The Manciple’s Tale

Summary

I. Ovid, Metamorphoses 753

(ed. Frank Justus Miller)

II. Ovide moralisé 755

(ed. C. de Boer)

III. Guillaume de Machaut, Le Livre dou Voir Dit 759

(ed. Daniel Leech-Wilkinson)

IV. John Gower, Confessio Amantis 769

(ed. G. C. Macaulay)

V. The Seven Sages of Rome 771

(ed. Karl Brunner)

James A. Work asserted in 1941 that The Manciple’s Tale had no one source but was cobbled together from Chaucer’s memories of a common story and related materials; no scholar since then has convincingly undermined that assertion. The story of Phoebus, his unfaithful wife, and a tattling bird that the god changes from white to black circulated in a number of different texts, one of which was a work to which Chaucer alludes frequently in his poetry, Ovid’s Metamorphoses. However, the Latin story differs in several significant details from Chaucer’s. Ovid gives Phebus’s wife’s name as Coronis, which Chaucer omits; Ovid’s raven travels to find the absent Phebus whereas in Chaucer the wife’s infidelity occurs while the crow is caged at home, where he waits for his master to return; and Ovid’s Coronis pleads for the life of the child in her womb as Phebus threatens to kill her, but the nameless wife in Chaucer’s tale is not described as pregnant. Chaucer also adds the crow’s loss of his singing voice as punishment.

The Ovide moralisé (c. 1225) and Guillaume de Machaut’s Le livre du voir dit (c. 1365) also include versions of this fable that resemble Chaucer’s in tone and, to some extent, in the focus upon unwise speech, but both of these versions follow Ovid more closely than Chaucer’s does. The story also appears in John Gower’s Confessio Amantis, where the emphasis on proverbial wisdom addressed to “Mi sone” strongly resembles the self-consciously labored, parodic concluding lines of Chaucer’s tale. However, there is no conclusive evidence that Chaucer knew Gower’s version, which is shorter than The Manciple’s Tale and differs from it in a number of ways; in fact, Gower’s tale may not predate Chaucer’s at all. Another strong Middle English analogue for the tale is The Seven Sages of Rome, a translation of the French Li Romans des sept sages; the version printed here is from the Auchinleck Manuscript.