Sophie Gee

And, you know, what's so brilliant about reading the Canterbury Tales as a whole and what's so exciting about this period historically is that all these converging and conflicting and

clashing forces of politics and religion and culture and nationalism, all of it gets kind of compressed into this incredible cycle of poems.

And I think that's what makes The Canterbury Tales just, you know, truly, truly, truly great.

Our pandemic.

Yes, exactly.

Yeah, it's under a Tuscan sun.

Totally.

Love that.

So we kind of get into it.

And the first pilgrim who's described in the prologue is also the pilgrim who will first tell a tale, the guy who wins the drawing of straws.

And that's the knight, the knichter.

I'm just going to read a little bit of the description of the knight and then talk about what makes it interesting from a kind of historical point of view.

So here's what Chaucer says.

So just to pause on that.

He's worthy.

He loves chivalry.

And Chaucer's not just using the word love in a kind of throwaway sense, in the way that we love things on Facebook.

He's saying that this is a man whose primary attachment is to chivalry.

And in other words, to this courtly code of fighting and championing the causes that you really believe in and preserving the power of the aristocracy and being Christian and so on.

And he sort of explains what chivalry is, troth and honor, freedom and courtesia.