Geoffrey Chaucer's little tragedies: the category of the tragic in ‘the monk's tale’

The article examines the implementation of the category of the tragic in The Monk’s Tale, which is part of The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer. The purpose of this work is to clarify the concepts ‘tragedy’ and ‘the tragic’ in the culture of the Late Middle Ages, as well as their interpretation in Chaucer’s oeuvre. The focus is on the specific understanding of these terms in the Middle Ages: since the genre of dramatic tragedy became a thing of the past along with Antiquity, the word ‘tragedy’ began to be used by poets and scribes of the Middle Ages to specify a distinct type of narration that deals with the power of fate as the main theme. The need to identify what works Chaucer used as examples to follow, as well as to study the peculiarity of the category of the tragic in The Monk’s Tale, determined the choice of methods for the analysis of the material. The research employs culture-historical, comparative-typological, and biographical methods of analysis. It has been established that, relying on the Latin (Boethius) and Italian models (Francesco Petrarca, Giovanni Boccaccio), Chaucer perceived ‘tragedy’ as a variation of the ‘fall of princes’ story. Both Chaucer and Boccaccio were interested in the study of earthly life, the search for a connection between human behavior and human fate, and the image of Fortune. However, the Italian poet did not call his works ‘tragedies’, while Chaucer did: his character, the Monk, tells seventeen stories about the victims of Fortune, among which there were both sinners and relatively innocent people. Our analysis has shown that the main point in Chaucer’s understanding of the category of the tragic is the fundamental incomprehensibility of the ways of fate. Focusing on the category of the tragic, Chaucer receives the opportunity to explore the irrationality of human existence.