The Mood Of The Knight's Tale

In the medieval world, Chaucer had a great many encounters with the architecture of the time, which made him uniquely qualified to integrate architecture into his writing, using ekphrasis to treat visual images as text. The main source, on which the Knight's Tale was based, was a long epic poem Teseida written by Giovanni Boccaccio, whose knowledge about the ancient Greek world is unknown, but is presumably that he gained the knowledge through his close friendship with Paolo de Perugia, a medieval collector of ancient myths and tales. Although, Chaucer has used the storyline of Teseida almost without change of Boccacio's work, he made some rather important change in style, tone and structure. The tone and mood of the Knight's Tale are radically different from what we find in proportions of Teseida.

In Teseida, Boccaccio presents a description of the temples and scenes differently. This modification related to the description of temples and scenes done by Chaucer takes the emphasis that Boccaccio focuses more on the religious prayers to the gods than on the visual details in higher prominence. This alteration presents the reader a situation in which architecture and visual detail are privileged over the religious devotion and emotions of the characters. The most interesting aspect of this section is a shift in the narrative voice. Boccaccio’s text depicts the temples as the female personification of prayer views them, and focuses on the heroes' reaction to the images accordingly. In Chaucer's work an all-seeing narrative voice, as the Knight, is moved away from the action of the story, telling most of the Tale. In my paper, I would like especially to focus on and discuss how the Knight’s first person narration of the artistic details in the description of the temples affects the reading of the Tale and its