Chaucer Writes the Canterbury Tales in Post-Plague England
Poet involved
What happened
Geoffrey Chaucer began the Canterbury Tales around 1387 and worked on them until his death in 1400, leaving them unfinished. Written in Middle English vernacular, the Tales emerged in a society still reeling from successive waves of plague that had killed a third or more of England's population and fundamentally altered its social structure. The collection features pilgrims from across the social spectrum, many of whose livelihoods and worldviews had been shaped by the demographic catastrophe of the preceding decades.
Literary impact
The Black Death created the social and linguistic conditions for Chaucer's vernacular triumph: the death of so many Latin-literate clergy opened space for English as a literary language, and the upheaval of social hierarchies gave Chaucer the material for his democratic cast of pilgrims. Parasitic insects, via the plague they transmitted, were thus instrumental in giving English literature one of its foundational texts. The post-plague world's darkened view of human mortality pervades the Tales from the Knight's philosophical stoicism to the Pardoner's sermon on death.
Source: Wikipedia
