Chaucer: the Canterbury Tales: The Man of Law's Tale

Ok everyone, this reading is QUITE LONG (I"m sorry!) so I'm going to give it as the only reading this week. If the topic is cool enough, we can read the other two readings for next week and continue discussing the issues.

Main Theme Your Looking For:

How does the idea of "the foreign" give us an idea of who the creators of the media (i.e., Chaucer in this case) are by demarcating the boundaries around what is "normal" (familiar, universal) in the tale and what is "strange" (foreign, odd).

- this theme can be difficult to find in this reading due to the fact that it's from the Middle Ages, and we're having to try to separate what they would view as familiar from what they would view as odd. However, if you look closely, I think it's interesting how much you can see in the characterization, environments, and ethics of the players in the tale that give us a window into what traits were "familiar" and what traits were "foreign" (especially if you look at what adjectives are used to describe things, and also look at what is thought to be 'worth mentioning,' i.e., it wasn't a foregone conclusion, so it needed to be written about).


Here is the link to a great web page that gives a side-by-side translation of the tale in the original Middle English and Modern English (this is my preference for reading, as the reading is long, and you're not expected to understand Middle English for this class!)

Please continue Pressing "Next" until you get to the end of the Man of Law's tale, as there are a lot of pages (1163 LINES) to get through before you're done!
http://www.librarius.com/canttran/manlawtr/manlawtale134-147.htm