Why Does Chaucer's Manciple Tell a Tale About a Crow?

Author / Editor
Phillips, Helen.

Title
Why Does Chaucer's Manciple Tell a Tale About a Crow?

Published
Nottingham Medieval Studies 54 (2010): 113-19.

Description
Phillips explores the proverbial and biblical background to ManT, identifying links between its plot and its teller, an untrustworthy servant. In popular tradition, crows were regarded as unfaithful servants and unreliable messengers, an association based on the raven that did not return to Noah. This idiom of the "corbie messenger" survives in Scots but is no longer widespread in Britain.

Chaucer Subjects
Manciple and His Tale.
Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations