8 - The Friar’s Tale and The Summoner’s Tale in Word and Deed

Summary

Often overshadowed by the other works of the “Marriage Group,” the tales told by the Friar and the Summoner powerfully engage with several of the social issues that Chaucer interrogates within the Canterbury Tales, including medieval anti-clericalism and anti-fraternalism, institutional corruption, the fourteenth-century gift economy, and even demonology. Most important, however, The Friar’s Tale and The Summoner’s Tale indulge in a ribald exploration of the tangled relationships among entente, utterance, and performance - a web of social and linguistic concerns that Chaucer invokes as early as the General Prologue and regularly reasserts throughout the Tales. While it pays heed to the vocational rivalry that motivates the Friar and Summoner, this chapter also considers their tales in relation to the broader linguistic problematic of Chaucer’s project. The Friar’s caustic exploration of the performative efficacy of the spoken word and the Summoner’s cynical implication that speech is, quite literally, a lot of hot air offer a gloss of one of the Canterbury Tales’ most enduring puzzles, the ongoing struggle to reconcile the word with the deed and the ethical stakes of doing so.