Comparing Knight's Code And The Un-Courtly Love

Words: 1449
Pages: 6

The Un-Knight’s Code and The Un-Courtly Love The three Canterbury Tales have different ways of showing chivalry, courtly love, and the portrayal of women in the stories, mostly in a negative way. Chaucer shows in The Wife of Bath’s and the Miller’s tale that men don’t follow the Knight’s Code and the men and women don’t follow Courtly Love. He’s breaking those stereotypes of the knights and how they act and how women and others break the rules of Courtly Love. The Knight's Tale on the other hand, has more positives than negatives and closely follows the rules of both. But the other two tales outweigh the positive with the negative. The Knight’s Code of Chivalry is the medieval knightly system with its religious, moral, and social code. Examples of the rules are live to serve the king and country, live for freedom, justice, and all that is good, never …show more content…
This breaks the rule that you must respect women and those who have passed on in a war. For Courtly Love in the stories, “The Wife of Bath’s Tale” shows the knight marrying an elderly woman after finding out what women really want, but the knight is not very comfortable with her because of her appearance and age. In the rules of Courtly Love, it states that you must be loyal to whoever you are married to, and the knight breaks that rule by displaying negative feelings to his newly wed wife. In “The Miller’s Tale”, Nicholas is having an affair with Alison and Absolon having feelings for her as well. Both are trying to win her heart, but it ends up poorly since John finds out what is going on with the three. This means that John, Nicholas, and Absolon love Alison. This breaks the rule that two people can’t love one person and again it breaks the rule that you must be loyal to whoever you