The "Canterbury Tales” and Fourteenth-Century Peasant Unrest.

Author / Editor
Simons, John.

Title
The "Canterbury Tales” and Fourteenth-Century Peasant Unrest.

Published
Literature and History, 2d ser., 1, no. 2 (1990): 4-12.

Description
Shows how close is the "bond between literary culture and the ideology and practice of domination enshrined in judicial controls" in late-medieval England after the Black Death. Summarizes statues of labor, taxation, and responses to the Uprising of 1381, reading MilT and RvT as expressions of "aristocratic contempt" for lower-class pretensions and clerical abuse, with PardT reflecting anxieties about plague.

Chaucer Subjects
Canterbury Tales--General
Miller and His Tale
Reeve and His Tale
Pardoner and His Tale