Religious Symbolism In The Middle Ages

5 Pages 1239 Words

Literature can influence people’s lives, tell a story, and teach a history lesson all at once. The time in which an author lives, the people he surrounds himself with, and his or her upbringing, all affect their personal style of writing. Authors do not simply grab ideas out of thin air or from the sky. Author’s stories come from their experiences and from their elder’s experiences-stories that were retold and past on to them. Authors of the middle ages were one of the first to put story to paper. Popular topics for the first early works were the current topics of the day, whether it was a war, peacetime, or a time of transition. Religion ruled the land and people, in the early centuries. In reading the literature from these times, it is highly evident that religion played a major influence in these early works. Almost all of the stories/poems in class so far has contained some kind of religious reference. Two stories that have strong evidence of the role and impact of religion in society is shown in the epic poem Beowulf of the eighth century and Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales of the fourteenth century.
Geoffrey Chaucer lived in one of the darkest ages in history. Due to poor medical conditions, the plague would kill thousands of people at a time. When sickness was spreading rapidly, many people turned to the church for help and looked to God for answers. Geoffrey Chaucer, was born between the years 1340 and 1344. He wrote The Canterbury Tales in the late fourteenth century in England. Religion dominated this time period in history; so therefore, it played a major role in literary work of the time. The Canterbury Tale's storyline is based on a very religious practice, a pilgrimage. Chaucer uses a narrator to tell the tale. The narrator of the tales starts out by saying that he is "Bifel that in that seson on a day, In Southwerk at the Tabard as I lay, Redy to wenden on my pilgrimage To Canterbury with ful devout...