The Parson's Tale

"The Parson's Tale" is the final tale of Geoffrey Chaucer's fourteenth-century poetic cycle The Canterbury Tales. Its teller, the Parson, is a virtuous priest who takes his role as spiritual caretaker of his parish seriously. Instead of telling a story as the other pilgrims do, he delivers a treatise on penitence and the Seven Deadly Sins. This was a popular genre in the Middle Ages; Chaucer's is a translation and reworking that ultimately derives from the Latin manuals of two Dominican friars, Raymund of Pennaforte and William Perault. Modern readers and critics have found it pedantic and boring, especially in comparison to the rest of the Canterbury Tales. Some scholars have questioned whether Chaucer ever intended the "Parson's Tale" to be part of the Tales at all, but more recent scholarship understands it as integral to the work, providing an appropriate ending to a series of stories concerned with the value of fiction itself.

Framing narrative

The General Prologue of the Canterbury Tales introduces the characters, a diverse group of pilgrims on the way to Canterbury Cathedral to see the shrine of Thomas Becket. While the Host, Harry Bailey, proposes a story-telling competition in which each teller will tell two tales on the way there and two on the way back to the Tabard Inn in Southwark – a total of over 100 stories – only 24 full or partial tales exist. It is unclear whether Chaucer intended to write all 120, or whether he had never intended to fulfil the promise of the General Prologue in the first place. Additionally, when Chaucer died in c. 1400 the intended order of the tales in the collection was still unclear.