ABSTRACT
This chapter outlines the intellectual and political contexts which would have encouraged Chaucer's own critical imagination in its magnificent explorations of love, sex and marriage. In The Canterbury Tales Chaucer's fascination with the interactions between individual being, predominant social practices and received ideas focused on those living within the institution of marriage. Marriage was primarily a transaction organized by males to serve economic and political ends, with the woman treated as a useful, child-bearing appendage to the land or goods being exchanged. The Knight of the Tower demonstrates just how well entrenched it was, for he assumes that the best attitudes are utter subservience on the part of women and unquestioning domination on the part of men, supported by male aggression and physical violence towards women in a culture of discourse quite alien to self-criticism or reflexivity.
