St. Augustine and the Parson's Tale

Abstract

In her Radcliffe monograph The Sources of the Parson's Tale, Miss Kate Petersen concluded that the ultimate sources of the Parson's ‘litel tretys’ were two thirteenth-century Latin works: the Summa Casuum Poenitentiae of St. Raymond of Pen afort, from which Chaucer drew the material on penance; and the Summa de Vitiis of Guilielmus Peraldus, from which came the discussion of the Seven Deadly Sins. Because of its highly persuasive parallels and careful construction, Miss Petersen's study has won very general acceptance. In the present writer's opinion, however, there is one aspect of Miss Petersen's work which is perhaps worth some reconsideration, and that is the positiveness of her identifications of the ultimate sources of the tale. Can it be successfully maintained, as Miss Petersen would have us believe, that exactly here and here we may fix the ultimate limits of the sources upon which Chaucer drew in the Parson's Tale?