Canterbury Tales 2
We in the twentieth century would be much more hard-pressed to define evil than would people of either Chaucer's or Dante's time. Medieval Christians would have a source for it -- Satan -- and if could easily devise a series of ecclesiastical checklists to test its presence and its power. In our secular world, evil has come down to something that hurts people for no explicable reason: the bombing of the Federal Building in Oklahoma City, the burning of black churches in the South. We have taken evil out of the hands of Satan, and placed it in the hands of man. In doing so, we have made it less absolute, and in many ways less real. Nonetheless, it must be recognized that in earlier times evil was not only real but palpable. This paper will look at evil as it is portrayed in two different works -- Dante's Divine Comedy, and Chaucer's Canterbury Tales -- and analyze what the nature of evil meant to each of these authors. The Divine Comedy is an epic poem
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Some common words found in the essay are:
Hell Dante, Below Limbus, Oklahoma City, Medieval Christians, Purgatory Paradise, Divine Comedy, Christian Virgil's, Dante Chaucer, Canterbury Tales, Dante Dante, nature evil, hell dante, divine comedy,
Approximate Word count = 1041
Approximate Pages = 4 (250 words per page double spaced)
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