Chaucer Assignment #2

Here is the second Chaucer assignment. Note that it is now due on or before March 12th.


If you'd rather not download a PDF:
Assignment #2: Translation and Commentary (5% of your grade). Due on OR before Wed March 12th

Select a passage of ten to fourteen lines from Section I of the Canterbury Tales (General Prologue, Knight's, Miller's, Reeve's, or Cook's Tale, and their prologues) or from the Wife of Bath's Prologue and Tale. Translate it, first, from Middle English into Modern English, and then into Modern English, but with no poetic language (no figures of speech, nothing fancy, just a statement of bare meaning). Use the glosses in the Fisher and Allen Canterbury Tales, and feel free to use glosses from other editions: the Kolve and Olson Norton edition, the Riverside Chaucer, or even any other translations. Of course, the translation should be your own work, and any guidance you find in glosses or translations should be just that: guidance, and not a substitute for your own work.

Then, on a separate sheet,
(1) Briefly identify the passage by work, speaker, and context.
(2) Paying close attention to the images, structure, and language of the passage, explain its significance to the themes of the tale in which it appears.
(3) Making specific reference to other tales, explain the significance of the passage to the themes of The Canterbury Tales as you've read them so far.

Be ANALYTICAL: do not merely summarize plot. The analysis should be between 2-3 pages long.

Printing on both sides of the paper is fine.
Staple it yourself, please.