The reality presented in Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales is one that is skewed by both Chaucer, the writer, and his fictional persona of humble narrator, who is the only source of information in the poem. The resulting overlay of these different perspectives and the reader's dependence on biased information makes it difficult to distinguish the complete motive behind the Canterbury pilgrimage for any of its participants.
[...] The ambiguity of motive in Chaucer's Canterbury tales The reality presented in Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales is one that is skewed by both Chaucer, the writer, and his fictional persona of humble narrator, who is the only source of information in the poem. The resulting overlay of these different perspectives and the reader's dependence on biased information makes it difficult to distinguish the complete motive behind the Canterbury pilgrimage for any of its participants. Spiritual benefit as a motive for pilgrimage was questioned in Chaucer's time. [...]
[...] The search for a motive is further complicated by the fact that the narrator specifically mentions that the Knight has “foughten for oure feith.”[12] In the twelfth century, Pope Innocent III expanded Urban II's plenary indulgence for crusaders to include any man who defends the Christian faith, thus ruling out the Knight's pilgrimage as an act of penitence. There is no mention of an individual miracle by Beckett that the Knight would owe devotion for nor is the narrator's description of the Knight any help in determining a motive as it is not much more than a verbalizing of preconceived notions of chivalry. [...]
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