Chaucer’s Sir Thopas and La Prise de Nuevile

Abstract

In her chapter on Sir Thopas in Sources and Analogues of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, L. H. Loomis concentrated on identifying among the mass of Middle English metrical romances the particular objects of Chaucer's imitation. But the sources and analogues of Sir Thopas are not to be looked for only in Guy of Warwick and its congeners; Chaucer's poem is itself a burlesque, and it may therefore also be compared with other medieval burlesques. This other set of literary relations, however, has attracted little attention from scholars. Loomis dismisses that side of the family in a single sentence: Sir Thopas, she asserts, 'follows no previous pattern of burlesque or parody, either social or literary'.1 Chaucer could read English, French, Latin, Italian, and also possibly Flemish and Spanish; so a survey of all the burlesque or parodistic writings that he might have known would be a laborious task. The present discussion is confined to one French text, the thirteenth-century Prise de Nuevile. Loomis herself draws attention to this poem, in a footnote to the sentence quoted above, as one of three 'medieval French burlesques on the chansons de geste or the romances of chivalry' which, 'though analogous in parodistic spirit to Thopas, differ from it entirely in style and substance'; but it may be doubted whether she had read La Prise de Nuevile, for she speaks of it as inedited, evidently following the authority she cites: a volume of the Histoire littIraire de la France published in 1856.2 Since then the poem has in fact been edited twice, by A. Scheler in his Trouveres belges, Nouvelle Serie (Louvain, 1879), and by A.Jeanroy and H. Guy in their Chansons et dits artesiens du XIIIe siecle (Bordeaux, 1898). In any case, Loomis's description of La Prise de Nuevile as differing entirely in style and substance from Sir Thopas cannot be accepted, unless she simply means that the French poem is not a burlesque of Middle English romances, which goes without saying. The truth is that La Prise de Nuevile resembles Chaucer's poem closely in several respects, and is quite enough in itself to cast doubt on Loomis's assertion (barely credible, in any case) that Sir Thopas 'follows no previous pattern of burlesque or parody'.