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 Nun's Priest's Tale," one of the verse narratives in Geoffrey Chaucer's *The Canterbury Tales* (late 14th century), a frame-story collection in the tradition of Boccaccio and medieval beast fable. The tale centers on Chauntecleer, a magnificently described rooster living on a poor widow's farm, who recounts a frightening dream to his favorite hen Pertelote — a vision of a fox-like beast threatening his life. Pertelote dismisses the dream as the product of an excess of bile and melancholy (invoking humoral theory), prescribes herbal laxatives, and cites Cato's authority that dreams are worthless. Chauntecleer counters at length with learned exempla — including a murdered pilgrim whose ghost directs his companion to the hidden body, and a traveler warned by dream not to sail — arguing from classical and patristic authority that prophetic dreams must be heeded. The tale is distinctively comic in its mock-heroic register: barnyard animals speak in the language of medieval scholasticism and courtly love, allowing Chaucer to satirize clerical debate culture, marital argument, and the pretensions of learning. Readers drawn to medieval literary humor, the question of fate versus free will, or the relationship between dream-vision and narrative will find this tale one of the richest and most ironic in the collection.

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

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