Corruption in the Church and Society Reflected in The Canterbury Tales :: Canterbury Tales Essays

Corruption in the church and Society Reflected in The Canterbury Tales In discussing Chaucers collection of stories called The Canterbury Tales, an inte peace of minding picture or illustration of the Medieval Christian Church is presented. However, while people demanded to a greater extent voice in the affairs of government, the church became corrupt -- this corruption excessively led to a more crooked society. Nevertheless, there is no much(prenominal) thing as just church history This is because the church crumb never be studied in isolation, simply because it has always link to the social, economic and political context of the day. In history then, there is a two way process where the church has an influence on the rest of society and of course, society influences the church. This is naturally because it is the people from a society who sword up the church....and those same people became the personalities that created these tales of a pilgrimmage to Canterbury. The Christ ianization of Anglo-Saxon England was to take power in a relatively short period of time, but this was non because of the success of the Augustinian effort. Indeed, the early years of this mission had an ambivalence which shows in the military issue of people who hedged their bets by practicing both Christian and Pagan rites at the same time, and in the number of people who promptly apostatized when a Christian king died. There is certainly no evidence for a big conversion of the common people to Christianity at this time. Augustine was non the most diplomatic of men, and managed to antagonize many people of power and influence in Britain, not least among them the native British churchmen, who had never been particularly eager to dispense with the souls of the Anglo-Saxons who had brought such bitter times to their people. In their isolation, the British Church had maintained older ways of celebrated the major festivals of Christianity, and Augustines effort to compel them t o aline to modern Roman usage only angered them. When Augustine died (some time amid 604 and 609 AD), then, Christianity had only a precarious hold on Anglo-Saxon England, a hold which was limited largely to a few in the aristocracy. Christianity was to buy the farm firmly established only as a result of Irish efforts, who from centers in Scotland and Northumbria made the common people Christian, and established on a firm basis the English Church. At all levels of society, belief in a god or gods was not a matter of choice, it was a matter of fact.