Chaucer's Monk's Tale and Nun's Priest's Tale: An Annotated Bibliography, 1900-2000 (review)

The Nun's Priest's Tale famously has the narrator quoting St Paul and exhorting his listeners to 'taketh the fruyt and lat the chaf be stille', and this tale has been especially fruitful in generating critical response, as the latest volume in the comprehensive Chaucer Bibliographies testifies. The Nun's Priest's Tale is paired here with the textually tricky Monk's Tale, regarded by the Host and by subsequent readers as probably the least engaging of the pilgrims' narratives and yet one which has provoked much literary and historical contextualisation.

Peter Goodall's introduction to this volume provides an excellent guide to the arrangement of the critical material surveyed, as well as summarizing the trajectory of critical response to the tales individually and collectively. The individual annotations are concise and thorough - and it is good to see so many Australian academics involved. The volume proper begins with noting nearly 200 editions, translations, modernisations and retellings of The Canterbury Tales: the magisterial Robinson OUP edition is sharply criticized for its poor Glossary and for not dealing with Chaucer's syntax; the Neville Coghill translation, beloved by students, but the bane of academics, goes unscathed. A further 50 manuscript and textual studies are most helpfully noted, followed by linguistic and lexical studies and those items that deal with Chaucer's wide-ranging source material.

Half-way through, the volume moves further into the tales by considering the Monk and the Nun's Priest as characters in their own right and grouping the studies that have explored the relationship between the teller and the tale, and between the pilgrims as individuals. The Nun's Priest himself has generated much critical controversy; often he is regarded as the archetypal unreliable narrator, while Derek Pearsall is convinced that he is 'the maturest and wittiest voice of the poet himself' (p. 149). The following section of the book deals with material relating to both tales, although the subtitle, 'The Tales Together', is a little misleading since very few items combine their discussion of the two.

As a big fan of the Nun's Priest's Tale, I must admit that I turned first to the final section of the bibliography - to find nearly 300 items on this tale. As noted in the introduction to this section, the post-modern preference for ambivalence has vied with critical approaches that focus on rhetoric and allegory. With so much to plunge into, the notes provide a welcome guide that would enable scholars to focus their reading and to isolate gaps that might be filled, or directions not taken. In the preceding section, for instance, Goodall helpfully points out that relatively little historical research has been conducted on the Monk's Tale and thanks to his compilations it is easy to see that the Nun's Priest's Tale has been deluged with six times the volume of critical attention that Monk's Tale has received.

Overall, this is an indispensable guide to anyone interested in Chaucer - not only the Chaucer specialist, but any reader for whom the wealth of medieval lore contained in Chaucer studies is of interest. There is much to digest in this bibliography - though preferably without enduring the indisposition that the Nun's Priest's Tale's protagonist, Chanticleer, suffers.