right|thumb|Depiction of the Parson, from the [[Ellesmere Manuscript.]]

"The Parson's Tale" is the final tale of Geoffrey Chaucer's fourteenth-century poetic cycle The Canterbury Tales. Its teller, the Parson, is a virtuous priest who takes his role as spiritual caretaker of his parish seriously. Instead of telling a story as the other pilgrims do, he delivers a treatise on penitence and the Seven Deadly Sins. This was a popular genre in the Middle Ages; Chaucer's is a translation and reworking that ultimately derives from the Latin manuals of two Dominican friars, Raymund of Pennaforte and William Perault. Modern readers and critics have found it pedantic and boring, especially in comparison to the rest of the Canterbury Tales. Some scholars have questioned whether Chaucer ever intended the "Parson's Tale" to be part of the Tales at all, but more recent scholarship understands it as integral to the work, providing an appropriate ending to a series of stories concerned with the value of fiction itself.

Framing narrative

The General Prologue of the Canterbury Tales introduces the characters, a diverse group of pilgrims on the way to Canterbury Cathedral to see the shrine of Thomas Becket. While the Host, Harry Bailey, proposes a story-telling competition in which each teller will tell two tales on the way there and two on the way back to the Tabard Inn in Southwark – a total of over 100 stories – only 24 full or partial tales exist. It is unclear whether Chaucer intended to write all 120, or whether he had never intended to fulfil the promise of the General Prologue in the first place. Additionally, when Chaucer died in the intended order of the tales in the collection was still unclear. However, it is evident from the Parson's Prologue that – at least by the time Chaucer was writing the Prologue – it was intended to be the final tale: the competition's host, Harry Bailly, tells the Parson that he would be an ideal tale-teller to end the contest, and the Parson agrees to "knytte up al this feeste, and make an ende" ("tie up all this festivity, and make an end").

Thematically, it is linked to the Manciple's Tale, which directly precedes it in all major manuscripts. The Manciple's Tale warns against careless speech; when the host asks the Parson to tell a fable, the Parson refuses, condemning the telling of fables and referring to the Epistle to Timothy. The last two tales thus "represent a closing down of the work".

This kind of treatise was popular in the later Middle Ages, since it was decided at the Fourth Council of the Lateran (1215) that every Christian should make confession at least once a year. Initially, manuals, written in Latin, were primarily intended as reference works for confessors. By Chaucer's day, they circulated in vernacular languages, for personal, non-clerical use, as a kind of "self-help manual". No external evidence has been found that would help scholars date the tale precisely. Popular among early Chaucer scholars was the hypothesis that not only was this the case, but that Chaucer had never intended it to be part of the Tales at all. Instead, so this theory goes, Chaucer left the Parson's Prologue without a tale to follow it, and what we know of as the "Parson's Tale" was added to this gap. This is in stark contrast to other contemporary portrayals of priests, such as Langland's Sloth.

The Host suggests that the Parson might be a Lollard, a follower of a reformist religious movement that is now seen as "proto-Protestant" and which has been linked to many social conflicts in 14th- and 15th-century England. Following the Host's example, scholars have examined the "Parson's Tale" for hints of Lollardy, and suggested that Chaucer himself may have held Lollard sympathies. The Parson's own vocabulary, however, is orthodox in nature. The contrast between the previous more lively tales and the Parson's treatise has disappointed many readers; E. Talbot Donaldson, for example, wrote that "in literary terms it is ill-tempered, bad-mannered, pedantic, and joyless, and when it is used as a gloss to the other tales it distempers them, fills them with ill-humour, coats them with dust, and deprives them of joy." Reconciling this disjunction has been the focus of much of the scholarship on this tale. One such take holds that the Tales becomes increasingly concerned with speech and the value of fiction towards the end, culminating in the "Parson's Tale."

See also

  • Penitential, a type of manual for priests hearing confessions
  • Exemplum, a popular element of medieval sermons

Notes and references

Further reading

  • an annotated bibliography is available on pp. 209–252.
  • "The Parson's Prologue and Tale", middle-english hypertext with glossary and side-by-side middle english and modern english
  • "Parson's Tale" retold in Modern English prose