Abstract
In older traditions of scholarship on Chaucer's Nun's Priest's Tale, critics such as Mortimer J. Donovan, Stephen Manning, and Charles Dahlberg1 were concerned with the moral teaching of Chaucer's fable, but perhaps the most elaborate attempt to come to grips with Patristic symbolism in the imagery and theme of the tale is the article of Bernard S. Levy and George R. Adams,2 who see in Chauntecleer's dilemma a comic version of the fall of man.3 In some senses, Levy's and Adams' approach is justi fied by the fact that Chaucer has introduced into his immediate French sources the Genesis theme of paradise and man's fall. Thus, in Marie de France's Del cok et del goupil,4 there is no mention of Scriptural themes: the fox simply tempts the rooster, apprehends him, and then loses him when he is tempted by the rooster's challenge to open his mouth. As the fox speaks, the rooster flies into the branches of a tree:
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