Religion, Alchemy, and Nostalgic Idealism in Fragment VIII of the Canterbury Tales

It has been said of Fragment VIII of the Canterbury Tales—the Second Nun's legend of Saint Cecilia and the Canon's Yeoman's exposé of alchemical failure and fraud—that "no other part of the Tales contains in two ostensibly unrelated stories such a tight unity of theme and imagery."¹ Long familiar to Chaucerians, this unity paradoxically has been anatomized in terms of a set of oppositions. These oppositions correlate with the overarching contrast established by the two tales between the heavenly clarity of spiritually advantageous activity, illustrated in the Nun's account of Cecilia, and the confusion and deception surrounding alchemy, revealed in the Yeoman's confession and tale.² The Yeoman's "elvysshe craft" (751) stands against Cecilia's "feithful bisynesse" (24), raising the specter of sin in the face of the Nun's expression of Christian piety.³

Despite the soundness of these observations, the long-standing critical preoccupation with the ways these performances contrast runs the risk of obfuscating important similarities between them.⁴ Although the Nun and Yeoman have radically different speaking styles and interests, they share certain habits of thinking about the past, and both—though in significantly different ways—are idealists.⁵ The Nun's legend expresses an ideal in its representation of the purity of the primitive church and the simple clarity of its Christianity. This portrait resonates with the idealism underlying certain strains of religious reformist thinking that looked to early Christianity to criticize the contemporary church and urge its improvement through a reclamation of an idealized past. The Nun's tale thus bespeaks a kind of nostalgia.⁶ The Yeoman, as we will see, similarly betrays nostalgia, although in his case it is for alchemy perfected as he believes it once to have been by the philosophers of a bygone era. Whereas the Nun merely expresses her nostalgia, the Yeoman draws attention to the impossibility of realizing the object of his desire and the potential perils of acting upon nostalgic idealism. In this way his performance casts a shadow on the Nun's otherwise bright tale and the modes of reformist thinking to which it is obliquely related.

Saint Cecilia and the ecclesia primitiva

The Second Nun's Tale stands in sharp contrast to previous Canterbury tales told by members of the religious establishment because it explores contemporary religious thinking without actually depicting an aspect of life in the contemporary church. The Nun instead offers an idealized portrait of the early church in a hagiographic legend set in the distant past. She offers no commentary on the reformist discourse to which her tale seems to allude but merely engages its ideal by presenting a version of it in her legend of Saint Cecilia.

Cecilia's world, as the Nun depicts it, is one in which truth is both accessible and communicable. Despite the Nun's temporal and cultural separation from this world, her tale-telling is clearly an attempt to participate in it. Her performance is marked as a pious utterance from the outset, opening with a moral exhortation to her listeners to eschew "Ydelnesse" (2) in favor of a life of "leveful bisynesse" (5). She practices what she preaches, personally avoiding sloth by recounting Saint Cecilia's life of pious works. Her prologue makes no reference to Harry Bailly's tale-telling contest, and her performance seems to have nothing to do with any game or competition.⁷ Our sense of her presence as tale-teller—weak from the outset, since there is no headlink introducing her and she does not open with any remark that can be construed as self-revealing—weakens further over the course of her prologue until she explicitly removes herself from authorship by insisting that she is not a subtle innovator but merely a reteller of a venerable story:

Foryeve me that I do no diligenceThis ilke storie subtilly to endite,For bothe have I the wordes and sentenceOf hym that at the seintes reverenceThe storie wroot, and folwen hire legende. . . .

(79-83)

The Nun trusts the...