Chaucer's Roman Tales

Author / Editor
Hirsh, John C.

Title
Chaucer's Roman Tales

Published
Chaucer Review 31 (1996): 45-57.

Description
Considers Chaucer's two tales set in ancient Rome--PhyT and SNT--maintaining that each is "particularly concerned with political corruption"; "the depravity of those who wield the state's power has quite undermined it." Hirsh notes a possible "progression" in certain late tales, which "give evidence of a growing authorial disinclination to privilege the ideal and ordered, but rather to engage the incongruous,the eccentric, and palpably false or unjust."

Chaucer Subjects
Physician and His Tale.
Second Nun and Her Tale.