Romances

Abstract

The modern reader sees mixture of genres as one of the features of The Canterbury Tales. By choosing different narrators and by using a variety of kinds of narrative to match the variety of voices, Chaucer made this a ‘tale collection’ in a more interesting sense than most medieval compilations: not merely an assembling of stories but a gathering of blueprints for narrative, an index of tale-types. Exemplary stories attached to sententious ideas already by Chaucer’s time fell into mixed categories of religious and moral tales from which a medley could be compiled: so Chaucer varied the didactic effects with examples of animal fable (Nun’s Priest and Manciple), saint’s life (Second Nun), miracle (Prioress), historical exemplum (Physician), tragedy (Monk), sermon plus exemplum (Pardoner) and prose dialogue and tract (Melibee and Parson). One direction in which Chaucer moved on from the simple exemplum is, as we have seen, towards comic and satirical tales of contemporary life: so the fabliau is a literary kind one can hardly avoid recognising as a distinct entity, forming a designed antithesis to the romances, in the tales given to Miller, Reeve and Shipman, and as the basis for more literary manipulation in the satirical cartoons of contemporary life offered in the tales of Summoner, Friar and Canon’s Yeoman, and in the literary indecorum of The Merchant’s Tale.