foreign [Music] welcome back to the book club I'm Michael Knowles and this month we will be reading the most vulgar body downright often disgusting book I've ever read the Canterbury Tales by Jeffrey Chaucer the most popular work of English literature ever we will be doing that with my dear friend Catherine illingworth Catherine last time you were here we were reading Dante together so that's right very similar time period a little bit earlier but similar time period to Chaucer that's right Dante we were discussing the most elevated beautiful images that one can possibly imagine so much so that as I read the final three contos Paradiso I was crying at my desk that's right that was not my experience of the Canterbury Tales I was crying sometimes for different reasons in laughter and how body this book is can you maybe give a brief summary of this story I can try after that introduction I so this is the story of a group of people who have gathered together completely by chance because they all want to go on a pilgrimage from the city of Southwick outside of London to Canterbury and they are staying at an inn together and as they realize that they're all going to be making this journey together the host who's the owner of the Inn invites everybody to help pass the time while they're traveling by telling a story so he says everyone tell two stories on the way there two stories on the way back and we'll see who can tell the best story and and whoever tells the best they win a dinner yes which is he's being a shrewd businessman because he says then you'll all come back here and dine here again and I'll cover the check for one of you so he's jumping up future business for himself but that's what's at stake and so the Canterbury Tales is the collection of some of those stories Chaucer didn't get around to writing all of them but the ones he did write that's what they're doing and because this is written in the 14th century it's not written in Modern English I have here in my hand a translation from Middle English into new English I I do have the original though here just to give you a sense and I'm gonna butcher not only am I going to butcher the modern lab I'm going to butcher the middle English too but this is what it what it sounds like okay with his sure is person to the road and bear that every vein in swish liqueur of which virtue engendered is the floor you get the point I do you did that you have to have a lot of fun with Middle English and I don't think anyone has had more fun reading a lot about language than what I lacked in Precision I feel I made up for an enthusiasm it's the feel that you communicated impeccably so it's written now in the 14th century this is post Dante now there's another figure that follows Dante who's a big admirer of Dante's and who actually gives the Divine Comedy it's titled Divine and that is boccacho yes and bokacho I had never read the Canterbury Tales before this episode okay I I admit with shame but I had read the de Cameron which as I read this I thought wait a second this reminds me of an Italian story that has pretty much the same framework exactly that's a great way to talk about the way the Canterbury Tales is set up and it's framed so um yeah so Dante the fictional narrative of the Divine Comedy takes place in the year 1300 Dante dies in 1321 and then boccacho is the one of the first Scholars of Dante who sort of interprets and disseminates comments on Dante and writes and you know bookacho's main work that the Cameron is a group of people who people are dying right and left of the plague in the city and so it's this sort of group of young Aristocrats who think we have to get out of here and as we are sort of seeking Refuge from this horrible life-threatening disease we're going to tell stories to each other to pass the time and that is very similar people entertaining each other you know and even Beyond in addition to this Frame narrative Chaucer also actually just flat out rewrites some of the stories that bocacho includes in the de Cameron so why is the work considered so great because as as we're describing it and and joking but I think rightly joking about it there's a lot of body jokes some some of the stories have some profundity to them but some are just kind of wacky and silly and farcical and so why is it considered so great and why is it the most popular work of English literature that's a a great question and I think that we have an Impulse as readers to and this goes back for centuries if not Millennia to really value tragedy as the worthy form the word the way of treating serious topics you know even like the Shakespearean tragedies are the ones that are like the the serious works and the funny ones are silly and I think that um Chaucer in this work like many other medieval writers and even going back to Antiquity want to resist that impulse that we all have a little bit that you can actually contain an extraordinary amount of Truth in comedy and you can treat things of extreme seriousness and solemnity with jokes and there are you know that pops up in different ways in across different cultures in literature and in different Traditions but there's just something about if you think about British humor and about the the British bearing you know there's a it's it's distinct you know and and I think that that is one of the great legacies that Chaucer sort of imprinted on the literary tradition in the UK is that you can treat very serious important things with jokes and often the most important points he has to make in the tales he tells are encapsulated within the jokes right and certain Tales will be much more serious right and and you you realize when he's giving these serious tales that this man is really capable of so many different voices all of these sound like different people because different people are telling them yes and he's extremely learned yes yes and he wants you to know that he is making no mistake that he has read everything he is he's read everything about everything yes and is is extremely capable across multiple languages Classical Languages other contemporary languages and we should talk a little bit about Chaucer's life because because it's it's extraordinary both in his life itself and how much we know about it we have almost 500 records of Chaucer's life and we have maybe a handful of Shakespeare's I mean we know significantly more about Chaucer than we do about almost any other writer of his time and most of the major medieval Poets of his age we don't even have names for them you know they're these Anonymous writers of morality plays and you know different works of literature that just aren't attributed to anybody and that is the case with Chaucer because he is he was the son of a wine merchant who worked in sort of the import export business but then made his way from that Merchant class into the aristocracy and was actually a courtier and so ran in those circles but held all of these positions throughout his life that where he was managing Estates for the court essentially and so because he was working in all of these official government capacities that we just have records of almost everything he did at least in a professional basis so that shows us that you know we know that he encountered all kinds of people if he's managing a state that means he's working with you know workmen and attorneys and the field laborers and then obviously encountering a lot of religious Personnel of his time and can really sense because he sort of climbed from a lower station to a higher one that everybody else who's also trying to make that turn and he knows what the aristocracy values about itself and the importance that they feel they have for society I mean he just he has seen it all and that is what enables him to write about this astonishing and I would say almost unparalleled diversity of characters all right so let's get into this diversity of characters and these these stories I suppose we should begin with the prologue yes great idea so the prologue is how we it sets up the stage for us and tells us you know what we know about our host Mr Harry Bailey who's one of the few characters who really has a name and we know about the pilgrimage Journey that they're all taking and we also get little portraits of every character that's included and he includes the the funniest details so on on one hand he does maybe what anybody would do in that position where he says this person holds this job and therefore they have these qualities so there's one there's a knight and all of his qualities are nightly but then that sort of perfect packaging starts to devolve a little bit and you think like all right this person of dubious character speaks with a lisp and maybe is wearing something they shouldn't be wearing and has this relative or this life experience so he's bringing in a he's wanting to paint these people as individual human beings you know beyond they're just portraying their station in life and and that gets more and more complex as he goes along so you mentioned the night yes the night is is the first one up yes and he tells the Knight's Tale yes the Knight's Tale is a great place to begin because it he resists maybe the introduction you gave of the Canterbury Tales when I started to read the Knight's Tale I thought oh this is very nice yes what a nice book for nice people to learn how to be good citizens and sort of live by a structured code that will make Society better this is very uplifting because the the story is about these these two poor guys that get conquered by Theseus yes who who runs Athens and Theseus throws them into prison and it's palaman and our site is that how you pronounce it ourselves more exotic so should I put this well maybe I'll leave the Middle English so you've got these two guys palaman and RCT and they look out the window of the jail cells and they see Emily beautiful Emily and they fall madly in love with her just by the very sight of her and they have no hope of ever being with her because they're locked up in jail forever but they can they can look on her and then the get sprung from the Clank and that is where things start to go awry yes right and so now all of a sudden you have two dear friends who both are not only loyal to each other but are both very committed to the chivalric code and that is we all kind of have a sense about what chivalry is you know it's when we usually speak about it in terms of you know opening a door for a lady or being respectful of your elders those kinds of chivalric gestures but it also in medieval literature ties in with with a much wider set of expectations and rules that govern Behavior it means you should be brave you should always be on a quest you should be loyal to your lord and then it's also very much entangled with the sort of courtly love tradition that had been popular in medieval literature now for a couple hundred years before Chaucer is writing about it but um it's very much sort of pivots around longing but longing for without satisfaction ever truly being realized I mean Dante we spoke last time is just in a state of longing for this entire very very long poem you know and it's the degree to which he is sort of satisfied at the end is is complicated and when you have these two nights in the Knight's Tale that are experiencing this you know they see this beautiful woman and she's picking flowers which is something that always seems to happen in medieval literature it's like men like can't deal with like the hotness of a woman picking flowers I feel seen yeah I feel understood yeah and um when they when they suddenly have like the barrier to their you know being able to pursue Emily is suddenly removed then it creates conflict of wow how do these structures that govern Our Lives the chivalric code how are we going to maintain our integrity and our devotion to that while also going after this object of our desire which is kind of what we as Knights are engineered to do and when the first of the two men to be sprung is RCT and he's sprung from the Clank you think he should be happy but he's not happy right because the deal that he struck was you got to get out of Athens as long as you get out of Athens I'm not going to kill you right but his love is in Athens so he's he goes away but then he does the only thing he cares about he doesn't get so he's miserable and then palamon is stuck in the Clank but at least he gets to look out for a little bit every day and see his love so is he better off is RCT better off but then Parliament sneaks out of jail yes by drugging his Jailer yes and so we have a something that also shows up a lot in medieval literature which is a disguise you know and so then his he finds a way to be near Emily by disguising himself as a sort of member of her household and so he can be near to her but they can't keep this up for long they can't keep it up for long they meet in a field and then that field turns into the field of battle yes and Theseus sort of sets it up and he says okay guys I could kill you right now because you you both broke the deal right yes but but I'm going to let you hash it out and so they amass armies yeah basically right and Theseus also Builds an arena yeah for this so we have this sort of physical space of the tower that they've been locked in and now there's this new confined to this new physical space of the Arena that's been constructed for this so it's it's this tale is really wanting is to see that there we have containers for what happens in society we have rules that govern our Behavior we have buildings that you know provide spaces for our conflicts we have we know how to handle things right in this world and in that conflict someone someone dies yes and but first we have a moment of prayer we have three different prayers that go to three different deities we have one night that prays to uh for victory one that pays for sort of satisfaction and love and then sweet Emily who is not really getting a lot of agency here she's praying to Diana and she says oh I would love to maintain my virginity because this is not great for me I don't know these people but if I do have to marry at least let it be for love and so then you know this big conflict ensues and then at one point we you know there's the war even breaks out in heaven and the gods are all in on it and then you have sort of experienced Saturn who has seen these things before and is not squeamish about getting involved in Conflict he sort of opens the heavens and and brings a conclusion to this which is basically we have one who is wounded and then a Victor but then that Victor suddenly there's an earthquake so he then Falls from his horse and then he's actually the one who ends up dying and so he's able to give permission to his friend to go and marry Emily so you have everybody's prayers have kind of been answered where he gets to we have a Victor in love a Victor in war and yet they both are failures in those counterparts as well and then Emily also ends up with somebody who actually really does love her and so it's kind of uh maybe things are satisfied but it's also just very tragic and and so it's not the traditional sort of happy ending that we would expect normally from a romance because it's really a lot of death though it is somewhat funny at least I found it funny when you get to the end Palomar is wounded and we know we know that palamon is going to win that's sort of preordained but it looks like he's wounded and then there's arasite trotting around on his horse taking a Victory lap and then he just falls off and right on top of his head and he's oh no he's about to die yeah and that is something that is really jarring when we read medieval texts especially this genre because all of a sudden there's like there's this Wheel of Fortune that is constantly turning and that shows up in tale after tail and Chaucer that the plot points are not motivated by rational progressions of events you know the way it's like if you compare the way that stories are told in like when the novel emerges as a literary format in you know several centuries later that really reaches its peak in like the sort of Victorian era and slightly before that you know you have you really are trying to understand what the effects of our actions are and how things churn and move forward in rational ways that is not a priority yet in literature and so you can have things like wow there's all of this build up to who's going to win but then there's an earthquake and The Wheel of Fortune flips and then then here's the outcome wow who knew you know and so it makes everything feel a little bit absurd and so as the reader you think like you feel maybe even a little bit tricked like I was invested in how these actions were going to lead to consequences but we don't often get that satisfaction in the romance genre and still this this symbol which is a really central theme throughout the whole book this is The Wheel of Fortune yes I think does describe life and in a pretty accurate way I sometimes think these days people are always citing statistics and data and I think I don't think those are real I believe in the goddess Fortuna I think that actually she will allow me to understand the world better than this idea that everything is perfectly rational and just constantly progresses as you predict that it will that's you know what's the old Yiddish line got locked there's a lot of strange Accents in this episode but it means I'm so glad you're here who would translate for me if what that means is man plans and God laughs right and that's that's what happens and so we we arrive at the end and it's a nice pretty tale beautiful maybe even right and then we have The Miller's Tale which is not pretty I know you're very eager to get to this I am because we're about to maybe fall into a bit of a crevasse here we are because what's strange about the Miller's tale told by the Miller the guy who just grounds up the grain yes is that it is a kind of a retelling yeah the Knight's Tale yes it's about a woman who is beloved of two men yes and she's actually married to another guy and so the whole story is about cuckoldry yes the word cuckoldry which in modern days has become a more popular slur against one's political opponents but it's but it's one of the oldest slurs in the English language the Italians use it all the time but it's all about cuckoldry which is you know the the poor husband his wife is stepping out on him right and in the case of the Miller's tale this woman Allison wants to sleep with her young lover Nicholas but her husband John he's he's around he's kind of a jealous guy and so they got to figure out exactly the right time to do it and then there's this other clerk over at the church Absalom and and he also wants Allison and Allison she doesn't like Absalom out of sight out of mind is the point that that trosser makes and this young guy Nicholas he's living with them actually sort of renting a room from them and so how do they arrange to have their escapade there is it's all trickery and deceit that depends on these characters being the most gullible people who have ever lived I mean it is we talked we talked about in the Knight's Tale about how there is a sort of standard of perfection you know that this is nothing like real life because this is not how people actually behave and this is not what governs you know human decisions but things are just as unbelievable and outrageous in The Miller's tale this is a really important point because I think there's an inclination in our Modern Age to say anything that looks up to an ideal that's absurd right be real be real but anything that is base and cynical and scatological we say that's what life really is like but yes no it isn't no it isn't exactly yes is there some Middle Ground perhaps here yes sometimes it's one and sometimes it's the other because it's so tempting going is the way that Chaucer puts these three Tales you know in succession we have or that we have the prologue setting things up then the Knight's Tale which is like things are we are Athens things are structured you know and then after that you have this you know well I'll tell you a tale about two guys interested in the same gal you know and it's and the Miller also is it's like we learn he is so drunk he cannot sit on his horse and he's described as this big brawny guy who could tear a door off his hinges if he wanted to you know and so he's as much of a caricature as the night is um but that doesn't but so he's he comes in with this premise of saying like all right I'm gonna be real with you and he even says like I can't handle this like Knight's Tale stuff this is too much for me and so it's what as you said it's tempting us to think like all right now we're gonna get the real what is it really like when two men are in love with the same woman but then it's not like well I'll tell you what it's like when two men are in love with the same woman so Nicholas and Allison figure out how to have their little Rendezvous they take care of John basically by telling him that Nicholas says I've had this vision from God has told me there's going to be another flood you've got to go get some provisions and we're gonna have little boats and you gotta basically get out of my way because in a few days it's all gonna end but you me and your wife we're gonna we're gonna make it yes but you gotta go away so I can sleep with your wife and so they take care of the Carpenter and and Nicholas and Allison are having fun and Absalom comes up and he says please I want a kiss give me a kiss he goes go away I don't want to talk to you there's no please give me a kiss and so she says okay fine come on over here you can get a kiss Absalom started wiping his mouth dry dark was the nightest pitch as black as coal and at the window out she put her hole and Absalom so Fortune framed the farce put up his mouth and kissed her naked ass most savoriously before he knew of this and back he started something was amiss he knew quite well a woman has no beard yet something roughened hairy had appeared what have I done he said can that be you tihi she cried and clapped the window too and then not not to be outdone he decided she says I'm sorry I didn't mean to do that you can come back you can get a kiss now and so Nicholas decides he's gonna have fun too and so he's the lover and he's going to stick his derriere out there and um so Absalon was ready he's all set to make a launch speak pretty bird I know not where thou art this Nicholas at once let fly a fart as loud as if it were a Thunderclap he was near blinded by the blast poor chap indeed poor chap that is that is the most disgusting thing I've ever said in public certainly on camera but I I do feel it is necessary to understand just how gross this story gets yes yes I think that that that is there is a kind of anatomical specificity that we are not making he's implying nothing he's leaving nothing to the imagination here he's going to tell us exactly which body parts we're dealing with and and tells us in the you know in the beginning to this like you may want to skip this to save your dignity which you chose not to do here today yes I chose for the benefit of your viewership for the benefits yes I don't know speaking of the sort of funny way that human beings work you then get to one of the most famous tales in in the Canterbury Tales which is The Wife of Bath's story yes yes and she is oh probably the most famous I would say along with maybe the partner the most famous character that Chaucer invents and she becomes has sort of a takes on a personality as like this fictional character that people all recognize in Chaucer's time like the people love the wife of Beth and so what we learn about her her portrait is that she's been married five times she's been with many people even in an outside of that she works in the sort of textile trade which is the most lucrative business to be in in this time period but she also the fact that she's had five husbands means that she's gotten very good at marrying old guys and then inheriting their wealth and so she's created quite a position for herself in society in spite of the fact that she is breaking every rule that we especially when we look back at the Middle Ages think mattered then right you know and so because she is not sorry of our apologetic about anything she's a nasty woman yes she never heard anyone say that about the wife of that but sure yes she is she is is who she is without any shame at all and people love her for it you know which is is funny because she is really breaking all of these conventions and yet her something about her is just so appealing you know their confidence with it you know and then the tale that she tells us you know because we're learning all the things we've talked about so far marriage is is a pretty big topic you know because it's again one of those things that gives structure to society it relates to love and longing which is related to the chivalric motivation and and it's a confounding issue I mean specifically for her she talks about all her husbands and she says oh this really nice guy yeah took him for all he was worth and this this other wonderful kind gentleman oh yeah you know I was a devil to him I just ruined his life and you know the only one I really liked was the guy who just viciously beat me yes right yes exactly and it's a so she's been through a lot and put other people through a lot you know in this sort of as this marriage convention has sort of ruled her the happenings of her life so when we get to hear her tale I mean this is something that so interesting about reading the Canterbury Tales we could spend our whole time today talking about the way that this is structured because you're constantly going back from portrait of the Storyteller to the story that they tell and you know those are equal fictions and and so you're always the voice is always changing you know when we read Dante you have one person who's conversing with hundreds of people as he's on a linear trajectory to go one place here that the mic is being passed constantly and they even steal it from each other like the characters are interacting and so it's that's why the character fairy tales kind of resists a what is Chaucer saying yeah you know it's really hard to get there but one of the things that the wife of bath is saying because her tail is basically this just to summarize it the story of a knight who rapes a young Maiden which is a cry I'm punishable by death and then the queen who is supposed to sentence him says all right I will give you an opportunity to survive and you have exactly one year to tell me what women want so then he goes around looking for this answer and finally there's this kind of old ugly hag of a woman who in the 11th Hour can tell his she says I can tell you the answer that'll save your life but you're gonna owe me something and he's like okay great whatever you want yeah he's on the line exactly so she says that what women want is sovereignty over their husbands so he says great tells the queen she's like you got it and then he so he's free and then he then has to marry the old hag and so she then tells him that he she sort of gives him a choice because it's their wedding night and he takes off her veil she's this like old terrible creature that he does not want to be married to and he goes okay I will transform myself to be young and beautiful forever but I will cheat on you or I can be faithful to you but I'm gonna look like this and so he turns to her and he says well why don't you choose and she just he just answered that exactly right because what he has done is given her sovereignty over him and so then to sort of reward him for this correct answer this gift of sovereignty she says you get both I'll be beautiful forever and I will be faithful to you and so the old hag who then becomes this hot young lady yes and the queen are they right is that what women want I can't answer I don't know but you're you're a woman I would say there's something floating under the surface here which is that what we're trying to get is possibly a picture of mutual submission because that is what at the end and that's what really is a a great successful partnership is two people who are not so much like alternating who gets to rule over who in the in which moment but two people who have enough mutual respect that they can actually honor one another's wishes and come to productive Solutions and maybe the wife of path is touching on that a little bit at the end of her story that you know he grants her her will and then he turns around and gives him what he wants and so there's weirdly I mean because this man also is a rapist yeah and which is that we I mean you forget that if you read the story yes and it's the the whole context of this story is is horrifying and so he is he being transformed into suddenly a virtuous person who has all of this respect for women you know is that what is happening here it seems to be he does undergo this transformation you know and sort of at the in you know within being molded by this woman who has kind of magical powers right and so the most magical power of all in the entire book is the power of speech right yeah this is what comes when you just you're you're really dazzled when when you you watch Chaucer's amazing facility with speech he can speak as anybody about anything in any tone or register it's it's amazing and by the end of the book or well it's unfinished so the end of what we've got of the book right you get a story about speech that's right yes this is and this is not a popular tale from within this text I'm glad we have the chance to give it a little Spotlight today it's called The Nuns priest's tale and this the nuns priest is somebody that is referenced as being part of the party that's accompanying this nun in the general prologue but unlike most of the speakers he doesn't have a really distinct portrait so we don't know a lot about who's telling us this story but he launches Chaucer takes us launching into this sort of a like a medieval has called them beasts it's like an animal Fable a beast Fable have you ever heard of like a medieval bestiary I think that the people in the Middle Ages really looked to animals both in artwork and you've probably seen pictures of medieval marginalia of like silly rabbits and things like that animals add a sort of an underpinning of immutable nature we learn and that I mean that in sort of a natural law sense because animal nature it seems to be a lot more static than human nature you know that like kinds of people don't always behave as their kind but kinds of animals generally do right animals don't have a rational soul and will so they're they're not constantly evolving and growing and you know a rabbit's a rabbit right exactly and you know if you have that sort of this Aristotelian like hierarchy of the souls you have your vegetable soul and animal soul and an intellectual soul and so this is the sort of it has a will animals have a will but they don't have language essentially so animals provide a sense of stability narrative and um stability of significance I guess that allow us to question whether the things that happen are happening as a consequence of natural law or just of this Wheel of Fortune fate circumstance that we were kind of talking about earlier so this is a story that is um it's a barnyard tale of this rooster named chanticleer and he is kind of wooing his wife who is also one of his sisters because that's how it works if you're in the chicken family yes so there's all these hens but he has this sort of moment of wooing and he's uh sophisticated and educated rooster and so he um is sort of quoting translating things from Latin for her you know as he speaks but he has a couple moments of mistranslation in the beginning where he is so confident in his learning that we don't really pay much attention to it unless you sit there and realize like everything that he's saying is not really from these Original Latin Source texts he's saying that you know women are the best thing that ever happened to men but that's not what his sore sex are saying so he's a little bit unreliable but the big action of this is a fox breaks into the far the farmyard and so there's a moment where trying to clear the rooster finds himself in the mouth of the fox and as the fox is sprinting across this Barnyard all the hens are and all the animals are just scattered everywhere and Chaucer Compares this to the scene at the fall of Troy that there is that this is so dramatic and such a big event and happening that you know it's exactly like the poor women who are know that you know Society is over and the greatest tragedy in all of literature you know and um this is just the hen house just being invaded by a fox yes which is so silly to think about these pens you know being have anything to do with Troy you know until he adds a couple of details that say that you know the woman who actually owns this Farm is this poor Widow so she has no income other than this farm and it's her it's her entire survival depends on them so the fact that her rooster is in the mouth of a fox is actually kind of life-threatening for this woman and so it adds this level of seriousness that's very very off to the side of the scene you know while this silly barnyard scene is unfolding right um but what the the rooster is able to save himself by tricking the fox into speaking and as he tricks him into speaking he opens his mouth to talk and that's what makes the he drops the rooster to the ground and the rooster can then and in fact the fox only was able to get the rooster by tricking the rooster into speaking yes by saying oh chanticleer please sing out one of those beautiful song yeah me I used to love it when your dad was saying so please just sing out this beautiful song and as the rooster goes to sing he stretches at his neck and the fox can Chomp down on the neck drag him off to the woods and so you see the same tool here and the rooster goes up in a tree yes right and then the fox what Does the Fox Say the fox says hey sorry about that I don't know what came over me I'm not usually like this you want to come down maybe and the end of the rooster says to um invoke a beautiful line from George W bush basically fool me once shame on you fully twice um um the point is you're not gonna fool me again yeah it's a loose translation yes yes that's a perfect description of this response um so what we have really unfolding here is that rhetoric is where all the power lies you know it's when people traditionally think about speech there's rhetoric sort of gets thrown into this like I don't know about rhetoric rhetoric is how you manipulate and how you lie and you can make people do things they don't want to do and create false impressions of reality if you're a great rhetorician it kind of means you're up to mischief and a trickster but then there's these other kinds of speech that are performative like the the most famous example I guess would be like a wedding vow that when you say you know do you take this woman you know it's the the I do is actually like enact the sacrament of marriage and so that speech can actually work in that way but I think that what um Scholars that I admire who work on this have made the observation that this tail is kind of and the Canterbury Tales as a whole are kind of telling us that all speech is action you know that it is even the rhetoric kind is leading is changing reality it's Ted has consequences and it leads people to you know the rise and fall all the time and so speech is is really what humanity is turning around it's not just idle chattering it's easy to think of these people are just passing the time and playing a game for a dinner but it's right it's not just idle chatter exactly it's actually from the silliest most vulgar tale to the most serious religious tale and there are many tales we didn't have time to get to right they're they're doing something they're taking us on a journey it could be taking us on a pilgrimage right yes exactly and that the pilgrimage is you know so critical to keep in mind because after the introduction they only mentioned pilgrimage one more time in this whole story and but it's there all the time and you have this they're going to see the relics of the martyred Thomas Beckett and Canterbury is so critical because he was martyred in the cathedral you know where his relics are actually enshrined now and so it's that sort of darkness and Holiness and somberness really undergirds this whole thing and so even though we are are making jokes and you know use talking about things that people wouldn't maybe normally talk about on a pilgrimage that this is all part of human life as we strive for those things that are sanctifying that are reliable these things that order Society in in ways that are reliable gives structure there's this prime mover who is allowing us to live in a way that sort of gives structure to Interior life what we think about within ourselves and then give structure to the principles that govern Society and sometimes it's left unfinished it is sometimes The Wheel of Fortune spins such that you don't get to finish and we we can ponder that on our own pilgrimages and with with all of the baudiness and all of the seriousness and all of the Holiness and all of the chicanery and all of the part of human life all of the things that are part of the human comedy absolutely Catherine marvelous is always to have you with us I look forward to the next time you're back oh thank you until then I'm Michael Knowles this is the book club thank you so 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