Betwixen hem was maad anon the bonde that highte matrimoigne'- Chaucer, Knights Tale- Riverside Edition- Discuss how marriage is presented within Fragment A.
This love halt togidres peples joined with a holy boond, and kyntteth sacrament of marryges of chaste loves: and love enditeth lawest treuth felawes'- Boethus II. M.8 Chaucers Translation.
Marriage as a topic can be seen as contributing to what we perceive to be the unique identity of each tale primarily because it is alluded to, in one way or another, in every tale of fragment A. In this essay I will discuss precisely how marriage is presented inter-textually and contextually within the Fragment. In particular I shall consider what precisely is meant by the notion of a bonde' with regards to matrimoigne', and what might be the ramifications of the way this bonde' may be presented in each individual tale. .
In The Knights Tale Theseus (ostensibly)represents authority but also dominant masculinity - he was lord and gouvenor and in his tyme swich a conqueror' tied to conventions of the literary Chivalric' which I discuss further below, and the philosophy of order, as when he embarks upon his eulogy to the acceptance of ones fate the first moevere of the cause above whan he first made the fair chain of love' as determining ones existence, represented in a philosophical sense by Chaucers own translation of Boethus's Consolation of Philosophy - but certes now schewith wel how fer fro the soothe and how up-so doun is this thing that we seyn, that the betydygne of temporal thingis is cause of the eterne prescience'- Book V Prosa 3 Chaucer's Translation of The Consolation of Phiosophy. As a self consciously literary tale, it is this imposition of pre-destined order- the providential ordering of the universe' according to Helen Cooper in her Oxford Guide To The Canterbury Tales, upon the totality of the narrative itself, where each character resembles a figure in the conventional mode of story and description (e.
