Sophie Gee

high-ranking court officials, he's including this sort of subtle critique of the way that European Christian states are managing their own self-image in the period and the way that the ideals of chivalry and the kind of code of knighthood have long since come under a kind of compromise.

Yes, I think you're probably right about that.

And the partner's tale, which is the one where the three men go off seeking treasure and the treasure turns out to be death.

I think the homosexual motif is repeated there.

Yeah, he so does that.

And one of the things that the English of the period can do, Middle English, can do, I think, that modern English, I don't think, can quite pull off to the same extent, is that it has this kind of nuance and precision in the particular flavour of the language, the words, that it just carries a lot more kind of heft than it does now.

So this, for example, is a little moment in his description of the prioress.

So the prioress is another of the people that you're describing, Shanti, who...

sort of on the religious payroll of medieval Catholic England.

I mean, we still have prioresses, but they're not a kind of huge deal.

So she'd be the person who would be at the head of a priory.

And his basic point about this woman is that she's kind of, she's a bit of a fake.

She speaks French, but she's been educated in Stratford at the Bow.

She doesn't really speak proper French.

She's never been anywhere near Paris.

She's got kind of nice table manners, but it doesn't really mean that she's got a particularly pious or

virtuous soul.

And this is how he describes her table manners.

So let me just look at a couple of those words.

At meat, well taught was she withal.