[SLIDE 1]
“Mendicant vs. Aristocratic Pedagogy in Chaucer’s “Summoner’s Tale”1
by Marc B. Cels
Canadian Society of Medievalists Annual Meeting, Congress 2011
St. Thomas University, Fredericton, NB, 29 May 2011
The Summoner’s Tale is a scathing satire of mendicant greed, pride and ineptitude wrapped up
within a fabliau centered on a fart joke.2 It is also a tale about wrath.3 I approach the tale as
someone interested in the history of the vice of wrath and particularly in the way that anger is
discussed in the mendicant friars’ penitential and homiletic writings. Critics have noted the ways
that Chaucer vividly dramatized stereotypical charges against the friars in the first part of the
tale. 4 It includes a clumsy sermon against wrath by the hypocritical Friar John—a harangue
which actually provokes wrath and earns the preacher a crude insult.5 There has been insufficient
attention, however, to the interaction between the enraged friar and the calm aristocrats in the
second half of the tale, during which Friar John seeks justice from the local lord, only to be
further humiliated. Here, in the “Summoner’s Tale” we have a sort of lay response to the
The original title and focus for this paper, “The Staleness of Mendicant Preaching in Chaucer’s
“Summoner’s Tale,” was modified to better fit with the other two papers in this panel.
2
Once neglected by polite critics, the scatological themes were more enthusiastically parsed for
sophisticated Biblical references that critics have read as indicators of Chaucer’s own religious attitudes. For an
overview, see John Finlayson, "Chaucer's Summoner's Tale: Flatulence, Blasphemy, and the Emperor's Clothes,"
Studies in Philology 104, no. 4 (2007): 155-170.
3
For an overview of the twentieth-century debates about the theme of wrath in this tale, see Geoffrey
Chaucer, The Summoner's Tale, ed. John F. Plummer, A Variorum Edition of the Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, V. 2.
The Canterbury Tales, Pt. 7(Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1995), 37-38.
4
R.A. Pratt, "Chaucer and the Hand That Fed Him," Speculum 41, no. (1966): 641-642. David G. Allen,
"Death and Staleness in The "Son-Less" World of the Summoner's Tale," Studies in Short Fiction 24, no. (1987): 114. Friar Hubert and Friar John appear to be generic friars, rather than members of particular orders. Siegfried
Wenzel, "The Dominican Presence in Middle English Literature," in Christ among the Medieval Dominicans :
Representations of Christ in the Texts and Images of the Order of Preachers, ed. Kent Emery and Joseph Peter
Wawrykow(Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1998), 315-331.
5
Chaucer was well acquainted with sermon forms not only from experience but also from access to
preaching manuals. Coolidge Otis Chapman, "Chaucer on Preachers and Preaching," PMLA 44, no. 1 (1929): 178185.
1
1
mendicant discourse about anger. [SLIDE 2] I argue that the tale not only undermines mendicant
and clerical moral authority but also, as a counterpoint, legitimizes the moral authority of
aristocratic elites as the temperate wielders of righteous wrath and guardians of the social order.
Such a counterpoint would have been particularly timely at the end of the fourteenth-century, in
the wake of the Peasants’ Revolt, when England’s elites, including Chaucer and his readers, were
zealously suppressing social unrest.
[SLIDE 3]
Allow me to briefly review the “Summoner’s Tale.” 6 Greedy Friar John stops at a
villager’s house, barges in, and finds the master, Thomas, ill and out of sorts. Friar John begins
his usual ploy, to excite contrition through a sermon, then hear his confession, and finally to
make a pitch for alms. Before he can begin, however, the wife pipes up: “Chideth him weel, for
seinte Trinitee!/ He is as angry as a pissemyre,”—that is angry as an ant (1824-5). Friar John
accepts the wife’s diagnosis and launches into a wordy exhortation against anger. Nevertheless,
Thomas has already been shriven by his own curate and refuses to confess again. The friar still
makes his pitch for a cash donation to his convent. Thomas is by now, enraged—though Friar
John is oblivious to it. Thomas reveals that he is sitting on hidden treasure that the friar may take
only if he promises to share it with his brethren at the convent. Friar John quickly and greedily
promises and enthusiastically gropes Thomas’ ass, but he only catches a mighty fart, which sends
the mendicant off in a rage.
6
The tale seems to be an original creation by Chaucer; see Christine Richardson-Hay, "The Summoner's
Prologue and Tale," in Sources and Analogues of the Canterbury Tales, ed. Robert M. Correale and Mary Hamel,
Chaucer Studies, 35 (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2002), 449-477.
2
[[SLIDE 4] In the second half of the tale, the furious friar heads off to the local manor hall
to seek justice. The lord and lady receive their confessor calmly and seek to soothe his visible
rage; but to no avail. The lord then ponders the technical problem of sharing out a fart equally.
His carver, Squire Jenkins, offers a solution: the friars could arrange themselves behind a wagon
wheel placed at Thomas’s ass so that his fart could be divided by the spokes, ensuring each a fair
and well-deserved share. The court approves and commends both the servant and Thomas for
their cleverness, to the final humiliation of the hypocritical friar.
In one of the closest studies of the tale’s ironic discourse on anger, Thomas F. Merrill
seeks to justify the homiletic digression, since its length (112 lines) tests the patience readers.7
The form and substance of the sermon dramatizes the commonplace stereotype of the proud
friars, insensitive to their audience’s real spiritual needs as they clumsily misdirect their learned
eloquence and stale book learning. By characterizing the ministry of friars this way, the taletelling Summoner scores points against his rival pilgrim, Friar Hubert. Nevertheless, the
sermon’s teaching is orthodox. Merrill argues that the sermon on anger, despite the inept
delivery, provides a moral standard against which to measure, for comedic effect, not only the
hypocritical wrath of Friar John in the tale, but also the mutual rancour between of the
Summoner and Friar Hubert. [SLIDE 5] These two quarrelling pilgrims act out the dispute
between secular clergy and the mendicants in their competition to greedily exploit the laity, and
thereby expose ecclesiastical hypocrisy to lay ridicule.
7
Thomas F. Merril, "Wrath and Rhetoric in 'the Summoner's Tale'," Texas Studies in LIterature and
Language 4, no. (1962): 344-346.
3
Merrill’s analysis stops short of examining the counter-point in the second half of the
tale, in which the reaction of the lord and lady to Friar John’s apoplexy seems to me to counter
the exemplas of tyrannical anger in his sermon and teaches lessons about and legitimizes
aristocratic wrath, namely its righteous zeal. Before I examine that counter-point, however, I
would like to review the political implications of the tale’s antifraternalism that scholars after
Merrill identified.
Chaucer’s antifraternalism was once taken as evidence of the actual practices and moral
decline of the friars and clergy in the fourteenth century.8 For example, R. A. Pratt argued that
Friar John’s sermon reflects the staleness of canned preaching from the late Middle Ages. It
might, but scholars such as John V. Fleming and Penn R. Szittya have since become more
cautious about accepting Chaucer’s criticisms, noting that he repeats stereotypical charges
against the friars that had been coined by their rivals long before.9 Not long after the Franciscan,
Dominican and other mendicant orders were founded in the early thirteenth century, they had
spread rapidly through Christendom and gained the favour of popes and princes. Many secular
clergy resented the success of these highly trained priests and viewed them as interlopers in the
traditional ecclesiastical order of clergy and monks. They accused friars of being corrupt and
false prophets of the End Times who led Christians into sin while enriching themselves. They
Merrill generally accepts Chaucer’s anticlericalism at face value, as reflecting abuses that were real.
John V. Fleming, "The Antifraternalism of the Summoner's Tale," Journal of English and Germanic
Philology 65, no. (1966): 688-700. J. V. Fleming, "Anticlerical Satire as Theological Essay: Chaucer's Summoner's
Tale," Thalia 6, no. 1 (1984): 5-22. and Penn R. Szittya, "The Friar as False Apostle: Antifraternal Exegesis and the
Summoner's Tale," Studies in Philology 71, no. (1974): 19-46. and Penn R. Szittya, The Antifraternal Tradition in
Medieval Literature(Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1986). For an attempt to find some historical
evidence to help gauge actual mendicant deviancy (at least among the Dominicans) see G. Geltner, "Bretheren
Behaving Badly: A Deviant Approach to Medieval Antifraternalism," Speculum 85, no. (2010): 47-64.
8
9
4
also resented the economic competition from the friars, who diverted alms and fees for religious
services to which secular priests felt entitled.10
Marxist interpreters, such as Alcuin Blamires, emphasize the social and economic basis
for the antifraternalism and anticlericalism, arguing that Chaucer and other fourteenth-century
writers adapted the antifraternal complaints of the secular clergy to the needs of the lay elite’s
ideology. Chaucer accuses clergy, and especially the friars, of using religion to economically
exploit the lay commoners. Blamires argues that such criticism, whatever the reality behind it,
was part of a strategy of “displacement of oppression”, that is, the scapegoating of clergy for the
oppression and exploitation of the peasantry committed by the aristocratic elites, with whom
Chaucer identifies and for whom he wrote.11 Lay elites of his day were in fierce economic
competition with ecclesiastical landlords for declining rents and fees as a consequence of the
demographic decline caused by the plague in the second-half of the fourteenth-century. Attempts
to control workers and reduce rising wages and rents had sparked the English Peasants’ Revolt of
1381, which was put down with much violence and followed by the roundup of agitators and the
enforcement of economic legislation.12 Antifraternal and anticlerical sentiment among lay elites,
Blamires argues, deflected criticism of their own exploitation of the commoners and their role in
10
For an overview that emphasizes the theological and apocalyptic charges against the friars, see Szittya,
Antifraternal Tradition, , esp. 5-10.. According to Szittya, the revival of antimendicant invective in the later
fourteenth century coincides with a revival of apocalyptic foreboding in response to the social, economic, and
political instability caused by the Black Death. Szittya and others trace many of the antifraternal commonplaces
back to the mid-thirteenth-century secular Parisian master, William of St.-Amour and his De periculis novissimorum
temporum (1254): G. Geltner, ed. William of Saint-Amour's "De Periculis Novissimorum Temporum": An
Introduction, Edition, and Translation, Dallas Medieval Texts and Translations, 8 (Leuven: 2007). Gower, Langland
and especially Chaucer echo these charges. See Fleming, "The Antifraternalism of the Summoner's Tale," 688-700.
Fleming, "Anticlerical Satire as Theological Essay: Chaucer's Summoner's Tale," 5-22; Derrick G. Pitard, "Greed
and Anti-Fraternalism in Chaucer's "Summoner's Tale"," in The Seven Deadly Sins : From Communities to
Individuals, ed. Richard Newhauser (Leiden: Brill, 2007), 207-227.
11
Alcuin Blamires, "Chaucer the Reactionary: Ideology and the General Prologue of the Canterbury Tales,"
Review of English Studies 41, no. 204 (2000): 523-39.
12
Chaucer was directly involved in repressing the revolt as a justice of the peace in Kent from 1385-1389.
Ibid.: 524 n.7.
5
punishing the recent Revolt. This type of a reading helps us to consider the treatment of anger in
this tale from the social perspective of Chaucer’s elite audience.
At the heart of the friar’s sermon are three Senecan exempla illustrating the dangers of
granting power to the wrathful. [SLIDE 6] The choleric magistrate who executes three innocent
men is an example of rash and foolish judgment while angry (ll. 2017-2042). From the story of
King Cambyses, the wrathful drunkard, the friar ineptly draws the moral that it is best to placate
the powerful and not expose their sins, but only those of the poor (ll. 2043-78). Finally King
Cyrus destroys the river that drowned his horse—an example of an excessive punishment
(ll.2079-2088). R. A. Pratt showed that these classical exempla very likely come from a real
friar’s preaching manual the Communiloquium of John of Wales; however, they were addressed
not to husbands, but to princes.13 Therefore, they may have been familiar to Chaucer’s elite
audience. I wonder if these negative examples of aristocratic conduct would have hit a nerve
among Chaucer’s audience in the wake of the Peasants’ Revolt. Merrill, however, argued that
the exempla are ironic in light of the abuses of the sanctimonious friars and clergy who had
pretentions to being society’s moral leaders and judges, and yet, at least in the Canterbury Tales,
are unable to rule their own passion. I argue that the scene at the manor in the second part of the
tale counters the friar’s negative examples with positive examples of aristocratic conduct—
courtly conduct that not only legitimates aristocratic rule but also legitimates aristocratic wrath.
Linda Georgianna draws attention to the interaction of the friar with the lordly household,
the description of which seems beyond the ability of the tale-telling Summoner. [SLIDE7] She
argues that through this scene “Chaucer invites his courtly audience to… share in a more private
joke, a genteel and more pertinent attack on the friars’ pretensions to social positions of power in
The wording of Seneca’s exempla in the tale is closer to that of the Communiloquium than to what is
found in the original De ira. Pratt: 619-642.
13
6
the halls of the rich.”14 I concur with her and her observation that the scene involves the
reestablishment of an aristocratically dominated social and moral order, an order that the friars
were accused of threatening by their greedy meddling.15 I would add that the aristocracy’s
worthiness to rule is legitimized by its members’ ability to rule their wrath. The scene shows the
aristocracy in favourable light as complete masters of the situation, diagnosing, interrogating,
counseling and finally judging and overseeing the punishment of the hypocritical mendicant.
Critics have noted that the relationship between priest and penitent is reversed as the lord
and lady interrogate the friar and counsel him to calm his unseemly ire.16 It has not been noted,
however, that the lord and lady echo some of the remedies suggested by moral theologians and
manuals on the vices—the store of wisdom to which Friar John as laid special claim, despite his
false humility.
The lord is immediately able to gauge the friar’s distress (ll. 2171-2175). [SLIDE 8]
Although the friar’s injury is trivial, the friar magnifies its significance: namely that the nasty
personal insult he suffered was also directed at his convent and order, and therefore redounds
blasphemously against God’s Church (ll. 2176-2183, 2190-2193). Making his case this way, the
friar is evoking the standard, Augustinian teaching on patience that encouraged good people to
suffer inwardly personal harm from the wicked, but not to bear the wrongs committed against
one’s neighbor or God. Moreover, it taught that when a personal injury is also damaging to God
and his Church, then it must be punished. This teaching was expounded in the moral treatises,
14
Linda Georgiana, "Lords, Churls, and Friars: The Return to Social Order in the Summoner's Tale," in
Rebels and Rivals : The Contestive Spirit in the Canterbury Tales, ed. Susanna Greer Fein, David Raybin, and Peter
C. Braeger(Kalamazoo, Mich.: Medieval Institute Publications, Western Michigan University, 1991), 150-151.
15
For a similar view of the court as a microcosm of the manor’s harmonious order, see Traugott Lawler and
Geoffrey Chaucer, The One and the Many in the Canterbury Tales(Hamden, Conn.: Archon Books, 1980), 74.
16
Earle Birney, "Structural Irony within the Summoner's Tale," in Essays on Chaucerian Irony
ed. Beryl Rowland(Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1985), 118; Lawler and Chaucer, 50
7
such as Aquinas’ Summa theologiae, and in the manuals for confessors the friars studied.17 In
accordance with the same teaching, it seems, Friar John has avoided violently punishing flatulent
Thomas, but has brought charges to the local secular lord to carry out God’s justice.
But the patient members of the court resist the friar’s attempt to implicate them in his
injury. Though aghast at the act, the lady of the manor remains a model of mildness as she
teaches the friar patience. She attempts to dismiss or minimize Thomas’ insult on two counts.
[SLIDE 9] Firstly, she responds, “I seye a cherl hath doon a cherles dede.” (l. 2206) That is, it was
a lowly act by a lowly person, and beneath contempt. She also seeks to dismiss the seriousness
of the insult, saying: “His sike heed is ful of vanytee;/ I holde hym in a manere frenesye.” (ll.
2208-9). This accords with Thomas Aquinas’ analysis of the causes of anger in question 47 of
the prima secundae of the Summa theologiae.18 Aquinas implies that understanding the causes of
anger helps to remedy the passion.19 Anger is caused by an unjust slight against one’s
excellence. Sure, if a lowly person imputes one’s excellence, that is unjust and might cause
anger. However, if one is secure in one’s excellence, then such a slight is all the easier to
dismiss, especially if the lowliness, poverty or sickness of the person causing the injury also
mitigates his responsibility for acting angrily. An insult uttered in passion is less serious that a
more calculated assault.20
17
On the morality of vindication (vengeance/punishment), see Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae IIa-IIae
q.108 a. 1. The teaching is dependent on Augustine’s De sermon Domini in monte, 1, cited by Gratian in D.23. The
Thomistic synthesis was popularized at the end of the thirteenth-century by the Dominican John of Freiburg in his
Summa confessorum, 2.5.52.
18
Summa theologiae, Ia-IIae, q. 47.
19
Though Thomas promises to discuss the remedies of anger in the prologue to the question, he does not
make the explicit: ‘Deinde consdierandum est de causea effective irae, et de remediis eius.”
20
Even if such excuses were not enough to fully calm Friar John’s anger, they should have made it clear
that any injury he may have suffered was beneath the concern of the lord and lady. They will not so be easily
manipulated by this friar into settling his petty score.
8
Friar John, however, will not be soothed but betrays his own baseness by fantasizing
about how he will take vengeance by preaching against Thomas from the pulpit (ll.2210-2215—
the last we hear from Friar John). Moreover, he continues to smart from being tricked into
promising to divide Thomas’ gift—an absurd provision. This has been read by some as John’s
fixation on the literal meaning of word that kills the spirit.21 This maybe so, but I think Friar John
is insisting that Thomas’ trick is proof that fart was both fully intentional and directed broadly at
his convent, therefore justifying John’s desire to avenge an injury that redounds against God’s
Church.22
[SLIDE 10]This stirs the lord to muse about the technical problems of dividing a fart (ll.
2216-2242).23 His deliberation is slow and rational, unlike the passionate response of the ancient
tyrants mentioned in the Senecan exempla and unlike the friar’s apoplexy. The lord decides that
Thomas’ demand is a confounding impossibility and concludes that “the devel putte it in his
mynde” and that Thomas is a “demonyak.” Such possession, of course, mitigates or eliminates
Thomas’ volition and responsibility for his insult. The lord therefore advises the friar to eat his
supper and forget about the churl.
But the Summoner and Chaucer have will not let Friar John rest at the table. The lord has
been a model of magnanimity, both in his advice to the friar, and in his patient dealing with the
21
John A. Alford, "Scriptural Testament in the Canterbury Tales: The Letter Takes Its Revenge," in
Chaucer and Scriptural Tradition, ed. David L. Jeffrey(Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 1984), 201.
22
Compare to the interpretation of Enrico Giaccherini, I 'Fabliaux' Di Chaucer: Tradizione E Einnovazione
Nella Narrativa Comica Chauceriana(Pisa: ETS Università, 1980), 159. cited in Chaucer, 200. which argues that
Friar John feels he must amplify his original charge, which has not excited the sympathetic response he expected.
23
Some critics read the deliberation as mock seriousness. Chaucer, 200. Fiona Somerset argues that the
lord removes the problem from sacred law to natural science, implicitly rejecting John’s complaint of a blasphemous
assault Fiona Somerset, ""As Just as Is a Squyre": The Politics Of "Lewed Translacion' in Chaucer's Summoner's
Tale," Studies in the Age of Chaucer 21, no. (1999): 206.
9
pesky intruder, but justice is not achieved by letting the hypocritical friar off scot-free.24 The
final lesson that the friar learns at court is taught by the squire Jankyn, [SLIDE 11] for it is beneath
the dignity of the lord to execute the final humiliation of the upstart and presumptuous friar.25
Jankyn solution for dividing Thomas’ fart comes not from the stale academic treatises in which
the friars invested, but from experience carving at court. Jankyn is rational, restrained and even
courteous, while he vindicates Thomas’ insult and shows how the friar and his convent can
indeed share the fart equally, and suggests that they deserve such a prize for the way that they
practice or abuse their ministry. Indeed, Jankyn emphasis on the friar’s just deserts evokes or
rather imposes on the obdurate friar, another common remedy for wrath, namely the
consideration that the slights and misfortunes that one suffers should be accepted as divine
punishments for one’s sins.26
[SLIDE 12]I have tried here to tease out the positive teaching and examples in the second
part of the Summoner’s Tale to counter Friar John’s negative examples of elite wrath in the first.
Unlike the Wife’s Prologue and Tale, in which a character explicitly questions Church doctrine,
the moral teaching in the Summoner’s Tale remains orthodox. However, the true teachers of
patience is not the bumbling and hypocritical friar, but by the aristocratic court, where the lord
and lady attempt to instruct and counsel the wrathful friar. The lord is presented as a mild but
just guardian of the traditional social order, an order that the greedy friar threatens until he is
By mitigating John’s the insult of John’s gift, they also mitigate it as an active of punishment, which the
corrupt friar deserved.
25
On the use of servants by medieval masters as agents of their wrath, see Debra Blumenthal, "Defending
Their Masters' Honour: Slaves as Violent Offenders in Fifteenth-Century Valencia," in "A Great Effusion of
Blood?": Interpreting Medieval Violence, ed. Mark Meyerson, Daniel Thiery, and Oren Falk(Toronto: University of
Toronto Press, 2004), 34-56. The squire, though a servant, is still a member of court and likely a lord in training.
26
The most common example would be found in tract De ira in the Summa de vitiis by the thirteenthcentury Dominican, William Peraldus, which was widely circulated and mined by preachers and the composers of
moral guides. William Peraldus, Summae virtutum ac vitiorum, 2 vols. (Lyon: P. Compognan and R. Taillandier,
1668), 8.4, vol. 2, 370-371.
24
10
finally punished, righteously but moderately. The positive example of aristocratic, even courtly
mildness may have conformed to the ideological self-image of Chaucer’s elite audience and
justified their rule and exercise of righteous zeal. In the end, however, Chaucer may have been
seeking to reinforce a moral ideal through a positive example, rather than by showing up the
faults of the powerful, which even Friar John had warned against.
Works Cited
Alford, John A. "Scriptural Testament in the Canterbury Tales: The Letter Takes Its Revenge." In
Chaucer and Scriptural Tradition, edited by David L. Jeffrey, 197-203. Ottawa: University of
Ottawa Press, 1984.
Allen, David G. "Death and Staleness in The "Son-Less" World of the Summoner's Tale." Studies in
Short Fiction 24 (1987): 1-14.
Birney, Earle. "Structural Irony within the Summoner's Tale." In Essays on Chaucerian Irony
edited by Beryl Rowland. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1985.
Blamires, Alcuin. "Chaucer the Reactionary: Ideology and the General Prologue of the Canterbury Tales."
Review of English Studies 41, no. 204 (2000): 523-539.
Blumenthal, Debra. "Defending Their Masters' Honour: Slaves as Violent Offenders in Fifteenth-Century
Valencia." In "A Great Effusion of Blood?": Interpreting Medieval Violence, edited by Mark
Meyerson, Daniel Thiery and Oren Falk, 34-56. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004.
Chapman, Coolidge Otis. "Chaucer on Preachers and Preaching." PMLA 44, no. 1 (1929): 178-185.
Chaucer, Geoffrey. The Summoner's Tale A Variorum Edition of the Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, V. 2.
The Canterbury Tales, Pt. 7, Edited by John F. Plummer. Norman: University of Oklahoma
Press, 1995.
Finlayson, John. "Chaucer's Summoner's Tale: Flatulence, Blasphemy, and the Emperor's Clothes."
Studies in Philology 104, no. 4 (2007): 455-70.
Fleming, J. V. "Anticlerical Satire as Theological Essay: Chaucer's Summoner's Tale." Thalia 6, no. 1
(1984): 5-22.
Fleming, John V. "The Antifraternalism of the Summoner's Tale." Journal of English and Germanic
Philology 65 (1966): 688-700.
Geltner, G. "Bretheren Behaving Badly: A Deviant Approach to Medieval Antifraternalism." Speculum
85 (2010): 47-64.
11
________, ed. William of Saint-Amour's "De Periculis Novissimorum Temporum": An Introduction,
Edition, and Translation, Dallas Medieval Texts and Translations, 8. Leuven, 2007.
Georgiana, Linda. "Lords, Churls, and Friars: The Return to Social Order in the Summoner's Tale." In
Rebels and Rivals : The Contestive Spirit in the Canterbury Tales, edited by Susanna Greer Fein,
David Raybin and Peter C. Braeger, 149-72. Kalamazoo, Mich.: Medieval Institute Publications,
Western Michigan University, 1991.
Giaccherini, Enrico. I 'Fabliaux' Di Chaucer: Tradizione E Einnovazione Nella Narrativa Comica
Chauceriana. Pisa: ETS Università, 1980.
Lawler, Traugott, and Geoffrey Chaucer. The One and the Many in the Canterbury Tales. Hamden,
Conn.: Archon Books, 1980.
Merril, Thomas F. "Wrath and Rhetoric in 'the Summoner's Tale'." Texas Studies in LIterature and
Language 4 (1962): 341-350.
Pitard, Derrick G. "Greed and Anti-Fraternalism in Chaucer's "Summoner's Tale"." In The Seven Deadly
Sins : From Communities to Individuals, edited by Richard Newhauser, 207-227. Leiden: Brill,
2007.
Pratt, R.A. "Chaucer and the Hand That Fed Him." Speculum 41 (1966): 619-642.
Richardson-Hay, Christine. "The Summoner's Prologue and Tale." In Sources and Analogues of the
Canterbury Tales, edited by Robert M. Correale and Mary Hamel, 2, 449-477. Cambridge: D.S.
Brewer, 2002.
Somerset, Fiona. ""As Just as Is a Squyre": The Politics Of "Lewed Translacion' in Chaucer's Summoner's
Tale." Studies in the Age of Chaucer 21 (1999).
Szittya, Penn R. "The Friar as False Apostle: Antifraternal Exegesis and the Summoner's Tale." Studies in
Philology 71 (1974): 19-46.
________. The Antifraternal Tradition in Medieval Literature. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University
Press, 1986.
Wenzel, Siegfried. "The Dominican Presence in Middle English Literature." In Christ among the
Medieval Dominicans : Representations of Christ in the Texts and Images of the Order of
Preachers, edited by Kent Emery and Joseph Peter Wawrykow, 315-331. Notre Dame, Ind.:
University of Notre Dame Press, 1998.
William Peraldus. Summae Virtutum Ac Vitiorum. 2 vols. Lyon: P. Compognan and R. Taillandier, 1668.
12