Chaucer and the Social Contest (Routledge Revivals) by Knapp Peggy;

Author:Knapp, Peggy; [Knapp, Peggy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Group
Published: 2022-05-31T00:00:00+00:00

The Nun's Priest's Fablis and Glosses

The dialogic nature of the Canterbury Tales is nowhere more evident than in the comic egalitarianism of the Nun's Priest's Tale. Muscatine discussed it last because he found it an epitome and capstone of all Chaucer's poetry.16 It seems a light-hearted summa of the persons, tendencies and issues the rest of the narrative supplies. The broadest focus, though, may be its sharp-witted, but inconclusive, commentary on the role of fictions in moral teaching. And here again the authorized and Wycliffite meanings contend.

The prologue to the Nun's Priest's story focuses the problem of teaching through fiction by its rejection of the Monk's handling of his avowedly didactic tragedies. The Monk's definition of tragedy sounds Boethian—a similar passage occurs in a gloss on II. pr. 2. 70 of Chaucer's translation of the Consolation—and therefore admonitory, and many of the separate tragedies have their morals appended. The Knight and Host make a telling point about the matter, though, when they interrupt the Monk to remind him that a “sentence” requires an audience. Stories offer useful instruction only if they effectively induce the listener's interest and good will, although, as I have argued earlier, the Monk's tales are also less than lucid about the lessons being taught. Harry Bailly thinks the Monk might do better on a topic he knows first hand and suggests “somewhat of huntyng,” but the Monk, presumably offended, relinquishes his turn. In a sense, then, the Nun's Priest, as the next performer, is challenged to work out the disputed problem of right balance between delight and instruction in narrative.

The debate about the truth value of fictional narrative dates from antiquity, but Christian thought complicates the formula “sense revealed from under a veil of fiction” by positing the absolute preeminence of the revealed Word of the Incarnation. Saint Augustine's famous argument in On Christian Doctrine is that, just as the Israelites were commanded to take things of value with them from pagan Egypt, Christians are permitted to learn from the ancients. When the Egyptian “clothing” they took with them concerns human institutions “accommodated to human society and necessary to the conduct of life, [it] should be seized and held to be converted to Christian uses” (2.60.60). This general permission was often applied to defend the Christian use of pagan or non-scriptural fictions. It is probably fair to count Boccaccio's defense of fiction as the prevailing resolution of the debate in the late Middle Ages—fiction is “a form of discourse, which, under the guise of invention, illustrates or proves and idea,” provided the hearer or reader seeks beyond its “superficial aspect.”17 Such a defense of fiction could be shaped to fit the exegetical principle of fruit hidden inside chaff.

The acceptance of fiction for teaching is confirmed by its widespread use in sermon-making within mainstream, authorized practice. The outline of the proper form for a popular sermon included a place for exempla as a matter of course, although the more scholarly “university sermons” proceeded without them.18 The unauthorized, Wycliffite view was strongly opposed to the inclusion of any non-biblical material in the pulpit.

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