The Antifraternalism of the "Summoner's Tale."

Description: Challenges arguments that seek to identify the friar of SumT with a specific fraternal order and adduces the Rules of various fraternal orders and commentaries on these Rules to show that "general antifraternal literature" underlies many details of Chaucer's ironic satire: the nature of glossing and the possession of books, church building, competition with the secular clergy, the equation of money or gold with flatulence, etc. Argues that the friar of SumT is "a kind of 'stage friar' who sums up everything that is wrong with the mendicant orders from a fourteenth-century English secular point of view."

Chaucer Subjects: Summoner and His Tale
Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations