to ensure that the right person gets the right straw (but the Knight gets the first story). The Host is afraid of the Knight because he’s a mercenary. The estate satire which introduces the characters is extremely tied up with the stories they tell. What Chaucer is really telling us is that nobody will ever tell a story the same way as anybody else, and the way a person tells a story will be influenced by each person’s character, preferences, social status… It’s an incomplete text because some copies were burned, but there are some parts that survived:

The General Prologue, the Knight’s Story, and the Story. The intent was to set up relations between the first part of the book (estate satire) and the second part (the frame tale). The Canterbury Tales can be divided into several operating sections. Chaucer is not very good at condensing ideas, so he spreads them out. His main intent is to analyze, or rather make us analyze, the 29 characters (he gives us various opportunities to look at the characters in different ways):

Chaucer’s impression of the Pilgrims (General Prologue).
Interchanges between tales.
Pilgrim’s prologues.
Tales each character tells in its own way.

There are two types of prologues in The Canterbury Tales: first, Chaucer prologues the General Prologue (Chaucer gives his impression of the pilgrims, which is not necessarily accurate, as well as an impression of himself where he pretends to be stupid; Chaucer the narrator is himself unreliable; he’s giving a false impression of himself and might be giving a false impression of the characters (him saying he’s stupid is an ironic take that makes us know we have to be cautious and not believe everything he says; he’s an unreliable narrator)) and then the pilgrims’ prologue (which is when the pilgrims introduce themselves and is generally before each tale). The impressions of the pilgrims are made up after the fact, and he’s giving his impression on what they say and how they are. You can’t trust a word he says; you have to make up your own mind; he never tells you the moral of the story; you have to find it out yourself. Since it’s a dialogical text, there is no right way to interpret it; even the way the writer interprets it might be wrong. Chaucer doesn’t talk about Pardoners as a group.

The Canterbury Tales: Character Analysis

Prologue Lines 1-18: Spring, Pilgrimage, and Irony

He talks about April and he says that April follows March, and March is supposed to be dry, and April is supposed to be dry. He’s not really interested in describing spring; it’s symbolic. Chaucer starts playing with words: Of which vertu (means both “by which power” and “the liquid the plants make”). He creates, even procreates, by simply breathing upon things and creating new life (God). Spring as the idea of reproduction, birth, sex among the plant life. He tells you exactly what month we are in by the signs of the zodiac; he uses the symbol of the ram, so he starts using sexual language; he’s saying that people are horny. Little birds that sleep all night with their eyes open. When describing spring, Chaucer centers on a sexual image. You would think it’s leading you to think that the months of spring lead you to want to have sex, but instead, he says it leads you to want to go on pilgrimage. Another thing that happens in spring is Easter, which also makes you want to go on a pilgrimage. This was a way of introducing the pilgrims because infusing the sexual elements and the religious elements is laughing at the blasphemy.

Whan that Aprill with his shoures soote

The droghte of March hath perced to the roote…

…Thanne longen folk to goon on pilgrimages,

And palmeres for to seken straunge strondes…

This also starts another joke: he’s describing 29 people going on a pilgrimage, and you have to guess why they’re there. We have a priest, a parson, a plowman, and a knight who are traveling together. The priest asks a pilgrim to stop swearing; he’s called a Lollard; the suggestion being that the parson and the plowman are running away after the 1381 rebellion. You have some people after sex, some running away from the rebellion. They all want to go on pilgrimages for their own interests, and this is a typical pilgrimage. The joke works on two levels:

When it’s the season of the year to be horny, they want to go on pilgrimages.
But the real reason they want to go on pilgrimages is to let their hair down and precisely have sex.

So there are two jokes in the same lines. Chaucer is setting up what he’s going to do: he’s going to play with words, he’s going to play with concepts (is a pilgrimage a holy journey or is it simply an excuse to let your hair down?). He notes an important thing:

Line 30: Chaucer says that he spent the night with the pilgrims and got to know them, making it seem like he was actually one of them. This is important because it lets him act like he’s just reporting what they said — like he was there listening and writing it all down. In reality, he made everything up, so he’s being playful and unreliable as a narrator. This is also a joke about Giovanni Boccaccio, who wrote The Decameron. Boccaccio never explains how he knows what his 10 characters said, while Chaucer does — he puts himself in the story. That gives him permission to tell all the tales as if he heard them directly. The line where Chaucer joins the group has a double meaning — it’s “dialogic,” meaning it plays with different voices (Chaucer as author, narrator, and character), making it both realistic and made-up at the same time.

Me thoughte it was accorded for to ryde.” (around lines 30–35)

Shortly after that, we get something like:

And forth we riden, a litel more than paas / Unto the watering of Seint Thomas.
And there I saugh coming with a greet compaignye / Of sondry folk, by aventure yfalle / In felaweshipe, and pilgrims were they alle.

But the most relevant line is this one:

That I was of hir felaweshipe anon.
(Line 32 or so, depending on edition)

The Knight’s Story and Social Order

Section 3, Knight: They’ve agreed to have a storytelling competition, and the Host has decided to draw lots. Chaucer leaves it to the imagination whether it happens or not. The Knight had a very long sword, so he was threatening the pilgrims. As a mercenary, he has gathered a lot of booty (riches you’ve obtained in the field of battle, usually after robbing the dead; he always had the most important piece of booty; he has a lot of commanders; if he was a real knight, he would have had only one commander). The Church should have been addressed first, but since she’s a woman, she got a bit left out. He shouldn’t have addressed the Knight first, especially knowing he’s a mercenary, because he’s scared of him. He talks about an agreement which could mean the Knight had threatened him.

The Prioress: Her story is about good churchmen; her story should have gone first because she represents the Church. She’s the second in command in a convent.
The Knight pulled the shortest straw. I don’t know if it’s because of Adventure; it just happened, sort; the fate of every individual, chance; because it just happened. Could be interpreted as slightly ironic because he said, “I don’t know whether it was by luck, luck, or luck,” which means it wasn’t luck at all. The Knight gets the first story, and the characters are represented out of order in the estate satire, which is represented by the order in the storytelling contest, which is also out of order. If the stories would be told by who was higher in the estates, the Monk would have gone first.
The Miller: He is not scared of the Knight because he thinks he has more money than him; he’s drunk, and he knows the Knight has earned his money through crimes. And since social status is determined by wealth, he thinks he’s better than any knight.

The stories which should reflect the order of the estates are being told out of order, which is Chaucer’s intention. The estates are supposed to be there to stop the social status from falling out of order. Chaucer’s take on this is that it has already happened, and there’s no need to whine about it.

Descriptions: The Prioress

Prioress (indirect satire – because he didn’t have much choice): He makes a distinction between a nun and a prioress because it was a responsibility that nuns don’t get easily; it’s a very high ranking. You wouldn’t expect her to be simple a lot, but to be rather serious. “She had a coy smyl” → it has some sexual undertones but is also ambiguous. How can the smile be simple and coy at the same time? She should be uncomfortable around that company. “Her greatest oath is that of Saint Loy” → her greatest oath should be God, but also it’s taking the name of the Lord in vain. Nuns shouldn’t swear (blasphemy). This nun knows a swear word (a very mild one), but they shouldn’t swear at all. Saint Loy refused to swear, so she was swearing by a saint who refused to swear. Saint of smiths (gold), and he was supposed to be incredibly handsome and very important as a reminder of what they could no longer have. She’s swearing by the most handsome Lord. She’s a prioress; she should be old, not smiling, and be part of the Saint of Loy’s cult, who usually appealed to young women who were usually nuns.

“She was called Madame Eglantine” → nuns had religious names. Eglantine is the name of a princess in Le Roman de la Rose. She has chosen her own name, and you wouldn’t call her “Madame,” only “Sister.” She’s exactly the opposite of what a prioress should be: she’s young, she’s smiling a lot, she has a non-religious name. She has a certain authority.

Chaucer tends to center on people that had a specific problem but weren’t enough to have their own estate (young women who didn’t want to be nuns). It was easier to pay the Church to give certain privileges than to pay a dowry, like becoming a prioress long before she’s supposed to and giving her the possibility to do what they wanted to. Nuns were also not supposed to leave the Church, and she was on a pilgrimage.

“She sang thru her nose beautifully” → She sings through her nose because she reckons it gives her a certain touch of class. She speaks French as it was taught at a religious school at Stratford-at-Bow (she’s a Cockney nun); she speaks French with a Cockney accent. She wants to be regarded as a lady. Chaucer doesn’t say that she’s a pretentious girl from the Bow that wants to be regarded as a lady but always fails. He doesn’t directly say that but rather gives you clues about her past and her life, and you have to figure it out.

“She didn’t wet her fingers in the thick gravy” → She doesn’t use cutlery, which is prohibited. She performs a miracle: she doesn’t use her fingers or cutlery, but yet she doesn’t get her fingers wet. What she’s doing in her free time is not praying or doing something godly; it’s practicing table manners. Chaucer dedicates a lot of lines to describe her table manners; it shouldn’t be the defining habit of a nun. She should wait to be last to have her food served, but she serves herself and doesn’t wait. Also, the fact that she has practiced table manners so much means that she’s very bored in the convent. She’s very social; she’s very chatty. With the enjambment, what Chaucer accomplishes is that you believe he’s going to say that she’s not very happy about the company she’s in, but that she’s trying really hard to imitate court mannerisms. She wants respect.

Dialogism and reader reception theory: You have to be alert; you have to pay attention and understand.

Descriptions: The Pardoner

Pardoner: He’s already started; he’s already putting on a show; maybe even his homosexuality is a show. Now he gets the chance to speak.

Line 306: Galians (galenicals) very close to the slang for “balls,” mixing medical terms with parts of the body. Letuarie (electuary) is medical equipment but also means lujuria (lust). He’s saying, “God bless your test tubes, God bless your medical equipment,” but he’s getting close to saying, “God bless your penis, God bless your urine.” You have to know evil before making the distinction of evil and good. The Pardoner is showing people what evil is. He’s making them commit sin because he wants them to recognize that they’re sinning and that they’re doing something for which they have to repent.

He wants to show what happens when somebody falls into sin, and he wants to give the pilgrims a first-hand demonstration. He’s preaching but in a very special way. By the end of the display, he says, “That is how I preach,” and by the end, he always shows his relics, and that apparently is the end of his performance, but he then says, “Are you going to buy my relics?” And the first person he picks is the Host, and the Host realizes that he’s being made a fool of and gets angry, but this is a show; the Pardoner needs a volunteer from the show. The Host is showing by his use of language that he’s not a really sophisticated individual; he’s not very bright.

The Pardoner has a show to put on in front of the pilgrims. In this show, he’s going to test the pilgrims to see if they know enough to reject him. He needs a volunteer to make sure his message gets across to the pilgrims. His volunteer is going to be the Host, who’s not very bright.

Line 320: Saint Ronan is a saint, and ronyon means penis. The Host makes the mistake for the Pardoner; the Pardoner is making fun of the Host. He wants to make the Host angry because he wants him to commit one of the deadly sins. There are two tests going on simultaneously. The Pardoner has been dropping hints; he’s been telling everyone that his relics are false, and now, after telling everyone that his relics are false, he tries to sell them the relics, and the first person he chooses to buy the relics is the Host to make him angry because he’s been pushing his buttons. He passes his first test, not buying the relics, and he tells him that he’s a cheat, and in doing this, he gets angry, which is one of the deadly sins.

The Pardoner, in one sense, wants to show people what sin is; he shows what evil is because he himself is evil; he’s the epitome of evil (gay, says he’s ___, compares a bar to a church…). But he goes a step further: you don’t know evil until you see evil, you experience evil, you do evil (apple in the Garden of Eden), so to learn this lesson, at least one of them has to commit sin.

Line 324: “Don’t let him tell you any dirty stories; tell us something that’s got a moral content so that we may learn.” This is probably not the first time he does this; he’s probably done this every time.

Line 329: In churches, he means bars. Golliardism. He knows it by heart because he’s learned it.

The root of all evil is greed. We have a person masquerading as a priest of God.

Line 338: In one sense, it is negative because if you’re known to be a good preacher, the assumption is that you don’t give the same sermon over and over again. He’s more of a showman than a preacher, which is why he has to give the sermon to a different crowd every time.

Line 427: He can preach against the sin because he practices the sin (Alcoholics Anonymous). He is still sinning, but because he knows what sin is, he’s able to teach people how not to do it. But this isn’t his main aim; he preaches greed. He has a moral purpose behind what he’s doing, and if they haven’t understood it by now, they never will (the pilgrims).

Line 447: “I’m no saint, I’m evil.”

Line 450: In this particular case, he’s setting himself up as the Antichrist. Blasphemy, going against Christ. He’s going against Christ, and he puts the worst example of greed that exists according to Christ. He’s doing reverse psychology: “You have to make up your mind about if I’m going to do you any good.”

The Mass and the Pardoner’s Subversion

Mass:

Blessing (Bidding prayer).
Reads one passage from the Old Testament, one passage of the New Testament (related to the teachings of Christ), and then a bit of the Epistles of St. Paul. The priest is going to show you why he chose those three readings, how they’re related, and how they will show you different aspects of the same thing.
Lord’s Prayer.
Sermon (which will show you how the three readings are related).
Bidding prayer where a hymn will be sung.
Taking offerings and taking the communion.
Fraternity (cross or shake hands with the people next to you).

The mass is written down in the prayer book, and the order has to be done as it is. They had to be done in that order. If you do them in the wrong order, it is as if you’re cursing; the priest might be excommunicated. The Pardoner is preaching to an assembled audience; he’s most definitely doing everything in the wrong order, which is a reason why the order is going to be turned around, even if some elements of his black mass are going to be changed. This is a combination of a storytelling competition and a mass. What he’s doing is telling parts of his story (because it already begun as soon as we saw him); he is disguising as someone who’s disguising themselves as a monk or a priest, which makes it worse than faux en blanc (he’s disguising himself as a pardoner and gives a mass even though pardoners can’t carry out a mass).

A curse is a blessing in reverse.

Bloody hell → by Our Lady Bloody Mary that’s in hell.

There’s always some kind of religious method to his madness:

Line 435: Instead of a lesson, he tells a parable, but by telling a parable, he’s imitating Christ.

The Sonnet: Evolution of Love Poetry

The basic form of love which is dealt with in the sonnets is a result of a kind of an intellectual theological battle between two powerful forces:

Platonic Love and the Symposium
Platonic: Symposium. Written in the 13th century BC. It’s the kind of talk that goes on between Socrates and his guests after they have eaten and drunk, and it was not known that Plato had written this book on love until it was rediscovered by the Arabic inheritors of the East before the fall of Constantinople, and it had been lost there for about five centuries and was rediscovered by Avicenna in the 7th century, and it was translated into Latin by Marsilio Ficino in the late 15th century. We got our first translation of the Symposium into Latin, so now the Western world has it.
Augustinian (Neoplatonist) Influence
Augustinian (St. Augustine, St. Jerome) (Neoplatonists, influenced by the 2nd century AD philosopher Plotinus): The teachings of them had always acknowledged the potentiality of love, the importance of the senses, and yet the attitude was, “Oh God, why have you afflicted me with love when I want to focus on you, but you have made me be in love with a beautiful girl and made me not focus completely on you?” God created the world for a purpose, and it was not simply that we should ignore it. The world is there for a purpose; perhaps we can even see the workings of God in the world; perhaps if we look at the world not as a distraction, not as something serious, but if we study the world, we can find evidence of the workings of God within it, and then Plato’s Symposium was rediscovered. The Christian view of love fused with the Platonic concept of love.

Plato doesn’t address his audience directly; he speaks to the audience through Socrates, but he is speaking through another person, the person he considers to be wiser than him, and she is called Diotima, and she appears as the second-to-last speaker in this dialogue, the Symposium, and what she has to say is extremely important → she says that there is an important concept, the ladder of love, by which you may see God’s love. This distraction can have overwhelming results. Let us talk about the thing that is most resistant to philosophy and to rationality: what is more irrational than love? Love can be seen as a ladder (explain the concept); man can become one with God and can enjoy and feel that they control love.

When you fall in love, at first you fall in love with the body and the physicality. But unfortunately, beauty doesn’t always match personality. Beauty is the less important of the two; the personality tends to affect the view of outward beauty. Plato puts himself as an example: he was ugly, but his goodness shone on the outside. You don’t just love externals; you love internals; you have to be content with this individual as a person. Love of the soul. You’re gradually coming to a point where the external becomes less and less important, and you’re looking for the goodness (the agathos) in everyone. He’s talking about a Platonic relation with the world. Steps of the ladder:

You fall in love with a beautiful face. (Chaucer Petrarchan poem to show this: “If no love is, what am I feeling?”)

The individual recognizes that the beauty found in one body is not unique but is shared by others. This leads to a more general admiration for physical beauty across many people.

The focus shifts from physical appearances to the inner beauty of people, such as their character, virtues, and intellect. Relationships become more about shared values and deeper connections. Beauty is everywhere in nature, in animals, so you don’t fall in love only with the soul or the physical body of someone, but you fall in love with the world.
If you love the world, you also love God.

The blueprint of the Renaissance: Oratio de hominis dignitate (Oration on the Dignity of Man) → man is responsible for the decisions he makes; he’s even responsible for his status in the world. If he wants to, he will sink himself into the same level of animal lust. Mankind is made up of everything in the universe, even chaos. Chaos is signified with la colita (the tail/buttocks); the divine is the brain which controls the entire body in the same way that God controls the universe: man is capable of lust, rape, and chaos (the butt). However, in the rest of the body, he’s capable of something like a love that goes beyond mortal love, represented in love with the partner, also love that represents the rest of the world, which also represents God and the divine.

Since man’s brains are what God and the divine are like, then there’s a part of man that can be extended to tame the chaos, take over the body to tame the soul. Man can be capable of anything, even the divine. Platonism is suggested by Diotima but by a philosopher named Plato. That mankind was originally a part of the divine and that mankind’s main goal in life should be to prepare and cleanse himself so that after death his spirit might join again being with who he originally was joined: God.

Sonnets are more complicated because they’re about this humanistic development of Platonic ideas about a certain kind of love. A sonnet is a love poem, but it’s so much more than a love poem, and the first thing that you have to say when analyzing a poem is what type of love: a rational love. The soul is what you’re interested in; you’re not describing what you see; you’re describing what you see in her through her beauty. “My lady has something divine about her.” It was blasphemous and got into trouble with the Church.

Essay Writing Considerations

Contextualize: Does NOT want the entire story.
Not explaining why we know what part the passage is from.
Give the whole story of The Canterbury Tales.
WANTS: Explain what section it’s from and how we know (he’s referring to himself because Chaucer is speaking… or the character he chooses to present as himself, so it’s a General Prologue if he’s talking about himself, it’s the Pardoner’s Tale).
How we know where to look.
Give some form of modern English summary or translation.
Know that we can translate or give a version of the old version in modern English.
Explain the most important points (he doesn’t have a beard → because he has been castrated…).

Look at the passage / Contextualize it / It may tell us quite a few things → what those things might or might not be. Work in a broader context but not until we’ve analyzed the passage.

Sample Exam Questions

Why is it notable that the description of the Pardoner is apparently so negative?
Explain the complete significance of the Pardoner’s description as a potential eunuch?
Why is the description of the Pardoner so unique in Chaucer?
Kind of questions he would like for an exam.

Chaucer was a master of writing in character and helped popularize certain poetic forms in English literature. He often wrote from the perspective of fictional narrators, using their voices to add humor, irony, or critique. Although Chaucer had many strengths, there were also things he wasn’t as skilled at, which is why some might think he wasn’t naturally suited for writing sonnets. Sonnets require the writer to compress all their meaning and ideas into just 14 lines, demanding precision and focus. However, this very challenge may have made Chaucer particularly well-equipped to write them, as he had a talent for layering meaning in limited space and using voice creatively. Even if he didn’t write many sonnets himself, his writing style shows qualities that fit the form well.

*A sonnet does not have verses; it’s a 14-line compact structure composed of an octave followed by a sestet, which is six lines divided into two units of three but not divided on the paper, and a verse, and there’s a line (verso in Spanish is line, not verse). A 14-line short poem divided into two quatrains and two tercets. Petrarch → lines. Chaucer → verse and stanzas.

Sonnet Structure and Evolution

Canticus Troili 3 → 7-line strophes with 10 syllables per line (rhyme royal, perfected by Boccaccio). Three stanzas or verses of rhyme royal. 11-syllable lines.

ABB thesis (I love her) A

ABB antithesis (but she doesn’t love me) A

CDE synthesis (so I’m getting rid of her; I don’t love her either)

DEC

First quatrain → thesis, the problem.

Second quatrain → two parts of the problem.

First tercet → should have some form of solution.

Second tercet → should be a simple reiteration.

But poets usually break the rules. Voltas, especially with Shakespeare, can crop up anywhere because Shakespeare was the first person to write anti-sonnets, the basic forms of sonnets. There are three basic forms of sonnets.

The Italian (Petrarchan) Sonnet
The Italian sonnet, because it is an inflected language, tends to round out at a hendecasyllabic line (11-syllable lines). It was invented in the medieval ages in the Sicilian school of poets; they decided that the poems that they were going to write weren’t Latin but vernacular. Petrarchan sonnet, but he didn’t invent them. Divided into an octave and a sestet. The octave is formed by two quatrains, each of which is supposed to have a different job. More oxymorons, more ambivalence, more questions.
The idea is that mankind has something from God. Reason should be capable of solving all the problems it’s able to. The word “dear” was very important in English sonnets; “green” means something that’s fractious and also something that’s rotten and dying. Dream vision.

Wyatt’s Sonnets

When he writes, he’s trying to imitate Petrarch. Hendecasyllable first line. The second line has 10 syllables. Metrically all over the place. Petrarchan lines in line 1, 4, and in the first line of the couplet at the end, but the last line of the couplet has 9 syllables. Written when Wyatt had a love affair with his “dear,” and his decisions of lovers were very unwise because the woman was thought to be Anne Boleyn. It became known that she had been with Thomas Wyatt because he was a courtier. Shakespeare writes about the dark beauty, and the second section is written about this femme fatale dark lady. The last poems in the Shakespeare section are about this lady.

Edmund Spenser’s Sonnet Sequence

Sonnet sequence → the man is usually the one who speaks, a lover’s complaint. You generally get a lovers’ sequence and something else. After the Amoretti, you get the Epithalamion (the song that people used to sing under the window of the new couple). Man can be a beast and an angel, and like God, he can go up and down the scale; it’s up to him. Here, we have two points in the scale.

The hunter (Spenser) and the women no longer need him.
The dogs represent the desire Spenser feels. They appear to be psychological; they don’t represent rival courtiers, but again, Spenser has taken that as an adaptation of what Wyatt was doing.

Beguiled means to enchant someone or to cheat someone. The next brook might mean the most near, and in terms of her perceived relationship with Spenser, it means the next man: “it might as well be the next man, it might as well be Spenser.” The deer would be the one most likely to be panting, but she’s described as being fearless. So Spenser is the one that’s scared; he’s nervous, and he’s nervous because the deer has come back, and he doesn’t expect this, and it’s not typical in what the woman does in these Mona Lisa type poems; she does the unexpected. And Spenser has treated the whole experience as a game, and now the game doesn’t seem as funny anymore because the deer is actually hunting him as opposed to him hunting her, but it’s a weird kind of hunting because the hunting deer ends up being the hunter but also the one who’s tied. He’s still trembling as he puts a halter around her neck. He’s afraid she might change her mind at the last moment and run away. He might be afraid of the responsibility. With Wyatt, you get no perceived distinction between the game and winning the game; if he wins, he will be more than satisfied, but with Spenser, we have a completely different setup: it’s a game that he’s playing; it’s a game we’re not even sure he wants to win, because the first thing he does when the deer escapes is to rest; he isn’t bothered, and when she comes back, he’s scared. This is a reflection of a new attitude of women: they do the unexpected, and that makes them fascinating. He says directly what Wyatt says indirectly.

He questions why it is that men hunt women when then they will be too nervous to do anything about it, but he’s also saying, “Who understands women?” We don’t know what he means by the end; he might not even know himself. The most important words are beguiled and will. It can mean enchanted by her own will; she wants to satisfy her desire to be in love or, more specifically, to be loved. It’s a new way to look at the act and whole nature of love; it’s not to simply be in love but to want to be loved by a woman. It’s an idea that you want to get something; you want to be loved; if you get desperate enough, it doesn’t matter by whom. This poem is quite unique and honest. She hasn’t won; she has allowed herself to be won because she had convinced herself she wanted to be won by this person, but it could have been by anyone else. This again is an undermining of another cliché: it’s not the man who has won the woman; it’s the woman who has won because she has persuaded herself to be loved and to be in love herself between the two elements of her personality. Elizabeth Barrett Browning was the first woman to write a sonnet about a man.

Shakespeare’s Sonnets

Thought to be homosexual sonnets because there are a lot of plays about homosexual themes. The first 126 sonnets deal with a young man, but the love is Platonic, and from 127, they deal with… When Shakespeare writes his sonnets about the beautiful youth, the Dark Lady simply tempts (some of them are funny and amusing, Willy) represents having a bit of fun. She’s genuinely regarded as a loved one in some sonnets, a sexual partner, a friend… but one sonnet.

She’s called dark because she’s dark (dark hair, eyes…). When talking about ladies as lovers, color symbolism is very important. The Dark Lady is thought to be Lucy Negro, a lady from Shakespeare’s theater company. “Unless you get married and have children, you and your beauty will forever be lost. You’re not going to lose the beauty you own because I’m going to write about it.”

In Sonnet 94, the first unusual thing is that Shakespeare is not speaking to a single lady, as sonnets traditionally do, but to a group of people. This creates an immediate mystery: who is “they”? The “they” refers to a privileged group — those who have power to hurt others but choose not to. These people are described as beautiful and strong, with great self-control. The poem explores the idea that beauty and power are gifts, but if someone wastes these gifts by being cold or selfish, they become corrupted from the inside, like a flower that looks perfect but is rotting within. Shakespeare uses the image of a lily — a beautiful flower that can still become infected. This infection isn’t physical, but emotional or moral, like depression or inner decay, which in Elizabethan times was seen as a result of isolation or not fulfilling your natural role (like love or connection). The sonnet ends with a warning: even the most beautiful things lose their worth if they turn cold or refuse to love. It’s not about being a narcissist — it’s about how self-absorption can lead to emotional or spiritual rot.