ENGL 203 Chapter Notes - Chapter 1: Guillaume De Lorris, Middle Ages, Piers Plowman
Document Summary
The second and third estates are given at birth while the rst can be entered. High members of the church were frequently a matter of birth. Men were de ned how they made their living while women were de ned by their sexual status. By the late fourteenth a new middle class was made up of merchants and tradesmen called the mercantile class. A new subdivision of the clergy called intellectuals were men who were trained by the church but did not end up with a career in the church. Chaucer and william langland were both highly conscious of the social divisions. Satirize the abuses that occurred with the estates. Allegory: a form of extended metaphor in which objects and persons within a narrative are equated wit meanings that lie outside the narrative itself. Literal meaning (what the gure does in the narrative) Allegory evoke a dual interest in the present and what they represent.
