VILLASIS, CHRISTINE JOY U.

AB-ELS 1A
The Canterbury Tales

The Knight’s Tale - Geoffrey Chaucer's The Knight's Tale offers an

example of knightly culture through the story of Palamon and Arcite, two knights of ancient
Greece. Throughout the tale, Chaucer places emphasis on the fighting scenes, critiquing the
knightly ideal through explicitly brutal depictions of violence. His use of satire comments on the
degeneration of the knightly ideal into a baser set of values, to which the dueling knights no
longer stay faithful. The criticism in Chaucer's tale prompts the question of what has caused the
degeneration, and forces the reader to look past the ambiguity in the text for clues. With The
Knight's Tale, Chaucer implies two possibilities; the collapse of chivalric ethos occurs because
its ideals could not match the knights' irrepressible desires for self gain or because knightly
culture has itself become obsolete.

In its representation of violence and Palamon and Arcite's disloyalty to knightly

ideals, The Knight's Tale conveys the degeneration of chivalric ethos. Though the corruption and
disregard for the code is apparent through Chaucer's use of satire, the cause of the degeneration
is not as clear. One possible implication of Chaucer's criticism is that the knightly ideal has
degenerated into being solely about self gain. The Knight's Tale is mainly driven by the selfish
desires of the knights and by the actions they take to ensure they get what they want. In his
article, which supports Chaucer's critical portrayal of the knightly ideal, Patterson writes that
chivalry's "deepest ambition was to produce not a better world but a perfect knight. It was
committed to codes of behavior not as programs of action but techniques of self-fashioning: the
chivalric life was its own goal" (Patterson 175). Chivalry, then, focuses very little on the knights'
heroic deeds and adherence to the code, but exists instead as a means of self-service. Patterson
also comments critically on how chivalric discourse supports the compatibility of the
contradictory knightly desires for honor and wealth. Although the knightly ideal upholds
selflessness, the vision of a true knight often ignores the rewards that knights receive or those
that they actively seek to gain. In The Knight's Tale, both Palamon and Arcite are motivated by
their desire for self gain, namely to win possession of Emelye. When they reject their vows of
loyalty to one other, the knights have only their own profit in mind. Chaucer's writing condemns
those knights who benefit selfishly from their exploits, finding it completely conflicting with true
knightly ideals.
Chaucer's criticism may also suggest his belief that the knightly ideal is outdated and that
it represents only a nostalgic sentiment. It is possible that Chaucer identifies with this view of the
Knight as modest, and uses his criticism to regretfully point out the movement away from the
knightly ideal. Chaucer's ambiguity concerning the cause of the degeneration of chivalric ethos is
significant because it reflects on the overlaying reasons for collapse. By suggesting multiple
possibilities, the poet maintains a sense of the complexity of the existence of the chivalric ideal
when those who pledge to honor it fail to embody its values.

The Miller’s Tale - “Game” and “ernest” are two important concepts in
reading the Tales representing respectively jokiness, frivolousness and fun, and seriousness,
morality and meaningfulness. Yet one of the things the Miller’s Tale makes clear is that it
becomes very difficult to decide what is lighthearted fun and what is meaningful, moral telling.
The story of John the carpenter is grounded in reality: the details of the story all make sense, and
it appears to be set within a suburban, believable Oxford that Chaucer might have known. Yet
the story itself is clearly a fabliau: and its sources confirm its debt to fabliau - a hugely elaborate
trick, set up with huge care in the story, which snaps shut as the story ends. Immediately
“realism” is juxtaposed with “fantasy”.
The same problem is bequeathed directly to the reader at the end of the tale: when, after
the glorious moment at which John comes crashing down through the roof, and our pleasure in
Nicholas’ elaborate trick stops, Chaucer suddenly focuses on John’s pain. The result of the
elaborate trick is an old man, lying unconscious, pale and wan, with a broken arm on his cellar
floor - his house destroyed, his wife cuckolded. Is Chaucer doing precisely what the narrator tells
us, at the end of the prologue, we musn’t do, and making “ernest” of “game”? Maybe – and the
Tales as a whole tread a careful, ambiguous line between the serious and the comic. The same
ambiguity of tone is applied to the Christian theme which runs throughout the tale. John the
carpenter’s plan involves floating up through the roof in his kneading tub when the flood comes;
and yet the tale replaces his idealistic upward movement with a crashing downward movement,
through his house to the cellar floor. Christian uplift is replaced with a rather damning fall. We
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might usefully compare this to the fall in discourse and in subject matter from the Knight’s Tale
to the Miller’s Tale: a step downward for the tales themselves as a linear movement (as the Host
seems to know full well) in Middle English class distinction – a noble knight to a churlish,
drunken miller. Metaphorically speaking, John the carpenter isn’t the only thing to come
crashing down in this tale.
Is this, then, a blasphemous version of Christianity? Well, it all depends how seriously
we read it. If we are offended by Absolon’s devilish transformation at the end of the tale (into a
blackened devil carrying a flaming iron), or if we recognise the alignment of Alison and
Nicholas with Adam and Eve (and the respective falls from grace which follow), then perhaps
we might view the tale as deliberately depicting sin. And yet, even though the tale itself is a
comic delight - and there is a tremendous amount of pleasure to be had from reading it - the
Miller’s Tale is far from a negative, anti-type example of sinners in action.

The Reeve’s Tale - Then the Miller tells a version of this tale that is less
like a fairy tale, where one of the men gets slighted and is embarrassed in the end. The Reeve
then takes this theme, of men doing whatever they can to get the woman, even further by making
it about rape and assault. 'The Reeve's Tale' is not a nice story, and is not one you'd want to tell
to children. It starts out light-hearted enough but ends very dark.
'The Reeve's Tale' tells the story of a miller who is dishonest and proud as a peacock.
Two students decide to outsmart the Miller and ensure that he does not cheat them out of their
grain. When they realize that they have failed in this mission, they then decide to get back at the
Miller. In the end, one student sleeps with the Miller's daughter and the other with his wife, and
they leave the Miller badly beaten and unconscious (knocked out by his own wife no less!).
This Miller is not a good man, and as such, the Reeve ends this tale with the moral of the
story that you can't hope for good if you do evil. This is what the Reeve calls justice as he has
now repaid the Miller. However, we must wonder if this has gone beyond justice. In this story,
the students don't even try to use nice words to seduce the women, but simply jump on them or
trick them into sleeping with them. And after the wife (unknowingly) knocks out her husband
(she thought she was knocking one of the students out), the students continue to beat him
senseless. We need to wonder if the Miller really deserves all of this based on his pride and
dishonesty.

 The Cook’s Tale - After hearing Reeve's tale, the Cook laughs and says that
he has a story that is quite as good. The host tells the Cook that he must tell a very good story to
make up for the bad food that he has sold. The Cook first says he will tell a story about an inn-
keeper but then changes his mind saying that he will save that story for the return trip home.
Instead, he tells a story about a Cook's Apprentice.
This story is not complete, so we cannot tell how it would have ended, but it starts out
with a young man who goes from bad to worse. Based on the style of previous stories, this story
would have probably continued in the same pattern, showing how bad the human soul is.
The Cook is a repulsive figure. His suppurating sore suggests filthy personal habits and
the Host accuses him of serving stale food. It deals with an apprentice cook. It was probably
intended as the last merry tale in the first fragment. Its plot is very similar to the earlier tales. The
plot contains an eligible woman, the wife of the apprentice’s friend who keeps a shop to mask
her activities as a prostitute. Perhaps this is an indication that there are two rivals vying for the
hand of this lady - her dissolute husband and Perkin Reveler. However since the plot does not
develop the reader does not get the full picture. Perhaps the Cook’s Tale was meant to be more
raunchy than the Reeve’s tale through which Chaucer intended to depict the London low life.
The setting of the Cook’s tale with its taverns and shops is a sharp contrast to the glamorous
world of The Knight’s Tale.

 The Man of Law’s Tale - theme is constancy, a term nearly

interchangeable in medieval times with patience. Constance (Custance) is the spiritual antithesis
of the Wife of Bath, whose tale usually follows this one. Constance exemplifies endurance in
adversity and trust in God. She also teaches constancy to total commitments and submission to
law. Even though, in the beginning, she weeps for having been ordered to Syria, Constance does
not strive against lawful authority represented by the wills of God, of parents, and of husband.
The emphasis in The Man of Law's Tale is the power and safety that comes with Christian
constancy. In the medieval sense, Christian constancy meant a steadfast devotion to God and an
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indifference to the world. The poem opens with a contrast between the wealth of this world —
characterized by the wealthy Syrian merchants and the Sultan — and the wealth of the spirit,
summed up in the character of Constance. She is the perfect and the universal. She is portrayed
in poverty and in prosperity, in joy and sorrow, in defeat and in victory. Looking forward to the
bliss of the next world, Christian Constance can tolerate many ills, including grief, abandonment,
and the cruelty of Fortune. Constance can resist the temptations of this world knowing that she
will be rewarded in the next world.
Throughout the story, Constance is unmoved and unshaken from the great Christian virtues of
humility, faith, hope, and charity. She moves from one improbable situation to another and
always, in the end, is miraculously saved. Chaucer makes no attempt to explain these miraculous
events; he — and his audience — seemingly accepts them joyously.
 

The Wife of Bath’s Tale - one of the most popular characters in

Geoffrey Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales. The primary reasons for her popularity is her
expression of her feelings regarding marriage and the expectations of women during medieval
times. A prologue introduces The Wife of Bath's story, revealing her life and beliefs. She
explains that she is a bit of a rebel who prefers to follow her own experience rather than
authority. The Wife of Bath has been married five times and considers herself an expert on
marriage and male-female relationships because of her experience with men. She makes several
references to the Bible to justify her beliefs and explains she does not feel God should condemn
those who marry multiple times. She admits to being imperfect and does not believe virginity is a
virtue for everyone as described in the Bible.  She believes that nagging men is one way for
women to get what they want from men. For example, she criticized one of her husbands who
complained of her spending practices. Despite the fact that he married her for money and beat
her, she believed her fifth husband was her true love. After being introduced to him by a friend,
she discovered her attraction to her fifth husband, Jankyn, at her fourth husband's funeral. The
Wife of Bath was irritated by Jankyn's traditional medieval views of women, which he expressed
by reading aloud from the Bible. In her rage, she smacked Jankyn, ripped pages from his book,
and threw him into the fire. He hit her in the back in retaliation, and she pretended to be dead
until he felt sorry for her and promised her anything if she would live. This was viewed as a
victory by the Wife of Bath over her fifth husband, and she remained his faithful wife until his
death. These events taught the Wife of Bath that a happy marriage is one in which the wife is in
charge.

The Friar’s Tale – The corruption of the church in “The Friar's Tale”
teaches the punishment of greed, lies, and manipulation, and how one should repent for those
sins. It also emphasizes the importance of sincerity in everything spoken. The Friar's Tale and
the next one, The Summoner's Tale, belong together as a unit because the Friar tells an
uncomplimentary tale about a corrupt summoner, and the Summoner, in his turn, tells an
uncomplimentary tale about a corrupt friar. The reader should remember that in spite of the
personal animosity between the Friar and the Summoner, the greater quarrel is about the
importance and validity of their respective professions.
Although The Friar's Tale is elegantly simple — partly because of the Friar's intellectual
simplicity — the tale has its enriching subtleties. For example, Chaucer plays on the medieval
word "rebekke," a type of stringed fiddle-like instrument, and "rebekke," slang for "old woman."
The word also puns on the biblical name Rebecca (wife of Isaac and mother to Jacob), whose
sacred water vessel in the biblical story is reflected in The Friar's Tale by a comically brown
cooking pan. Another literary technique is a type of reversal in that the summoner and the demon
ride out seeking "prey" with the pun on "pray." The central irony in the tale, of course, is that the
foxy summoner out-foxes himself and becomes the "prey" of the demon.
The Friar's Tale is connected to The Wife of Bath's Tale in that the Wife discusses the
problem of authority (that is, the husband or the wife), and the Friar deals with the relative
authority in terms of the church and demons. In The Wife of Bath's Tale, authority is given over
to a woman — a violation of medieval sense of hierarchy. The Friar continues the theme of
authority by first describing the evil machinations of his superior, the archdeacon to whom the
summoner is supposedly a "vassal." The summoner, in turn, has his own servants and spies in the
form of whores and thieves. Likewise, the demon falls into a hierarchy in that he is assigned by a
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higher power the responsibility of capturing his prey, the soul of the summoner. Then in the
episode of the farmer and his cart of hay, the reader learns that the authority of the demon is
limited.

The Summoner’s Tale - in the personal conflict between the Friar

and the Summoner, the Friar's attack is on the Summoner's intelligence. On the personal level,
the Summoner's response makes the Friar seem a raving idiot. Getting even with the Friar for his
tale of a wicked summoner, the Summoner tells of a wicked friar. The Summoner's story shows
the Summoner's disdain for the pilgrim Friar and the Summoner's belief that the message the
friar in the tale espouses is of a blasphemous nature, one that inverts and perverts the essence of
his Christian order.
When the friar enters Thomas' house and learns that the man is dying, he sees a perfect
opportunity to increase his coffers under the guise of the Church's needs. In doing so, he
commits one of the most horrible sins of the Middle Ages, that of simony — using the offices of
the church for one's own personal gain. Indeed, the friar should be a character of purity and good
works; instead the reader sees him inverting the meaning of his order and becoming the primary
source of deceit and corruption by using the church for his corrupt actions. Again, the friar's
hypocrisy and simony is evident when he assures Thomas and Thomas' wife that he has prayed
for the soul of their dead child and for the health of Thomas when, in fact, the reader knows
intuitively that he has done no such thing.
An organizing feature of The Summoner's Tale is the ironic contrast between what the
Friar advocates and what he preaches. The Friar preaches desire for higher things, but his own
appetite is for food and things of this world. His sermon on fasting and gluttony is accompanied
by his ordering a meal considered rather gluttonous. He preaches patience and self-control, but
he himself gives way to wrath. He sermonizes on the value of the "poor in spirit" and poverty,
and yet he is openly insistent that money be given to him and not other monks or friars. And
while he is supposedly pure and chaste, he is overly familiar with Thomas' wife, kissing and
fondling her.
The Summoner's Tale is also ripe with hypocritical paradoxes, many of which have as
their base the difference between eschatology and scatology — that is, the concern for an
afterlife juxtaposed with the obscenities of this earthly life. As noted earlier (see the analysis
for The Miller's Tale), this theme is also treated extensively and with much more comic power in
the earlier tale. Chaucer uses the fart as an ironic comment on the friar's claim that he can talk to
God, and the fart, like a stroke of thunder, answers back. That the friar believes he must portion
out the fart equally among the other friars shows him to be concerned more with scatology than
with eschatology. It is further ironic that the lord's meat carver is the one who devises a plan to
split the fart. This reinforces the notion that the friar and his order are interested more with the
obscenities of an earthly life that with the occupation of saving souls, their own included.

The Clerk’s Tale

  – The tale itself is simple enough: woman of low birth is
horribly tested by her noble husband, made to suffer extremely, and eventually, is restored to
good fortune. But what does the tale mean? Not, according to the Clerk, at least, what it seems to
mean at first reading: that women should patiently submit themselves to their husbands will. This
sentiment, of course, is deeply at odds with the Wife of Bath (herself explicitly acknowledged
and praised by the Clerk in the tale) and her tale only a little earlier – and the Clerk endorses the
Wife’s desire for female maistrie.
Yet why is the tale not to be read as endorsing female subjugation to the husband? Perhaps
because the Clerk (as he implies) wholeheartedly endorses the maistrie-seeking of the Wife of
Bath, but also, as is twice said in the tale, because there are no Griseldes left in the world today.
Is this lack of patient Griseldes a sign of progress, or something to be mourned? If the story is a
celebration of Griselde's fortitude, the Clerk accurately judges that it would be impossible for
any woman to legitimately withstand the suffering that Griselde faced with such resignation; and
indeed, her extreme behavior might not even be read as commendable, for she allows her
husband to murder her two children without struggle. The Clerk indicates that women should
strive toward the example that Griselde sets, but not necessarily follow her example in such an
extreme form. Where does one draw the line? The tale could be read as supporting either pro-
feminist or anti-feminist sentiments.
Petrarch’s solution to the problem is also voiced by the tale: that the tale is not, in fact, about
men and women at all, but how men in general should relate to God. This is a perfectly
reasonable interpretation, but as presented by Chaucer, Walter – cruel, testing for no obvious
reason, and extremely self-satisfied – does not make for a particularly attractive representative of
God. Petrarch’s interpretation of his own story is not an absolute one: and nor is Chaucer’s (it is
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important to note that the envoy at the very end of the tale is attributed “de Chaucer” and not to
the Clerk – perhaps something more significant than a simple print-setting error). For the envoy
advises wives not to nail down their tongues, but to attack their husbands and be shrews - a
sentiment which the tale does not reflect at all, particularly when you consider that it is
Griselde’s strength of character and humility which justify her eventual reward and reunion with
her children.

The Merchant’s Tale – There is a real sense in this tale of goodness

slightly gone bad, ripeness becoming slightly rotten. This starts, perhaps, with the opening paean
to marriage and the description of January as a worthy, noble knight. It is only as we read on that
we realize that, in fact, this apparent positivism is flecked with a bitter irony. January, the noble
knight, is also portrayed in unforgiving detail, even down to the scratchy bristles on his neck, and
the loose skin on his aged body. We, like May, recoil at the description – there is nothing, for
example, of the comfortable, stylized presentation of (for example) the Nun’s Priest’s Tale here.
The narrator is unstinting when he wants to focus our attentions on something unpleasant.
The authorial condemnation of May also departs from the other fabliaux of the Canterbury Tales.
Like Alison of the Miller's Tale, she is crafty, but May is also wicked. She escapes without
punishment from her husband, but unlike the Miller's Tale this is not a satisfactory conclusion.
While the Miller's Tale prized cunning and crafty behavior, the Merchant's Tale adheres to more
traditional values. Therefore, May's escape from punishment is a dissonant element of the story,
for she behaves contrary to the established values that the Merchant has set for his tale.
May, unlike her husband, largely escapes from the spotlight of the tale – it does not have access
to her thoughts (only God knows, at one point, what she thought of her husband) nor does it
really describe her body in anything like the detail it lavishes on her husband’s. What we see of
May is largely a matter of her secret signs and cunning behavior: and the only lengthy
description of her, significantly, is given in the context of presenting her as a good option for
January to marry. What appears beautiful on the visible outside is clearly rotten in the middle.
This too is represented in the strand of Biblical imagery throughout the tale. It is rather obvious,
perhaps, to see May’s infidelity with Damien (whose very name, some critics argue, means
“snake”) as a version of Eve’s transgression with the snake – both, indeed, take place in a
beautiful garden, though the Bible’s Adam does not share the physical disgust of January.
Characteristic of the Merchant’s apparent bitterness, perhaps, is the remark which follows
January’s really rather beautiful pastiche (calling May to awake and come into the garden) of the
Song of Songs: it refers to them in a blunt, dismissive phrase as “olde, lewed words”. In this tale,
beautiful women are really venomous, malicious tricksters - beautiful, lyrical poetry is really
only old, obscene words.
May, however, despite her low blood, proves herself hugely more intelligent than her noble
husband: we might also find analogues for this (at least in sympathy, if not in intelligence) in
Griselde of the Clerk’s Tale. There is nothing of the indulgent, joyful trickery of the Miller’s
Tale in the Merchant’s Tale, but instead a return to the signification of the Reeve’s Tale - the
moment of sexual intercourse is presented with the same unflinching, uneuphemistic detail, and
the preceding action between the illicit lovers in both tales is largely a matter of signs.

The Squire’s Tale - Since the Squire's Tale exists only in a fragmentary
form, it is difficult to determine precisely how we are supposed to read it. The tale may be a
fragment because Chaucer never finished the tale or because the later section of the tale was lost
in the manuscripts from which the Canterbury Tales were taken. And yet, the Franklin’s
interruption comes at a point which suggests that the Squire’s Tale might be one of Chaucer’s
many trick interrupted-endings (see, for example, his House of Fame, or Chaucer’s Tale of Sir
Thopas).
For the moment at which the Franklin interrupts comes only two lines after the Squire has
outlined his plans – extremely lengthy plans – for the rest of his tale, giving as the last plot point
to be covered in his telling Cambalo’s fight for the hand of Canacee. There seems nothing very
unusual about that, until we remember that, at the start of the tale, we are clearly told that
Canacee and Cambalo are brother and sister. And this is where the tale becomes interesting.
Canacee, of course, is the person discussed in the Man of Law’s Prologue - Chaucer, the Man of
Law claims, will not tell her story, and nor will he.
Yet here is Chaucer, in the mouth of the Squire, promising to tell the story of incestuous
Canacee. It is certainly true that the Squire’s plan for the rest of his tale looks as if it might take
four pilgrimages of its own to complete – the Squire, the son of the Knight, certainly inherited
his father’s long-windedness – and some critics have argued that the Franklin breaks off the tale
(either with irony or with faux modesty and compliments) only to prevent the pilgrimage from
having to endure all of it. Yet critics – who have paid scant attention to the Squire’s Tale, often
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disregarding it as unfinished – have yet to come up with a fully persuasive explanation of why it
is the promise of incest which seems to motivate the abrupt termination of the Squire’s Tale.
William Kamowski has also pointed out that the abridgement of the Squire’s Tale precedes an
abridgement of the Host’s original tale-telling plan: There are lots of interesting avenues for
exploration and interpretation with the Squire’s Tale, yet it only seems fair to conclude that the
critical work on the Tale remains, like the Tale itself, frustratingly inconclusive.

The Franklin’s Tale – The Franklin’s Tale is, as the narrator

acknowledges at the start, a Breton lay, a brief romance supposedly descending from Celtic
origins, and usually dealing with themes of romance, love and usually containing some sort of
supernatural ingredient. Chaucer took the story from Boccaccio’s Decameron though the tale
weaves well into many of the other Tales, including the Merchant’s Tale, which is echoed in
many of the Franklin’s descriptions.
The tale seems to offer the solution to the problem raised and complicated in the other “Marriage
Group” tales in its initial comments that “maistrie” has no place in love. Dorigen and Arvigarus
are among the few happy couples in Chaucer’s Tales, and yet one suspects that the problem of
“maistrie” is sidelined so as to focus on an entirely different problem, and one close to the heart
of the Tales: the problem of language, words, and keeping one’s word.
“Trouthe” is a central word in the tale, meaning “fidelity”, and “truth”, as well as “keeping one’s
word”, and the idea of pledging troth (an Elizabethanism) – giving one’s word as a binding
promise – is central to the agreements between Dorigen and Aurelius. What the Franklin’s Tale
shows us is not dissimilar from the Friar’s Tale - that we have to watch what we say because,
like Dorigen’s promise made “in pley”, we never quite know how things are going to work out.
The word becomes the marker of the deed, and, not to break her word, Dorigen is almost forced
to perform the deed. In a work so concerned with stories and tale-telling, it is significant that
Chaucer (as in the Friar’s and Manciple’s Tales) takes time to remind us of the value of each
individual word we speak, and write.
The tale itself, of course, also bequeaths a word to both of its audiences (that is, the pilgrim
audience of characters and the real-world audience reading or listening to Chaucer) and asks us
to evaluate it in relation to what we have heard. “Fre”, the root of our modern word “free”, can
mean generous (i.e. to give freely) but also has overtones of nobleness, “good behavior”.

The Second Nun’s Tale – The Second Nun's Tale is a conventional

religious biography, a “saint’s life”, as the medieval genre it belongs to is often called. Written in
rime royal, it is very likely that Chaucer composed the tale previous to and separate from the
Canterbury project, and only adapted it to fit within the Tales later. The Second Nun tells the
story of Saint Cecilia in a dry, sanctimonious fashion that exalts her suffering and patient
adherence to her faith, and, in a fashion that might be compared to the Prioress’ and the Clerk’s
tales, stresses the patent inhumanity and saintliness of Cecilia from the first moment.
Like the “litel clergeoun” of the Prioress’ tale, Cecilia transcends the horrors of the mortal world:
she stands against paganism, against false idols, and even against death, and is rewarded by
being translated into a saint at the end of the tale. Some critics have recently begun to compare
this tale to the Canon Yeoman’s tale which follows it, wondering whether Cecilia herself might
undergo some sort of transformational alchemical process: though she, unlike the false Canon’s
trick-coals, is entirely unchanged when heated up.
The tale points to the mythological nature of medieval Christianity. The metaphor of the angelic
floral coronets, which only Christians can see, for example, is a physical manifestation of the
idea that Christians belong to a City of God, a distinct community with shared values that exists
within a secular and often hostile environment. There is perhaps also an interesting thought
lurking in the tale about the problematic contradiction (highlighted by the Host in his words to
the Monk and the Nun’s Priest) that human ministers of God are not allowed to be sexual beings:
Cecilia, of course, sets herself apart from the earthlier women of the Tales (the Wife of Bath is
the key example) by, right at the start of the tale, professing her distaste for sex.

The Canon’s Yeoman’s Tale - is hardly over, when two new

characters arrive on the pilgrimage, sweatily riding up behind the pilgrimage and eventually
overtaking them. The arrival of the Canon and his Yeoman is such an unusual event –
particularly at this point of the Canterbury Tales – that the compiler of the Hengwrt manuscript
(see “The texts of the Tales” for more information on the manuscripts) actually left it out
altogether. It is an unusual construction, and one with “transformation” and “change” as its
central themes - not surprisingly, then, it pins down a change already starting to occur within the
fabric of the Tales as a whole.
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Alchemy is the subject of the Canon Yeoman’s tale, as he calls it, the “sliding” science: and
alchemy argues that all things are in a state of perpetual change, slipping from one thing to
another. Coals can become the philosopher’s stone, metal melts to become a false covering for a
crucifix, and thanks to the trickery of the tale’s false Canon, we are never quite sure what
substance it is we are examining. Can we ever tell what it is we are looking at – can we ever
know the difference between true and false?
The Canon himself is a mysterious, imposing and peripheral figure, and one who, at the very
moment his falsehood appears to be rumbled, runs away from the company, and from the Tales –
for good. He is almost silent, and yet his silence is not (like Chaucer’s) from shyness, or from
high-status - clad in a hooded black robe, with a glimpse of white underneath, he even physically
appears shrouded and covered up. Moreover, we never actually ascertain whether the Yeoman’s
tale is about this Canon, or – as he claims – about another Canon. It seems hugely improbable,
even to take the Yeoman’s words at face value (and the tale offers other warnings about doing
that!), that the Yeoman would have this amount of knowledge about an entirely different Canon.
The Canon then is a liminal figure, sitting somewhere on the border between reality and fiction,
between true and false.
The central image of the Canon Yeoman’s tale is the devilish furnace at the center of their back-
street workshop, and (rather like the alchemical/furnace imagery in Jonson’s The Alchemist) it is
a complex metaphor: for hell, for devilish behavior – and falseness, but also for money. As the
Pardoner argued in his tale, money is the root of all evil: and yet, unlike the slight comeuppance
the Pardoner is served with by the Host at the end of his tale, justice is entirely absent from the
denouement of the Canon Yeoman’s tale. The last furnace we saw in the Tales was Gervays’
in The Miller’s Tale – a timely reminder, perhaps, of the neat interclicking justice of Absolon’s
branding Nicholas. Neither the Canon nor his Yeoman receive any sort of narrative punishment.
Yet the way that this timely reminder of the profitability of falsehood intrudes upon the Tale also
points to the complex narrative problem of the Pardoner’s tale: just in the way that the
Pardoner’s hollow words and empty bones could bring people to salvation, so too can the
Canon’s trickery actually make him money – and, moreover, the Canon’s Yeoman can
supposedly turn this experience into a moral tale for the company to listen to. Of what substance
is a tale made? Can a tale acknowledge the desire for gold and the ingenuity of the
misdemeanors of those who pursue gold without endorsing them? As it is reaching its
conclusion, the pilgrimage is waylaid by another pertinent reminder of the tale-telling project and
its questionable substance. Tales, as Chaucer will admit in the retraction, and language, are not
always innocent.

 The Physician’s Tale - This is a tale which takes no prisoners: with

no prologue to ease us in, this brutal, harsh, violent and uncompromising tale refuses to be read
as a fable (“this is no fable”) or allegory, but insists that we view its cruel and unpleasant events
as things which happen in the real world. One rather wonders why the Physician thinks it will
win him the prize at the end of the tale-telling.
Moreover, the tale rushes towards its unpleasant conclusion, even at the expense of plausibility.
Why doesn’t Virginius try to argue with the judge, or call upon the mob of thousand people who,
only a little later, burst through the doors to deliver justice? Why doesn’t Virginius hide his
daughter, or jump on his knightly steed and escape to another land? Again, as in the Knight’s
Tale and the Franklin’s Tale, there seems to be some interrogation of ideas of chivalry: this is a
man who, without any need for reflection, would rather preserve his daughter’s nobility and
honor than keep her alive. Chaucer again casts a negative light across the codes of honor to
which men adhere.
Critics have not devoted much attention to the tale, except to say that it provides, perhaps, the
first significant “death’s head” in the Canterbury Tales: what hitherto has been a fun, “game”-
some party, a well-meaning competition, despite its squabbles, is suddenly presented with a tale
entirely without good-naturedness or comedy. It is the beginning of a turn toward darkness
which entirely changes the tone and tenor of the Tales as a whole, and – although in its criticism
of hypocrisy, defense of religion and beauty, and painful, final justice, it has much in common
thematically with some of the other tales – it is a tale which seems decidedly set apart from its
predecessors.

The Pardoner’s Tale - become one of the most critically discussed of

the Canterbury pilgrims. His tale is in many ways the exemplar of the contradiction which the
structure of the Tales themselves can so easily exploit, and a good touchstone for highlighting
precisely how Chaucer can complicate an issue without ever giving his own opinion.
Thus the Pardoner embodies precisely the textual conundrum of the Tales themselves - he utters
words which have absolutely no correlation with his actions. His voice, in other words, is
VILLASIS, CHRISTINE JOY U. AB-ELS 1A
entirely at odds with his behavior. The Pardoner’s voice, at the beginning of his tale, rings out
"as round as gooth a belle", summoning his congregation: and yet his church is one of extreme
bad faith. There is a genuine issue here about whether the Pardoner’s tale, being told by the
Pardoner, can actually be the "moral" tale it claims to be.
The imagery of the Pardoner’s Tale also reflects this fundamental hollowness. The tale itself is
strewn with bones, whether in the oath sworn “by Goddes digne bones”, whether in the word for
cursed dice (“bones”) or whether in the bones which the Pardoner stuffs into his glass cases,
pretending they are relics. The literary landscape is strewn with body parts, and missing, absent
bodies: beginning with the anonymous corpse carried past at the beginning of his tale. Bones,
stomachs, coillons – words for body parts cover the page, almost as a grim reminder of the
omnipresence of death in this tale.
The General Prologue, suggesting that the Pardoner resembles a “gelding or a mare”, hints that
the Pardoner may be a congenital eunuch or, taken less literally, a homosexual, and, as the Host
seems to suggest at the end, might well be without his “coillons”, a Middle English word
meaning both “relics” and “testicles”. All of the “relics” in this Tale, including the Pardoner’s,
evade the grasp of the hand. The Pardoner thus can be categorized along with the other bizarrely
feminized males in the Tales, including Absolon, Sir Thopas, and, if we believe the Host,
Chaucer (the character).
And of course, at the center of the tale, there is a search for somebody called “Death” which,
naturally, does not find the person “Death”, but death itself. It is a successful – but ultimately
unsuccessful – search. All that is left over at the center of the Tales is the bushels of gold, sitting
under a tree unclaimed. The root of the tale, as its moral similarly suggests about the root of evil,
is money: and money was, to a medieval reader, known to be a spiritual "death". Notably,
moreover, in the tale, both “gold” and “death” shift from metaphor to reality and back again; a
neat reminder of the ability of the Tales to evade our grasp, raising difficult questions without
ever answering them.

 The Shipman’s Tale - Despite its relative brevity, the Shipman’s Tale
interrogates and complicates several key issues raised in earlier tales. After the darker reaches of
the Physician’s and Pardoner’s Tales, the Shipman’s Tale returns to fabliau origins, presenting a
reasonably simple “trick” story, complicated by Chaucer in the telling.
Primarily, the tale continues the idea, previously raised in The Wife of Bath’s tale, that money,
sex, and women are closely inter-connected. It is interesting that, in the second fragment, the
Shipman promises to tell his tale, mentioning his “joly body” (attractive figure). Scholars have
argued that, in fact, the lines about the Shipman’s “joly body” were intended to be adapted into
the mouth of the Wife of Bath, and it is the Wife of Bath’s Tale which immediately follows the
Shipman’s promise. The bawdy fabliau of the Shipman’s Tale is usually assumed to have been
intended to be The Wife of Bath’s tale before the version we currently have was composed.
Moreover, the Shipman’s would not be an unlikely tale for the Wife to have told. At the end,
when the Host concludes that the monk tricked both the merchant and his wife, he seems not to
have realized the victor at the very end of the tale. Rather like in the Miller’s and the Franklin’s
Tales, we are asked to consider each of the participants at the very close of the tale, and decide
who we think has come off best. It is clearly not the merchant, though he has made huge profits
in his business dealings, and had his loan repaid, and, though (as the Host argues) the monk has
had sex with the wife, remained friends with the merchant, and got off scot-free, it is the wife
herself who seems to triumph. Not only has she had enjoyable sex with both the
merchant and the monk, but she is one hundred franks better off; and she coerces her husband
into agreeing to “pay” in return for sleeping with her.
Like the Wife of Bath, this wife has realized the inherent value of her sexual attractiveness: and
in a way that seems to a modern reader uncomfortably close to prostitution, she bears out the
Wife’s dictum that the “bele chose” is in fact an excellent bargaining tool for women to get what
they want from men. As the Man of Law’s Tale suggested, the female is a pawn in business
transactions, and yet, what the Wives (of bath, and of the merchant in this tale) realize
that Constance never even considers, is their own potential profitability. If women’s bodies are
valuable, these two women seem to say, then why shouldn’t we be the ones to profit from our
bodies?
One also notices the importance attached in these business dealings to giving one’s word, to
agreements sealed with kisses and with handshakes, and of one thing being verbally exchanged
for another before the words become actions – a reminder, perhaps, of the issues of contracts
raised by the Franklin’s Tale.

 The Prioress’s Tale - The Prioress' Tale is overtly a “Miracle of the

Virgin”, a reasonably common Christian genre of literature which represents a tale centered
VILLASIS, CHRISTINE JOY U. AB-ELS 1A
around Christian principles and a devotion to the Virgin Mary, but within the warm affection that
the Prioress shows for her Christian faith is a disquieting anti-Semitism immediately obvious to
the modern reader in our post-Holocaust times.
The tale is an unabashed celebration of motherhood, and an unapologetic argument for the virtue
of Christianity over Judaism, and in most critics’ readings, it partly serves as a grim reminder
that anti-Semitism by no means began with Hitler in the Second World War. The guiding figure
of the tale is the Virgin Mary, addressed directly in its prologue, who serves both as the exemplar
for Christian values and as the intervening spirit who sustains the murdered child before he
passes on to heaven. Her mortal parallel is the mother of the murdered boy, who dearly loves her
son and struggles to find the boy when he is lost.
The Tale itself, as Seth Lerer has pointed out is "a nightmare of performance..." which
"dramatizes just what happens when a performer faces a hostile audience". The little clergeoun
of the tale (the child) is an unsuspecting victim, murdered solely because of his eagerness to
sing: one of many tales which seems to take as its theme the danger of speaking, the potential
danger of words and language, and a warning about what happens to people who open their
mouths at the wrong moment (other such tales include those of the Manciple and the Nun’s
Priest).
Despite its interest in song and performance, the key question still seems to be whether we are to
read the tale as an outdated example of anti-Semitism, acceptable to a medieval audience but
acceptable no longer or whether there is another option. If there is, it probably lies in the
sentimental presentation of the Prioress’ Tale, and the juxtaposition of the extremely angelic
singing seven year old, and the extremely cruel and horrible Jews (who even go to the lengths of
throwing the child’s corpse into a cesspit). If we remember that the Prioress is a woman so
sentimental that she even cries over a dead mouse, it’s quite a contrast in her personality that she
expends such vitriol over the Jews. Perhaps there is some sort of contrast; perhaps the Prioress is
intended to be held at arm’s length from Chaucer. The bottom line with this tale is that it entirely
depends on your reading of the details.

 The Tale of Sir Thopas - Sir Thopas offers up one of the funniest
moments in the Canterbury Tales. Written in ridiculously bouncy tail rhyme, the poem is a
hilarious parody of Middle English verse romances packed full of bizarre pastoral details.
Thopas, for example, is hugely effeminized, well-dressed, and with a girl’s name (Thopas was
usually a woman’s name in the medieval period). Thopas falls in love, in the manner of the
courtly knight, before he has decided who he will be in love with (an elf-queen, in the end) and
runs away from his climactic battle at the end of the first fit because he has forgotten his armour.
In the Ellesmere manuscript, the setting of Sir Thopas has the tale ever vanishing into the
margin, and close readers will note the way each fit is half the length of its predecessor - there is,
as well as its “dogerel” parody of verse romance, a definite sense that Chaucer the character has
definitely run out of things to say. Note the number of times Chaucer has to ask the company to
listen or to be quiet (implying perhaps the jeers and responses of a less-than-impressed pilgrim
audience) and note too the way that details from the prologue seem to echo in the Tales: an
effeminized, antisocial Chaucer becomes an effeminized, entirely chaste Thopas, the Host’s
comment that Chaucer looks like he would find a “hare” becomes a forest with hares for wild
beasts, an “elvish” looking-Chaucer inspires the “elf-queen who is to be Thopas’ lover. To that,
we might add, a storyteller Chaucer reluctant to tell a tale (but pushed into the spotlight)
becomes a knightly Thopas desperate to escape knightly combat. The apparent purposeless of the
narrative, packed with pointless details, might well reflect a narrator who is making the tale up as
he goes along.
There are several interpretable jokes hidden in the fabric of the tale. Chaucer is parodying his
own endless inventiveness, celebrating his own skill at creating varied voices, by presenting
himself as someone who cannot even come up with a single bearable story – and, silenced by his
own characters, the abortion of Chaucer’s tale actually points to a remark about the strength of
his characterization. Chaucer’s characters, it seems, are so well written that they give advice
about tale-telling to their writer. Sir Thopas, vanishing fit by fit as it does, also demonstrates
Chaucer’s awareness of his own elusiveness, the self-vanishing quality which enacts the
invisibility of the writer’s point of view – which we have already mentioned in several other
tales. The Chaucer sent into the fiction to represent the author is, we and he know all too well, a
poor imitation of the real thing - but it is the nearest thing to an omniscient author we are going
to get.

The Tale of Melibee/Melibeus – Melibee, first and

foremost, seems to be a punishment for cutting Chaucer off mid-flight with Sir Thopas; before
beginning it, he promises a “litel thyng in prose”, asks that he is not interrupted, and then
VILLASIS, CHRISTINE JOY U. AB-ELS 1A
delivers a hugely lengthy tale of almost unsurpassed dullness. If one saw in Thopas running from
the giant the figure of Chaucer trying to escape the Host’s demand, Melibee seems to represent
him coming back with the armor.
Some critics have also argued that an omission Chaucer deliberately makes from its source,
Renaud de Louens' Livre de Melibee et de Dame Prudence  (itself a translation of Albertanus of
Brescia, Liber consolationis et consilii) points to Melibee as a separate composition intended for
the recently-crowned Richard II. Among Melibee’s many pieces of advice, Chaucer omits,
significantly for a child-king, “Woe to the land that has a child as king”. Is this, perhaps a
manual for a king?
Melibee is also rather self-consciously a construction; a patchwork of proverbs, sayings and wise
words, some of which have already appeared in the tales, and none of which are likely to be
entirely original. Part of the reason for its length is that its characters constantly cite authority
after authority to justify their opinion – and this academic arguing inflates the thin plot of the tale
into page after page of citation and quotation. So keen is everyone to get their favorite authority
into the argument that we never even find out what happens to mortally-wounded Sophie.
Melibee is, like Thopas (improvised from its situation), a text made up of text – and it proves
(particularly if the Parson’s tale, the only other tale in prose, was a late addition to the
Canterbury project) Chaucer’s mastery of genre, if nothing else. Prose tracts, full of academic
discussion rather than dramatic, narrative progression, are not without of his ability.
Within the tale itself, Prudence is another example of the patient and long-suffering wife who
demonstrates her virtue through stoicism, and, like Constance, her name is an obvious signifier
of one of her prominent qualities (Sophie, the daughter, has a name meaning “wisdom”). Her
role in the story is not as an active agent, she is a passive influence on the other characters; and
she is a good example to consider in examining the issue of “female counsel”, raised hitherto but
particularly in the Nun’s Priest’s Tale. Melibee suggests, above all, that women are worthy
counselors and interpreters, and, although the tale celebrates Prudence, its title is apt - it points to
Melibee himself, a man able to learn from his wife, whose name means “sweet learning” or
“sweet knowledge”.

 The Monk’s Tale - The Monk provides one of the first-known definitions
of tragedy in English literature, and, though his tale might have been fascinating to Chaucer's
medieval audience, many of whom would not know the classical stories it largely details, it does
not receive a huge amount of attention or adoration from modern readers and critics.
The Monk's tragedies are drawn from a variety of sources: Biblical, classical, historical and even
some that, in Chaucer's time, would have been within reasonably recent folklore and memory.
Yet the model of tragedy that the Monk offers is not, in fact, a classical model as such, but a
Boethian one - a reminder of the mutability of life itself, and the tendency of fickle, feminine
Fortune to spin her wheel and bring those at the top crashing down to the ground. It is, on one
level, simply a series of car-crash narratives - an unrelenting dark, Boethian reminder that the
high-status end miserably.
Some more recent studies have tried to locate the Monk's tale, with its emphasis on the stories
told about the history, and its focus on the writers from whom the Monk has drawn the stories, as
a response to Boccaccio's De casibus tragedies and a comment on the involvement of writing,
poets and poetry in the support of tyrants and despots.
Yet neither of these readings of the Tale really explains what it is doing within its context.
Louise Fradenburg argues very persuasively in her book that the Monk is a death's head at the
feast - a sudden explosion of misery and death into the festive fun of the Canterbury project. The
Monk's own solid physical reality, good for breeding (so the Host jokes - and breeding is the
opposite of dying) is juxtaposed with his tales, precisely about the end of the body and its death,
rather than life and strength.
Moreover, the numbers that the Monk quotes - he has a hundred tragedies in his cell, of which he
manages to fit in seventeen before he is interrupted - suggest a painfully dismal repetition of the
fall from fortune to misery, fortune to misery, fortune to misery. It is rather as if the Monk
himself becomes a sort of anti-Canterbury Tales all of his own: each of his mini-tales
progressively darkening the horizon.
It is no wonder then that the Knight sees fit to interrupt the Monk and halt his tale - particularly
as the Monk tells tales largely about the demise of high-status characters (and the Knight, of
course, is the pilgrimage's highest-ranking pilgrim). The Monk himself presents a threat to the
fun of the tale: he is all 'ernest' and no 'game', as the Host points out to him, and - beginning a
trend which arises more and more as these final tales progress - when he is interrupted, he
refuses to speak any further. One of the tellers has his mouth firmly closed.
VILLASIS, CHRISTINE JOY U. AB-ELS 1A

 The Nun’s Priest’s Tale – The Nun’s Priest’s Tale is one of the
best-loved and best-known of all of the Tales, and one whose genre, in Chaucer’s time and now,
is instantly recognizable. It is a beast fable, just like Aesop’s fable, and as one of Chaucer’s
successors, the medieval Scots poet Robert Henryson, would go on to explore in great detail, its
key relationship is that between human and animal. The key question of the genre is addressed at
the end by the narrator himself: telling those who find a tale about animals a folly to take the
moral from the tale, disregarding the tale itself.  For a start, it is important to notice that the
animal-human boundary is blurred even before the tale begins, when the Host mocks the Nun’s
Priest (who, being a religious man, would have been celibate) and suggesting that he would have
made excellent breeding stock (a “tredefowl”, or breeding-fowl, is the word he uses). The
thought is an interesting one – because if we can think of the Nun’s Priest himself as potentially
useful in breeding, animalistic terms, then can we think of his tale in potentially useful in human
terms?
The question frames the other themes of the tale. The issue of woman’s counsel is raised again
(last foregrounded in Chaucer’s tale of Melibee) explicitly – should Chaunticleer take Pertelote’s
advice about how to interpret his dreams? Should he disregard his dreams, and get on with his
life? He does, of course, looking among the cabbages (perhaps even to find herbs), when he sees
the fox – and at that point, the tale seems to suggest, he should never have listened to his wife in
the first place: his fears were valid.
That is, until we remember what the narrator tells us anyway at a crucial point, that his tale is “of
a cok” – about a chicken. It is hardly as if we need a prophetic dream to tell us that foxes like
eating chickens: its what we might call animal instinct. This is doubly highlighted when, after
quoting Cato and discussing the various textual politics of dream interpretation, Chaunticleer
calls his wives excitedly to him because he has found a grain of corn – and then has
uncomplicated animal sex with Pertelote all night. It is a contradiction, Chaucer seems to imply,
to expect unchicken-like behavior from a chicken: yet the contradiction is one which fuels the
whole genre of beast fable. If the Nun’s Priest had too much human dignity and restraint to be a
breeding fowl, Cato-quoting Chaunticleer has animal urges too strong to be a viable auctour.
It is a theme of course which points a sharp finger at the whole idea of a beast fable - the whole
genre, we might argue, resting on the writer precisely ignoring the correct moments to have a
character speak or not speak; and it also is a dangerous moral for the Tales as a whole. In a work
of literature that constantly apes orality, the injunction to shut up is a serious one – and, as a
comparison of the Nun’s Priest’s Tale to the Manciple’s Tale reveals – one very much in
Chaucer’s mind at the very end of the Canterbury project.

The Manciple’s Tale - There is something hugely destructive – and

self-destructive – about this tale, and particularly the way it takes the god of poetry, himself a
plausible representative for the whole idea of the Tales themselves, and turns him into a petty,
jealous murderer. The Manciple’s Tale is almost painfully brief - not given to flights of fancy,
we are given the simple information – jealous husband, unfaithful wife, talking crow, and then
destruction, of wife, of crow, and of poetry.
The Manciple’s Tale is also a cousin, though a darker cousin, of the Nun’s Priest’s Tale, and it
seems likely, at least, at first, that a tale about a talking crow and the mythical god of poetry will
be another fantastical beast fable – the genre leads us to expect the happily ending exploits of
another Chaunticleer. Yet what actually happens is a bitter shift in tone - the happy, metaphorical
beginning of the tale falls through into a painful reality. The god of poetry is a jealous human,
and the white-feathered beautiful-voiced talking crow becomes the black, hollow-voiced
harbinger of doom of reality. The tale brings the reader back to earth with a bump, and its
reminder is clear: know when to fall silent. Know when not to speak, when not to tell.
And “tell” is an appropriate verb to raise - like Chaucer himself, the crow can counterfeit the
speech of every man. The crow, in other words, is a veritable Canterbury poet himself - and what
this tale teaches him, through physical suffering, is that some subjects are simply not to be told.
Chaucer, in the Retraction, raises the worry that the Tales are sinful or blasphemous, and the
moral “hold your tongue” could not simply be the message of the final Tales, but a thought a
nervously religious Chaucer was increasingly coming to find in his own mind. Telling, in other
words, has its limits - and it is better to stop before there are real consequences to it. As the final
real “tale” (discounting the Parson’s sermon) of the Tales, it makes for a bleak, but unmistakable
end.
VILLASIS, CHRISTINE JOY U. AB-ELS 1A

The Parson’s Tale  and “Chaucer’s

Retraction.”
One of the biggest questions about the Tales as a whole is precisely how they end. Throughout
his works, and even within the Tales (look, for example, at the interruptions of Sir Thopas and
the Monk’s tales) Chaucer proves that he knows how to create a false ending, a trick ending,
which ends by not ending, by not concluding. The Canterbury Tales ends on a decidedly pious
and religious note, first with the Parson’s lengthy sermon, and then with a retraction written as
“Chaucer”. The Parson’s sermon, a translation from a medieval work designed to advise clergy
in the salvation of souls, would be a plausible medieval sermon – there seems nothing in it that is
ironic: it is a perfect example of its genre.
Yet can the Parson’s sermon seem anything other than just another genre? In a work which has
anthologized genres – we have already read beast fables, saint’s lives, fabliaux, Breton lays, and
all manner of other stories – and problematised them, drawing attention to their speaker’s voice
as something (as the Pardoner points out) ventriloquized, can we really be expected to take the
Parson’s voice seriously?
Critics disagree wildly about the answer to this question. The same problem applies to Chaucer’s
retraction – which, as in the Man of Law’s prologue, blurs the line between the Chaucer writing
the Tales (who has also written the Book of the Duchess, Troilus and Criseyde, and so on) and
the fictional Chaucer who is a character within the pilgrimage. Is the Chaucer who writes these
tales just another constructed voice?
Or, perhaps, is the Retraction of the tales a genuine one? Chaucer, in this theory, genuinely was
dying and was unable to finish the work – or for some reason, felt the need to immediately
retract it, as he genuinely believed that it did come too close to sin. Thus, before the Host’s plan
was complete, he concluded the tale with a pious sermon and then a Retraction: no-one could
therefore accuse the Tales of being unchristian. Is it a death-bed confession?
A Retraction is a fairly usual way for a medieval work to end, and perhaps that points us to the
aforementioned effect: its very normality is perhaps a clue that Chaucer’s intention is not pure
and simple. For it could be read simply as another “funny voice” – the voice of the Chaucer who
told Sir Thopas: could be read as comedy rather than penance. Moreover, as E.T. Donaldson has
firmly stated, the use of the Parson’s Tale as an interpretative key to unlock the whole of the
Tales is problematic, particularly when you consider the deliberate religious provocation of tales
like the Miller’s, the Wife of Bath’s and the Merchant’s. The tales by no means seem to be
written to a purely Christian agenda - though Christianity is undoubtedly a key theme.
End-points in Chaucer are difficult to definitively interpret, and perhaps this dichotomy was
intended by Chaucer himself. Perhaps this ending is simply one way of closing down the Tales –
the Manciple’s tale, of course, has been only the most recent in a line of tales which reiterate the
advice of these final fragments to hold one’s peace, and know when to fall silent. Is this Chaucer,
on an imaginary, real or literary deathbed, punningly, holding his peace, but also being “at
peace”? One thing is for sure: understanding the ending of the Tales seems a fitting
encapsulation of the complex problem of interpreting the work as a whole.