6 - Restraining the deviant speaker: Chaucer's Manciple and Parson

Summary

“Thou getest fable noon ytoold for me,

For Paul, that writeth unto Thymothee,

Repreveth hem that weyven soothfastnesse

And tellen fables and swich wrecchednesse.

Why sholde I sowen draf out of my fest,

Whan I may sowen whete, if that me lest?

For which I seye, if that yow list to heere

Moralitee and vertuous mateere,

And thanne that ye wol yeve me audience.”

(Tales.X.31–9)

When the Parson of The Canterbury Tales refuses to tell a fable, he does more than announce his non-fictive catechesis, more than reflect indirectly on the Manciple's Ovidian fable of Phebus and the crow. Addressed by the Host as “Sire preest,” he speaks as a priest about the speech appropriate for a priest. Although pastoral discourse on deviant speech, as we have seen, singles out certain social groups as prone to certain Sins of the Tongue (lawyer to lying, monk to murmur, entertainer to scurrility), it rarely distinguishes between cleric and laic, setting different, or stricter, norms for the clergy. On fables, it does. Under ociosa verba (idle or empty words) or vaniloquium, six pastoral texts, including one of the two which Siegfried Wenzel has found to be the closest, of known texts, to the Parson's treatment of the Seven Sins, forbid fables (fabulae) and other trifling speech (nugae) to priests, lest such idle words compromise their authority as religious teachers.