From Marie de France to Geoffrey Chaucer

Automatically there are some major difference from the lai's we have read to the story that Chaucer is telling. There is a complete and utter physical difference, prose to novel like writing, and the topics are very different off the bat. Chaucer starts out his story with very deep interest and conversations about death. Something that is inherently interesting to humans because no living thing can escape it, but Marie de France did not really use any other large themes other than the medieval romance characteristics and courtly love. Chaucer's work, "The Clerk's Tale", can be seen as much more deep and theme riddled than Marie de France's works. Religion is also a very large theme very clearly seen in Chaucer's work when in Marie's works if there was any spirituality involved it was quite hidden and you had to pick it out. Chaucer's work was, in the end, a large and expansive story to tell a religious end point.

This sort of marriage has not been seen in this class before. The whole idea of "marriage testing" has never been brought up before. All of the husbands in Marie de France were abusive...but Chaucer is just really rough. The actions of pretending to kill your children and take them away from their mother, just to see if your wife is loyal, is the worst thing we've read so far. Nothing about physical abuse, or even the four knights being killed and castrated, can be worse than this. It makes sense that his loving people would turn on him and he would get a taste of karma for once. He tests her literally to the point of leaving her. He leaves her...to prove that she is a good wife and that he still wants her. The fact that Griselda was actually willing to stay with him is beyond anything I've ever read. This takes the "ideal wife" characteristics to a severe extreme.