I. Ovid, Metamorphoses 753

(ed. Frank Justus Miller)

II. Ovide moralisé 755

(ed. C. de Boer)

III. Guillaume de Machaut, Le Livre dou Voir Dit 759

(ed. Daniel Leech-Wilkinson)

IV. John Gower, Confessio Amantis 769

(ed. G. C. Macaulay)

V. The Seven Sages of Rome 771

(ed. Karl Brunner)

James A. Work asserted in 1941 that The Manciple’s Tale had no one source but was cobbled together from Chaucer’s memories of a common story and related materials; no scholar since then has convincingly undermined that assertion. The story of Phoebus, his unfaithful wife, and a tattling bird that the god changes from white to black circulated in a number of different texts, one of which was a work to which Chaucer alludes frequently in his poetry, Ovid’s Metamorphoses. However, the Latin story differs in several significant details from Chaucer’s. Ovid gives Phebus’s wife’s name as Coronis, which Chaucer omits; Ovid’s raven travels to find the absent Phebus whereas in Chaucer the wife’s infidelity occurs while the crow is caged at home, where he waits for his master to return; and Ovid’s Coronis pleads for the life of the child in her womb as Phebus threatens to kill her, but the nameless wife in Chaucer’s tale is not described as pregnant. Chaucer also adds the crow’s loss of his singing voice as punishment.

The Ovide moralisé (c. 1225) and Guillaume de Machaut’s Le livre du voir dit (c. 1365) also include versions of this fable that resemble Chaucer’s in tone and, to some extent, in the focus upon unwise speech, but both of these versions follow Ovid more closely than Chaucer’s does. The story also appears in John Gower’s Confessio Amantis, where the emphasis on proverbial wisdom addressed to “Mi sone” strongly resembles the self-consciously labored, parodic concluding lines of Chaucer’s tale. However, there is no conclusive evidence that Chaucer knew Gower’s version, which is shorter than The Manciple’s Tale and differs from it in a number of ways; in fact, Gower’s tale may not predate Chaucer’s at all. Another strong Middle English analogue for the tale is The Seven Sages of Rome, a translation of the French Li Romans des sept sages; the version printed here is from the Auchinleck Manuscript.

Bryan and Dempster's Sources and Analogues of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, first published in 1941, has been one of the most important reference tools in Chaucer studies. It has played a leading role in helping scholars understand and assess how Chaucer handled the many classical, patristic and medieval sources he used in fashioning his masterpiece. In the past sixty years, however, there have been many new developments in the field, and a revised and expanded edition has long been needed. This new Sources and Analogues of The Canterbury Tales is a collaborative effort by an international team of scholars to meet this need. Its purpose is essentially the same as that of its distinguished predecessor – to present the sources in the forms that Chaucer knew them, and where sources are unknown, to present the closest analogues to the tales in the forms with which Chaucer was presumably acquainted.

There are, however, several important differences in content and format between Bryan and Dempster's work and this volume. Several new sources and analogues of the Tales discovered in the past half century (e.g. Friar's Tale, Second Nun's Tale) are printed here together for the first time. Some wellknown sources of others (e.g. Man of Law's Tale, Wife of Bath's Prologue) are re-edited from manuscripts closer to those Chaucer presumably knew and used. Some source texts in Bryan and Dempster have been omitted, including especially Sercambi's Novelle, now known to have been written too late to have influenced Chaucer's idea for the frame of the Tales. The most noticeable difference is the appearance of modern English translations of all sources and analogues in foreign languages. This addition, which will make these texts more accessible to scholars and students of Chaucer, as well as to a larger audience of interested readers of the Tales, has also required expansion of this edition to two volumes.

This first volume begins with a fresh examination of the sources of the frame of the work. Helen Cooper's assertion that Boccaccio's Decameron is the one text “that can stake a primary claim to being Chaucer's model for the Tales” represents a major shift of opinion among a number of scholars who are now willing to credit the influence of this work on The Canterbury Tales, and also signals another distinct change from Bryan and Dempster.

Central to the Chaucer canon, the Nun's Priest's Tale in its broadest outlines represents a genre as familiar to modern audiences as to Chaucer's, the beast fable. However, the simple skeleton of a fable plot is here fleshed out with material from a largely medieval genre, the beast epic, and this hybrid creation is adorned with exempla and rhetorical flourishes drawn from biblical and scholastic commentary, notably in Chauntecleer's and Pertelote's debate on the significance of dreams. In the later Middle Ages beast fables not only comprised an important part of the Latin grammar-school curriculum but also had a lively history in sermons, visual arts, and popular literature. The best known beast epic, the Old French Roman de Renart, was compiled by Pierre de St. Cloud in the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries. It exists in fourteen full-length manuscripts, and numerous others reproducing only one of the compilation's two branches; the poem also spawned many imitations.

The major questions about the sources and analogues of this tale, many of which were raised but not authoritatively answered by Kate Oelzner Petersen in her 1898 monograph On the Sources of the Nonne Prestes Tale, have in the past thirty years found some resolution, primarily in the work of Robert A. Pratt. Petersen discussed and reproduced a number of texts showing a variety of degrees of similarity to Chaucer's tale, but she sketched the tale's fabulistic pedigree only within a very broad folkloric context (pp. 1–9), and then asserted that in spite of the tale's debt to the French Renart literature, its closest surviving relative is Reinhart Fuchs, a German beast epic extant in only three manuscripts. Having examined possible sources for Chauntecleer's longest exempla on the reliability of dreams, Petersen concluded that while both were available in the works of Cicero and Valerius Maximus, Chaucer probably borrowed them from two sections of a book which he (like his contemporaries Thomas Hoccleve and John Lydgate) certainly knew, Dominican Robert Holkot's Super Libros Sapientiae, a commentary on the biblical Books of Wisdom (pp. 98–111).