The Age of Saturn: Literature and History in the Canterbury Tales

Author / Editor
Brown, Peter, and Andrew Butcher.

Title
The Age of Saturn: Literature and History in the Canterbury Tales

Published
Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1991.

Physical Description
xii, 296 pp.

Description
Examines CT within the social and political life of the later fourteenth century. Chaucer had an unusually assimilative, syncretic, and integrative imagination, but he lived at a time of disintegrating social and religious forms and values. He was not a poet who chose to "rise above" such circumstances; rather, he wrote words that articulate and analyze, sometimes in coded form, the specific problems he and his society faced.
His tendency was not to offer easy solutions but to provoke,air, and sustain debate, often by adopting the point of view of a Christian radical. Specific chapters discuss the Wife of Bath, the Franklin, the Pardoner, the Merchant, and the Knight.

Contributor
Butcher, Andrew.

Chaucer Subjects
Canterbury Tales--General.
Wife of Bath and Her Tale.
Franklin and His Tale.
Pardoner and His Tale.
Merchant and His Tale.
Knight and His Tale.
Chaucer's Life.