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Using Literature to Safely Express Your Views Although the ability to speak freely against the government or the social hierarchy is something that we take for granted today, many people throughout history have lost their freedom or even their heads for speaking out against the “powers that be.” This restrictive environment was successful in keeping many people silent but history is full of creative minds. Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales and Sir Thomas More’s Utopia provide two very interesting examples of how literature was used as a relatively safe way to criticize the church, the government and society. In The Canterbury Tales, Geoffrey Chaucer attacks certain aspects of the church that he believed had become corrupt. He did not however, attack the church directly. Instead, hypocrisy was to be Chaucer’s tool. He created what Wagenknecht refers to as “unworthy ecclesiastics” to represent the abuses he saw in the church (121). Chaucer then painted a word picture of manipulation, vanity, and greed. Our first indi