13 - The Nun’s Priest’s Tale

Summary

Chaucer’s Nun’s Priest’s Tale, a version of the well-known tale of the cock and the fox, has been read as a Menippean parody of a spectrum of authors: various forms and kinds of knowledge, from proverbs to dream theory to poetics to anti-Pelagian theology, proffer a myriad of ways in which to read the world without cohering in the slightest with one another, or solving the immediate, practical problem faced by the cock and his hens: the threat of death at the hands of a creature that they have not yet directly encountered. This chapter suggests how modern readers of the tale might negotiate its formidable critical legacy and find their way to a fresh, unique encounter with a tale in which direct experience promises a means of liberation from the plethora of discourses in which narration is always in danger of becoming mired. In pursuing experience rather than authority, the chapter argues, we are following a trail that begins within the tale itself.