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Unit 12 Study Guide

Perhaps no two writers best illustrate the contrast between the medieval world view and its Renaissance counterpart than the the late fourteenth-century English author Geoffrey Chaucer and the fifteenth-century Italian political observer, Niccolò Maciavelli. 

A service writer to the British elite, steeped and endeared to French culture, Chaucer wrote to fulfill their patronage.  Just as he moved easily in the circles of the high estate, he also held posts of substantial responsibilities in London society.  Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales (1386) is a collection of tales told by travelers on pilgrimage who agree to fill the lengthy hours with the relation of stories that do much to reveal their personalities as well as the characters they represent in their renditions.  About thirty English travelers, drawn from each of the medieval social arenas--the rulers, the clergy, and the workers (text)--set out for Canterbury, telling their stories in the tavern the night before they depart.  Each character is richly drawn and complex, and Chaucer, one of the travelers himself, takes delight in revealing their very human shortcomings and often pathetic idiosyncracies.

Niccolò Maciavelli (1469 - 1527), an Italian political observer,  was an active participant in civic, social, and military affairs of Florence in Northern Italy.  He traveled with Pope Julius II on an expedition and counseled with the King of France and the Emperor Maximilian (text).  Throughout his career, he found himself in and out of favor, depending on his political affiliations, and even suffered imprisonment and torture for a time.  A playwright and essayist, he is most remembered for The Prince (1513), a piece of "pedagogical literature" (editors) that was intended to curry favor for himself with the ruling Medici family.  It has become, however, one of the most poignant examples of Renaissance realism and political calculation.  In The Prince, Machiavelli analyzes effective leadership and the qualities by which rulers sustain power, even at the expense of high (public) idealism.  That he could write such a treatise suggests the slow emergence of Renaissance tolerance and independence from the centers of religious and aristocratic control that would eventually lead to popular revolution and the rise of democracy.
 

Readings

Read the Introduction to Geoffrey Chaucer and The Canterbury Tales,
pp. 1512 - 1517

Read selections from The Canterbury Tales, pp. 1517 - 1585 Read "Masterpieces of the Renaissance," pp. 1653 - 1663

Read the Introduction to Niccolò Machiavelli and The Prince, pp. 1705 - 1708

Read  The Prince, pp. 1709 - 1722

Study Questions

1) Identify among Chaucer's pilgrims the representatives of the three primary social groups of the Middle Ages: the Rulers, the Clergy, and the Workers.

2) To what extent do Chaucer's characters defy stereotyping?  Identify the various characer traits that suggest a more realistic treatment in Chaucer's development of them.

3) With which social class do Chaucer's sympathies lie?  To what extent might the "Chaucer" of the tales reflect an ironic juxtaposition to the socially and politically positioned author himself?

4) In Machiavelli's The Prince, identify the essential traits necessary for a "prince" (leader) to maintain order and authority over the state.

5) From a contemporary perspective, how should Machiavelli's objective analysis of political power be judged today?  Is it credible?  To what extent might it be read as a responsible "guide book" for national leadership in the world today?

Key Concepts

Medieval Social Classes
Chaucer was a member of the upper middle class, though he was no aristocrat himself.  Nevertheless, as a minister in patronage to various aristocratic families, he was a keen observer of English social manners in a time when the rigid hierarchy, dominated by the church and aristocracy, was still in tact.

The Enlightenment
The period of the European Renaissance is marked by a surge in intellectual life that broke from the restraints of the Catholic Church that had limited for hundreds of years the appropriate arenas of inquiry and investigation.  With the new intellectual initiatives came inevitable criticism of authority and centers of power and a new attitude toward authorities.  Studies of the natural world, undertaken independently of religious sanction, revealed disturbing observations that didn't always square with church doctrines and their implications and assumptions about the universe and mankind's place within it.  The Prince is a product of this new attitude and intellectual climate.

This page was last modified on January 17, 2006,
and is maintained by Dr. Geoffrey A. Grimes.