"Sire Nonnes Preest"—Reading Lancelot in Geoffrey Chaucer's The Nun's Priest's Tale

Although the story of Lancelot, as told by authors such as the fifteenth-century Sir Thomas Malory, contains much in the way of tragedy (such as the downfall of the kingdom of Camelot and King Arthur's death), Lancelot's end is ultimately the Christian ideal in that he gains admittance to a very select company—that is, Heaven. But, as Beverly Kennedy and others have argued, he gets there due to his all-encompassing love for Guinevere. While his love is neither as unnatural nor arbitrary as that of Tristan for Iseult, some audiences during Geoffrey Chaucer's time may have viewed his love as problematic—as indeed, the Nun's Priest in Chaucer's fourteenth-century Canterbury Tales does. After all, Lancelot and Guinevere commit fornication and adultery, both in their hearts and in deed. But these medieval audiences miss the larger picture of Lancelot's life by focusing only on a portion of it and fail to learn the lesson developed in Chaucer's other writings, such as Troilus and Criseyde or within the Canterbury Tales, the Franklin's Tale, that a true lover such as Lancelot can offer: steadfast devotion to one's beloved can carry one past obstacles to achieve greatness in this life and the next. Although Lancelot spends most of his adult life in mortal sin, it is his love for Guinevere which leads him to confess and do penance, acts essential for the medieval Christian to evade Hell as a permanent destination.

Chaucer's Canterbury Tales imagines a group of pilgrims travelling to the shrine of Thomas Becket at Canterbury who tell stories to pass the time. Unlike Giovanni Boccaccio's mid-fourteenth-century The Decameron, which uses a similar framing device while limiting the storytellers to members of the aristocratic class, Chaucer's pilgrims are drawn from all walks of life. Among these pilgrims are two who belong to the religious estate: the Prioress and the Nun's Priest. Through an intertextual examination of The Nun's Priest's Tale and the description of the Prioress in the General Prologue, I will argue that Chaucer's text reveals the various misreadings of the Arthurian legend by specific Canterbury pilgrims, in that each of the pilgrims mentioned above ignores the ways in which the legend can be used as a guide for moral behavior for medieval audiences while revealing the extent to which the story of Lancelot has pervaded their social consciousness.

While the Prioress does not offer any Arthurian allusions in her tale, which recounts a miracle of the Virgin Mary, Chaucer the pilgrim (distinct from Chaucer the author) relays the framing narrative and offers a lengthy portrait of the Prioress in the General Prologue, and his description reveals that the Prioress uses the love story between Lancelot and Guinevere as a partial model for her life. The Nun's Priest tells the story of Chauntecleer the Rooster and his wife, Dame Pertelote, on the day on which Chauntecleer encounters a fox. While an animal fable and the Arthurian legend may seem worlds apart, the Nun's Priest alludes to the latter in various ways; for example, the Nun's Priest focuses on the untruth of the story while using the "Book of Launcelot de Lake" as a critique of the Prioress. As a consequence of their incomplete readings of the Lancelot story, both pilgrims ultimately discard the "fruyt" of the story with the "chaf." For example, the Prioress follows Guinevere's example only so far—she fails to suffer the physical deprivation and humility that Guinevere undergoes in her final days. Meanwhile, the Nun's Priest is so focused on attacking his fellow religious figures that he fails to recognize the parallels between his own situation and that of Lancelot. Because they are poor readers, both the Prioress and the Nun's Priest do not turn to God, as Lancelot does, but rather direct their attention to secular concerns. Because both are in positions of authority which place the responsibility of religious education in their hands (the Prioress...