Women images in Boccaccio's the Decameron and Chaucer's the Canterbury tales

This thesis shows how Giovanni Boccaccio and Geoffrey Chaucer present the conditions and problems of medieval women in their respective narratives as they are and how the women characters are sympathetically treated by the above mentioned authors of the Middle Ages. To serve this purpose, this studyanalyzes the aspects of life in the medieval era in terms of women images. Therefore, in the first chapter of this thesis, the women images created by Boccaccio in the Decameron and the tales and the novellas are told by basically the women characters with specific reference to Fiammetta will be presented. In the second chapter, Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales will be dealt with through the characters, The Wife of Bath and the nuns. In this comparative analysis, the perception of womanhood as well as the role imposed on women from different social classes will also be presented in the light of the two works of art. In the third chapter, the women images will be compared and contrasted as these two works bear some striking similarities and differences. Finally, the thesis concludes by foregrounding each of the above mentioned works as a model which presents the women landscapes from the two different countries, Italy and England, of the 14th century.