..the depression wrought by the Monk’s catalogue of human disaster is resisted by the Knight, who declares what pleasure he himself finds in the prospect of someone who “hath been in povre estaat” who yet “clymbeth up and wexeth fortunate” (VII. 2774-6). But in the wake of the Monk’s focus on the histories of personal ruin, disaster, collapse, the Knight’s retort emphasizes only that individual aspiration, individual success stories, are a pleasure to contemplate. It might be possible to interpret here a claim that the dominant elite (and perhaps the author) are ultimately hospitable to radical peasant aspirations. For me, however, the implication is altogether different; almost the reverse. The aristocracy, by claiming to welcome the occasional parvenu, can congratulate itself on its tolerance. But this movement of Fortune’s wheel is—as visual representations of Fortune confirm—for individuals: so the limitation to individual significance seems to apply here…Although a person can climb, on Fortune’s wheel, out of “povre estaat,” there is no room on the wheel for confederacies or whole social realignments—the Knight really does not enable us to think in terms of a relaxation of estaat categories themselves.

Alcuin Blamires, “Chaucer the Reactionary: Ideology and the General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales,” RES 51 (2000): 523-39 [537-38].