Silencing the silencers : Chaucer’s satire of clerical authority in the Nun’s Priest’s Tale

This essay is a reading of Chaucer’s Nun’s Priest’s Tale as an anti-clerical satire, following others in the Canterbury Tales like the Friar’s, Summoner’s, and Pardoner’s Tales. Through the Nun’s Priest and Chauntecleer, Chaucer completes his anti-clerical satire by obliquely portraying priestly and...

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Main Author: Lai, Daniel
Other Authors: Walter Philip Wadiak
Format: Final Year Project
Language:English
Published: 2013
Subjects:
Online Access:https://hdl.handle.net/10356/95744
http://hdl.handle.net/10220/9454
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Institution: Nanyang Technological University
Language: English
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spelling sg-ntu-dr.10356-957442020-09-27T20:11:01Z Silencing the silencers : Chaucer’s satire of clerical authority in the Nun’s Priest’s Tale Lai, Daniel Walter Philip Wadiak School of Humanities and Social Sciences DRNTU::Humanities::Literature::English This essay is a reading of Chaucer’s Nun’s Priest’s Tale as an anti-clerical satire, following others in the Canterbury Tales like the Friar’s, Summoner’s, and Pardoner’s Tales. Through the Nun’s Priest and Chauntecleer, Chaucer completes his anti-clerical satire by obliquely portraying priestly and sexual abuses. Within the larger frame of the “interacting polarities” of experience and auctoritee, Chaucer subversively portrays the representational incongruities of anticlerical satire in an ironic, ostensibly sententious moral allegory, highlighting the “severe contradictions” between the Church’s proclaimed Christian “self-representations” and the practices of its human representatives. Through the undermining of authoritative literary forms, the use of fable, anti-feminism and individualist verisimilitude, Chaucer parodies the authoritative exegetical structures he attacks, to show the hypocritical, self-seeking excesses that result from the unchecked discursive power of contemporary structures of clerical and exegetical authority. In so doing, he constitutes a new, more egalitarian politics of reading. Bachelor of Arts in English 2013-04-08T01:31:43Z 2019-12-06T19:20:40Z 2013-04-08T01:31:43Z 2019-12-06T19:20:40Z 2012 2012 Final Year Project (FYP) Lai, D. (2012). Silencing the silencers : Chaucer’s satire of clerical authority in the Nun’s Priest’s Tale. Final year project report, Nanyang Technological University. https://hdl.handle.net/10356/95744 http://hdl.handle.net/10220/9454 en Nanyang Technological University 31 p. application/pdf
institution Nanyang Technological University
building NTU Library
country Singapore
collection DR-NTU
language English
topic DRNTU::Humanities::Literature::English
spellingShingle DRNTU::Humanities::Literature::English
Lai, Daniel
Silencing the silencers : Chaucer’s satire of clerical authority in the Nun’s Priest’s Tale
description This essay is a reading of Chaucer’s Nun’s Priest’s Tale as an anti-clerical satire, following others in the Canterbury Tales like the Friar’s, Summoner’s, and Pardoner’s Tales. Through the Nun’s Priest and Chauntecleer, Chaucer completes his anti-clerical satire by obliquely portraying priestly and sexual abuses. Within the larger frame of the “interacting polarities” of experience and auctoritee, Chaucer subversively portrays the representational incongruities of anticlerical satire in an ironic, ostensibly sententious moral allegory, highlighting the “severe contradictions” between the Church’s proclaimed Christian “self-representations” and the practices of its human representatives. Through the undermining of authoritative literary forms, the use of fable, anti-feminism and individualist verisimilitude, Chaucer parodies the authoritative exegetical structures he attacks, to show the hypocritical, self-seeking excesses that result from the unchecked discursive power of contemporary structures of clerical and exegetical authority. In so doing, he constitutes a new, more egalitarian politics of reading.
author2 Walter Philip Wadiak
author_facet Walter Philip Wadiak
Lai, Daniel
format Final Year Project
author Lai, Daniel
author_sort Lai, Daniel
title Silencing the silencers : Chaucer’s satire of clerical authority in the Nun’s Priest’s Tale
title_short Silencing the silencers : Chaucer’s satire of clerical authority in the Nun’s Priest’s Tale
title_full Silencing the silencers : Chaucer’s satire of clerical authority in the Nun’s Priest’s Tale
title_fullStr Silencing the silencers : Chaucer’s satire of clerical authority in the Nun’s Priest’s Tale
title_full_unstemmed Silencing the silencers : Chaucer’s satire of clerical authority in the Nun’s Priest’s Tale
title_sort silencing the silencers : chaucer’s satire of clerical authority in the nun’s priest’s tale
publishDate 2013
url https://hdl.handle.net/10356/95744
http://hdl.handle.net/10220/9454
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