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A Tale of two knights From Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale to Cervantes’ Don Quixote
Many changes occurred during the 500 years • That separated the time of Balian and Saladin shown in the film "Kingdom of Heaven" from the period depicted in "Barry Lyndon“ • From the pivotal 13th century Crusades to the 18th century beginnings of the French Revolution, feudalism declined, gunpowder replaced swords, arrows, and siege engines. European kingdoms consolidated and centralized.
The material significance and power • of armored knights on horseback diminished. At the same time the stories of legendary knights grew more popular and the values and chivalric traditions of courtly culture morphed and evolved in interesting ways.
Geoffrey Chaucer was born circa 1340 • Chaucer was descended from an affluent family who made their money in the London wine trade, He attended the St. Paul’s Cathedral School, where he probably first became acquainted with the influential writing of Virgil and Ovid. In 1357, Chaucer became a public servant to Countess Elizabeth of Ulster, the Duke of Clarence’s wife, and remained a public servant in the court for most of his life.
In 1359, the teenage Chaucer went off to fight • in the Hundred Years’ War in France, and at Rethel he was captured for ransom. Thanks to Chaucer’s royal connections, King Edward III helped pay his ransom. Later he also served as a diplomat to France and Italy. Considered one of the first English writers to write his works in English vernacular, rather than French or Latin, Chaucer died October 25, 1400 of in London, England of unknown causes; he was around 60 years old. He was buried in Westminster Abbey.
The Knight’s Tale is the first story in • Chaucer’s acclaimed work The Canterbury Tales. It is believed Chaucer began to write The Canterbury Tales in 1386 or 1387 when he was sent into retirement by the Duke of Gloucester under King Richard II. He worked on the tales until his death in 1400. The tales are presented as part of a story-telling contest by a group of pilgrims as they travel together on a journey from Southwark to the shrine of Saint Thomas Becket at Canterbury Cathedral
The CanterburyTales Context/influences • 100 Years War • The Black Death • Social order of the time • Initial beginnings of the movement towards the Protestant Reformation • Borrowed stories from around the world. • Dante & Virgil (pilgrim figures in the Divine Comedy) • The Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio – has similar tales of people running from the Black Plague. Also has an apology by Boccaccio much like Chaucer’s Refraction
The Knight is the first pilgrim • described in the General Prologue and he is described in glowing terms. He possesses the qualities that Chaucer felt a Knight should have truth, honor, generousness, and courtesy. The Knight is the noblest of the pilgrims, embodying military prowess, loyalty, honor, generosity, and good manners. The Knight conducts himself in a polite and mild fashion, never saying an unkind word about anyone.
The adventures of Chaucer’s knight • give us a fascinating tour of Europe and the Mediterranean in the 14th century. He is a mute guide through the convoluted politics, brutal wars, and religious zeal of the age. His travels also show us how interconnected the small elite of Europe was at the time, even across distances of thousands of miles. The knight’s far-ranging career took him across Europe, Asia, and Africa, where he participated in all the major actions of the day.
What associations would a 14th-century audience hold • for those knights who campaigned all around Europe and the Mediterranean? • They were a mixed lot to be sure, containing the highest nobility in search of honor to poor knights looking to make their fortune. Some of these latter men could be ruffians, which is why Chaucer took pains to emphasize that his knight was not a mere pirate. His excellent manners make clear that whatever rough-living he endured, he lived up to the highest ideals of his time.
The 14th century was a time of astonishing calamity and change. • The devastation of the Hundred Years’ War spilled over into adjoining countries and upset the social fabric of all Western Europe. Amid all this, the Black Death struck, dealing the continent another blow from which it would struggle to recover. But amidst this upheaval was ferment: the world was changing fast, driven as much by human ingenuity as by natural disaster. Societies and governments were abandoning feudal customs, scholars were reviving ancient learning, and poets and writers were exploring new forms.
The Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote of La Mancha • or just Don Quixote, is a Spanish novel by Miguel de Cervantes. Published in two parts, in 1605 and 1615, Don Quixote is the most influential work of literature from the Spanish Golden Age and the entire Spanish literary canon.
The century from 1550 to 1650 is often called Spain’s siglo de oro, or “golden century,” for the brilliance of its arts and literature. • The dramatist Lope de Vega wrote more than 1,500 plays, including witty comedies and action-packed romances. • Miguel de Cervantes wanted to be a playwright but found his place in history instead by writing Don Quixote, the first modern novel in Europe.
Miguel de Cervantes • Was born in Alcalá de Henares in 1547 - the son of a surgeon who presented himself as a nobleman. In 1571 he fought valiantly at Lepanto, where he was wounded in his left hand by a harquebus shot. The following year he took part in Juan of Austria's campaigns in Navarino, Corfu, and Tunis. Returning to Spain by sea, he fell into the hands of Algerian corsairs. After five years spent as a slave in Algiers, and four unsuccessful escape attempts, he was ransomed by the Trinitarians and returned to his family in Madrid.
In 1585, a few months after his marriage to Catalina de Salazar • Who was twenty-two years younger than he, Cervantes published a pastoral novel, La Galatea, at the same time that some of his plays, now lost except for El trato de argel and El cerco de Numancia, were playing on the stages of Madrid. Two years later he left for Andalusia, which he traversed for ten years, first as a purveyor for the Invincible Armada and later as a tax collector. As a result of money problems with the government, Cervantes was thrown into jail in Seville in 1597; but in 1605 he was in Valladolid, then seat of the government, just when the immediate success of the first part of his Don Quixote, published in Madrid, signaled his return to the literary world.
. In 1607, he settled in Madrd • just after the return there of the monarch Philip III. During the last nine years of his life, he published the Novelas ejemplares (1613), the Viaje del Parnaso (1614), and in 1615, the Ocho comedias y ocho entremeses and the second part of Don Quixote. At the same time, Cervantes continued working on Los trabajos de Persiles y Sigismunda, which he completed three days before his death on April 22, 1616, and which appeared posthumously in January 1617.
Cervantes novel Don Quixote • revolves around the adventures of a noble (hidalgo) from La Mancha named Alonso Quixano who reads so many chivalric romances that he loses his mind and decides to become a knight-errant (caballero andante) to revive chivalry and serve his nation, under the name Don Quixote de la Mancha accompanied by his squire Sancho Panza
Cervantes, himself a soldier, • Was quite familiar with the technology of his time and understood that his character would have a most powerful effect on his cultural milieu by purposely exaggerating the newness of the technologies around him.
Cervantes dramatizes the tension between past and present • by making use of such technologies as windmills, water-powered grain mills, fulling hammers, and firearms, among others. He associates these technologies with modernity and uses the anachronistic Don Quijote as a vehicle for illustrating the impact of technology on human sensibility.
Don Quijote wakes into a world he does not or refuses to recognize • armed with the values of chivalry, seeks to transform it. Either through direct battle or through the attempt to translate machinery into the terms of chivalry, the battered knight demonstrates how prosaic and removed from human values technology can be.
The paradox of Don Quijote • he is an anti-modern hero who is ironically a product of modernity. Not only does he become Don Quijote by reading the books produced by a technological innovation, the printing press, but he also dons armor. carries swords and displays a very modern individualism.
