The canterbury tales

This article combines critical race theory and adaptation studies to investigate racialized brownness in the Canterbury Tales and contemporary Chaucer receptions. The first section offers a close reading of somatic brownness in Chaucer's Romaunt of the Rose and General Prologue, and it incorporates brown into a constellation of color terms-in conjunction with whiteness and blackness-that Chaucerians deploy to theorize medieval race metaphors and race-making. The second section builds on sociological research to examine constructions of brown as a capacious racial designation in the Middle Ages and today. The third section examines creative updates of Chaucer that explore meanings of brownness across time and space: Nigerian British poet Patience Agbabi's Telling Tales; Mexican American poet Frank Mundo's Brubury Tales; and Indian director Avie Luthra's "The Sea Captain's Tale, " a screen adaptation of the Shipman's Tale. The conclusion considers theories of "brown kinship" and their implications for Chaucer reception studies globally.

William Morris (1834-1896) was not only a prolic writer and artist of the Victorian Age,
but also the embodiment of Neo-medievalism, which dominated the age, with his interest
in medieval manuscripts, sagas, romances and the gothic tradition as reected in his
professional life. Trying to avoid the inuences of the Industrial Revolution on individuals, Morris turned to medieval ideals and materialised them in his paintings and drawings as a Victorian medievalist. Yet, it was the foundation of the Kelmscott Press that endowed Morris with the best means to display his interest in medieval arts and literature. The Kelmscott Chaucer (1896) can be regarded as the product both of Morris's idealisation of Chaucer as a medieval poet, and of what Karen Barad denes as the “intra-action” of matter and discourse. Accordingly, through an analysis of the illustrated pages of The Canterbury Tales section of the Kelmscott Chaucer, the aim of this article is to analyse this book as a pictorial utopia and argue that Morris displays the intra-action of matter and discourse through his search for medieval printing techniques.

Keywords: William Morris; Neo-medievalism; Chaucer; The Kelmscott Chaucer; Pictorial Utopia

Ankara University The Journal of the Faculty of Languages and History-Geography 57.2 (2017): 1055-1069.

"Maintaining a radical, unconventional, and ambitious thesis, to say the least, Workman makes his case so fully, and with such learning and conviction, that even his most resistant readers will find themselves forced to interrogate the comfort zone of their own critical habits of mind. Whether or not Workman succeeds entirely in elevating Chaucer's poetics into the neo-Platonic sublime remains an open question. But what is certain is this: Written with boldness and panache, this wonderfully readable study articulates an interpretative position that is unique among contemporary studies - not only of Chaucer, but of medieval literature generally."
- Peter W. Travis, Professor of English, Dartmouth College, USA

"This exhilarating study shows us Chaucer thinking the deepest of thoughts about the metaphysics of Art, but doing so with an entirely characteristic blend of high seriousness and low humour. Workman's approach offers a restless bricolage of analysis and analogy, illustration, and illumination, to reveal the essentially metapoetic and metaphysical basis of Chaucerian narrative. Workman's Chaucer is both Ancient and Modern, effortlessly classicising and radically posthumanist, spinning an elegant gossamer of Poetic theory from the fabric of his own narrative practice."
- Vincent Gillespie, J. R. R. Tolkien Professor of English Literature and Language, University of Oxford, UK

Este trabajo trata de la evolución del bufón isabelino a través de la comedia clásica latina con el Miles Gloriosus de Plauto y el parásito latino en Terencio, sin olvidar la comedia en la literatura medieval con Los Cuentos de Canterbury de Geoffrey Chaucer y los interludios del Teatro Tudor con la figura del Vice, utilizando como ejemplo a Ralph Roister Doister y su Matthew Merrygreek, hasta llegar a las características del bufón isabelino aplicado a tres obras de Shakespeare: Mucho Ruido y Pocas Nueces, Sueño de una Noche de Verano y Enrique IV.

Palabras clave: Comedia clásica, Parásito latino, Plauto, Miles Gloriosus, Terencio, Chaucer, Los Cuentos de Canterbury, Teatro Tudor, Interludios, Vice, Ralph Roister Doister, Matthew Merrygreek, Bufón isabelino, William Shakespeare, Dogberry, Bottom, Falstaff.

The purpose of this essay is to present an evolution of the Elizabethan fool since the Classical comedy with Plautus’ Miles Gloriosus and Terence’s parasitus, without forgetting the comedy during Medieval literature with Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales and the interludes when the Tudor theatre with the figure of the Vice, using as an example Nicholas Udall’s interlude Ralph Roister Doister and his Matthew Merrygreek, to the characteristics of the Elizabethan fool in relation to three Shakespearean plays: Much Ado About Nothing, A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Henry IV.

Key Words: Classical comedy, Latin Parasitus, Plautus, Miles Gloriosus, Terence, Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales, The Tudor Theatre, Interludes, Vice, Ralph Roister Doister, Matthew Merrygreek, Elizabethan Fool, William Shakespeare, Dogberry, Bottom, Falstaff.

Resumo: Os Contos da Cantuária de Geoffrey Chaucer foram um marco para a Língua Inglesa, pois têm o objetivo de ser um extrato da vida dessa sociedade do final do século XIV. A partir deste, serão verificadas as transformações sociais ocorridas no período e como os ideais cristãos foram articulados pelo autor da obra. Deste modo, será analisado o discurso dos narradores em O Conto do Frade, O Conto do Beleguim, O prólogo do Vendedor de Indulgências e O Conto do Criado do Cônego, no que diz respeito à atuação do clero e seu espaço na sociedade medieval e em como a historiografia aborda os valores de conduta presentes nesses Contos, comparando-os com a crítica social presente em Chaucer.
Abstract: The Canterbury Tales written by Geoffrey Chaucer are considered a milestone for the English Language; they have the goal of being an extract of this society's life in the late fourteenth century. We will verify the social changes and how the Christian ideals were articulated by the author. We will analyze the speech of the narrators in The Friar's Tale, The Summoner's Tale, The Pardoner's Prologue and The Canon's Yeoman regarding to the role of clergy and their place in medieval society and how the values of conduct are discusses in these tales comparing them with the social critique presented in Chaucer's work.

Despite few overt references to the Black Death (1348-49) or later pandemic waves (1361-62, 1369, 1379-83, 1389-93), the Canterbury Tales (c.1387-1400) offer a compelling psychogram of a diverse community processing massive demographic shifts and lasting intergenerational traumas in the wake of a cataclysmic pandemic. Building on Boccaccio’s account of a group of noblemen escaping plague-stricken Florence for a bucolic retreat, Chaucer imagines a motley crew of itinerant first and second generation survivors who journey towards the shrine of Thomas Becket - the saint “who helped them when they were sick” (General Prologue 18) - while engaging in a storytelling contest, whose uncertain outcome (the work was left unfinished) locks the pilgrims in a state of compulsive narration mimicking their intergenerational trauma.

Echoes of the Black Death reverberate throughout the Tales, most noticeably in the Pardoner’s Tale, whose chronotope and story arc allegorize the plague’s lethality and swift transmission. Pandemic archetypes populate the General Prologue in the shape of bogeymen (Cook), fallen socialites (Knight, Prioress), rivalling opportunists (Miller, Reeve), wealthy inheritors (Wife of Bath), corrupt clergy (Pardoner), and utopian visionaries (Franklin). Post-pandemic social change is reflected in volatile social and linguistic codes (notably skewed forms of address), while socio-economic grievances (aired by the ‘churls’) are delivered through maladaptive child modes reminiscent of trauma literature.

Significantly, such egocentric coping mechanisms are regularly countered by visions of collaborative inclusivity (the Host’s), mutual altruism (the Franklin’s) and genuine piety (the Parson’s). Several narrators display a sense of existential dread linked to traumatic experiences (the Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale), and their mediated narrations arguably serve as Chaucer the pilgrim’s conduit for processing diffuse affective intergenerational memories. There are thus many ways in which the Canterbury Tales explore the remembering, narrativizing and processing of intergenerational trauma at multiple levels.

The Miller's Prologue and Tale explode many of the promises of the General Prologue and of The Knight's Tale. If at first the Host appears to control the tale-telling contest, the Miller's domination of the Host in his prologue makes it clear that command of the game will constantly be renegotiated. If the aristocratic sensibilities of The Knight's Tale prepare the reader for stories of chivalric heroes and their lofty values, The Miller's Tale steers the poem headlong into the earthy, amoral, world of the French fabliau, where common people navigate material concerns (see Muscatine). The Miller takes The Canterbury Tales in new directions, and also initiates a general pattern that the tales will follow. That is, the poem will be structured largely by the principle of contrast-a ludic tale will often follow an "ernest" one, "sentence" (moral instruction) will tend to follow "solaas" (pleasure), and churlishness will just as often answer gentility. What's more, one of the most important aesthetic effects of the poem will be the texture that these striking contrasts produce. All of this begins with Robyn the Miller, whom the General Prologue describes following the literary conventions of the grotesque. A "stout carl for the nones", his physical features are exceptionally large-his mouth, his nostrils, his beard, his shoulders, and, one is left to assume, the sow-colored wart on his nose (I.545). The Miller's portrait evokes directly and indirectly the image of a pig, an animal that was closely associated with the Miller's preferred instrument, the bagpipes (see Scott). He is a musical figure-a "janglere" and "goliard"-and music, both well-performed and poorly-performed, becomes important to his tale (I.560). Chaucer's fellow Ricardian poet, William Langland, seems to have associated millers with incompetent or lowprestige musical performance, naming Munde the milner as an example of an unskilled player (see Mann). Robyn's largeness and fierceness make him physically formidable, a skilled wrestler, and capable of breaking down doors with his head or ripping them from their frames. Door-buster is a fitting epithet for this burly fellow, not only because he knows how to make an entrance, but also because of his interest in blasting social and intellectual barriers, for, as we see in the tale, it is Nicholas' closed chamber door that conceals his secret knowledge and "pryveteee" from the gullible carpenter (I.3454). That it is Robyn's proxy in the tale-a servant and "strong carl for the nones" of the same name-who hoists this door off its hinges makes clear just what the Miller thinks of this secret learning (I.3469). Chaucer's unflattering physical description of the Miller is only one tactic he uses to distance himself from the character and the tale. In the Prologue, Chaucer the narrator addresses the reader with a disclaimer-a warning that echoes the sentiment expressed in Chaucer's apology from the General Prologue, but in a slyer, more taunting tone-urging his audience not to mistake the Miller's words for his own. For, after all, it is his solemn duty to report the tale as it was told, even if it is a "cherles tale" full of "harlotrie" (I.3169, 3184). The good news

This paper explores how Chaucer may have met the traditions of sworn brotherhood, and what his influences were when writing the Knight’s Tale. This is the first part of my essay "False Brotherhood in Chaucer’s The Knight’s Tale," in the second part of which (going to be published soon) I analyse The Knight's Tale itself and the bond between Palamon and Arcite on the basis of the rules of sworn brotherhood.

citation: Simonkay, Zsuzsanna. “False Brotherhood in Chaucer’s The Knight’s Tale / Part 1: Sworn Brotherhood and Chaucer’s Sources on Friendship.” HUSSE 11: Proceedings of the 11th Conference of the Hungarian Society for the Study of English. Ed. Veronika Ruttkay and Bálint Gárdos. Budapest: L'Harmattan, 2014. 159-171. Print.

Geoffrey Chaucer's pilgrims in his monumental work The Canterbury Tales have been widely treated by the scholars who produced copious articles and books on the countless matters focusing on each pilgrim. Nevertheless, little attention has been paid to Harry Bailly, the striking innkeeper of the text. Bailly guides a group of medieval people of different ranks to the shrine of Saint Thomas Becket in Canterbury which introduces the reader to the greatest panorama of the medieval period. As the main framework of the text, Bailly asks pilgrims to tell stories on their way to Canterbury. Bailly does not tell a story himself; yet, he becomes so successful in handling of the disputes among the pilgrims and putting all of them in order; and every time he has a say for the stories as well as the story tellers. He is also very cautious about the traditional three estates order which constitutes the backbone of the medieval society. The Canterbury Tales can be envisaged without any of its pilgrims, but not without a Harry Bailly. He is the authoritative figure, and a know-it-all. Throughout the text, he performs divergent roles as a host, a leader, a judge, a critic and a governor. Although his commanding position is impeded by his domineering wife, taken as another Wife of Bath in the paper, Bailly occupies a unique position as the maestro of the pilgrims. Accordingly, this paper aims to dwell on Harry Bailly in the Canterbury Tales to present him as the inalienable yet neglected character of the masterpiece of Geoffrey Chaucer.

This essay will analyse the presence of Elements of the Carnival —such as the Grotesque, Church Criticism and Laughter— in Geoffrey Chaucer's "The Canterbury Tales" through concepts of the Carnivalesque developed by Mikhail Bakhtin in "Rabelais and His World" and by Lillian Bisson in "Chaucer and the Late Medieval World".

Geoffrey Chaucer and the Politics of English as a minority language Fall 2013 English Studies University of Copenhagen Chaucer and the Politics of English as a minority language 16/12/2013 David Gomes zrp475 2 Chaucer's Wife of Bath and the re-invention of women in the late 14 th Century 'Who peyntede the leon, tel me who? By God, if wommen hadde writen stories, As clerkes han withinne hire oratories, They wolde han writen of men moore wikkednesse Than al the mark of Adam may redresse. … The clerk, when he is oold, and may noght do Of Venus werkes worth his olde sho, Thanne sit he doun, and writ in his dotage That wommen kan nat kepe hir marriage!' (III, 693-96, 707-10) Understanding how women lived and their role in society in the late fourteenth century is an ongoing task that raises many questions to which answers can never be definite. Historical evidence and the surviving literature from that time can give us the best guidance in such endeavour, even though one should be cautious when analysing a body of literature which is mostly constituted by male authorship. One particularly relevant example is the book Le Ménagie de Paris (c. 1393), a French medieval guidebook written by a sixtyyear-old man for his fifteen-year-old wife. In it he includes references to some of Chaucer's tales and female characters, Griselda being one of them, as he cites her as a reference to Chaucer and the Politics of English as a minority language 16/12/2013 David Gomes zrp475 3

In Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, the Wife of Bath's Prologue, the passage of Husband Number Four features an unfocused stream of consciousness characterized by disjointed interjections and changes of subject. In tandem, these factors become telling features of the Wife, Alison's, conflicted psychological state. At Line 458, she says, "Now wol I speke of my ferthe housbonde" then describes his character a man who "he hadde a paramour" (line 460).

Middle English Literature

The second part of the anthology including examples of Middle English Literature starting with Sir Gawain and Canterbury Tales. The anthology is intended as a source of texts for students.

English Literature – An Anthology for Students. Volume 1 - From the Old English Period to the Eighteenth Century. Poznań: Dom Wydawniczy Rebis, 2010, pp. 512.

Studies in the Orthography of Some Early Manuscripts of Chaucer’s “Canterbury Tales”
―
Jacob Thaisen
Volume I: Analysis and discussion

A thesis submitted for the partial fulfilment of the requirements for the award of the degree of Ph.D.
―
De Montfort University
October 2005
―

Abstract

The systems of spelling found in the extant manuscripts of a late Middle English text are rarely considered in discussions of the transmission of that text. If they are, scholars have typically used the occurrence of dialectal spellings to allocate manuscripts to geographical areas or the occurrence of identical spellings, often unusual spellings, in corresponding locations across the manuscripts to recover the usage of the presumed archetype. The basis for much of this scholarship has been profiles which rely upon text samples or which list what spellings are found in a manuscript but do not reveal the internal distribution of these spellings in that manuscript.

This study considers the spelling and codicology of nine complete, textually-important manuscripts of Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, each of which was copied by a different scribe. The author semi-automatically indexes the electronic transcripts prepared by the Canterbury Tales Project from the spellings registered in the Project spelling databases for one of the tales. He extracts a comprehensive spelling profile for each manuscript from this index. The profiles correspond to the questionnaire used for Angus McIntosh, M.L. Samuels, et al., A Linguistic Atlas of Late Mediaeval English (Aberdeen, 1986).

The author next evaluates the distribution of the variant spellings of each lemma relative to one another in the individual manuscripts. This evaluation leads to the findings that these manuscripts typically contain relatively few co-ordinate sets of spelling and that the boundary between two such sets usually coincides with a change in the codicology of the individual manuscript. This congruence can be related to the number of exemplars used by the scribes of these manuscripts in preparing them, implying that, with outside support, late Middle English manuscript spelling can be useful for textual purposes.

Much Canterbury Tales scholarship has been dominated by a view developed by some textual scholars in the interwar years. According to this view the first manuscripts were compiled from multiple exemplars due to individually circulating tales or, at best, from material received piecemeal, for Chaucer left the poem unfinished. This study concludes in opposition that large tranches of the text were physically together in a fixed order already when it reached the early scribes.

All’interno del Second Nun’s Prologue nei Canterbury Tales di Geoffrey Chaucer, troviamo l’Invocacio ad Mariam, i cui versi 36-74 sono ricchi di allusioni ad altri scritti. In questo articolo investigheremo diversi passaggi tratti da diverse fonti, delle quali il più importante è il Paradiso dantesco. Anche l’influenza degli inni latini deve essere apprezzata, sebbene il parallelismo con Dante possa lasciarla nell’ombra.
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Verses 36-74 of the Invocatio ad Mariam, in the Second Nun’s Prologue of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, strongly reference other literary sources. This paper examines the most important textual parallels, particularly the Paradiso written by Dante. A further focus is also the reference to the Latin hymns, although the influence of the Commedia can overshadow their role.

The concepts of orality and literacy seem to strive against and resist each other, yet so much of effective modern communication is based off how these two cultures of communication play off each other. Writing has changed the world people live in, structuring it with definable rules and nearly universal points of reference. People however, are still drawn to their traditional roots in oral culture and attempt to replicate a kind of orality through writing.

This article offers a new analysis of line 469 in the General Prologue of the Canterbury Tales: ‘Upon an amblere esily she sat’. Rather than considering what the ambler itself might represent, traditional scholarship has rather narrowly focused on the physical detail that the Wife appears to ride her horse astride, instead of side-saddle, as can be identified in the Ellesmere Manuscript portrait. The Wife’s riding style is subsequently viewed critically as evidence of her inherent masculinity which is almost always taken pejoratively. This article eschews these interpretations by specifically linking ‘amblere’ to a 13th century text called the Lai du Trot which morally distinguishes between two approaches to love through the gaits ‘amble’ and ‘trot’.Thus,  by paying close attention to Chaucer’s language and the wider implication of his use of the word ‘amblere’ we can subsequently allow for a more moral consideration of the Wife through the symbol of her horse.

In the Friar’s Tale, the summoner extorts his victims with the promise of striking their names from his “feyned mandement.” Then, in the Summoner’s Tale, the friar’s companion planes away the names of their patrons from his wax tablets. In these two parallel acts, we get a glimpse into a deep seated cultural anxiety over the opportunities and dangers posed by various forms of textual and documentary erasure. This essay explores the materiality and literary significance of such erasures, which ultimately invite us to revise our view of these two antagonistic tales and read them not merely as a simple expression of quiting, but instead as an instance of mutual cancellation in which the erasure of a name simultaneously inscribes a person into the narrative.

Study of the Islamicate background of two tales which appear in Boccaccio and Chaucer, specifically the Enchanted Pear Tree in the Decameron the Chaste Empress / Persecuted Queen in the Man of Law's Tale.  The former has earlier analogues in Ibn al-Jawzi in Arabic and and Mowlana Jalal al-Din Rumi in Persian.  The latter has analogues in `Attar's Persian telling in the Elahi-nama and in al-Kulayni's Arabic legal compendium, al-Furu` min al-Kafi.  It traces the "enchanted" tree tale in the symbolic trees of paradise and hell in Islamic tradition, and in the apochryphal Book of Daniel and Susanna.  It also traces the Persecuted Empress tale in English, French and Latin tradition, as well as in Arabic and Persian.
Publisher's webpage:  https://brill.com/view/title/15440

Geoffrey Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales presents pilgrims whose status in the medieval three estates is not clearly defined. The Prioress is one of those pilgrims who experiences in-betweenness as she lives in what Bhabha terms the " territories " (1994, p. 28) of her former and present estates, the nobility and the clergy respectively. In fact, the members of medieval monasteries were mostly of the noble origin. Generally, it was not the choice of the members of the nobility to enter monasteries; yet, it was the wish of their families. Thereby, most of the noble men and women had to leave their previously secular and worldly life behind and live in full compliance with the monastic rules which required an entirely ascetic life. Accordingly, in most cases, the noble members of monasteries had difficulty in adjusting to monastic life which put them in between the territories of their former and present estates, in what Bhabha terms " a third space " (1994, p. 28). As they neither completely belonged to the nobility nor to the clergy, those nobles of monasteries lived in a third space contesting the territories of both estates. Thus, they became medieval hybrids. Similar to her historical counterparts, Chaucer's Prioress of noble birth can find a fixed status or identity neither in the nobility nor in the clergy, and she has to live in between them. That is, the Prioress develops a hybrid identity at the interface between her former and present estates. Within this context, this paper aims to discuss Chaucer's Prioress in The Canterbury Tales as a medieval hybrid who occupies a medieval third space on the borders between the nobility and the clergy.
Öz Geoffrey Chaucer'ın Canterbury Hikayeleri Ortaçağ'ın üç sınıfında yeri tam olarak belli olmayan hacıları resmeder. Eski (soylular) ve yeni (ruhban) sınıfları arasındaki Bhabha'nın deyişiyle " alanlarda " yaşam sürdüğü için arada kalan Başrahibe bu hacılardan biridir. Ortaçağ'da manastır mensupları genellikle soylulardan oluşurdu. Soylular manastırlara çoğunlukla kendi tercihlerinden değil, ailelerinin istekleri doğrultusunda girerlerdi. Bu yüzden, bu asil erkek ve kadınların çoğu laik ve dünyevi hayatlarını arkalarında bırakıp, bütünüyle dünyaya kapalı bir hayat gerektiren manastır kuralları doğrultusunda yaşamak zorunda kalırlardı. Dolayısıyla, manastırın asil mensupları çoğunlukla manastır hayatına ayak uydurmakta zorluk çekerler ve Bhabha'nın " üçüncü alan " olarak tanımladığı eski ve yeni sınıflarının arasında yaşamak zorunda bırakılırlardı. Tam anlamıyla ne soylu nede ruhban sınıfına ait olmayan manastırın bu soylu mensupları iki sınıfında alanlarını kapsayan üçüncü bir alanda yaşayarak Ortaçağın melez bireylerine dönüştüler. Tarihteki emsallerine benzer bir şekilde, kendine ne soylular nede ruhban sınıfında

The medieval universe was captivated by composite monsters like manticores and centaurs which adorned the margins of manuscripts and tales of medieval man. Medieval monsters were at the same time the Others of the society. Medieval Others are largely treated under the monster studies which begin with the dichotomy of "Us" (human beings) and "Them" (monsters). The Others of the Middle Ages were not limited to beasts, but embraced Saracens and Jews as the monstrous Others alongside heretics, pagans, homosexuals, lepers and witches. With their atypical social positions, millers were among those monstrous Others or "Them" of the Middle Ages as they could not be fitted into any of the three estates; namely the clergy, the nobility and the commoners. They were the unwanted upstarts and leading rebels of the Peasants' Revolt of 1381. In accordance with their monstrous presence, the chronicles depicted the millers of the revolt with animal-like qualities. Similar to their historical counterparts, the most notable feature of Chaucer's Miller in The Canterbury Tales is his animal-like appearance with a hairy face and a gigantic mouth. Aggressive and disruptive, rather than a human, the Miller looks like a wild animal bringing down doors-literally social boundaries-with his head. Parallel to the Miller in The General Prologue, the miller in The Reeve's Tale possesses an animal-like appearance and a disobedient nature that grows into a threat to the social order. In this respect, this paper discusses Chaucer's Miller in The General Prologue and his miller in The Reeve's Tale as medieval monsters who are man-animal composites and defiant Others.

An introduction to the study of Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales, focusing on "The General Prologue". The lecture includes a discussion of Chaucer's life and works, the structure of The Canterbury Tales, the "frame narrative" tradition, the pilgrimage theme and "The General Prologue" as an "estates satire".

Generations of scholars have analyzed the culminating tale of Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales—The Pardoner’s Prologue and Tale, asserting the confessional theme, sermon structure, sacramental hermeneutics or reconciliation results of it. While looking at these assertions, it is intriguing to find how these themes and structures reflect our current Roman Catholic Sunday mass. This essay will attempt to piece these approaches together as the sequential components that mirror our Sunday Eucharistic celebration. This essay will suggest the Pardoner’s confession to the other pilgrims in the Prologue mirrors The Penitential Rite. Most importantly this essay will bring forth the idea that the first part of his tale reflects the Liturgy of the Word. And as he tells the tale of the old man and three rioters, it mirrors a Homily or a Sermon. Finally with the help of the Knight, the Pardoner reconciles with the Host which mirrors the Creed bringing unity upon parishioners. This paper will also look into Hans Boersma’s Heavenly Participation, and its discussion on sacramental ontology in tandem with the thesis of The Pardoner’s Prologue and Tale mirroring the Roman Catholic mass. I will also reference Norman Harrington’s views on The Pardoner’s Prologue as a confessional link. Before looking at The Pardoner’s Tale as the Liturgy of the Word and a Homily, I will contrast Rodney Delasanta’s theory on the tale having sacramental elements. Although in tandem with my analysis, Delasanta’s theory can be seen as a fragment of a Roman Catholic Eucharist celebration. I will then proceed to incorporate Roger Ellis and Alan Gardiner’s debate on whether The Pardoner’s Tale has sermon elements, as well as Robert P. Merrix analysis of a medieval sermon structure. This essay will also briefly look into the similarities and differences of biblical reference and values The Parson’s Tale and The Pardoner’s Tale have. And with a brief look at Chaucer’s Retractions, the ending of The Canterbury Tales, will be argued as an ever-unfolding Eucharistic feast.

In this article, I discuss the roles of both the poet and pilgrim as narrator in Chaucer's the Canterbury Tales. I maintain that as each of these subject-positions asserts its authority, each, in turn appropriates that authority from the other. This results in a mimetic misprision which confuses the center of the poem's textuality, and forces the reader/listener to wrestle with the notion of the poem's poetic priority. I demonstrate this by examining the common view that sees the pilgrim as a simpleton, as demonstrated in the poem, itself, and the portrait of Chaucer the Pilgrim in the Ellesmere manuscript, and contrast this to the rhetorical content present in the poem through a discussion of the General Prologue.

In its restrained elegance, the visual presentation of the Canterbury Tales in the Ellesmere manuscriptl is quite unlike that of the comparatively humble miniatures of the Pearl manuscript, but there is an absence of images of divinity and saints in both. Instead of portraying potentially idolatrous images in illustration of the tales, the Ellesmere manuscript portrays the pilgrim narrators. Such a strategy indirectly emphasizes authors, if not divine authorship, although that is alluded to in Chaucer' s leue or "confession" on the last folio (fig. 58). That focus on authorship, however, does not account entirely for the reticence about making divine images in a manuscript intended, as I will suggest, for the new Lancastrian regime, which was to become identified with the orthodox position advocating the use of religious images. Timing may have been a factor if this manuscript was made during a 1 San Marino, Huntington Library, MS Ellesmere 26 C9, made in London probably within the frrst decade ofthe fifteenth century (see discussions in The Ellesmere Chaucer, cited below). I would like to thank Mary Robertson, the Chief Curator of Manuscripts, for granting me access to the precious original, which made possible many insights, both technical and conceptual. This manuscript has been published in a facsimile, "a covetable object in its own right" (in the words of Jill Mann in the information brochure), by the Huntington Library and Yushodo Co. ofTokyo as The Ellesmere Chaucerin 1995. A companion volume, Martin Stevensand Daniel Woodward, eds., The Ellesmere Chaucer: Essays in Interpretation (San Marino and Tokyo, 1995), contains the most extensive studies of individual aspects of this manuscript to date. It includes bibliographical references, as does Kathleen Scott' s catalogue entry no. 42 for the Ellesmere in Later Gothic Manuscripts 2: 140-43. In my transcriptions from the Ellesmere manuscript, all Middle English expansions of abbreviations have been inserted italicized and follow the line numbers in Larry Benson, ed., The Riverside Chaucer, 3rd edn. (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1990). Expansions ofLatin abbreviations have been enclosed in brackets. References are given parenthetically, employing standard abbreviations for the tales. Prologues are designated by "Pro," so that "ProFrT," e.g., indicates the Prologue to the Friar 's Tale. Citations ofChaucer' s other literary works arealso from The Riverside Chaucer.