What is are the relations between Geoffrey Chaucer and the Crusades?
Geoffrey Chaucer’s “Knight’s Tale” Commentary by Karen Bernardo In Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, each of the different tales which comprise the larger work are told by a separate pilgrim to pass the time during a long trek to the shrine of St. Thomas a Becket. The first tale is told by a Knight recently returned from the Crusades. Because the Knight is presented as a traditional, old-fashioned sort of fellow, it should come as no surprise that he tells a tale of courtly love. What is courtly love? This term refers to a phenomenon of the late middle ages when women were accorded an almost religious status, and the act of seeking a woman’s favor took on the flavor of a religious quest. Ironically, however, while women seem to be central to the story, in fact they do absolutely nothing. The point of these stories was to show how women for men represented a metaphor for the man’s relationship with the divine, and consequently in these works women function as completely static works
The true Crusades were over by Chaucer’s time, but people probably didn’t realize that fact. (King Henry IV, who came to power about a year before Chaucer died, hoped to go on one.) The struggle with the heathen from which the Knight and his party have just returned was in the Baltic region, not the Holy Land. However, Chaucer seems to see the Knight as embodying the good qualities of a Crusader and a courtly gentleman who lives by the code of chivalry–and some critics see it as significant that Chaucer made the Knight grey-haired. Those qualities and the attitude that fostered them were becoming obsolete. Incidentally, take a close look at the Yeoman accompanying the Knight. Does his description sound familiar?
