Geoffrey Chaucer — "And if that he forbede it, wolde he say, / 'A man may do no synne, but if he may…"
And if that he forbede it, wolde he say, / 'A man may do no synne, but if he may / Nat touche a womman, for al his lyf.'
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More from Geoffrey Chaucer
"For every man that is in swich array, That he ne may nat speke, but he may pray."
"As for to speke of innocence, I woot no man that may be exempt from it."
"The Friar was very fond of playing and played so madly as if he were a puppy-dog in spite of this his eyes twinkled in his head in the same way as the stars do in the frosty night, while playing the h…"
"But al be that I kan nat telle aright The murthe of mariage, but I kan telle the wo."
"But al be that he was a philosophre, / Yet hadde he but litel gold in cofre."
About Geoffrey Chaucer (c. 1343-1400)
English poet, civil servant, and the father of English literature; The Canterbury Tales (~1387-1400) is the founding text of English-language storytelling. Closely associated with Giovanni Boccaccio (his Italian predecessor; the Decameron preceded the Canterbury Tales by ~40 years). For an intellectual contrast, see John Wycliffe, English theologian and Lollard reform-movement leader — Wycliffe and Chaucer were near-contemporaries in the same English Christian world — Chaucer's Wife of Bath and Pardoner are the canonical literary defense of fleshly humanity against the Lollard moral austerity that would later become English Puritanism. Earthy storytelling vs proto-Protestant moralism.