Form: Prose, like Chaucer the Pilgrim's "Melibee."

MS Position: always last, and always with the Retraction in MSS that record either (all four main MS groups and the two early witnesses, "Hengwyrt" [Nat. Lib. of Wales MS Peniarth 392D], and B.L. MS Harleian 7334).

Characters: Humanity as a whole, with emphasis on its susceptibility to harming its soul by self-destructive behavior.

Prologue Summary:  Repeating the "astrological" trope for announcing the time by cosmic signs (I.1 ff. and II.1 ff.), Chaucer-the-Pilgrim tells us "we were entryng at a thropes ende" (12) and the Host urges the priest to tell a tale. This includes the controversial claim that "...Now lakketh us no tales mo than oon. / Fulfilled is my sentence and my decree; / I trowe that we han herd of ech degree; / Almoost fulfiled is al myn ordinaunce" (X.14-17). The Manciple is named in many MSS as the teller who just finished, but in Hengwyrt "Manciple" is written over an erasure. Mainly, one wonders how the Manciple's tale could have taken from the morning until 4 P.M. to tell, but then again, one is not Chaucer.  Had he lived beyond 1400, he might well have come up with tales for the Guildsmen, or even their wives, to fill the time gaps in the narrative frame--heck, he might have had them all tell a second tale and make it back to the Tabard Inn for Harry's climactic "judgment of the tales"!  But he didn't, or he chose not to.

        Chaucer may have intended ParsT to conclude the whole CT structure because of the Host's urging the Parson to "knyttte up wel a greet mateere" (28), which could refer to the CT as whole. The Prologue contains echoes of previous tales reaching back to Fragment I with the reference to astrological time, the "pley" issue (23), the act of revelation ("unbokele and shewe us what is in thy male" [X.26]; compare I.3115], and the choice to tell virtuous tales as opposed to "fable" (31-41). The Parson offers to tell his tale "To knytte up al this feeeste and make an ende" (47), implying the tale is a summa or logical "summation" of all that has gone before.  He also elevates the narrative focus, "To shewe yow the wey, in this viage," or the actual pilgrimage, to "thilke parfit glorious pilgrymage / That hyghte Jerusalem celestial" (X.49, 50-51).

        The last lines anticipate Paradise in a series of parallel antithetical paradoxes: "there as the body of man, that whilom was foul and derk, is moore cleer than the sonne; ther as the body, that whilom was syk, freele, and fieble, and mortal, is inmortal, and so strong and so hool that ther may no thyng apeyren it; / ther as ne is neither hunger, thurst, ne coold, but every soule replenyssed with the sighte of the parfit knowynge of God. / This blisful regne may men purchase by poverte espiritueel, and the glorie by lowenesse, the plentee of joye by hunger and thurst, and the rest by travaille, and the lyf by deeth and mortification of synne" (1078-80). These are the last lines of the "tales of Canterbury," though not the last lines in MSS of CT (see "Retraction" (X.1081-1091).

Problems, issues, discussion points:

1) The logical structure is marred by some weak transitions, outright errors, and probable transition problems. Most notable is an exceptionally weak transition link between sources @ X.387 ("Now is it bihovely thyng to telle whiche been the sevene deedly synnes..."--so why is it suddenly "bihovely" to do so?).

3) Disproportionate sizes of sections on sin and penance.--ditto.

4) Early or late work? If it's a weak tale, critics like to put it as early as 1358, (Langhans, Anglia, 1929--he also accepts a birthdate earlier than 1340, so we don't have to swallow a 14-year-old Chaucer/Parson). Others place it after 1385, like Owen (MLN [1956]: 84-7) and Patterson (Traditio 34 [1978]: 356-70).

Critics on Parson's Tale:

Baldwin, Unity of Canterbury Tales (1955): PT is the moral center of CT and its statements about sin can be taken as GC's intended judgments of individual tellers and tales (also Huppe, A Reading of the Canterbury Tales, 1964).

Closure in The Canterbury Tales: The Role of the Parson’s Tale, ed. David Raybin and Linda Tarte Holley.  (Kalamazoo, Michigan: Western Michigan UP Medieval, 2000).

This collection of essays might be said to derive from Siegfried Wenzel’s lifetime of work on Parson’s Tale, and his introductory essay (“The Parson’s Tale in Current Literary Studies,” 1-10) provides the best overview of the tale’s critical history.  PT might be said to constitute the most difficult interpretive crux in Chaucer’s work, occupying the terminal position in all tale orders and differing so greatly from all the other tales except “Melibee,” likewise a “moral tale in prose.”

Main Collection

826.2 C49HcaSra 2000

Ruggiers ('65), Jordan ('67), Norton-Smith ('74) and others read the tale as a more general moral description of society's flaws, a corrective designed to bring CT to closure in as a piece of Christian morality.

E.T. Donaldson, Speaking of Chaucer (1970) attacked the direct application of ParsT doctrine as an interpretive "key" to unlock the other tales' sentence.

Portnoy, Phyllis. "Beyond the Gothic Cathedral: Post-Modern Reflections in the Canterbury Tales." Chaucer Review. 28:3 (1994) 279-92.

                Studying the difficulties of the final fragment's tales, Portnoy proposes that their rhetoric against tale-telling and the Parson's sermon contribute to Chaucer's strategy of refusing closure.   Portnoy's title alludes to Robert Jordan's 1967 study (Chaucer and the Shape of Creation) that proposed a structural analogy between the tales' arched oppositions on various topics (professions, marriage, salvation, fraud) and the gothic cathedral's flying buttresses which erect the structure by striving against each other as they rise to the central peak. In Jordan's scheme, the "Parson's Tale," considered a moralizing aesthetic flaw by some 1950s  New Critics and 1970s structuralists, was in fact the apex of the "cathedral"'s highest tower, reaching toward heaven. Portnoy's study of the interpretive patterns in the tales as a whole, and especially in the last fragment, lead her to believe that the "cathedral" structure is a figment of Jordan's imagination because it makes Chaucer more of an optimistic moralist than the tales can support. Finally, the "Retractions" end the act of narration, itself, "as the multiple voices are silenced by the last words of the poet" (279). Portnoy touches on many of the more important early tales, including the whole of Fragment 1, the Wife of Bath's and Nun's Priest's tales, but she spends most of her time on the "Parson's Tale" and the "Retractions."

Twu, Krista Sue-Lo.  "Chaucer's Vision of the Tree of Life: Crossing the Road with the Rood in the Parson's Tale."  Chaucer Review 39:4 (2005), 341-78.

            Showing further evidence of this “tale”’s renewed interest for critics, Twu’s article combines New Critical close-reading analysis with New Historicist evidence from English Medieval authors’ attitudes toward the act of translation.  She concentrates on Chaucer’s lifting of one section of Raymund of Penaforte’s Summa de poenitentia et matrimonio (1221) on the crucial role of penitence in Christian spiritual life, and his decision to change Raymund’s central metaphor from the three-day journey motif to the image of a “tree of penitence.”  Drawing on Medieval iconography to analyze the “vegetative” metaphors in CT and in C15 religious practice, Twu argues that the “tree metaphor both unifies and simplifies the interpretive relationship with the biblical material [in the sermon] while providing a more complex commentary on the two types of pilgrimage,” that of the soul toward God and of the CT pilgrims toward Canterbury (10).  Throughout the article, she refers specifically to “Chaucer” (i.e., the poet, not the pilgrim narrator) as the author of the tale, suggesting a relationship between this tale and the “Retractions” which follow it in modern editions.