The nefarious escapades of the trickster Reynard the Fox emerged from the beast fable genre in the twelfth-century Latin poem Ysengris, a direct antecedent of the French Roman de Renart and ancestor of Geoffrey Chaucer’s Nun’s Priest’s Tale. Chaucer appropriates the low comedy humour gaulois and “pithy moralizing,” typical of fabliaux, “a racy and often cynical comedy, savoring sex and violence, though not without subtler moments”, but puts his own “tongue-in-cheek” spin on the French Branch II tale of the clever fox and the duped cock. Although the figure of Reynard is prevalent in trickster lore, the primary trickster at play in the Nun’s Priest’s Tale may be not the fox but the teller of the tale, the Nun’s Priest himself who travels the road to Canterbury. Both share trickster’s capacity for slippery rhetoric. Indeed, the Nun’s Priest crosses and re-crosses his trail of meaning as effectively as a smooth-talking fox tricks a bemused rooster into closing his eyes. His use of “ambiguity and ambivalence, doubleness and duplicity, contradiction and paradox” are, thus, indicative of the presence of trickster. - [Author]

Language: English