Insight on Canterbury Tales?

Question

I need good, quality information on the Summoner from the Canterbury Tales. Best answer gets 10 points....

Answer 1

The Summoner arraigns those accused of violating Church law. When drunk, he ostentatiously spouts the few Latin phrases he knows. His face is bright red from an unspecified disease. He uses his power corruptly for his own gain. He is extremely lecherous, and uses his position to dominate the young women in his jurisdiction. In exchange for a quart of wine, he would let another man sleep with his girlfriend for a year and then pardon the man completely.

The critic first delves into the topic of subinfeudation, demonstrating how the summoner's bailiff-like role implies a lord-vassal relationship. In this case, the summoner is the bailiff overseeing the archdeacon's "vassals," and by abusively wielding power over these people for his own gain, he creates a group of his own vassals. The use of words such as "dutee," "retenue," and "rent" all build up this image of a feudal lord. At the same time, Hassan-Yusuff asserts that Chaucer is building up an image of a game, or competition between the summoner and the devilish yeoman, by taking advantage of the double meaning of "win" (to gain as profit or to overcome an opponent) (16). When the devil finally reveals his identity to the daft summoner, Chaucer uses "image clusters to illuminate his theme" (16), blending feudal and hunting terms as in the ambiguity of "purchasyng" (which can connote the act of seizing prey as well as having more financial implications.

The principal manner in which Chaucer uses this feudal imagery to depict the summoner's depravity is through a reference to the oath of fealty. The summoner and the yeoman enter into a binding partnership that is "strikingly similar" to the feudal oath of fealty, a contract between lord and vassal. The binding nature of this oath is evident in how the summoner insists on honoring the commitment even after he realizes thathis new friend is from hell. Becoming a student of the devil, he attempts to soak up the yeoman's knowledge of how to "wynne," but when tries to turn the tables to top the devil, he "ironically [becomes] the devil's vassal and property" (18). The critic's conclusion is that the summoner, who is supposed to be God's vassal, is actually serving the same evil lord as the devil.
In looking at the "Man of Law's Tale" especially, we can see a progression from a sacred submission to a kind of submission without purpose. They present essentially the same kind of submissive, patient character. The only difference is the one who is worshipped and the Tales that fall between them. Through these two tales Chaucer is presenting an idea about the nature of submission. Submission, because it is an act of relinquishing ones own power to trust another has no power to decipher human kindness from violation. How then can a heroine be both submissive and know which entity to be submissive to? The senselessness of this kind of worship is further exemplified by the "Friar’s" and "Summoner's Tale" which appear between the Man of Law and the Clerk's stories where religious and secular figures who claim to know goodness are exposed for their corruption. Chaucer's point then extends beyond the 'arbitrary' world of Griselda and the separation between secular and sacred into revealing through the course of his tale's the nature of power throughout the structure of society.
Like David Allen in "Death and Staleness in the Son-less World of the Summoner's Tale," Edward Malone asserts that Thomas is silent and insensitive not because he is angry but primarily because he is grieving over his dead son. However, instead of crediting the friar with the blame for Thomas's stoic disposition, Malone centers his argument on the insensitivity of Thomas's wife.

He makes specific references to her speech to the friar upon his arrival at their household. She tells him to chide Thomas for his anger. She also says her husband hasn't been interested in sex for days. Malone feels the wife is more insensitive than her husband in wanting to engage in "oother desport" so soon after the death of their son.

Malone pays careful attention to the clues to the time frame in which the story takes place. He deduces that the friar has been away from the household for two weeks and during this time the child has passed away. Thomas says, "How han ye fare sith that March bigan? / I saugh yow noght this fourtenyght or moore." His wife says, "My child is deed withinne thise wykes two, / Soone after that ye wente out of this toun." Malone combines these two statements to infer that the child has died fairly recently. This further supports his argument that Thomas is not angry but grieving. In addition, Malone makes the clever observation that the child is a boy. The friar refers to the child with the masculine pronoun "hym." Malone also makes the point that Thomas has reason for his grief as he is old and sick and will probably not get another son during his lifetime.

Malone is aware of Thomas's situation as a wealthy old gentleman without an heir yet he is unreasonably callous towards his wife's position. He makes it sound as if the wife is completely insensitive to Thomas's situation. However, Malone does not consider the argument that Allen makes that Thomas's wife would have been accustomed to children dying at a young age.

While Allen is more sympathetic to the wife's character, neither he nor Malone stop to fully consider the wife's position. Besides being mentally unstable, Thomas is physically frail and unusually ill. If he dies, she will be left a widow. In spite of any inheritance that her husband might leave her she is still subject to the rule of the church. A widow with a large inheritance has no one to protect that inheritance except maybe the church because as we know, widows and orphans were often the wards of the church. We also can assume from reading the "Friar's Tale" that widows were not always treated kindly by the clergy. The Summoner in the "Friar's Tale" tries to cheat the widow out of her money and when she doesn't have any he then tries to take her pots.

Malone is especially hard on the widow for wanting to have another son so shortly after the death of her previous son. He only reads the tale from Thomas's male perspective. If Thomas's wife had a son then he would grow up to provide for when she grew older and she wouldn't have to marry some rich miser for protection or worse still become a ward of the church. The fact that Thomas is almost on his deathbed and still married to a wife who is able to have children should tell the reader something about the marriage partnership. Consequently, we can assume that Thomas's wife is still young and does have to think about providing for herself in the future. In order to stay a widow yet still have some control over her inheritance she must have a son that will legitimize her right to her dower.
David Allen addresses the particularly disturbing incident in the "Summoner's Tale" in which Thomas's wife tells the friar that her son has just passed away. Allen like many readers finds it distressing that the friar should casually reassure the woman that her son is in heaven and then expound upon the subject of heaven to declare his own spritual excellence as a friar. Allen acknowledges Phillipe Aries observation that infant mortality was common during the medieval times. According to Aries, parents could not afford to become too attatched to their children and this may have been the reason for the friar's callous treatment of the boy's death. Allen then cites David Hunt's thesis that parents might have been ambivalent to a child's death. They experience grief and loss, yet they also feel relief because a death meant one less mouth to feed. Allen takes this theory and applies it to the circumstances in the "Summoner's Tale." He concludes that the child's mother hastily accepts the friar's reassurance that her son is in heaven because this is easier than dealing with her feelings of relief. By the same token, Allen attributes Thomas's depression to his son's death. The friar however, can't see that Thomas is grieving and proceeds to rattle off a completely inappropriate sermon about a knight who challenges a king. The knight provokes the king’s anger and as a result the knight's squire is killed. Not only does this courtly anecdote pass over the cherlish Thomas, but it unfeelingly implies that Thomas is somehow responsible for his son's death. Instead of bringing comfort and healing, the friar rubs salt in the wound.

Worse still, the friar asks for some money. He reasons that he is as essential to the medieval world as the son and that he "whoso wolde us fro this world bireve out of this world...He wolde bireve the sonne." Allen assumes a pun on the word "sonne" reading it as "sun" and "son." This is the final insult! Allen uses this pun as another example of the "stale" sermon. The idea of "stale " as opposed to fresh sermons originates with Francis of Assisi who was known for improvising sermons to address the immediate concerns of his audience. Thus, each sermon was fresh, tailored to the specific needs at hand. Allen argues that the friar has ignored Thomas's immediate grief and has spat out a "one-size fits all" anecdote that is courtly, old-fashioned, and "stale." The friar's ignorance is made supremely apparent when he likens himself to the "sonne."

I find David Allen's criticism insightful especially where it critiques the friar's stale sermons. He could have also explored the effect of the stale sermons in more depth. For instance, in the quote above when the friar admonishes Thomas that to deprive a friar of alms is to deprive the world of the sun, he is virtually saying, "Don't let me starve the way you have starved your child!" This is horribly unfeeling because the friar is not starving! One might even go so far as to say that the opposite is happening. The friar is feeding off the food and money that would have otherwise gone to feed underweight babies. This is entirely plausible when we consider that the after-life had priority over the "pilgrimage" of present times. The spiritual health of one's soul would take precedence over the physical health of one's body.

Allen constructs his argument on the previous theses of medieval scholars Aries and Hunt, but his entire paper hinges on the fact that Thomas is indeed grieving for his lost son. Allen assumes that because the wife is concerned about the child that Thomas must be also. Thomas is also bitter towards friars in general and the friar's arrival can't have lightened his already bitter disposition.

The Summoner's Tale is one of The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer.

The tale is a fierce counterpunch to the preceding tale by The Friar which had been an offensive attack on summoners. Summoners were officials in ecclesiastical courts who summoned people to attend and worked in a similar way to ushers. The Friar had accused them of corruption and taking bribes and the Summoner seeks redress through his own story.

There are in fact several tales which the Summoner tells and all of them directed at friars. The main tale of a grasping friar seems to be a completely original composition by Chaucer but the bawdy story the Summoner tells in his prologue seems to be an inversion of Caesarius of Heisterbach's story Dialogus miraculorum. In the Heisterbach's story he ascends to heaven and finds his fellow Cistercians living under the cloak of the Virgin Mary. In the Summoner's version the friar descends into hell and not seeing any other friars believes they are all such goodly men, but the angel who accompanies him says to Satan:

Hold up thy tayl, thou Sathanas!' quod he;
`Shewe forth thyn ers, and lat the frere se
Where is the nest of freres in this place!'
With that the freres (friars) fly out Satan's ers (****), swarm about the room and disappear back up his ers.

The main tale of the Summoner's is about a mendicant friar who travels about preaching and gaining his living by begging. It tells at first how the friar begs for alms and that he records the names of the people who give him charity so he can pray for them later. It then says that he erases the names as soon as he has left the house. This prompts the Friar from the pilgrimage, listening to the tale, to interrupt angrily just as the Summoner had interrupted his tale earlier. After Harry Bailey, the host, calls for peace the Summoner continues his tale.

The friar in the tale then goes to a sick man's house. He does not beg for some meagre fare to sustain him, but instead demands a roasted pig's head. The friar asks the sick man for money to help his order build its cloister. He tells him how important it is to share wealth and he emphasises how important friars are to society saying:

And if yow lakke oure predicacioun, (preaching)
Thanne goth the world al to destruccioun.
The sick man says angrily that he has given much to many friars over the years and he is still sick. The friar reprimands him for spreading his charity around like this and tells him three short parables warning of the dangers of ire. The sick man then says he has one gift he can give and that it is hidden down at the base of his back. The friar puts his hand there and the sick man lets out a fart.

Leaving in disgust the friar goes straight to the house of the local landowner and tells him and his wife what has happened. The landowner does not seem very shocked and instead is more worried how the gift could be divided between all thirteen friars of the order. When the lord's squire suggests an ingenious solution to the problem involving a cartwheel, the lord is so impressed that he gives the squire a new coat.

The Summoner uses the tale to satirise friars in general, with their long sermonising and their tendency to live well despite vows of poverty. It reflects on the theme of clerical corruption, a common one within The Canterbury Tales and within the wider 14th century world as seen by the lollard movement.

Neither the Summoner's nor the Friar's tale leave either of them looking particularly good. After the Friar's tale the Summoner does not use his own tale to defend summoners but rather he replies with his own attack. The short stories warning about ire within his main story are possibly a comment on the unheeded anger between both of them.

Answer 2

Go to http://www.sparknotes.com/lit/canterbury/

They have summaries on many different works of literature. I have never used this summary, but I have used others in the past and been happy.