Sacred Texts: Legends and Sagas

The Canterbury Tales and Other Works of Chaucer (Middle E...

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This is an excerpt from "The Shipman's Tale," one of Chaucer's *Canterbury Tales* (late 14th century) — a verse fabliau, the bawdy comic genre of adultery and clever swindling inherited from French tradition. It introduces a wealthy Saint-Denis merchant, his beautiful and extravagant wife, and their intimate friend Daun John, a charming monk who has cultivated the household's affections under the pretense of cousinship with the husband. As the merchant prepares for a business trip to Bruges, his wife privately confesses to the monk that her husband is a miser, and she desperately needs a hundred francs to pay a debt she fears will dishonor her — she pledges sexual repayment in exchange for the loan. In a darkly comic irony, the monk then immediately turns around and borrows the same hundred francs from the merchant himself, claiming to need it for livestock, so the husband unknowingly finances both his own cuckolding and his wife's betrayal. The tale's distinctive perspective is its frank, almost mercantile view of marriage and desire: wives are framed as costly household expenditures, and erotic and financial transactions are presented as interchangeable — a cynicism the Shipman (himself a practical, amoral figure) delivers without moral commentary. Readers considering the full text will find a tightly plotted comic triangle where the joke ultimately lands on the merchant and the "debt" is collected in a way he never anticipates.

The Canterbury Tales and Other Works of Chaucer (Middle E...

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