Editing The Canterbury Tales (section)

===Liminality===
The concept of [[liminality]] figures prominently within ''The Canterbury Tales''.<ref name="empathy article" /> A liminal space, which can be both geographical as well as metaphorical or spiritual, is the transitional or transformational space between a "real" (secure, known, limited) world and an unknown or imaginary space of both risk and possibility.<ref>Bishop, Norma J. "Liminal Space in Travellers' Tales: Historical and Fictional Passages (Folklore, Ritual, History)". Order No. 8615152 The Pennsylvania State University, 1986. Ann Arbor: ProQuest. Web. 30 September 2015.</ref> The notion of a pilgrimage is itself a liminal experience, because it centres on travel between destinations and because pilgrims undertake it hoping to become more holy in the process. Thus, the structure of ''The Canterbury Tales'' itself is liminal; it not only covers the distance between London and Canterbury, but the majority of the tales refer to places entirely outside the geography of the pilgrimage. Jean Jost summarises the function of liminality in ''The Canterbury Tales'',

{{Blockquote
|Both appropriately and ironically in this raucous and subversive liminal space, a ragtag assembly gather together and tell their equally unconventional tales. In this unruly place, the rules of tale telling are established, themselves to be both disordered and broken; here the tales of game and earnest, solas and sentence, will be set and interrupted. Here the sacred and profane adventure begins, but does not end. Here, the condition of peril is as prominent as that of protection. The act of pilgrimaging itself consists of moving from one urban space, through liminal rural space, to the next urban space with an ever fluctuating series of events and narratives punctuating those spaces. The goal of pilgrimage may well be a religious or spiritual space at its conclusion, and reflect a psychological progression of the spirit, in yet another kind of emotional space.<ref>Jost, Jean. "Urban and Liminal Space in Chaucer's Knight's Tale: Perilous or Protective?" Albrecht Classen, ed. ''Fundamentals of Medieval and Early Modern Culture: Urban Space in the Middle Ages and the Early Modern Age''. Berlin, DEU: Walter de Gruyter, 2009. Print.</ref>}}
Liminality is also evident in the individual tales. An obvious instance of this is [[The Friar's Tale]] in which the yeoman devil is a liminal figure because of his transitory nature and function; it is his purpose to issue souls from their current existence to hell, an entirely different one.<ref>Bloomfield, Morton W. "The 'Friar's Tale' as a Liminal Tale". ''The Chaucer Review'' 17.4 (1983): 286–91. Print.</ref> The [[The Franklin's Tale|Franklin's Tale]] is a [[Breton lai|Breton Lai]] tale, which takes the tale into a liminal space by invoking not only the interaction of the supernatural and the mortal, but also the relation between the present and the imagined past.<ref>Nowlin, Steele. "Between Precedent and Possibility: Liminality, Historicity, and Narrative in Chaucer's 'The Franklin's Tale{{'"}}. ''Studies in Philology'' 103.1 (2006): 47–67. Print.</ref>