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The Nun's Priest's Fable

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

R. T. Lenaghan
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Extract

Critical comment on the Nun's Priest's Tale often seems to be of two sorts. One is a straightforward response to the plain fact that the tale is funny. The other is a response to the somewhat less obvious fact that the tale is also serious, or at least that it makes a statement worthy of serious consideration. The second sort of comment may find the seriousness of the poem in an allegorical reading and it often seems a trifle defensive, as if written with an anxious or reproving eye on Matthew Arnold. However, even if one feels, as I do, that this defensiveness is a critical disadvantage, reluctance to read the poem as more than a simple joke would be equally disadvantageous. To identify Chauntecleer with Adam seems as mistaken as to take what looks like a fabular Moralitas for the final statement of the poem's import.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 78 , Issue 4-Part1 , September 1963 , pp. 300 - 307
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1963

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References

1 This article is based on a paper I read at the 1960 meeting of the MLA in English Section I.

2 The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer (2nd éd.), ed. F. N. Robinson (Cambridge, Mass., 1957), p. 205. All references to The Canterbury Tales are by the line numbers of this edition.

3 Chaucer and the French Tradition (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1957), pp. 242–243.

4 The justification for any critical convention must lie in its application, but to experience of the aural metaphor I would add impressive auctoritee: “The world of social action and event, the world of time and process, has a particularly close association with the ear. The ear listens, and the ear translates what it hears into practical conduct.” Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton, 1957), p. 243.

5 “The Classical Lamentations in The Nun's Priest's Tale,” MLN, lxiv (1949), 76–78.

6 See his unpubl. diss. (Stanford, 1956), “Chaucer, Gower, and the English Rhetorical Tradition.”

7 Middle English Sermons, ed. Woodburn O. Ross, E.E.T.S., O.S. 209 (London, 1940), pp. 1,3,9, and passim. G. R. Owst, Preaching in Medieval England (Cambridge, 1926), p. 319.

8 “The Nun's Priest's Morality and the Medieval Attitude Toward Fables,” JEGP, lix (1960), p. 414.

9 Les Fabulistes Latins, 2 éd., ed. Leopold Hervieux, ii (Paris, 1894), 316.

10 On the Sources of the Nonnes Prestes Tale, Radcliffe College Monographs, No. 10 (Boston, 1898).

11 Ioannis Saresberiensis Episcopi Carnolcnsis Melalogicon, ed. Clemens C. I. Webb (Oxford, 1929), p. 54.

12 Edith Rickert cites a mid-fourteenth-century inventory of a bequest to St. Pauls School. “Chaucer at School,” MP, xxix (1931–32), 265–270. A convenient list of such collections can be found in Ernst Voigt, “Das erste Lesebuch des Triviums in der Kloster und stiftsschulen des Mittelalters (11–15 Jahrhundert),” Milteilungen der geseUscliafl für deutsche Erziehungs und Schulgeschichle, i (Berlin, 1891), 42–53; or George L. Hamilton, “Theodolus: a Medieval Textbook,” MP, vii (1909–10), 169–185.

13 Priscianus, Praeexercitamina, ed. Heinrich Keil in Grammalici Lalini, ii (Leipzig, 1858), 430.

14 Rhetoric in Greco-Roman Education (New York, 1957), p. 178.

15 Gesta Romanorum, ed. Hermann Oesterley (Berlin, 1872), p. 545.

16 Les Fabulistes Latins, iii, 463–464.

17 See Rickert, “Chaucer at School,” p. 272. Also Educational Charters and Documents 598 to 1909, ed. Arthur F. Leach (Cambridge, 1911), pp. 244 and 316; and Arthur F. Leach, The Schools of Medieval England, 2nd ed. (London, 1916), pp. 180–181 and 209.

18 M. Fabii Quintiliani Institutionis Oratoriae, ed. Louis Rademacher (Leipzig, 1907), Bk. ii, Ch. iv; also Ad C. Herennium de Ratione Dicendi, ed. Harry Caplan in The Loeb Classical Library (London, 1954), Bk. i, Ch. viii.

19 Isidori Hispalensis Episcopi Etymologiarum sive Originum ed. W. M. Lindsay (Oxford, 1911), Bk. i, Ch. xl.

20 Matthieu De Vendôme, Ars Versificatoria, ed. Edmond Faral, in Les Arts poétiques du XIIe et du XIIle siècle (Paris, 1924), p. 180.

21 Isidori … Etymologiarum, Bk. i, Ch. xli.

22 Ad Herennium, ed. Caplan, Bk. i, Ch. viii.

23 John M. Manly, “Warton Lecture on English Poetry: Chaucer and the Rhetoricians,” Proceedings of the British Academy (1926), p. 109.

24 “The Nun's Priest's Morality,” JEGP, lix (1960), 403–416.

25 John M. Steadman has shown that the flattery morals parallel the moral traditionally drawn from the fable of the crow and the fox. “Flattery and the Moralitas of The Nonne Preestes Tale,” MÆ, xxviii (1959), 172.

26 See the convenient table in E. P. Dargan, “Cock and Fox, a Critical Study of the History and Sources of the Medieval Fable,” MP, iv (1906–07), 44. For the texts: Aesopica, ed. Ben Edwin Perry (Urbana, Ill., 1952), i, 609; Les Fabulistes Latins, ii, 308; Marie de France, Die Fabeln, ed. Karl Warnke, in Bibliotheca Normannica, vi (Halle, 1898), 198–200.

27 Mr. Steadman has pointed out that the fable of the crow and the fox was sometimes used to illustrate the dangers of vainglory. MÆ, xxviii (1959), 173.

28 Eustache Deschamps, Œuvres complètes, ed. Auguste H. E. Queux de Saint Hilaire, S.A.T.F. ii (Paris, 1880), 61–62.