The Parson's Tale

Depiction of the Parson, from the Ellesmere Manuscript.

The Parson's Tale seems, from the evidence of its prologue, to have been intended as the final tale of Geoffrey Chaucer's poetic cycle The Canterbury Tales. The "tale", which is the longest of all the surviving contributions by Chaucer's pilgrims, is in fact neither a story nor a poem, but a long and unrelieved prose treatise on penance. Critics and readers are generally unclear what rhetorical effect Chaucer may have intended by ending his cycle in this unlikely, extra-generic fashion.

Framing narrative

It is clear from the Parson's Prologue that - at least by the time Chaucer was writing the Prologue - it was to be the final tale: the host, Harry Bailly, tells the Parson "Thou sholdest knytte up wel a greet mateere", and the Parson agrees to "knytte up al this feeste, and make an ende".

Thematically, it is linked to the Manciple's Tale, which directly precedes it in all major manuscripts. The Manciple's Tale warns against careless speech; when the host asks the Parson to tell a fable, the Parson refuses, condemning the telling of fables and referring to the Epistle to Timothy. The last two tales thus "represent a closing down of the work". The General Prologue had initially set out a plan for four stories to be told by each pilgrim, a contest ending in a feast at the Tabard Inn once the travellers had returned from Canterbury. By the time Chaucer was writing the Parson's Prologue, he had instead chosen to end the work with the pilgrims still en route to Canterbury: instead of being judged by Harry Bailly on their storytelling, they will be judged by God on their souls.

The Tale

Unlike every other tale of Canterbury, the Parson's Tale is not a tale at all, but rather a treatise on penitence and the Seven Deadly Sins. Citing Saint John Chrysotom, the parson divides penitence into three parts: contrition of the heart, confession of the mouth, and satisfaction (making amends). In the first part, he explains at length how a person comes to universal and total contrition. In the second, he explains the kinds of sins, and how one makes a true confession. In the third and final part, he explains how to make satisfaction for one's sins, and reminds his listeners that "the fruyt of penaunce [...] is the endelees blisse of hevene" (§ 111).

Chaucer himself claims to be swayed by the plea for penitence, since he follows the Parson's Tale with a Retraction (the conceit which appears to have been the intended close to the entire cycle) in which he personally asks forgiveness for any offences he may have caused and (perhaps) for ever having deigned to write works of worldly vanitee at all (line 1085).

This kind of treatise was popular in the later Middle Ages, since it was decided at the Fourth Council of the Lateran (1215) that every Christian should make confession at least once a year. Initially, manuals, written in Latin, were primarily intended as reference works for confessors. By Chaucer's day, they circulated in vernacular languages, for personal, non-clerical use, as a kind of "self-help" manual. Chaucer appears to have complied the tale himself mostly from three different thirteenth-century works, translating their contents into English. He used the Summa de poenitentia of the Dominican Raymund of Pennaforte for the sections on contrition, confession, and satisfaction, inserting the material on the sins in the middle from a source that ultimately traces to the Summa vitiorum of Dominican William Perault. (Chaucer may have come to this text in a shortened form that was circulating in England at the time.) He also incorporated elements from the Summa virtutum de remediis anime, a work on the remedial virtues. Chaucer adapted and condensed these works, interspersing them with elements from proverbs and other literature.

It is possible that the tale was originally written outside of the context of the Canterbury Tales, and only added to them at a later date. Popular among early Chaucer scholars was the hypothesis that not only that this was the case, but that Chaucer had never intended it to be part of the Tales at all. Instead, so this theory goes, Chaucer left the Parson's Prologue without a tale to follow it, and what we know of as the Parson's Tale was added to this gap.

Manuscript context

f. 224v of the Ellesmere manuscript, showing scribal marginalia.

The Parson's Tale is included in most manuscripts of the Canterbury Tales, but owing to its position as the final tale, damage to the manuscripts has often left it incomplete.

The scribes who copied the tale often added marginal glosses and other ordinatio to help readers navigate the dense paragraphs of text.

Character of the Parson

The Parson's portrait in the General Prologue "stresses his teaching by example rather than by precept"; unlike other characters, who use scripture for their own ends, the Parson is the only one who uses scripture for the exclusive purpose of benefiting his listeners' souls. His tale, accordingly, is somewhat drab, boring, and single-voiced. Because sin is the subversion of reason, the Parson avoids appealing to his listeners' emotions. Nevertheless, scholars have found some elements of Chaucerian style and rhetoric in the piece.

Scholars have suspected the Parson of Lollard sympathies, but Peggy Knapp has found his vocabulary hews to orthodoxy. His discussion of sin is, while in depth, theologically conventional; he presents sin as a dis-ordering of a divine rules by which "alle thynges been ordeyned and nombred'".

Interpretation

Scholars are divided on how much the Parson's Tale represents Chaucer's own beliefs, as opposed to imagined beliefs of the fictional character of the Parson. In general, readers have struggled with this tale, seeing it as a repudiation of the rest of Chaucer's work. The contrast between the previous more lively tales and the Parson's treatise has led many to assume it is a dull and unoriginal work, with some scholars even having suggested that it was not composed by Chaucer at all, but simply copied or translated by him for his own use, and added to the Tales after his death. While this view is no longer common, even scholars who believe the work to be Chaucer's find that it does not refer to the rest of the Tales as one might expect, even though they include many examples of the sins that the Parson decries. Although the tale is importantly located at the end of Chaucer's compilation, "its most important characteristic [is] its generality."

See also

• Penitential
• Exemplum

Further reading

• Raybin, David B.; Holley, Linda Tarte, eds. (2000). Closure in the Canterbury tales: the role of The parson's tale. Studies in medieval culture. Kalmamazoo, Mich: Medieval Institute Publications, Western Michigan University. ISBN 978-1-58044-011-0.
  • an annotated bibliography is available on pp. 209-252.
• Lawton, David (1987). "Chaucer's Two Ways: The Pilgrimage Frame of The Canterbury Tales". Studies in the Age of Chaucer. 9 (1): 3–40. doi:10.1353/sac.1987.0000. ISSN 1949-0755.

External links

• "The Parson's Prologue and Tale", middle-english hypertext with glossary and side-by-side middle english and modern english
• "Parson's Tale" retold in Modern English prose
• Works related to The Parson's Prologue and Tale (Chaucer) at Wikisource