This week, I was tasked with reading the General Prologue and The Knight Tale from the Canterbury Tales by Geoffery Chuacer, as well as On the Incarnation from Bruce Foltz’s Medieval Philosophy. In this blog, I want to talk about the natural part of rebirth and the universally spiritual aspects of it.
Whan that Aprill with his shoures soote
The droghte of March hath perced to the roote,
And bathed every veyne in swich licour
Of which vertu engendred is the flour;
Whan Zephirus eek with his sweete breeth
Inspired hath in every holt and heeth
The tendre croppes, and the yonge sonne
Hath in the Ram his halve cours yronne,
And smale fowles maken melodye,
That slepen al the nyght with open ye
(So priketh hem nature in hir corages),
Thanne longen folk to goon on pilgrimages.
(General Prologue, 1–12)
This is the beginning portion of the General Prologue. The imagery in this opening passage is of spring’s renewal and rebirth. April’s sweet showers have penetrated the dry earth of March, hydrating the roots, which in turn coax flowers out of the ground. Additionally, Zephyr, the warm, gentle west wind, has breathed life into the fields; and the birds chirp merrily. The verbs used to describe Nature’s actions—piercing (line 2), engendering (line 4), inspiring (line 5), and pricking (line 11)—conjure up images of conception. The setting is incredibly integral to the Christian tradition of writing. The landscape in this passage also clearly situated the text in England. This is not a classical landscape, nor is it an entirely fictionalized space. Chaucer’s landscape is also accessible to all types of people, but especially those who inhabit the countryside, since Chaucer speaks of budding flowers, growing crops, and singing birds. His talk of the natural world is an integral part of his story, as this entire text is about the spiritual journey of certain individuals. But he also compares how natural-like both the landscape is and the concept of rebirth and resurrection. This leads to the discussion of Christ himself. In Medieval Philosophy, the text writes, “You must know, moreover, that the corruption which had set in was not external to the body but established within it. The need, therefore, was that life should cleave to it in corruption’s place, so that, just as death was brought into being in the body, life also might be engendered in it. If death had been exterior to the body, life might fittingly have been the same. But if death was within the body, woven into its very substance and dominating it as though completely one with it, the need was for Life to be woven into it instead, so that the body by thus enduing itself with life might cast off corruption …” (Foltz 72). This was written in the part that discusses the resurrection of Jesus Christ. In it, the author writes how natural and spiritual the process was, and how the universal attributes of human life, such as death, are mixed with the realistic aspects. In Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales begins bringing the spiritual and nature world together through the facilitation of human beings seeking a pilgrimage, a deeply religious journey meant to further the connection between God and ordinary soul-searching individuals. By laying out the landscape in ways that mimics the concepts of rebirth and highlighting the acts of pilgrimage, the author is essentially establishing that there is a concrete relationship between nature and spirituality.
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