The fox foolishly does so, and the nimble rooster
escapes. The fox and cock then exchange morals:
“beware of fl attery” and “hold your tongue.”
One of the most brilliant and witty stories in The
CANTERBURY TALES, “The Nun’s Priest’s Tale,” GEOFFREY
CHAUCER’s only BEAST FABLE, is widely anthologized. It
retells the story of the cock and the fox, a FABLE that
goes as far back as Aesop. Chaucer’s sources for his tale
are largely French and ANGLO-NORMAN redactions:
MARIE DE FRANCE’s fable “Del cok e del grupil,” and
REYNARD LITERATURE, especially the Renart le Contrefait.
(ca. 1319–1342). Chaucer’s tale, however, is some-
what longer and more complex than many of his
sources, owing to the characterizations of his chickens
and the descriptive talents of the pilgrim narrator.
Moreover, the Tale also contains elements from the
ROMANCE and sermon traditions, such as courtly man-
ners (parodied by chickens), exempla (see EXEMPLUM),
and a moral. The moral of “The Nun’s Priest’s Tale”
remains far less clear than those of its sources or its
modern adapted forms, leaving a tale that deals more
with moralizing than any one particular moral. Over-
all, however, “The Nun’s Priest’s Tale” does not lack
the moral typically found in fables of the cock and
fox—admonitions regarding pride or false fl attery.
Instead, it offers a hyper-abundance of morals, both
throughout the tale and in a crescendo at the story’s
close.
The wit and sophistication of “The Nun’s Priest’s
Tale” lies in its telling, especially the highly self-con-
scious mode of narration that combines simplicity and
irony. That style appears in a number of incongruous
and lengthy passages discoursing on various subjects
typically of no concern to barn fowl: COURTLY LOVE,
digestion, free will, predestination, tragedy, antifemi-
nism, and the nature of dreams. The tale’s characters,
as well as the narrator, invoke numerous authorities on
these subjects, from the homespun wisdom of Cato on
the physiology of dreams and digestion to the book of
Lancelot, “That wommen holde in ful gret reverence.”
The protagonist rooster, Chanticleer, cites what he
claims to be biblical wisdom to quell the disturbance
with his wife caused by his dream: “In principio, / mulier
est hominis confusio” [In the beginning, / Woman is
man’s confounding], which Chanticleer intentionally
mistranslates in such a way as to regain his authority
over Pertelote intellectually and sexually. Authorities
such as Geoffrey of Vinsauf and Thomas Bradwardine
are also cited in the raucous comedy of the Nun’s
Priest’s beast fable. Meditating on the largest issues
such a tale-telling pilgrimage might engage, “The Nun’s
Priest’s Tale” makes its claim to being the most self-
conscious of Chaucer’s literary productions. Largely
for this reason, scholars attribute a late date to the tale’s
composition, after the idea of The Canterbury Tales had
fi rmly taken hold of Chaucer’s imagination. Moreover,
the reference to the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 dictates
composition after that, and only two occurrences of
Friday, May 3—1392 and 1398—occur afterward.
Thus, most scholars date the tale to the mid- to late
1390s.
The narrator’s modest protestations of his tale’s sim-
plicity and his polite deferrals to the authority of other
books are everywhere overwritten by the formal and
structural qualities of his story. This is a tale in which a
talking rooster admonishes his wife about the pro-
phetic powers of dreams by recounting the narrative in
a book (by “Oon of the gretteste auctour that men
rede”) in which the protagonist recounts a dream in
which yet another fi gure arrives to tell a story of mur-
der and a dung cart that foretells his own death. These
receding, inset narratives contain other narratives
around which various textual authorities are assem-
bled. The multilayered structure of the tale thus refl ects
the multilayered structure of the tale collection as a
whole, in which pilgrim fi gures are invented to voice
various inset narratives, and where the speaker’s voice
recedes in the wake of the inset levels of fi ction he cre-
ates, all of which are overlaid by Chaucer’s own
“authoritative” position outside the frame.
The superlative self-conscious situation and narra-
tive exposition in “The Nun’s Priest’s Tale” leads us to
a consideration of its narrator, a shadowy fi gure who
recedes so seamlessly into the background that we may
be tempted to identify with Chaucer himself. This may
be an effect of his facelessness in the GENERAL PROLOGUE
TO THE CANTERBURY TALES, where he is simply one of the
“preestes three” traveling with the Prioress. The blank
characterization allows for, and perhaps cultivates, this
kind of authorial projection. But it is most certainly the292 “NUN’S PRIEST’S TALE, THE”