The Summoner

Who?
A Summoner’s job is to call people before the ecclesiastical court for their spiritual crimes as they potentially face excommunication. This is not a very well paying job so the Summoner finds another way to make money. People bribe him to avoid being excommunicated.

Characteristics

The summoner loves garlic, leeks, and onions when he’s not guzzling alcohol
he drinks only the strongest and reddest wine
The summoner has a lecherous, dishonest, and generally unethical soul
illiterate except when he’s screaming something in Latin when he’s drunk
Summoner is disdainful of the church's teachings, brushing aside people's fear of excommunication
Seduces young girls
messy, gross, disgusting

Commonplace Book

The defining characteristics of the Summoner include: a disgusting and hideous appearance, an unethical and ugly soul, a drunk, disorganized, and illiterate. We used platforms such as Twitter, Pinterest, and Squarespace to best depict the Summoner.
For one section of the Commonplace Book, we chose to use the pinterest page to represent the Summoner, because we believe that it fits all aspects of him. Pinterest is one of the most disorganized forms of social media, due to the fact that all pinned images are just scattered around the board. We have pinned images of luxury items, such as nice watches and yachts, because the Summoner enjoys certain luxuries that are not common of his position. We also pinned photos of ale companies and food, because these two items are the most emphasized descriptions of the Summoner.
We used twitter as a third means of portraying the Summoner. We did this because we wanted to show what the Summoner finds important enough to talk about. He talks about his likes and dislikes and things he could relate to in the 21st century. We wrote tweets about the friar because we saw in the Summoner’s tale that he viewed friars as beggars, swindlers, and thieves. He goes on to insult the friar more than once within the first 30 lines of the text, so we wanted to capitalize on this discord he had with the Friar. We made the other tweets also reflect aspects about himself like the fact that he is ugly to the point that it can scare children, and that he essentially steals from the church. We also tried to use poor grammar to illustrate his illiteracy.

Autobiography

We chose to create a website for the Summoner because we believe that Chaucer’s 21st century Summoner would need to advertise his side-work (other known as bribery). By having a website, the Summoner is able to “help” more people. The spelling and grammar is horrendous but this was done on purpose to represent the Summoner’s illiteracy. We also added a page for the public to write reviews on the Summoner. Since he is not capable of reading a page of directions to learn how to get rid of the reviews, he keeps them up on his page; this is mainly due to laziness. The reviews represent how other people think of the Summoner, and the “About” page represents how he thinks of himself.

The Summoner
“Who had a fiery-red, cherubic face, / For eczema he had; his eyes were narrow / As hot he was, and lecherous, as a sparrow; / With black and scabby brows and scanty beard; / He had a face that little children feared.”
     The Summoner is one of the most lecherous, dishonest, and unethical pilgrims in the General Prologue of The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer. Through bribery, he makes the majority of his money, and if that is not bad enough, he is known to seduce young girls. During the time that Chaucer wrote the General Prologue, this would have not been uncommon. A Summoner’s job is to call people before the ecclesiastical court for their spiritual crimes as they potentially face excommunication. Unfortunately, this is not a very well paying job, so the Summoner finds another way to make money. People bribe him to avoid being excommunicated. Chaucer uses elements of satire to distance himself from the Summoner throughout the General Prologue. When studying the Summoner’s portrait, we pulled five main characteristics to build off of for our digital Commonplace Book and digital Autobiography. The defining characteristics of the Summoner include: a disgusting and hideous appearance, an unethical and ugly soul, a drunk, disorganized, and illiterate. We used platforms such as Twitter, Pinterest, and Squarespace to best depict the Summoner.
     Our Autobiography is shown through the main platform, Squarespace. We chose to create a website for the Summoner because we believe that Chaucer’s 21st century Summoner would need to advertise his side-work (other known as bribery). By having a website, the Summoner is able to “help” more people. The spelling and grammar is horrendous but this was done on purpose to represent the Summoner’s illiteracy. We also added a page for the public to write reviews on the Summoner. Since he is not capable of reading a page of directions to learn how to get rid of the reviews, he keeps them up on his page; this is mainly due to laziness. The reviews represent how other people think of the Summoner, and the “About” page represents how he thinks of himself. For one section of the Commonplace Book, we chose to use the pinterest page to represent the Summoner, because we believe that it fits all aspects of him. Pinterest is one of the most disorganized forms of social media, due to the fact that all pinned images are just scattered around the board. We have pinned images of luxury items, such as nice watches and yachts, because the Summoner enjoys certain luxuries that are not common of his position. We also pinned photos of ale companies and food, because these two items are the most emphasized descriptions of the Summoner. Our group chose not to include any photos of women, because we felt we would get in trouble if we were to include these types of photos. We do think however, that the 21st century Summoner would include photos of women on his page. Pinterest is also an appropriate social media for the Summoner, because the Summoner was illiterate and wouldn't be able to express his thoughts thoroughly. Since images do not require great literary skills to get the message across, the Summoner would most likely use Pinterest as his main social media account. Also, pinterest does not require the user to talk about who they are, but allows them to portray the image that he/she would like to portray. We are absolutely positive that the Summoner would portray himself as a successful, attractive, and tasteful man to lure in young women and not have to show his ugly personality/face off to the public.
      We used twitter as a third means of portraying the Summoner. We did this because we wanted to show what the Summoner finds important enough to talk about. As a character he is mostly amoral, has a generally nasty odor, an unpleasant and repulsive appearance, is illiterate, and is very unlikeable, so we tried to encapsulate these qualities in the tweets. He talks about his likes and dislikes and things he could relate to in the 21st century. We wrote tweets about the Friar because we saw in the Summoner’s tale that he viewed Friars as beggars, swindlers, and thieves. He goes on to insult the Friar more than once within the first 30 lines of the text, so we wanted to capitalize on this discord he had with the Friar. We made the other tweets also reflect aspects about himself like the fact that he is ugly to the point that it can scare children, and that he essentially steals from the church. We also tried to use poor grammar to illustrate his illiteracy. People may see his tweets as offensive or untasteful, but we did this on purpose to show how ugly this character is; he smells bad, he looks bad, and he is bad. Twitter is a good platform to present the Summoner because posts on twitter tend to be impulsive and a stream of consciousness. We think that this would appeal to the Summoner because he is very up front about his ideas, and Twitter provides medium for him to present his ideas.
  In our presentation of the Summoner, we set out to present who Chaucer depicts him as through the mediums of 21st century media. We decided to use squarespace because it acted as a good way to organize all of the personal information. To represent what the Summoner would be like in the 21st century, we used pinterest and Twitter. We think that we successfully portrayed the Summoner because we tried especially hard to make our medium be representative of what the Summoner is.

See our Digital Autobiography + Commonplace Book

Website