Game Over: Defragmenting the End of the Canterbury Tales

Is there something missing between the end of the Manciple's Tale and the beginning of the Parson's Prologue?

The first line of the Parson's Prologue—"By that the Maunciple hadde his tale al ended" (X 1)—suggests that the Parson's Tale follows the Manciple's Tale with no break. ¹ Yet modern editors, starting with F. J. Furnivall and Walter Skeat, have nevertheless routinely separated the two tales, placing each in its own fragment or group. Such a move has been justified by appeals to unity and synchronicity: it is impossible to reconcile the place and time references in the Manciple's and Parson's Prologues into a continuous, meaningful sequence. The geographical and chronological gaps are thus taken as a sign of the incompleteness of the Canterbury Tales and its unfinished editing, the X 1 reading is explained as scribal, and the two tales are separated. The precise editorial justifications have varied, but Skeat's may serve as an example. In his notes to the Parson's Prologue, he writes, "there is no real connexion between this Group [i.e., Group I or Fragment X] and Group H [Fragment IX]. It is most likely that the word maunciple [in X 1] was only inserted provisionally." ² Most scholars, embracing editorial tradition, have accepted such arguments, sometimes implicitly, even if they have rejected some or all of their premises. ³

But is today's continued editorial assignment of different fragment numbers (or group letters) to the Manciple's and the Parson's contributions to the Canterbury Tales merely a remnant of old-fashioned critical or editorial goals that should now be abandoned? I contend that the editorial presumption of a lacuna masks the continuities as well as disjunctions between Fragments IX and X in ways that adversely affect readers' understanding of Chaucer's compositional practices and thematic concerns. Indeed, there are good reasons for considering the Manciple's Tale to be the immediate precursor to the Parson's, and for marking the two as parts of the same fragment.

The tradition of printing IX and X separately—"fragmentation"—is both more tenuous and more pernicious than is generally recognized, and the advantages of "defragmenting" this portion of the Canterbury Tales are considerable. Such an editorial move would, for instance, restore the continuity to this link that it had in almost all of the manuscripts and in all of the early prints up to the 1540s. Moreover, as I argue below, it would cause us to focus attention on the transition from the Manciple's to the Parson's Tale, attention that, since Furnivall and Skeat, has been diverted by the editor's mark of fragmentation and, consequently, the reader's assumption of incompleteness. In doing all of this, the editorial realignment I am proposing could help us better understand the role of the Manciple's Tale in the Canterbury Tales as a whole. And that, in turn, might also make Chaucer out to be a more strictly doctrinal poet than he has been perceived, for linking the Manciple's Tale more firmly to the Parson's Tale would also extend the Christian piety of the Parson's Tale and Retraction forward into the structure of the Canterbury Tales, though without recourse to Robertsonian allegorization.

I am far from the first to argue that the Manciple's Tale "prepares perfectly for the Parson's Prologue and Tale," as Donald Howard puts it, a view which has received a fair degree of acceptance. ⁴ Howard argues that the tales of the Second Nun, the Canon's Yeoman, and the Manciple work together, along with the General Prologue description of the Manciple, "to recapture themes interlaced throughout the work" and to prepare for the conclusion of the Tales by "[collapsing] the structure that has gone before" (304). Others have also discovered unity in the two tales' proximity. James Dean builds on Howard's reading, arguing...