It is not hard to apply Chaucer's description of the greedy doctor to today's medical system, nor is it difficult to find modern-day people with equivalent personalities to those of many of Chaucer's other characters. However, it is the institutions of his time as well as their flaws and hypocrisies that Chaucer is most critical of; he uses the personalities of his characters primarily to highlight those flaws. The two institutions that he is most critical of have lost much, if not all, of their influence; in today's society, the Church has only slight hold on the lives and attitudes of the people as a whole, and the strict feudal system has entirely disappeared. Few institutions today are as clearly visible and universally influential as those two forces were in the Middle Ages, so, if Chaucer were writing his tales today, he would most likely turn to the hypocritical attitudes of the general populace and the fumbles of daily life. He gives some emphasis to these in the Tales, but in today's American culture, he would be most likely to criticize businessmen, and the ravenous political system.
             One of the things Chaucer would be most likely to point out about many big- businessmen would be the hypocrisy of their supposed love of sports. To truly love sports implies a similar love of sportsmanship, fairness, and equality. In a marketplace where one technology company takes another's product, reverse-engineers it, then sells it as its own, where is the sportsmanship? When that second company is already larger and has greater budgets, there is also no fairness. As for equality in the workplace and job-market, there is no equality. The reason Chaucer would criticize the businessmen on the top as well as the institution itself would be because, since they are in positions of power, they can change things. Some try to; others more often don't.
             As Chaucer found both hypocrites and ideals in Medieval English society, he would pr
             ...