{"collection":"Sacred Texts: Legends and Sagas","full_text_available":false,"graph_url":"https://unchartedknowledge.5gfusion.net/v2/api/page/sacred_texts_v1_neu_eng_mect_mect45_htm/graph","html_url":"https://unchartedknowledge.5gfusion.net/v2/page/sacred_texts_v1_neu_eng_mect_mect45_htm","id":"sacred_texts_v1_neu_eng_mect_mect45_htm","license":"unknown_pending_legal_review","rights_basis":"sacred_texts_v1_preview_gate_primary_text_only; acquisition-method/ToS and compilation-copyright questions still open, not resolved by this gate","source":"sacred_texts_v1","source_url":"https://unchartedknowledge.5gfusion.net/browse/neu/eng/mect/mect45.htm","summary":"This is \"The Manciple's Tale\" from Geoffrey Chaucer's *Canterbury Tales* (late 14th century), a verse narrative in the tradition of the classical myth retelling and moral exemplum. It recounts how Phoebus Apollo, portrayed as a perfect knight, keeps a white crow that can speak and sing; the crow witnesses Phoebus's wife sleeping with a lover and reports it to him, whereupon Phoebus kills his wife in a rage, then bitterly regrets it and punishes the crow by stripping it of its white feathers, its song, and its speech \u2014 the origin of why crows are black and harsh-voiced. The tale's stated moral is a pointed warning against loose speech: do not tell a man his wife is unfaithful, because he will hate you for it. What makes the tale distinctive is its self-undermining irony: the narrator digresses into a long passage arguing that \"flesh is naturally unfaithful\" (using the caged bird, the cat, and the she-wolf as examples), then pivots to blame men rather than women for infidelity, and ultimately frames the crow's honest truth-telling as a punishable betrayal. The closing maternal sermon on keeping one's tongue \u2014 drawn from Solomon, David, and Seneca \u2014 is delivered at such repetitive length that it itself becomes an example of the very over-talking it warns against. The tale raises uncomfortable questions about whether truth-telling is ever safe or virtuous, making it one of Chaucer's more cynically comic pieces.","tags":[],"text":null,"title":"The Canterbury Tales and Other Works of Chaucer (Middle E...","tradition":"Sacred Texts: Legends and Sagas","translated_text":null,"word_count":2041}