Content warning: mentions of epistemic violence, kidnapping

Our usual hosts AJ, Alice and Shannen join forces with Gil Vitro (PhD student, UC Santa Barbara) to discuss “The Man of Law’s Prologue” & “Tale”. This tale is a doozy – Custance gets stuck on a boat and gets roped into various adventures involving conversion narratives, conflicts between religions, and a mess of family drama. We discuss the primary text as well as adaptations of it, alongside Better Call Saul, VeggieTales, and discourses around race, gender, and sexuality!

Sources, Further Reading, & Thanks

Thanks to ebunny on Pixabay for their rendition of “Greensleeves”, Free for use under the Pixabay Content License

“The Man of Law’s Prologue” & “Tale"

Ellesmere Manuscript mssEL 26 C 9, f. 50v, Huntington Library

De Miseria Condicionis Humane by Pope Innocent III

For the shortest tale, we sure had a lot to say about it! After introducing Roger (aka Hogge) of Ware and discussing “The Cook’s Tale” the first episode in this mini-series, we’re keen to share with you even more about the Cook. More than you would ever care to know! We start with Alice bringing her cousin-in-law on to discuss her career as a line cook in Los Angeles for a number of knee-slapping, riproaring, and sometimes scary stories from the kitchen. After, the hosts discuss additions to the Cook’s Tale as found in Bodley MS 686 as well as the Tale of Gamelyn. For those unfamiliar, its a tale post-Chaucer’s death attributed to the Cook in some manuscripts and features a character from the extended Robin Hood universe!

Sources, Show Notes & Further Reading

• Alice and her cousin have the same first name
• Bowers, John M., Consortium for the Teaching of the Middle Ages., and University of Rochester. The Canterbury Tales : Fifteenth-Century Continuations and Additions. Edited by John M. Bowers. Medieval Institute Publications, 1992.
• Knight, Stephen, Thomas H. Ohlgren, and Thomas E. Kelly. Robin Hood and Other Outlaw Tales. Published for TEAMS in association with the University of Rochester by Medieval Institute Publications, Western Michigan University, 1997.

Join our regular hosts Alice, and Shannen for a delicious, aromatic conversation on this unfinished bawdy tale, its additions and adaptations with Jo King (PhD candidate, UC Santa Barbara)! We got everybody’s favorite Cook, Roger of Ware, and the shortest Canterbury Tale! Despite that, it has a varied manuscript and adaptation history which makes this shortest episode potentially our longest so far — so much we had to cut it into two episodes!

Show notes, sources, and further reading:

Dubin, Nathaniel E., trans. “The Knight Who Made Cunts Talk” from The Fabliaux : A New Verse Translation. First edition. Liveright Publishing Corporation, A Division of W.W. Norton & Company, 2013.

Edwards, A. S. G. “Chaucer’s Cook’s Tale, 4422.” Notes and Queries (Oxford) 64, no. 2 (2017): 220–21.

Mannyng, Robert, Idelle Sullens, and William. Handlyng Synne. Medieval & Renaissance Texts & Studies, 1983.

Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Trilogy of Life, including The Canterbury Tales (1971)

Pecan, David. “[Un]Licensed Riot: Prodigality, Hypocrisy, and Guild Discourse in Chaucer’s Cook’s Tale.” Nalans 10, no. 20 (2022): 281–92.

Wang, Denise Ming-yueh. “Old Pies, Stray Flies, and Possibly Poisonous Parsley in the Cook’s Prologue and Tale.” Ex-Position (Taipei) 45, no. 45 (2021): 27–45.

Content warning: issues of consent, violence

Description

“The Reeve’s Tale” is a complicated tale — a hodgepodge of different accents, stumbling actions in the dark, and no clear moral for the modern audience. In this episode, we get together to sort out the wheat from the chaff with our guest, Elisha Hamlin (PhD student, UC Davis). We open with the nutso astroweather and the Kings of Swords before moving onto whether or not the Reeve was a cringe Brony! If you aren’t familiar, “The Reeve’s Tale” (his rebuttal to “The Miller’s Tale”) centers around the misadventures Symkyn the miller, his wife, and kids experience when they host two Cambridge students, John and Aleyn, before there’s a dark turn where the lines of consent are notoriously blurred. Despite this, this tale was a favorite of J.R.R. Tolkien, who wrote on it as an undergraduate as well as a professor.

If you’d like follow up on some of the quotes or line numbers, please see the edition on the Chaucer Harvard website: https://chaucer.fas.harvard.edu/pages/reeves-tale

Show Notes

https://chaucer.fas.harvard.edu/pages/reeves-tale

Crocker, Holly A. "Affective Politics in Chaucer’s Reeve’s Tale: “Cherl” Masculinity after 1381." Studies in the Age of Chaucer, vol. 29, 2007, p. 225-258. Project MUSE, https://dx.doi.org/10.1353/sac.2007.0000.

Feinstein, Sandy. “The ‘Reeve’s Tale’: About That Horse’. The Chaucer Review, Summer, 1991, Vol. 26, No. 1 (Summer, 1991), pp. 99-106. Available at: jstor.org/stable/25094185.

Waymack, Anna Fore. Speaking Through the “Open-Ers”: How Age Feminizes Chaucer’s Reeve. 2013. University of Texas at Austen, Master’s thesis. Available at: repositories.lib.utexas.edu/items/ea72fe5b-c927-47da-a434-b875ac69ee73/full

Cunterbury is a scholarly arts & comedy podcast hosted by two Gen Z academics — Alice Fulmer-Zelinka and AJ Scott — exploring the major works of Geoffrey Chaucer and friends. In our first season, we are providing witty commentary and multiplicity of yassified voices to discuss The Canterbury Tales — and its pilgrims like you’ve never heard them before. If interested in supporting our work, please refer to the show notes, where among other things you’ll see you can follow us on Bluesky at “cunterburypod”, “cvnterburypod” on Instagram, and/or our Patreon. If you’re a scholar, comedian, or another type of clown interested being a guest on our program, please contact us at [email protected].

In our third episode, our regular hosts AJ, Alice, and Shannen have a roundtable discussion with Dr. Tess Wingard, a MSCA Postdoc Fellow at Trinity College, Dublin. “The Miller’s Tale” — one of the most (in)famous Canterbury Tales — fails to disappoint us with its depictions of sex, farts, and the stars. What more could you want? A Middle English fabilau (an Old French genre — think raunchy comedic poetry) told by the drunken miller Robyn, this blockbuster tale has influenced art and pop culture for centuries since its inclusion in the Tales.

Content warning: discussions of sex and consent

Show notes and further reading:

https://labyrinthos.co/blogs/tarot-card-meanings-list/seven-of-swords-meaning-tarot-card-meanings

https://globalchaucers.com/tag/soviet-union/

Baechle, Sarah. Father Chaucer and the Apologists : Cecily Chaumpaigne and 700 Years of Rape Culture. University Park, Pennsylvania: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2025. https://doi.org/10.1515/9780271099798.

From Jonathan Myers’ The Canterbury Tales (1998): The Miller’s and Reeve’s Tales https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=86Y62CIF3II

Pavlinich, Elan J. “The Cunning Linguist of Agbabi’s ‘The Kiss.’” Medieval Feminist Forum 57, no. 2 (2022): 110–40. https://doi.org/10.32773/CCUH4012.

Friedman, John Block. “Bottom-Kissing and the Fragility of Status in Chaucer’s Miller’s Tale.” The Chaucer Review 54, no. 2 (2019): 119–40. https://doi.org/10.5325/chaucerrev.54.2.0119.

Cunterbury is a scholarly arts & comedy podcast hosted by two Gen Z academics — Alice Fulmer-Zelinka and AJ Scott — exploring the major works of Geoffrey Chaucer and friends. In our first season, we are providing witty commentary and multiplicity of yassified voices to discuss The Canterbury Tales — and its pilgrims like you’ve never heard them before. If interested in supporting our work, please refer to the show notes, where among other things you’ll see you can follow us on Bluesky at “cunterburypod”, “cvnterburypod” on Instagram, and/or our Patreon. If you’re a scholar, comedian, or another type of clown interested being a guest on our program, please contact us at [email protected].We are joined by Shannen Escote, our guest host from the English PhD program at UC Davis! In this episode, we move onto the first tale in the Tales: “The Knight’s Tale”. It’s a chivalric romance told by an elder knight (relative to medieval life expectancy); a love triangle between two knights who are cousins. Its setting is ripped from the Theban cycle, French romances adapting stories from it, and Giovanni Boccacio’s Teseida. Philosophically, it bears resemblance to Boethius’ Consolation of Philosophy. We also discuss popular (and unpopular) adaptations of the tale, including William Shakespeare and John Fletcher’s Two Noble Kinsmen (1613) and the MGM film Challengers (2024) starring Zendaya.

Text of Francis Beaumont’s Knight of the Burning Pestle

“Crusoe, Classic works and Copyright”

From Alice’s Substack:

The Knight's Wail: Homosociality in King Richard II's Courts, Poetry, John of Gaunt, & Pan

Fumo, Jamie C. “The Pestilential Gaze: From Epidemiology to Erotomania in The Knight’s Tale.” Studies in the Age of Chaucer, vol. 35, no. 1, 2013, pp. 85–136. Project Muse, https://muse.jhu.edu/pub/102/article/524017.

Ingham, Patricia Clare. “Homosociality and Creative Masculinity in the Knight’s Tale.” Masculinities in Chaucer: Approaches to Maleness in the Canterbury Tales and Troilus and Criseyde. Edited by Peter G. Beidler. D. S. Brewer, 1998, pp. 23–35.

Pugh, Tison. “Necrotic Erotics in Chaucerian Romance: Loving Women, Loving Death, and Destroying Civilization in the Knight’s Tale and Troilus and Criseyde.” Chaucer's (Anti-) Eroticisms and the Queer Middle Ages. Ohio State UP, 2014, pp. 98-126. Project Muse, muse.jhu.edu/book/35091.

Shimomura, Sachi. “The Walking Dead in Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale.” The Chaucer Review, vol. 48, no. 1, 2013, pp. 1–37. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.5325/chaucerrev.48.1.0001.

Cunterbury is a scholarly arts & comedy podcast hosted by three Gen Z academics — Alice Fulmer, Nina Gary, and AJ Scott — exploring the major works of Geoffrey Chaucer and friends. In our first season, we are providing witty commentary and multiplicity of yassified voices to discuss The Canterbury Tales — and its pilgrims like you’ve never heard them before. If interested in supporting our work, please refer to the show notes, where among other things you’ll see you can follow us on Bluesky at “Cunterburypod” and/or our Patreon. If you’re a scholar, comedian, or another type of clown interested being a guest on our program, please contact us at [email protected].

In our pilot episode, we introduce ourselves, some segments you can expect, who Chaucer and the Tales are, and a longer episode than anticipated on the General Prologue. The General Prologue contains some of the most famous lines of Middle English poetry and a long list of pilgrims — and here we include our feelings on them. If you’re looking for refresher, a fun way to cram for your English class or just a way to pass a long train, bus, or car ride, we got you.

Show notes

https://labyrinthos.co/blogs/tarot-card-meanings-list/the-devil-meaning-major-arcana-tarot-card-meanings

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R_FQU4KzN7A

https://patreon.com/Cunterbury?utm_medium=unknown&utm_source=join_link&utm_campaign=creatorshare_creator&utm_content=copyLink

https://bsky.app/profile/cunterburypod.bsky.social

Further Reading/Resources

https://chaucer.fas.harvard.edu/

https://quod.lib.umich.edu/m/middle-english-dictionary/dictionary

https://middleenglishromance.org.uk/

https://medievalistsofcolor.com/

https://smfsweb.org/

https://creativeworks.byu.edu/CreativeWorksStore/ProductCategory?siteID=20

https://newchaucersociety.org/