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Short Summary: In Yorkshire, at Holdernesse, a friar making his rounds, begging from householders, calls upon old Thomas, who is very ill. The wife tells him Thomas is grouchy, and the friar preaches a sermon on the evils of anger. Then he presses Thomas for a rich gift; Thomas says he has already given all he can, but the friar persists.
The Summoner’s Tale focuses on a lowly friar who travels the country begging for alms. The friar makes his living by preaching and begging wherever he goes. The Summoner points out that the Friar records the names of those giving alms so he may pray for their safety and well being later on.
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Antifraternal Stereotypes I: Professional Rivalry
In most manuscripts of The Canterbury Tales, theSummoner’s Tale follows theFriar’s Tale, and they form a pair. The Friar baits the Summoner by telling a tale about a corrupt summoner, who is in cahoots with the devil. The Summoner gets even with an equally vicious tale, in which a greedy friar gets his come-uppance. “Quiting,” a Middle English term that means both repayment and retaliation, is an important dynamic in theCanterbury Tales (see the chapter on The Reeve’s Tale in this volume), an...
Interlude: Some Terminology, and the Difference History Makes
Today we’d call the Summoner’s aggressive one-up-manship gender expression rather than gender identity. This distinction derives from contemporary transgender politics. Gender expression refers to the outward, culturally-determined signs of gender, such as behavior, clothing, appearance, and name, signs that are usually read in binary terms, as either masculine or feminine. Gender identity, in contrast, is my internal, deeply-held sense of my gender, which may be at odds with my biological se...
Antifraternal Stereotypes II: The Womanizer
Friars made vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience, but had a reputation for chasing women. In Chaucer’s General Prologue, the Friar is portrayed as acquisitive and a womanizer, able to extract a “ferthyng” [“farthing, a coin worth a quarter of a penny”] (GP 255) from even a poor widow, and paying for the marriages of those women he’d made pregnant: “He hadde maad ful many a mariage / Of yonge wommen at his owene cost” (GP 212-13). A barbed reference in The Wife of Bath’s Tale satirizes fri...
Insulted by the Friar’s association of summoners with the devil, and by his final ironic reference to hell as the “heritage” [spiritual inheritance] of summoners (FrT 1641), the Summoner gets even. He kicks off with a fable that puts friars right inside the devil’s arsehole. His Prologue’s terrifying, Bosch-like vision of 20,000 friars swarming out...
Compare and contrast the portrait of the Friar in the General Prologue to The Canterbury Tales (GP 208-269) with the representation of Friar John in The Summoner’s Prologue andTale.Look up ars-metric in the OED. What are its meanings in the Middle Ages? Patricia Parker notes that in the early modern period “‘ars-metric’ is associated with Arabic learning and its backward writ...The General Prologue to The Canterbury Tales hints at a close relationship between the Summoner and the Pardoner. How productive is it to read The Summoner’s Tale in conjunction with the portrait o...The Summoner’s Tale has been very little adapted for cinema, theater, or television. Suggest some reasons why. One notable exception is Pier Paolo Pasolini’s I racconti di Canterbury (1972), a film...The Summoner's Prologue. The Prologe of the Somonours Tale. 1665 This Somonour in his styropes hye stood; This Summoner in his stirrups stood high; 1666 Upon this Frere his herte was so wood. Upon this Friar his heart was so enraged.
Having made his point about the friars in general, the Summoner tells another insulting story about one friar in particular. A friar, who goes about seeking contributions, promises prayers and possible salvation in exchange for anything his parishioners will give.
Prologue. The Summoner’s Prologue binds firmly together the tales that it links: it continues the quarrel between himself and the Friar, and so prepares the dramatic ground for his Tale. The particular example of antifraternal satire given here, that friars are lodged in the devil’s backside, may possibly be a motif invented for the Summoner.
The lines are closely cued by the ending of the Friar’s Tale, where Huberd dispatches his villain ‘where as that somonours han hir heritage’—which is very painful—and adds a prayer that Christ may keep ‘us’ (all the pilgrims, that is, except the Summoner) from hell and ‘the temptour Sathanas’.
