Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales: The Position of Fragment VII (original) (raw)
Related papers
2015
Most manuscripts of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales have placed the fragment that begins with The Shipman's Tale after Fragment VI. Thus, it is usually found as Fragment VII in most modern translations of Chaucer's tales. Although it is the longest tale-cluster in Chaucer's tales, the order of this fragment is still controversial. For instance, Henry Bradshaw insists that this fragment should be moved ahead and placed after Fragment II. On the other hand, most scholars believe that breaking the order of the tales as it exists in the Ellesmere a Manuscript, and as Bradshaw hopes, might ruin the thematic relationship among the tales in different fragments. This research investigates the position of Fragment VII in multiple manuscripts. It evaluates various critical perspectives on the issue and recommend moving fragment VII to be placed after Fragment II. I argue that some amendments to the order found in the Ellesmere a Manuscript and the ones that follow its order might reinforce the thematic relationship among the tales and does not ruin it.
The Chaucer Review: An Indexed Bibliography Vols. 1-30
1997
The structure of the Shipman's Tale can be understood in terms of Chaucer's puns on "cosyn," referring to relationship (between the monk and the merchant, and, indirectly, between the monk and the merchant's wife), and "cosynage," referring to deception. Used no fewer than sixteen times, the two meanings of "cosyn" take on different emphases in the two parts of the tale. In the first part the "relationship" aspect of "cosyn" dominates, with the "deception" aspect submerged. In the second part, the deception aspect dominates. The structure of the tale depends, then, on the structure of the pun.
Chaucer’s Volumes: Toward a New Model of Literary History in the Canterbury Tales
Studies in the Age of Chaucer, 2007
Th e battle between the Wife of Bath and her fifth husband, Jankyn, in which she ''rente out of his book a leef, / For which he smoot me so that I was deef,'' 1 enacts the spectacular failure in transmission that results when a coercive literary tradition collides with an audience whose resistance finally wells over into violence. In addition to its commentary on the effects of antifeminist writings in the Wife's autobiographical prologue-the focus of most recent criticism on the Wife of Bath-the battle also figures the very structure of literary tradition, whose motive force is the dynamic interaction of repetition (emulation, imitation) and rupture, 2 as an overt rivalry. As she tells it, the Wife It gives me great pleasure to acknowledge those whose responses to this essay (or to the papers it draws on) have shaped my thinking:
Framing Chaucer's Canterbury Tales for the Aristocratic Readers of the Ellesmere Manuscript
Medieval Images, Icons, and Illustrated English Literary Texts (chapter 6), 2004
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.
Implications of Narrative Levels in Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales
Geoffrey Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales introduces a multilayered narrative representation of the medieval panorama to the contemporary narratee by its unique portraits of medieval characters from various classes. Along with the stories told in a variety of genres such as romance, fabliau, saint's biography and fable, The Canterbury Tales, like its precursor A Thousand and One Nights, foregrounds the act of storytelling as a prevailing motif, also complicating the diegetic stance of the narrator(s). The first person and third person points of view employed in an isolated manner retain an interactive control over subnarratives and metanarratives. So, different narrators or alternating tones of the narrating act refer to different narrative levels in these tales, which, in Genette's terms, are "diegetic levels." Gaps or connections between these narrative levels are full of implications in a narrative analysis. This paper deals with the narrative levels in The Canterbury Tales and investigates how narrative arrangements contribute to the narrative. Thus, the paper shows that narratives in different degees in Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales function as (a) explanatory, (b) thematic and (c) actinal units.