The Nun’s Priest promised a merry tale after the Monk’s catalogue of gloomy tragedies and kept that promise with his mock-heroic rendition of the old cock and fox story. ... But who, thinking back on the Nun’s Priest’s Tale, remembers this warning against vainglory and naivety? Who does not recall instead the mock-heroic characterizations of the humanized chickens, the narrators absurd grandiloquence, or perhaps the peculiar tension between action and commentary in the poem's unfolding? In recalling any of these elements, one attests to the force, not of the poem’s moral, but of its mocking performance, its “folye” that scarcely prepares a reader for the Priest’s closing remarks. - [Author]

Language: English

Locators: DOI: 10.2307/2872707