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Canterbury Tales Love

Decent Essays

Within Canterbury Tales love is a prevalent topic. Love can have more than one embodiment, it can take the form of a romantic love, a love for service, a courtly love, the list can go on for eternity. Throughout the prologue of Canterbury Tales, two embodiments of love can be found, these forms of love are romantic love and courtly love. Amid the Middle ages when the story of the Canterbury Tales was written, one of the most common types of love was courtly love. This love was a non-sexual love that was frequently found in systems like that of feudalism. Although both loves were present in the middle ages, these types of love have changed to keep up with the times. Courtly love has almost disappeared, while romantic love has remained the most …show more content…

Courtly love is a medieval European conception of love that not only emphasizes nobility and chivalry but is also nonsexual. Bravery, excellent military skills, generosity in victory and defeat, and courtesy to women are all qualities that are fundamental to the idea of courtly love. Another very important part of courtly love is that the relationship contains no sexual intercourse, although this was not alway followed it was one of the many qualities of courtly love. Courtly love was used to make a knight braver and to inspire him by knowing he had a lady to come home to. Glorifying a lady with words and the knight wearing a lady’s colors in battle are examples of how this relationship would have worked but the lady of the relationship always remained pure and out of reach. It was believed that if the rules of this embodiment were broken, it could be tragic for the …show more content…

This character is the Wife of Bath. Although the Wife of Bath had five husbands, she was utterly loyal to everyone of them. She even fell in love with her fourth husband, Jenkins. Jenkins had a mistress on the side who the Wife of Bath knew about. By her showing her jealousy, she is showing the readers that she has true feelings for him and he was not just any old fling. Throughout the Wife of Bath, she outlives each of her husbands. When they each of them passed away, she was upset. However, she was completely destroyed when Jenkins died. The Wife of Bath was looked at in society as the one who was frowned upon for being married so many times. Nonetheless, she was also accepted since she was getting married for the right reasons and under the right circumstances. These characteristics and situations show that she is the perfect example of a romantic

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