Nun’s Priest’s Tale, The

   by Geoffrey Chaucer

(ca. 1395)

   One of the most widely read and admired of CHAUCER’s CANTERBURY TALES, The Nun’s Priest’s Tale is a BEAST FABLE in which a fox tricks a cock named Chaunticleer into closing his eyes to sing in order to seize him and carry him away, and the cock subsequently tricks the fox into letting him go. But the tale is told in a mock-heroic style that treats Chaunticleer and his favorite wife, Pertelote, as if they are a knight and lady in a courtly ROMANCE. The tale is also full of fascinating digressions and rhetorical displays that effectively divert the reader from the simple plot. Chaucer’s tale seems to be drawn from the ROMAN DE REYNART, an epic-length compilation of the fables of Reynart the Fox. The ultimate source of the story was probably a fable by MARIE DE FRANCE called “Del cok e del gupil,” or “The Cock and the Fox.”

   In the tale the rooster Chaunticleer lives like a king with his seven wives in the barnyard of a poor widow. Sleeping next to his beloved Pertelote, Chanticleer awakes in a great fright. He tells Pertelote that he has dreamt of being attacked by a strange, red beast. Pertelote, vowing that she cannot love a coward, tells Chaunticleer that his dream was likely caused by indigestion, and offers to mix up a laxative for him. But Chaunticleer, declaring that he defies laxatives, defends the prophetic power of dreams. He recounts several examples of dreams that proved accurate in foretelling disastrous events. Yet despite besting her in a long debate, Chaunticleer ends up following Pertelote’s advice to pay no heed to the dream.

   As Chaunticleer struts about the yard later in the day, he is startled by a fox, who through flattery gets the cock to close his eyes, stand on his toes, and crow loudly. But as soon as Chaunticleer blinks, the fox seizes him and makes for the woods. The widow, her household, and all the animals on the farm, even down to the buzzing bees, pursue the fox. The narrator goes through a number of digressions at this point, including a meditation on free will and predestination, a diatribe against taking women’s advice, a complaint about the evils that occur on Fridays that parodies a lament on the death of RICHARD I by GEOFFREY OF VINSAUF, and a catalogue of all those who join in the chase. Ultimately Chaunticleer saves himself by convincing the fox to taunt the pursuing crowd once he has reached the safety of the woods.

   When the fox opens his mouth to do so, Chaunticleer flies to the safety of a tree. As the tale ends Chaunticleer draws the moral that one should not blink when one ought to keep his eyes open, and the fox answers with the moral that one shouldn’t speak when one ought to keep silent. The narrator concludes that the reader should take the fruit of the tale and leave the chaff. This last direction has been difficult for scholars to follow, since almost all of the tale is “chaff ”—that is, digressions that have little to do with the basic plot or any morals drawn from it. Like the rest of the tale, that final advice is probably a joke, since in it Chaucer invites us to dismiss nearly all of the tale. Scholars have noted the appropriateness of the tale to a priest narrator, especially one that served a nunnery. The tale’s relationship with The MONK’S TALE, which precedes it, has also been explored, particularly the way the tale parodies the “fall of a great man,” the theme of the tragedies that make up The Monk’s Tale. Other scholars have seen relationships between this tale and other tales in Fragment VII of The Canterbury Tales, including The PRIORESS’S TALE, whose moral “murder will out” is echoed when Chaunticleer describes his dream. Perhaps most fruitfully, the tale has been interpreted as a parody of rhetorical excess, so that the tale’s style is, in fact, its central point. Some have seen the narrator as losing control of his material through his unchecked rhetorical flights. But all agree that this is one of the most entertaining of all Chaucer’s tales—a masterwork of comedy.

   Bibliography

   ■ Benson, Larry, ed. The Riverside Chaucer. 3rd ed. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987.

   ■ Bloomfield, Morton W. “The Wisdom of the Nun’s Priest’s Tale.” In Chaucerian Problems and Perspectives: Essays Presented to Paul E. Beichner, C.S.C., edited by Edward Vasta and Zacharias P. Thundy, 70–82. Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1979.

   ■ Gallick, Susan. “Styles of Usage in the Nun’s Priest’s Tale,” Chaucer Review 11 (1978): 232–247.

   ■ Johnson, Lynn Staley. “ ‘To Make in Som Comedye’: Chaunticleer, Son of Troy,” Chaucer Review 19 (1985): 225–244.

   ■ Wheatley, Edward. “Commentary Displacing Text: The Nun’s Priest’s Tale and the Scholastic Fable Tradition,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 18 (1996): 119–141.