The Mediæval Setting of Chaucer's Monk's Tale

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is not to establish definite sources for Chaucer's Monk's Tale but to consider it as a representative of a general mediæval type. Professor Lounsbury declared that the Monk's Tale belonged to a “species of composition to which the men of Chaucer's age were exceedingly addicted.” In the Canterbury Tales, he continues, “the Monk's tale is introduced as a specimen of these collections of stories, and largely and perhaps entirely for the sake of satirizing, or at least of censuring, the taste that created and enjoyed them.” “In the Middle Ages,” writes Mr. J. E. Wells, “it was not at all uncommon to make collections of a single general type.…. These collections were.… of an encyclopædic character.” So Mr. E. Greenlaw: “It [the Monk's Tale] is.… an example of the many collections of tales having a didactic purpose which were characteristic of mediævalism.”