What's Myrie about the Prose of the Parson's Tale?

Abstract

In the prologue to the longest of the Canterbury Tales, the Parson offers to tell “a myrie tale in prose” (X 46).1 In the tale that follows, the Parson appears partly to renege on his word. I say partly because, although the Parson does tell a “tale in prose,” one wonders what justifies calling his elaborate exposition of penance “myrie.” Tracing Chaucer’s various uses of “a myrie tale” in the Canterbury Tales, Lois Ebin observes that the Parson offers “the final definition” of that expression: “it is a tale which is explicit in its ‘sentence,’ one which we must take seriously, and, to use the Parson’s repeated phrase, ‘understonde.’”2 At the same time, Ebin observes that Chaucer invests the word myrie with the additional sense of fruitfulness found in the Host’s command that the Parson be “fructuous”—an adjective that in Chaucer’s time meant “not only ‘fruitful’ or ‘fertile’ but also ‘beneficial,’ ‘productive,’ ‘effective,’ ‘yielding good results,’ [and] ‘edifying.’”3 Much of the extensive scholarship on the Parson’s Tale substantiates these two senses of myrie (both sententious and fructuous) by reading the tale proper against its Latin penitential sources. In what represents a recent critical consensus, Richard Newhauser writes that the tale “belongs to a specific genre among a mass of late-medieval religious prose, that of the