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

Corruption in the Church and order of magnitude Reflected in The Canterbury Tales In discussing Chaucers collection of stories cal take The Canterbury Tales, an interesting picture or representative of the Medieval Christian Church is presented. However, while throng demanded more utterance in the affairs of government, the church became corrupt -- this corruption also led to a more crooked federation. Nevertheless, there is no such field of study as just church history This is because the church can never be studied in isolation, simply because it has always related to the social, frugal and political context of the day. In history then, there is a deuce 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 make up the church....and those akin people became the personalities that created these tales of a pilgrimmage to Canterbury. The Christianization of Anglo-Saxon England was to take place in a relatively short period of time, but this was not because of the supremacy of the Augustinian effort. Indeed, the early years of this mission had an ambivalence which shows in the number 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 office died. There is certainly no evidence for a large-scale rebirth of the common people to Christianity at this time. Augustine was not the most diplomatic of men, and managed to chafe many people of power and influence in Britain, not to the lowest degree among them the native British churchmen, who had never been particularly eager to save the souls of the Anglo-Saxons who had brought such bitter times to their people. In their isolation, the British Church had maintained elderly ways of celebrated the major festivals of Christianity, and Augustines effort to compel them to confor m to new Roman usage besides angered them. When Augustine died (some time between 604 and 609 AD), then, Christianity had only a precarious gift on Anglo-Saxon England, a hold which was limited largely to a few in the aristocracy. Christianity was to become intemperately established only as a result of Irish efforts, who from centers in Scotland and Northumbria made the common people Christian, and established on a stanch 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.