The Monk's Tale
one of The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer
"The Monk's Tale" is one of the Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer.
The Monk's tale to the other pilgrims is a collection of 17 short stories, exempla, on the theme of tragedy. The tragic endings of these historical figures are recounted: Lucifer, Adam, Samson, Hercules, Nebuchadnezzar, Belshazzar, Zenobia, Pedro of Castile, Peter I of Cyprus, Bernabò Visconti, Ugolino of Pisa, Nero, Holofernes, Antiochus, Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, and Croesus.
Some literary critics believe that a large portion of the tale may have been written before the rest of the Canterbury Tales and that the four most contemporary figures were added at a later point. A likely dating for this hypothetical first draft of the text would be the 1370s, shortly after Chaucer returned from a trip to Italy, where he was exposed to Giovanni Boccaccio's Concerning the Falls of Illustrious Men, as well as other works such as the Decameron. The tragedy of Bernabò Visconti must have been written after 1385, the date of the protagonist's death. The basic structure for the tale is modeled after the Boccaccio's Illustrious Men, while the tale of Ugolino of Pisa is retold from Dante's Inferno.
The Monk, in his prologue, claims to have a hundred of these stories in his cell, but the Knight stops him after only 17, saying that they have had enough sadness. The order of the stories within the tale is different in several early manuscripts, and if the more contemporary stories were at the end of his tale, Chaucer may wish to suggest that the Knight has another motivation for interrupting than sheer boredom. In line 51 of the General Prologue, it is said of the Knight that: "At Alisaundre he was, whan it was wonne".
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “The Monk's Tale” is one of The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Monk's, Tale and Canterbury, not as a finished interpretation.
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The phrase “one of The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer” supplies a clear boundary for inquiry. It also exposes the unanswered questions: who defined that boundary, when it became stable and which sources sit outside it.
The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 22, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q5103779. VIAF identifies the subject as 174051873. The Library of Congress control number is no2007029065. None of the 3 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1385.
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This entry incorporates text from “The Monk's Tale” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.