The Nun's Priest's Tale in the Canterbury Tales

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Recommended: Canterbury tales as a social satire

Chaucer's "The Nun's Priest's Tale" is at once a fable, a tale of courtly love, and a satire mocking fables and courtly love traditions. To this end, Chaucer makes use of several stylistic techniques involving both framing and content. The tale begins and ends with "a poor widwe somdeel stape in age" (line 1), but the majority of the content involves not the widow but the animals on her farm, in particular an arrogant rooster name Chauntecleer. The first mention of the main character does not come until the twenty-ninth line, after twenty-eight lines of minute description of the widow and the farm. The donation of large amounts of time to detail slows down the plot of the story; this plot is even further drawn out by the Nun's Priest's constant interjections, which are mostly delivered in very formal language. Chaucer's use of abundant narrative intrusion and profuse attention to detail create a story in which the plot is marginalized and traditional structures broken, the result of which is an ambience where the absurdity of fable and courtly love can easily come to light.

The Nun's Priest's tale begins with the mention of a poor old widow living in a cottage. The majority of the first page of the short story deals with the details of this woman's life. Only after every detail of her person and her farm has been revealed is the main character, Chauntecleer, introduced. The story also returns the focus to the woman at its end. The framing of the story is such that the events of the story all occur within the confines of this woman's life. This clever framing does not allow the reader to adequately realize the characters in the story; they are, at any given point in the story, less than human. The high language and con...

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...so, with the belittling of Chauntecleer, Chaucer makes a point of showing the idiocy of deriving morals from a tale about animals, which lack moral reason. Long-winded and ultimately inconsequential paragraphs of minute detail only further the depiction of the events of the barnyard as commonplace, and the narrator's formal-speech interjections over-apply high allusion and upper-class sentiment, pointing out the irony in paying close mind to a story about an ordinary day in the life of a barnyard animal. By using these rhetorical and stylistic tactics, Chaucer expertly mocks the writing styles and conventions of his day, creating a story that is at first glance highly traditional but on closer inspection sharply satirical.

Work Cited

Chaucer, Geoffrey. "The Canterbury Tales." The Progress of Nonsense. Ed. Doug O'Keefe. Evanston: Northwestern University, 2006.

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