Dante's vision in The Inferno expresses his personal experience, conveying his interpretation of the nature of human existence. He takes the reader through the dark, and ghastly depths of hell using very striking, and grotesque imagery. Writing in the first person, he enables the reader to identify, to deeply understand the truths he wished to share about the meaning of life and man's relationship w

Dante's relationship with God, which portrays the experience of a deeply committed Christian, is evidenced throughout The Inferno. At the time he completed his work, this commitment to Christianity and the sense of duty to lead a morally pure life were religiously upheld by the current medieval society. The spiritual belief-that those who insist on denying God's Will or those who give in to sinful temptation and die unrepentant are eternally damned, makes Dante's Inferno a religious and morally challenging experience.

Geoffrey Chaucer writes a human comedy in place of a divine one, repeatedly questioning and challenging Dante's pretense to truth and authority. Unlike Dante, Chaucer does not wish to make us live or pray better, rather, he wants to enable us to think more clearly about our human nature. According to a literary critic, Condren, the Canterbury Tales reveals Chaucer's "evident love affair with the world he creates--a world he neither condemns, endorses, burdens with ideology, nor seeks to improve, but a world he shows as a dynamic, human, endlessly fascinating entity unto itself".

The Shipman's tale, a story taken from familiar legends, like the others, is scandalously humorous and pokes fun at other characters, including Church officials, who are on the pilgrimage. It is a story, in which a merchant's wife commits adultery on her husband with a visiting monk, who ultimately deceives her as well. The overriding concern of the Shipman's Tale revolves around money and its relationship with sex. The story uses terms relating to business and financial transactions in reference to all of the sexual dealings of this story, and money is found to be virtually interchangeable with sex. The wife agrees to have an affair with Dan John, the monk, as a business transaction, and she claims at the end that she will repay her debt to her husband in bed.

Dante's work, even though called the Divine Comedy , is not intended to be humorous. From the multitude of different stories in Inferno, including the cantos III, VII, and XIX, a major theme repeatedly emerges-the eternal justice of God, which gives each sinner his due by "perfecting" the sins that he committed in life and thus makes the punishment always fit the crime.

Writing some fifty years after Dante completed his work, Geoffrey Chaucer was exposed to a thawing of the Medieval Religiosity. This change in spiritual attitude is reflected in Theodore Spencer's sketch of the times: "At the end of the thirteenth century, Jesus is not seen as a stern judge, but rather as a suffering human being; He is no longer above humanity, He is on the same level, a man for whose pains a human sympathy and pity can be felt." As a product of its time, The Canterbury Tales reflects a lighter outlook on human nature-its virtues and vices-in relation to its repercussions. Chaucer's pilgr

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Approximate Word count = 1920
Approximate Pages = 8 (250 words per page double spaced)