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This provides a general overview, including electronic resources, bibliography, annotated bibliography and notes on the Knight's Tale

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Site copyright ©1996-2012

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to the Works of Geoffrey Chaucer

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Chaucer. The Knight's Tale. [Canterbury Tales Study Resources]

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Site copyright ©1996-2012 to Canterbury Tales to the Canterbury Tales to the Works of Geoffrey Chaucer Anniina Jokinen. All Rights Reserved. Created by Anniina Jokinen on October 29, 1998. Last updated on August 31, 2012.

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Knight's tale in images from manuscripts

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Geoffrey Chaucer

Site copyright ©1997-2017

to Chaucer's Knight

Portraits of the Knight from Various Editions

Images from a Manuscript of Boccaccio's Il Teseida, c1465

Manuscript of Boccaccio's
Il Teseida, c1465, by the
Master of the Hours
of the Duke of Burgundy.

Palamon and Arcite see Emelye.
From a manuscript of Boccaccio's Il Teseida
by the Master of the Hours
of the Duke of Burgundy, c1465.

Theseus arrives in Athens
with Hippolyta and Emilia.
Manuscript of Boccaccio's
Il Teseida, c1465.

Arcite Freed from Prison.

Manuscript of Boccaccio's
Il Teseida, c1465.

Emilia Hunting. From a MS
of Boccaccio's Il Teseida
by the Master of the Hours
of the Duke of Burgundy, c1465.

Theseus presiding over the

lists of Palamon and Arcite.
Manuscript of Boccaccio's
Il Teseida, c1465.

Arcite, Emelye, and Palamon

pray to their respective deities.
Manuscript of Boccaccio's
Il Teseida, c1465.

Arcite on his deathbed.

Manuscript of Boccaccio's
Il Teseida, c1465.

Images from the Kelmscott Chaucer, 1896

Miscellaneous Contextual Images

A Joust, 15th C.

A Tourney, c1470.

Chroniques d'Angleterre.
BnF MS. fr. 87, fol. 58v.

Lady awarding a

prize to the winner.
René d'Anjou's
Livre des Tournois, c1488.

Combat of Roland and Ferragut.

Grandes Chroniques
de France, 14th C.
The Bibliothèque
Nationale de France.

Wheel of Fortune, c1460.

From Lydgate's Troy Book.
British Library.

Lady Fortune and Her Wheel.

from Boccaccio's
De Casibus Virorum Illustrium
MSS Hunter 371-372. vol. 1, f. 1r.

to the Knight's Tale

to the Canterbury Tales

to the Works of Geoffrey Chaucer

Anniina Jokinen. All Rights Reserved.
Created on November 3, 1997 by Anniina Jokinen. Last updated on September 9, 2017.

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Chaucer's The Knight's Tale in Images [Canterbury Tales in Pictures]

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Geoffrey Chaucer Site copyright ©1997-2017 to Chaucer's Knight Portraits of the Knight from Various Editions Images from a Manuscript of Boccaccio's Il Teseida, c1465 Manuscript of Boccaccio's Il Teseida, c1465, by the Master of the Hoursof the Duke of Burgundy. Palamon and Arcite see Emelye.

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Middle English and Modern English side-by-side reading

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Knight's Tale, The Canterbury Tales, The Canterbury Tales, The Canterbury Tales, Geoffrey Chaucer, Geoffrey Chaucer, Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales in hypertext, The Canterbury Tales on-line, medieval, mediaeval, middle-english, electronic book, books, Librarius, librarius, literature. The Canterbury Tales, Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales in hypertext, The Canterbury Tales on-line, medieval, mediaeval, middle-english, electronic book, books, Librarius, librarius, literature. The Canterbury Tales, Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales in hypertext, The Canterbury Tales on-line, medieval, mediaeval, middle-english, electronic book, books, Librarius, librarius, literature.

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From “The Canterbury Tales”: The Knight’s Tale (modern english and middle english)

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Knighthood and Chivalry

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No substantial change since September 1996.

Terminology

The terms are often confused, and often needlessly distinguished. The term knighthood comes from the English word knight (from Old English cniht, boy, servant, cf. German Knecht) while chivalry comes from the French chevalerie, from chevalier or knight (Low Latin caballus for horse). In modern English, chivalry means the ideals, virtues, or characteristics of knights. The phrases "orders of chivalry" and "orders of knighthood" are essentially synonymous.

The German translation for "knight" is Ritter (literally, rider). The Latin term in the Middle Ages was miles, since a knight was by definition a professional soldier. In modern times, the Classical Latin term eques was preferred.

History

The Emergence of knights

Succintly, a knight was a professional soldier. The old "citizens' armies" of Antiquity had been replaced by professional armies. This trend was reinforced by the appearance in the 8th century of the stirrup, which made mounted men much more powerful and turned cavalry into the most important element of medieval armies. But being a mounted soldier was expensive, since it required enough income to buy and sustain a horse and the equipment (armor, weapons) to go with it. Thus, those who were too poor to provide this service became mere peasants, attached to the land.

In feudal society as it emerged in the 10th century, everyone held land from someone else in exchange for goods or services of some kind. Men who were not free provided a portion of their crops and labor services. Men who were free provided military service, either personally or (if they were rich enough) using others' services. Thus, a man who held his estate in knight's fee owed service as a knight to his lord. A more sizeable vassal, when called by his liege, would summon his knights and form a contingent in his liege's army.

The Development of Knighthood

Knighthood was originally a professional association. It included those men who could afford to make and maintain the heavy capital investment required by mounted warfare (horse and armor). It emerges in the 11th century, and its members are nobles (members of the great land-owning families) as well as small land-holders, free men, craftsmen, etc (in Spain, caballeros villanos were common until the 14th c.). It must be understood that, even in the feudal era, the boundaries of knighthood were quite fluid. Anyone who, by luck or effort, managed to obtain the training and equipment to be a knight, could eventually enter that class. In Flanders, there is a famous case of a family of servile (i.e., unfree) origin who entered into knighthood and became castellans of ??? in the 12th c.

In the course of the 12th century, a social and ethical dimension is added to this professional aspect. The strong influence of Cluny monks, who try to give an ethos to savage warfare, leads to the definition of the true miles Christi, a soldier who follows a certain code of behavior, which we now call chivalric. Starting in the second half of the 12th century, literature (gests and Arthurian romances) also provides a model for the knightly community, as well as a means of glorifying it.

Knighthood and Nobility

Thus, knights were not necessarily nobles, nor were nobles necessarily knights. The noble class and the knightly class slowly came to merge from the late 12th century onward. Nobles become knights with increasing frequency. The French prince (future king Louis VI) was knighted without the knowledge of his father who remains distrustful of a rather heterogeneous professional class, but thereafter every French king is knighted (Favier 1993). Conversely, heredity enters the knightly class in the 13th century. The son of a knight is automatically a squire, thus making him eligible for knighthood on the basis of his ancestry; at the same time, knighthood is more and more restricted to descendants of knights by various legal restrictions imposed over the course of the 13th century. In the late 13th century, a decision of the Parliament in Paris forbade the count of Artois from making unfree men into knights without the king's consent; interesting to note, the two men who had been so knighted were allowed to remain knights subject to the payment of a fine. This marked both the closure of the knightly class as well as the beginnings of a new form of access, by purchase.

In England, the evolution was different: those who held land in knight's fee but did not wish to take up the profession could pay a tax. Knighthood did not become a hereditary class in England, and instead the knightly class (those eligible to be knights) became the nucleus of the gentry.

See also my page on women knights.

The End of Knighthood

As a military institution, knighthood was on the wane from the late 13th century on. The end of feudal society meant that sovereigns gained a monopoly on war-making, and the old form of military service owed to one's immediate lord became obsolete. Kings still summoned their knights for wars, but increasingly they turned to other sources of manpower, namely mercenaries whose use became common in the 14th century. The war preparations of Henry V of England, which are well-documented, show how the king formed an army: he signed dozens of contracts (or indentures) with individuals who pledged to provide a specified number of men-at-arms and archers (usually 3 archers for each man-at-arm) at muster time.

The development of gunpowder and increasingly more powerful archery meant that the use of massive cavalry charges to break enemy lines and carry swift victory could not be relied upon, and the dominance of cavalry came to an end. If any battle summed up this change, it was the battle of Agincourt in 1415. The charging French knights, compressed by the terrain and the English arrows into a fragmented and ever constricted line of attack, reached the English line without any room to maneuver, and it only took a few fallen horses to prevent all other knights from moving in any direction. Thus, in half-an-hour the battle was decided, and thousands of French knights lay prisoners. The fear of a second attack prompted the English to kill them on the spot, and the French nobility was horribly decimated in a single day. The French learned their lesson; Charles VII, who finally expelled the English, formed the first standing, professional army in Europe.

The chivalric ideals continued to live on, perhaps precisely because the reality of knighthood had disappeared, and a free rein was given to romanticizing. The French king François Ier insisted on being knighted on the battlefield of his first victory at Marignano in 1515. Tournaments, pas d'armes were favorite entertainment at the French court of the 16th century. More and more elaborate suits of armor were forged for pure display, in increasingly baroque imitations of earlier models. Ariosto's poetic retelling of the crusades popularized the figures of Orlando and Ruggiero and extended the knightly myth for another 200 years. In the 19th century, when no one read Ariosto anymore, Sir Walter Scott and Romanticism took up the cause.

Orders of Knighthood

The origins of orders of knighthood are in the Crusades. In the Latin Orient, a new institution emerged, in which knights (professional soldiers) associated themselves under a strict, quasi-monastic rule of life, for the purpose of protecting pilgrims and defending Christian conquests in the Holy Land. In the 14th century, just as the original military-monastic orders were searching for a new mission after the loss of the Holy Land, kings began creating orders of their own, modelled in part on these original orders, but with a different purpose, to bind their nobility to themselves. Still later, in the late 16th century, these monarchical orders were imitated in form by the new orders of merit which became common throughout Europe.

Because each institution tried to use the prestige of the previous one by imitating it, the term "order of knighthood" has been passed on and is now used for modern awards and decorations which are neither orders nor composed of knights. In modern society, only a very few orders survive from the times of the Crusades, and most "orders of knighthood" awarded by sovereigns or governments (such as the English Garter or the Spanish Golden Fleece) are, in spite of their historical connection, awards of merit.

I discuss orders of knighthood at greater length.

Heraldry and Knighthood

The relations between heraldry, nobility and knighthood are often completely misunderstood. Briefly stated, heraldry appeared in the landed aristocracy and quickly spread to the knightly class in the 12th century, at a time when knighthood and nobility remain very distinct classes. Over the course of the 13th century, knighthood and nobility came to merge, just as heraldry spread far beyond either class to be used by all classes of society. Thus, heraldry is not particularly linked to nobility, although the most easily documented uses of heraldry are among nobles, simply because nobles were the elite.

The initial development of heraldry certainly owes a lot to the practices of the knightly class, in particular the growing fashion of tournaments, which became more and more popular from the 13th century, just as knighthood as a military institution was on the wane. Tournaments were the occasion to display coats of arms, and heralds, who were originally a specialized group of minstrels, became responsible for identifying and cataloguing the arms of participants. Their knowledge of coats of arms also helped them identify fighters in battle and dead on the battlefield, and for this reason heralds became associated with battles, truces, declarations of war, in an official capacity.

References

Favier, Jean: Dictionnaire de la France Médiévale. Paris: 1993, Fayard.

Walrop: La Noblesse de Flandres avant 1300.

Knighthood Main Page | Search Heraldica | Heraldic Glossary | Contact
François Velde

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No substantial change since September 1996. The terms are often confused, and often needlessly distinguished. The term knighthood comes from the English word knight (from Old English cniht, boy, servant, cf. German Knecht) while chivalry comes from the French chevalerie, from chevalier or knight (Low Latin caballus for horse).

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From the Medieval Studies Research Blog, University of Notre Dame

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 [This post was written in the spring 2018 semester for Karrie Fuller's course on Chaucer'sCanterbury Tales. It responds to the prompt postedhere.]

The idea of love is rather simple. However, artists from every specialty tend to exaggerate it in order to make it more exciting for their audiences. In other words, wild and adventurous love stories tend to garner more attention than timid, mundane ones. Life is not typically filled with love that takes people on an actual journey across the world and back, and the fantastic escapades that occur in literature and film are not common occurrences in the real world. Many novels that are popular today contain a chaotic love triangle or dramatic tale of love. However, such fantasies have always existed in people's minds-several stories in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales even demonstrate these ideas. Unfortunately, these types of stories are often glorified in a way that can be harmful. When these stories are written in ways that highlight a daring romance while ignoring the problematic parts of relationships, people are presented with a warped view of love. People are slowly made to believe that possessive and jealous lovers are attractive, or that self-loathing is sexy. Tropes like these should be reevaluated, or, at the very least, people should not be persuaded into believing that such tropes truly demonstrate an ideal form of love. I will focus primarily on the "Knight's Tale" in light of how less than perfect ideas of love continue to be romanticized in today's literature.

Throughout history, people have viewed knights in literature as chivalrous and noble men. When discussing the "Knight's Tale", however, some would argue that the knights, Arcite and Palamon, do not necessarily exhibit these traits, as they are not very considerate of the object of their affections, Emily. They function in their own world of fantasized love before Emily even knows they exist, and they do not honestly consider the situation from her point of view. The tale is set up to be rather romantic-two men fighting to the death for a woman's love has often been considered an act of pure devotion. However, the romance in the "Knight's Tale" is counteracted by the fact that Emily does not truly want to marry either of the knights (The Knight's Tale 2304-2305). Her own desires are placed after everyone else's, but the tale is considered romantic on the surface nonetheless. Essentially, the romantic ideals of protective knights and a beautiful woman are able to distract readers from the less-than-ideal treatment of Emily in which she is mostly ignored and forced into situations whether she likes it or not. Ashtin Ballard addresses Emily's plight in regards to the oppression of her expressions in her essay as well, and this idea highlights the neglect Emily suffers throughout the "Knight's Tale;" she is rarely able to discuss her woes, and no one seems to even want to hear about how she feels. Modern readers should be careful when reading to not accept this idea of love as ideal. Even if it is decorated with knights and princesses, it still contains many problematic aspects that continue into today's literature-especially young adult fiction.

One of the more iconic love triangles of young adult fiction has its home in the popular Hunger Games trilogy by Suzanne Collins. This idea of competitive love resembles the one in the "Knight's Tale," and it is present in many other pieces from the young adult genre. Glorifying this trope could be problematic, though. Generally speaking, only one love interest ends up with the main character, but this indicates that the main character was meant to be won from the start. Nevertheless, people want to feel wanted, so the thought of two people fighting for one person's affection is seen as exciting. It could be argued that if the main character has feelings for the love interests, then it is acceptable for such a rivalry to take place. I would argue, however, that this mainly works to make it more palatable to readers, and the idea of reducing a person to a prize is still present. Even if authors do not intend for this to happen, fans of books with this trope often make the rivalry into a competition. (See screenshot above of "Why Katniss Should Have Chosen Gale Over Peeta In the Hunger Games," article by Mehera Bonner.) Thus, it is easy to see the connection between society's romanticizing of competitive love and literature. Because the trope of the love triangle has evolved over time, people may write off Chaucer's version as archaic, but it seems that today's standards of love have not actually diverted that much from pieces considered outdated. People could learn a thing or two about unhealthy relationships if they understood where many of their beloved clichés gain inspiration.

To take it a step further, the idea of possessive lovers has become especially alluring. Similar to how Arcite and Palamon decide that Emily will belong to one of them, literature today contains characters that forcefully claim another (typically a young woman) as their own. A handful of people have claimed that abuse is romanticized in works like the Twilight saga by Stephenie Meyer. In her piece " Twilight: The Glamorization of Abuse, Codependency, and White Privilege," Danielle N. Borgia argues that Edward's "extreme dominance of his female partner is characterized as ideal masculinity" (Borgia 155). Likewise, the knights in the "Knight's Tale" are often read as wonderfully noble men who embody true masculinity. When a possessive or jealous lover is idealized, people begin to honestly believe that such a lover is to be desired. Many readers of young adult fiction are very impressionable, so these ideas have the potential to twist their views of love and devotion into harmful ones. Therefore, Chaucer remains relevant because, even though people claim ideas set forth in tales like the "Knight's Tale" are outdated, popular literature being published today often promotes the same ideas decorated in different ways.

The literary examples I have mentioned have been undeniably popular in the past few years, and it goes to show how society worships unhealthy relationships that are embellished to appear lovely. Even though people try to distance themselves from medieval ideas that they think are archaic, they unknowingly tend to enforce those ideas with only a few slight modifications. Readers should understand that some ideas from popular books are not new, so if they admire problematic love stories, then they run the risk of admiring the dynamics of stories like the "Knight's Tale." I think The Canterbury Tales is a useful text to compare modern works with, as people would be able to identify unsavory ideas in today's writing if they could make connections to a text that they may already view as containing problematic sentiments. Unless society wants younger generations to think that possessive partners and abusive relationships are desirable as long as they are dressed up romantically, we should teach people where the romanticization of such ideas began and how it is perpetuated today.

Nicole Matthias
University of Notre Dame

Works Cited

Borgia, Danielle N. " Twilight: The Glamorization of Abuse, Codependency, and White

Privilege." The Journal of Popular Culture, vol. 47, no. 1, 2011, Wiley Periodicals, Inc, pp.153-172. Wiley Online Library, www.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/j.1540-5931.2011.00872.x.

Chaucer, Geoffrey. "The Knight's Tale." The Canterbury Tales, 2 nd ed., edited by Robert Boeing and Andrew Taylor, Broadview Press, 2012, pp. 63-95.

Collins, Suzanne. The Hunger Games. Scholastic Press, 2008.

Meyer, Stephenie. Twilight. Little, Brown and Company, 2005.

[This post was written in the spring 2018 semester for Karrie Fuller's course on Chaucer'sCanterbury Tales. It responds to the prompt postedhere.]

Courtly love, as described by Chaucer in his Canterbury Tales, consists of a series of rigidly-defined criteria by which a man may rightly pursue a woman. In such pursuit, it is not uncommon for a man to become infatuated with a woman to the point of physical illness. He admires her from afar as she becomes the sole object of his gaze; the entire energy of his being is directed towards contemplation of her beauty. This dynamic may progress significantly without any direct reciprocation from the female party. In Chaucer's "The Knight's Tale," Emily endures the reality of courtly love to the point of abject suffering. (For a further analysis of the female voice in Chaucer's tales, consider reading Ashtin Ballad's Emily's Modes of Expression in the Knight's Tale- A Precursor to the #MeToo Movement). Several hundred years after the writing of The Canterbury Tales, Michel Foucault offers in his Discipline and Punish consideration towards a prison construct termed the 'panopticon'. In this building, a fortified guard tower at the center of a circular room looks out upon rows of prison cells stacked against its perimeter. The windows of the central tower are tinted so as to prevent the prisoners from knowing whether or not they are under observation at any given moment. This dynamic instills a latent sense of paranoia within the prisoner and subjects them to a power relation which renders them unable to resist the the penal system above them. Between these two works appears a space for courtly love to exist in relation to the construct of the panopticon. With Emily's character as a grounds for consideration, the following post will explore the extent to which courtly love suppresses the female will by means of persistent observation and imposition of external force.

While observation from afar comes to constitute a significant theme in "The Knight's Tale," its practical application is inverted with respect to the work of Foucault. In effect, it is the prisoners who observe a free subject rather than enforcers of the penal system who gaze upon a prisoner. Chaucer details Palamon's first encounter with Emily in writing:

And so bifel by aventure or cas* ( it happened by chance or accident)
That thurgh a window thikke of many a barre
Of iren greet and square as any sparre* ( beam)
He caste his eye upon Emelya (ln. 1074-1077).

Here, Palamon and Arcite conduct their observation from a point of concealment imposed against their mutual will. While the physical structure of the prison operates at a base level against them in their observation-power exchange with Emily, the Foucaldian implications of their situation work such that power weighs in their favor. Though Palamon and Arcite are traditional prisoners in the immediate sense, Emily here occupies the role of the panopticon prisoner. Her status as a young woman of consequential birth renders her a conventionally attractive subject of the male gaze. She is, however, entirely unaware of her sustained observation and subsequent fetishization by the palpably-bored Palamon and Arcite. (For an alternate exploration of love in Chaucer's work, consider reading Nicole Matthias' What is love, Or Chaucer as Related to Modern Views of Love in Literature).

Further, the role of the Gods in Chaucer's work seem to embody the indifferent nature of the penal system with regard to the will of its prisoners. Foucault, a significant critic of Western prison practice in the 19 th Century, argued that prison systems employed methods inconsistent with the personal development of prisoners. As a consequence of this, recidivism abounds and the penal system as a whole devolves into a self-indulgent cycle of discipline and punishment. Here, there seems to be a tension between an individual's free will and a near-supernatural sense of predestination towards a certain fate. Chaucer employs this mechanic in the pseudo-smiting of Arcite following his victory in battle. In granting such a great degree of power to the fickle hand of fate, Chaucer emphasizes Emily's own helplessness to resist the power structures above her. Not only is she impotent in the face of the male presence which observes her and dictates her future, a further unseen element toys with the very fate of mortals and casts their affairs in a perpetual state of uncertainty.

In summary, Chaucer's work in The Canterbury Tales maintains relevance beyond its value merely as a surviving fourteenth-century work of literature. Granted appropriate consideration, many tales serve as a fruitful ground for application of modern theory. In Chaucer's time, the panopticon was hundreds of years from conception. The very notion of an advanced, sprawling penal system seems beyond the scope of possibility for Chaucer's own context. Still, in producing nuanced works such as "The Knight's Tale," Chaucer effectively allows for his work to carry significance well into the modern age.

Connor Dunleavy
University of Notre Dame

[This post was written in the spring 2018 semester for Karrie Fuller's course on Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. It responds to the prompt posted here.]

The "Knight's Tale" is the first tale to appear in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, just after the General Prologue. In it, two imprisoned knights, Palamon and Arcite, vie for the affections of Emily, an Amazonian woman brought back to Athens by King Theseus as a spoil of war. After seeing her in the garden on a May morning, Palamon and Arcite fall madly in love with Emily, and they eventually duel to the death for her hand in marriage. Emily and her modes of expression (or lack thereof) are interesting, particularly because this tale, in more ways than one, sets the tone for the rest of the Tales. Emily is primarily relegated to a realm of silence in this text; however, she expresses herself intermittently through weeping and a singular, emotional prayer. This blog post will examine Emily's treatment and expression in the "Knight's Tale" in order to analyze the plight of women in the Middle Ages as presented through Chaucer's poetry. Ultimately, it will reveal the disappointingly small distance we have traveled in terms of gender parity in the decades since Chaucer was writing. Indeed, it posits that Emily is one of the early victims whose voice deserves to be read in the context of the modern justice movement, #MeToo.

Arguably, in close contest with her beauty, the most striking characteristic of Emily in this tale is her silence. Throughout this tale, the knights speak amply of her beauty, "that fairer was to sene / Than is the lylie upon his stalke grene / And fresher than the May with floures newe, / For with the rose colour stroof hire hewe," and of their desire to wed her. However, she is stunningly quiet on this subject, with one private exception of prayer, which will be examined later (Chaucer 65; lines 1035-38). Indeed, Theseus states, "I speke as for my suster Emelye," when he announces the prospect of a duel to Palamon and Arcite (Chaucer 76; line 1833). Emily is always in the background, being talked about, but never talked to. Her silence can be interpreted, especially for modern readers, as a symbol of women's oppression in the Middle Ages. Although, ironically, Emily is the driver for the entire tale, it is only as a tool for the knights to manipulate and fight over in order to prove the supremacy of their masculinity and honor. She has no agency, and this is mirrored in the silencing of her voice.

Although Emily's silence is the most symbolic indicator of her lack of agency in the text, her powerful appeal to Diana before the battle also illustrates her and other women's powerlessness. She laments, "I / Desire to ben a mayden al my lyf. / ... And noght to ben a wyf and be with / childe" (Chaucer 84; lines 2305-10). Further, she pleads with Diana, "Bihoold, goddesse of clene chastitee, / The bitter teeris that on my chekes falle! / Syn thou art mayde and kepere of us alle, / My maydenhede thou kepe and wel conserve. / And whil I lyve, a mayde I wol thee serve" (Chaucer 84; lines 2326-30). Emily's true feelings are only revealed in the sanctity and privacy of prayer, and even when she is her most vulnerable self, her desires and needs are cast in the wind in favor of what the knights of the tale desire (and, it would seem, what the gods command). Shortly after she cries in anguish, begging Diana to spare her from marriage, Diana appears unto her and tells her that she must be wed. This interaction begs the question, to what extent does Fortune play a role in this text, and to what extent are the outcomes predetermined? Both gods and Fortune appear in this text and affect the events that unfold, introducing questions of the role of agency in the lives of mankind, and especially women in the Middle Ages. Do women have any agency, or are they doomed to live as slaves to men and their desires? Emily's prayer is a powerful glimpse into the emotional underpinnings of marriage and agency for women during this time period.

A third and final mode of expression illustrated in this text is weeping, which Emily does periodically throughout the text. There are two categories of weeping that take place in the "Knight's Tale": weeping over a man or men, and weeping in prayer. At the start of the tale, upon Theseus' return, a "compaignye of ladyes" (Chaucer 63; line 898) weeps: "swich a cry and swich a wo they make, / That in this world nys creature lyvynge / That herde swich another waymentynge" (Chaucer 63; lines 900-03). Similarly, when Arcite dies, Emily "weepe bothe eve and morwe" (Chaucer 91; line 2821). In juxtaposition with the silence that dominates the majority of this tale, the weeping that punctuates the remaining spaces paints Emily as an emotional, rather than stoic, figure. Her emotions are compartmentalized - either she is entirely silent or highly emotional. In this way, Chaucer oversimplifies Emily, and, arguably, all women, through these extremes. Perhaps the only time Emily weeps and talks, thus complicating this binary, is when she is praying to Diana. In her uncertainty, she "for the feere thus hast she cried / And weepe that it was pitee for to heere" (Chaucer 84; lines 2344-45). The weeping that is peppered throughout this text speaks, in conjunction with the overwhelming silence, to the plight of women in the Middle Ages. Their lives are almost entirely controlled by men, particularly in Emily's case. And so, she weeps, remains silent, and passionately pleas with Diana, only to be denied both understanding and her desires. Emily's rather binary expression of emotion indicates that women have little choice, if any, over their lives, and emphasizes the roles of Fate and Fortune in place of the agency of women.

In sum, Emily's modes of expression - silence, weeping, and prayer - offer a glimpse of the struggle of a medieval woman; however, this tale is entirely relevant to modern women, too. Even still, over six hundred years later, women experience misogynistic attempts to control their bodies and fates. One need not look far to discover this truth - no farther than Twitter, in fact, where the hashtag #MeToo has documented thousands of instances of abuse and entitlement on the part of men seeking control over women. In popular culture, too, there are examples of men dueling over a woman everywhere - The Bachelorette, as one example, not to mention the plethora of young adult fiction that employs a similar structure. Chaucer's depiction of women in the Middle Ages is concerning and, of course, a more literal illustration of silencing women; however, the underlying implications of male control and domination plague our society to this very day.

Ashtin Ballard
University of Notre Dame
Works Cited
Chaucer, Geoffrey. "The Knight's Tale." The Canterbury Tales, ed. Robert Boenig and Andrew Taylor, 2nd ed., Broadview Press, 2012.

Featured Image: Emily Gathering Flowers, 1882, by Mary Eliza Haweis,Chaucer for Children

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Knight's Tale - Medieval Studies Research Blog: Meet us at the Crossroads of Everything

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This post was written in the spring 2018 semester for Karrie Fuller's course on Chaucer'sCanterbury Tales. It responds to the prompt posted here .] The idea of love is rather simple. However, artists from every specialty tend to exaggerate it in order to make it more exciting for their audiences.