Geoffrey Chaucer, The Summoner’s Tale

Darragh Greene (University College Dublin)

Ed. by Natalie Hanna, University of Liverpool
The Literary Encyclopedia. Volume 1.2.1.02: English Writing and Culture: High and Late Medieval, 1066-1485.
Vol. editors: Kate Ash-Irisarri (University of Edinburgh), Rory Critten (Université de Lausanne), David Fuller (University of Durham), Natalie Hanna (University of Liverpool), Hugh Magennis (Queen's University Belfast), Jamie McKinstry (University of Durham), Sarah Peverley (University of Liverpool), Sebastian Sobecki (Rijksuniversiteit Groningen)

Dates

First circulation or publication c. 1386

Places

England (Country of Origin; Publication/ performance)

Genres and Modes

Poetry (any)

Resources

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The Summoner’s Tale

by Geoffrey Chaucer is a late-fourteenth-century

fabliau

and anti-mendicant satire, which features a learned but hypocritical friar who gets his comeuppance at the hands of his social inferiors, an angry churl, and a clever squire. Written in rhyming couplets of iambic pentameter, the 586-line poem is disposed last in Fragment III of

The Canterbury Tales

, following

The Friar’s Tale

. It is preceded by a 44-line prologue, which records the Summoner’s angry reaction to

The Friar’s Tale

, which is about a wicked summoner who foolishly swears brotherhood with a devil and is damned. Most of the prologue consists of the Summoner’s short story of a friar who is given a vision of hell, where he sees twenty-thousand friars swarming in and out of “the develes ers”…

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2522 words

Citation: Greene, Darragh. "The Summoner’s Tale". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 27 July 2022 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=39387, accessed 19 April 2024.]

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