In their The Apocalyptic Imagination in Medieval Literature , Richard Emmerson and Ronald Herzman find apocalypse in unexpected places. Like Chaucer.
For the medieval mind, any pilgrimage evoked the pilgrimage of the soul toward heaven, and The Canterbury Tales is no different: “For the individual pilgrims, the pilgrimage suggests the journey of life, a full cycle from morning . . . to evening. It is a movement from birth, suggested by the imagery of procreation in the opening lines of the General Prologue, to the approach of death, implied by the setting of the Parson’s Tale, its penitential theme, and Chaucer’s ‘Retraction.’” They start from a tavern, and make their way to the shrine of a saint (157).
Individual eschatology mimics general eschatology, so the poem can also be read as a journey “from the natural to the supernatural, from Creation, suggested by the springtime imagery of the poem’s opening lines, to Doomsday” (158). And it moves from the tragic “pagan wisdom” of the Knight’s Tale to the explicit Christian Parson (159).
Individual characters and tales too are filled out with apocalyptic imagery. The Pardoner is depicted as both Simon Magus and Antichrist. Chaucer thus “provides an apocalyptic urgency to his portrayal of this vivid band of men and women approaching the end of their pilgrimage and to his understanding of the Church at this point in the pilgrimage of history” (181).
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