Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in

The Runaway Gods of the Manciple’s Tale

  • Chapter
Chaucer and the Death of the Political Animal

Part of the book series: The New Middle Ages ((TNMA))

  • 110 Accesses

Abstract

If the Pardoner’s Tale and Miller’s Tale tell stories that kick God out of the world, the Manciple’s Tale tells a story that kicks God out of heaven. “It is significant,” writes Marijane Osborne, “that the tale features a euhemerized Apollo, his deity almost entirely suppressed.”1 Put simply: In the first two stories, the men try to become like gods. The Old Man would defy death. First in the bed of Eos and centuries later by killing Death and making sure the Fall stays put, that nothing comes to replace it. The Miller’s narrators attempt, to use Strohm’s words, an “unfettered attack on all forms of transcendence,”2 and pool their resources in order to collapse the universe into a single empty signifier. Both poetic worlds try to mean more than they can and they destroy each other, either one drunk at a time or one “poure scoler” at a time. The Manciple’s Tale is an opposite movement for similar ends. The gods try to become like men.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

Log in via an institution
eBook
USD 16.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Hardcover Book
USD 54.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Durable hardcover edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Institutional subscriptions

Preview

Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.

Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.

Notes

  1. Édouard Jeauneau, Rethinking the School of Chartres (North York: The University of Toronto Press, 2009), 98.

    Google Scholar 

  2. Ann W. Astell, Chaucer and the Universe of Learning (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996), 100.

    Google Scholar 

  3. Jean de Meun, Roman de la Rose, ed. Felix Lecoy (Paris: Honoré Champion, 1965–1970), 16756.

    Google Scholar 

  4. Jamie C. Fumo, The Legacy of Apollo: Antiquity, Authority and Chaucerian Poetics (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2010), 68.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  5. F.N.M. Diekstra, “Chaucer’s Digressive Mode and the Moral of the Manciple’s Tale,” Neophilologus, Vol. 67 (1983): 131.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  6. Fumo, “Thinking upon the Crow: The Manciple’s Tale and Ovidian Mythography,” The Chaucer Review, Vol. 38, No. 4 (2004): 355.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  7. Derek Pearsall, The Canterbury Tales (London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd., 1985), 238.

    Google Scholar 

  8. Loren C. Gruber, “The Manciple’s Tale: One Key to Chaucer’s Language,” in New Views on Chaucer: Essays in Generative Criticism, ed. William C. Johnson and Loren C. Gruber (Denver, CO: The Society for New Language Study, 1973), 43.

    Google Scholar 

  9. See, for instance, J. Burke Severs, “Is the Manciple’s Tale a Success?” The Journal of English and Germanic Philology, Vol. 51 (1952): 1–16; Diekstra, “Chaucer’s Digressive Mode; and Fumo, “Thinking upon the Crow.”

    Google Scholar 

  10. Pelen, “The Manciple’s ‘Cosyn’ to the ‘Dede,’” The Chaucer Review, Vol. 25, No. 4 (1991): 343.

    Google Scholar 

  11. Ovid, Metamorphoses, ii. 544–545, trans. Mary M. Innes (London: Penguin, 1971), 64.

    Google Scholar 

  12. Pindar, Pythian Ode III, in The Odes of Pindar, Including the Principal Fragments, trans. John Sandys (London: William Heinemann, 1915), 189.

    Google Scholar 

  13. Bernard F. Dick, “The Waste Land and the Descensus ad Inferos,” Canadian Review of Contemporary Literature, Vol. 2, No. 1 (Winter 1975): 35.

    Google Scholar 

  14. Plato, Symposium, trans. W.R.M. Lamb (London: Harvard University Press, 1991), 105.

    Google Scholar 

  15. Emily Bronte, Wuthering Heights (London: Smith, Elder & Co., 1870), 240.

    Google Scholar 

  16. Alain de Lille, The Plaint of Nature, trans. James J. Sheridan (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, 1980), 125.

    Google Scholar 

  17. Apollodorus, Bibliotheca, III. x. 3–4, in The Library: Vol. II, trans. James Frazer (London: William Heinemann, 1921), 17.

    Google Scholar 

  18. Porphyry, On the Cave of the Nymphs in the Thirteenth Book of the Odyssey, trans. Thomas Taylor (London: John M. Watkins, 1917), 58n25.

    Google Scholar 

  19. Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2009), 19.

    Google Scholar 

  20. Frankie Lymon, Herman Santiago, and Jimmy Merchant, “Why Do Fools Fall in Love,” The Teenagers Featuring Frankie Lymon, Gee Records, 1956, LP.

    Google Scholar 

  21. Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy. Volume I: The Process of Capitalist Production, trans. Samuel Moore, Edward Bibbins Aveling, and Ernest Untermann (Chicago, IL: C.H. Kerr & Company, 1915), 833.

    Google Scholar 

  22. Ovid, Metamorphoses, i. 433–462, trans. A.D. Melville (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 14.

    Google Scholar 

  23. Hyginus, Fabulae, trans. and ed. Mary Grant (Lawrence, MO: University of Kansas Publications, 1960), 115.

    Google Scholar 

  24. Michèle Mendelssohn, Henry James, Oscar Wilde and Aesthetic Culture (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press Ltd., 2007), 233.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  25. Anthony Welch, The Renaissance Epic and the Oral Past (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012), 16.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  26. Horace, Epistle 1.18 in Horace’s Satires and Epistles, trans. Jacob Fuchs (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1977), 70.

    Google Scholar 

  27. Euripides, The Phoenissae, trans. E.P. Coleridge, in The Complete Greek Drama, ed. Whitney J. Oates and Eugene O’Neill Jr. (New York: Random House, 1938), 824.

    Google Scholar 

  28. Euripides, The Phoenician Women, trans. Peter Burian and Brian Swann (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 24.

    Google Scholar 

  29. Charles Fantazzi, “Vives against the Pseudodialecticians,” in Erika Rummel, Biblical Humanism and Scholasticism in the Age of Erasmus (Leiden: Brill, 2008), 110.

    Google Scholar 

  30. Vives, in Augustine, Of the Citie of God. With the Learned Comments of Jo. Lod. Vives, trans. John Healey (London: George Eld, 1610), 684. Quoted by R.W. Maslen in Philip Sidney, An Apology For Poetry (Or The Defence Of Poesy): Revised and Expanded Second Edition, ed. R.W. Maslen (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002), 124fn.22.

    Google Scholar 

  31. David K. Coley, Wheel of Language: Representing Speech in Middle English Poetry, 1377–1422 (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2012), 31.

    Google Scholar 

  32. Homer, Odyssey, trans. E.V. Rieu, D.C.H. Rieu (London: Penguin Books Ltd., 2003), 102.

    Google Scholar 

  33. Claudian, Gigantomachia, in Claudian: Carmina Minora Vol. II, trans. Maurice Platnauer (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1922), 287.

    Google Scholar 

  34. Valerius Flaccus, Argonautica, trans. J.H. Mozley. (London: William Heinemann, 1934), 73.

    Google Scholar 

  35. Plato, Timaeus, 47C, in Bruce W. Holsinger, Music, Body, and Desire in Medieval Culture: Hildegard of Bingen to Chaucer (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), 5.

    Google Scholar 

  36. Arthur C. Aufderheide, The Scientific Study of Mummies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 47.

    Google Scholar 

  37. Robert L. Tignor, Egypt: A Short History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011), 74.

    Google Scholar 

  38. Aristotle, Metaphysics, XII. 1072, b3, quoted in Kevin Corrigan, Reading Plotinus: A Practical Introduction to Neoplatonism (Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 2005), 206.

    Google Scholar 

  39. Margaret F. Nims, “Translatio: Difficult Statement in Medieval Poetic Theory,” University of Toronto Quarterly, Vol. 42, No. 3 (Spring 1974): 215.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  40. John Keats, “Ode to a Nightingale,” John Keats The Complete Poems, ed. Jack Stillinger (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982), 279

    Google Scholar 

  41. George Orwell, 1984 (New York: Signet Classics, 1977), 289.

    Google Scholar 

  42. Among available analogues only two others do not feature the child: Gower’s brief proverbial poem in the Confessio and the Seven Sages of Rome, which also does not feature Phoebus. Robert M. Correale and Mary Hamel, Sources and Analogues of the Canterbury Tales II (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2009), 749–774.

    Google Scholar 

  43. John Donne, A Valediction of Forbidding Mourning, In Poems of John Donne: Vol. I, ed. E.K. Chambers (London: Lawrence & Bullen, 1896), 51–52.

    Google Scholar 

  44. Arnold E. Davidson, “The Logic of Confusion in Chaucer’s Manciple’s Tale,” Annuale Mediaevale, Vol. 19 (1979): 5.

    Google Scholar 

  45. John of Salisbury, Policraticus, 1.6, quoted in Laure Hermand-Shebat, “John of Salisbury and Classical Antiquity,” in A Companion to John of Salisbury, ed. Christophe Grellard and Frédérique Lachaud (Leiden: Brill, 2014), 191.

    Google Scholar 

  46. Natalia Gagarina, “The Early Verb Development and Demarcation of Stages in Three Russian-Speaking Children,” in Development of Verb Inflection in First Language Acquisition: A Cross-Linguistic Perspective, ed. Dagmar Bittner, Wolfgang U. Dressler, and Marianne Kilani-Schoch (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2003), 139.

    Google Scholar 

  47. Travis, Disseminal, 243. See Charles Nodier, Dictionnaire Raisonné des Onomatopées Françaises (Paris: Demoville, 1808). Travis’s discussions of Nodier are conducted with reference to Gérard Genette, Mimologics, trans. Thaïs E. Morgan (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1995).

    Google Scholar 

  48. Stewart Justman, “Literal and Symbolic in the ‘Canterbury Tales,’” The Chaucer Review, Vol. 14, No. 3 (Winter 1980): 212.

    Google Scholar 

  49. John of Salsbury, Metalogicon, IV, 35, quoted in Ralph McInery, A History of Western Philosophy (South Bend, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1963), 159.

    Google Scholar 

  50. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, On the Origin of Language, trans. John H. Moran and Alexander Gode (Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 1966), 12.

    Google Scholar 

  51. Jody Endgers, The Medieval Theater of Cruelty: Rhetoric, Memory, Violence (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002), 71.

    Google Scholar 

  52. Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy, trans. S.J. Tester, in The Theological Tractates and The Consolation of Philosophy, trans. H.F Stewart, H.K. Rand, and S.J. Tester (London: William Heinemann Ltd, 1973), 307.

    Google Scholar 

  53. Jeffrey Schnapp, The Transfiguration of History in the Center of Dante’s Paradise (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986), 163, quoted in Travis, Disseminal, 216.

    Google Scholar 

  54. Winthrop Wetherbee, Chaucer: The Canterbury Tales (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 103

    Google Scholar 

  55. Mark Amsler, Etymology and Grammatical Discourse in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages, (Amsterdam: John Benjamins B.V., 1989), 33.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  56. John J. McGavin, “How Nasty Is Phoebus’ Crow?” The Chaucer Review, Vol. 21, No. 4 (1987): 449.

    Google Scholar 

  57. Alan Bennett, The History Boys (New York: Faber and Faber, Inc., 2006), 61.

    Google Scholar 

  58. V.J. Scattergood, “The Manciple’s Manner of Speaking,” Essays in Criticism, Vol. 24 (1974): 140.

    Google Scholar 

  59. Alain de Lille, Anticlaudianus, quoted in James Simpson, Sciences and the Self in Medieval Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 246.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  60. Michael Kensak, “The Silences of Pilgrimage: ‘Manciple’s Tale, Paradiso, Anticlaudianus,’” The Chaucer Review, Vol. 34, No. 2 (1999): 193.

    Google Scholar 

  61. Octavio Paz, Alternating Current, trans. Helen Lane (New York: Arcade Publishing, 1991), 68–69.

    Google Scholar 

  62. George Steiner, Real Presences (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1989), 3.

    Google Scholar 

Download references

Authors
  1. Jameson S. Workman
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Copyright information

© 2015 Jameson S. Workman

About this chapter

Cite this chapter

Workman, J.S. (2015). The Runaway Gods of the Manciple’s Tale. In: Chaucer and the Death of the Political Animal. The New Middle Ages. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137448644_3

Download citation

Publish with us

Policies and ethics

Search

Navigation