World as Book: Intertexts in the Nun’s Priest’s Tale

1. World as Book:Intertexts in the Nun’s Priest’s Tale • “Del cok e del gupil,” an Aesopian beast fable by Marie de France, a late 12th-century poet who, we estimate, was born in France but lived in England and wrote primarily in Anglo-Norman French. Beast fable: A short, simple narrative with speaking animals as characters designed to teach a moral or social truth.

2. 2. Roman de Renart, an Old French beast epic. Renart is the main source of the literary tradition associated with Reynard the Fox, the trickster hero of several medieval European cycles of versified animal tales that satirize contemporary human society. Though Reynard is sly, amoral, cowardly, and self-seeking, he is still a sympathetic hero, whose cunning is a necessity for survival. He symbolizes the triumph of craft over brute strength, usually personified by Isengrim, the greedy and dull-witted wolf. Some of the cyclic stories collected around him, such as the wolf or bear fishing with his tail through a hole in the ice, are found all over the world; others, like the sick lion cured by the wolf’s skin, derive by oral transmission from Greco-Roman sources. Beast epic: a satire of the epic, substituting animals for humans and heroes. Usually, a long cycle of animal tales that provides a satiric commentary on human society. Although individual episodes may be drawn from fables, the beast epic differs from the fable not only in length but also in putting less emphasis on a moral.

3. 3. The Monk’s Tale, an example of the “tragedy of Fortune” genre, based on Boccaccio’s De casibusvirorumillustrium. The episodes that make up the tale centre on the workings of the ancient Roman goddess Fortuna and the falls of great men she occasions. The Monk relates, in purely conventional and unimaginative form, the stories of Lucifer, Adam, Samson, Hercules, Nebuchadnezzar, Belshazzar, Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, etc., until he is abruptly interrupted by the Knight, and then the Host, who tell him that his tale is both depressing and boring and no one wants to listen to him anymore. The Nun’s Priest responds to the Monk’s serious moral tone with ultimate “pleye,” to tragedy with comedy, to epic with mock-epic, etc.

4. 4. Fragment VII as a whole. In addition to the Monk and the Nun’s Priest, this fragment includes the tales of the Shipman (fabliau about a rich merchant who is first cuckolded and then ripped off by the monk who sleeps with his wife), the Prioress (example of the “Miracles of the Virgin” genre, in which Jews murder a little boy whose corpse sings the Alma redemptoris mater until the body is found by the townspeople who proceed to execute all the Jews), and Pilgrim Geffrey’sown contributions (The Tale of Sir Thopas, a ridiculous parody of ME romance using a crude tail-rhyme stanza. Geffrey is interrupted by the Host who can’t bear to listen to anymore of his “drasty rhyming”; Geffrey apologizes and explains that he isn’t much of a poet, and then proceeds to offer The Tale of Melibee, a moralistic prose tract on the importance of forgoing vengeance.

5. #4 cont’d But the tales of Fragment VII, as different as they are in tone and subject, share a concern with what Ann W. Astell has called “medieval causes of books.” These causes were typically defined by medieval scholars in terms of Aristotle’s four causes: 1. efficient: human authorship and/or divine inspiration (The Shipman—human skill, The Prioress—divine inspiration) 2. material: literary materials which were the author’s sources (The Monk and his “oldebookes”) 3. formal: the pattern imposed on those sources by the author (The Nun’s Priest and his kaleidoscope of genres) 4. final: the purpose or ultimate good the author intends with his work (the failed instruction of the Melibee, the failed delight of Sir Thopas)

6. The Canterbury Tales as a whole: the Nun’s Priest’s Tale is a story-collection in miniature (and can you find all the allusions to earlier moments on the pilgrimage?...) • All of Chaucer’s other texts (Troilus and Criseyde foreknowledge and free will, courtly love, the dream visions, the “auctoritee debate”). • Almost every literary genre known in Chaucer’s day(beast-fable, epic or mock-epic, satire, tragedy, dream vision, debate, romance, allegory…) and every major philosophical idea debated or written about, from the fall of man and the question of free will to Galenic medicine and the interpretation of dreams. • God’s created universe (references to “real” people and historical events: e.g., Augustine and 14th-century Oxford theologian Bishop Bradwardine, Jack Straw and the 1381 Uprising)