Pagans, Tartars, Moslems, and Jews in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales

Brenda Deen Schildgen takes a new path in Chaucer studies by examining the Canterbury Tales set outside a Christian-dominated world--tales that pit Christian teleological ethics & history against the imagined beliefs & practices of Moslems, Jews, pagans, & Chaucer's contemporaries, the Tartars. Schildgen contends that these tales--for example, the Knight's, Squire's, & Wife of Bath's--deliberate on the grand rifts between the Christian or pagan past & Chaucer's present & between other cultural worlds & the Latin Christian world. They offer philosophical views about what constitutes "wisdom" & "lawe" while exploring alternative moral attitudes to the Christian mainstream of Chaucer's time. She argues that their presence in the Canterbury Tales testifies to Chaucer's literary secularism & reveals his expansive narrative interest in the intellectual & cultural worlds outside Christianity. Making impressive use of medieval intellectual history, Schildgen shows that Chaucer framed his tales with the diverse philosophies, religions, & ethics that coexisted with Christian ideology in the late Middle Ages, a framework that emerges as political & not metaphysical, putting these beliefs deliberatively in the context of literary discourse, where their validity can be accepted or dismissed and, most important, debated.Brenda Deen Schildgen is the author of 'Pagans, Tartars, Moslems, and Jews in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales', published 2001 under ISBN 9780813021072 and ISBN 0813021073.