Putting the Plowman in His Place: Order and Genre in the Early Modern Canterbury Tales

In ca. 1550, the apocryphal Plowman's Tale was moved from the position it occupied in the 1542 edition of Chaucer's Workes, at the end of the Canterbury Tales, to a position between the tales of the Manciple and the Parson. This move represents an early and influential intervention into the order of Chaucer's collection, and had profound consequences for the interpretation of the Canterbury Tales, which were read in this order for hundreds of years. In particular, the placement of the Plowman's debate between the Pelican and the Gryphon established a "Beast Group" among the Canterbury Tales, bringing the apocryphal work into dialogue with the tales of the Nun's Priest and the Manciple, and arguably exerting a considerable influence on the development of political beast fable in the sixteenth century and beyond.