Sam Reed

Professor Montag

ENGL 287

2 March 2023

Satirizing Corruption: Critiques of the Church in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales

Written at the end of the 14th century, Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, a collection of Middle English poetry about a group of pilgrims in a London tavern, confronts a church in deep crisis. Concerns of cultural and social corruption led to critical views about the direction of England’s religious institutions: the secularization of the church, the shirking of its teachings, and the abandonment of religious doctrine and practices created a growing dissatisfaction with the church and its various members. In the General Prologue of the Tales, characters associated with the church — the prioress, the monk, and the friar in particular — epitomize these concerns, offering pointed critiques of religion as it was experienced during the period. Drawing on specific aspects of corruption — the adoption of worldly values, the renunciation of church doctrine, and the emergence of perverted religious practices — these characters satirize the state of the Catholic Church in ways that draw attention to the deteriorating conditions of church life, practice, and principles throughout the Medieval era.

It’s worth noting that Chaucer is not necessarily caricaturing church-members so much as presenting them as they really were: while taking liberties, the characters in Chaucer’s poem were not impossible portraits of church life at the time. The prioress offers a plausible portrayal of a church nun: “charitable” and “pitous” to an extreme, Madame Eglentine sharply critiques the growing abandonment of the Catholic establishment’s adherence to ascetic religious practice (line 143). Her title, indicating her marital status, is unbefitting of someone ostensibly married to Christ; and her gold brooch, inscribed with the phrase “love conquers all,” venerates earthly love over and above the biblical ‘love’ of Christ. Eglentine, like much of the church during the Middle Ages, had fallen prey to worldly pleasures: to sexual pleasures, as indicated by her title and brooch, but also to pleasures of eating and emotional indulgence. Eglentine is a heavy-set woman: “For hardily, she was nat undergrowe” (line 156). Her sympathy at the harming of animals, although admirable, indicates an unhealthy degree of emotional investment: Eglentine’s care for the lives of rodents and dogs obscures her feelings for her fellow man. Eglentine, then, epitomizes the antithesis of religious asceticism; rather than refraining from indulgences, her life seemingly revolves around them.

The monk’s introduction offers another critique of the church — particularly, of the ways in which members shirked their responsibilities to adhere to theological and religious doctrines. At the time of Chaucer’s writing, Catholicism’s growing influence resulted in the church becoming an increasingly, and perversely, secular institution: by expanding its role in daily life, the Catholic Church had diluted the significance of religiosity, even among its supposedly devout adherents. The result was a religious class with little actual investment in the teachings of prominent thinkers and texts — hence, the Monk’s refusal to adhere to “the rule of Saint Maure or of Saint Beneit,” writers of important monastic doctrines (line 173). But more than simply rejecting the rules of the order, the monk refuses religion in practice, too: instead of heeding Saint Augustine’s calls to “swinke with his hands and laboure,” the monk prefers the pleasures of hunting and riding (line 186). As the secularization of the church took hold, church-members who paid little mind to the rules and regulations of the church emerged within the Catholic establishment. The monk — emblematic of this disregard by an increasing sect of the country’s religious population — offers a critique of an increasingly institutionalized church environment.

Where the monk rebukes the shirking of religious doctrine, the friar points critically at the ways in which even legitimate obligations to the church had been corrupted through secularization. Of course, Friar Huberd still shirks the rules of the church: unwilling to make acquaintance with the sick, the friar favors company with innkeepers and barmaids — fathering, it seems, many children in the process. But while failing to live the ascetic lifestyle expected of the clergy, Huberd’s introduction also highlights the perversion of the practices of the church itself. The friar runs a racket of penance for those willing to pay: “He was an esy man to yive penuance / Ther as he wiste to have a good pituance” (lines 223-224). His begging, too, operates as a kind of sacrilegious contest, even earning him the title of “the beste beggare in his hous” (line 252). While penance-purchasing and begging were real practices within the church, Chaucer seems to find their growing role distasteful; by highlighting the friar’s participation in both, the Prologue appears to indicate that the practices of the church had themselves fallen to a kind of religious corruption.

While Chaucer is critical of the secularization of the church, he refrains from being overly pessimistic: despite the church’s flaws, Chaucer holds out for a vision of a true, religiously minded institution in the future. Such a vision is best embodied in Chaucer’s country parson character: “riche [...] of holy thought and werk,” the priest embodies the ideals of what church-members can — and indeed, ought to — be (line 481). Absent the corruption that took over the church, the parson re-establishes the norms from which the Catholic institution had deviated. While Chaucer’s other characters — the prioress, the monk, and the friar — caution against the deteriorating state of the Catholic Church, The Canterbury Tales retains an optimistic outlook, hopeful for the church and its members.

Works Cited

Abrams, Meyer Howard. The Norton Anthology of English Literature. Norton, 1987.