Estate Satire

Estate satire is a genre of medieval literary writing, flourishing from the fourteenth century, that examines society through the three medieval estates: the clergy, the nobility, and the peasantry, the major social classes of the age. Because the traditional threefold scheme was framed around men, women were treated as a class unto themselves in this literature, with Geoffrey Chaucer's Wife of Bath standing as its best-known example. Estate satire set out each estate's proper duties and praised the ideal form of each class, then used that ideal as a measure by which to expose how far real society had strayed from it. The Norton Anthology of English Literature describes its purpose directly: such satires set forth the functions and duties of each estate and castigate the failure of the estates in the present world to live up to their divinely assigned social roles.